Excerpt from Footprints of the Red Men: Indian Geographical Names in the Valley of Hudson's River, the Valley of the Mohawk, and on the Delaware, Their Location and the Probable Meaning of Some of Them

The loca-tives of the Indian geographical names which have been handed down as the names of boundmarks or of places or tribes, are properly a subject of study on the part of all who would be familiar with the aboriginal geography of a district or a state. In manv cases these names were quite as designative of geographical cen ters as are the names of the towns, villages and cities which have been substituted for them. In some cases they have been wiselv retained, while the specific places to which they belonged have been lost. In this work special effort has been made, first, to ascertain the places 'to which the names belonged as given in official records, to ascertain the physical features of those places, and carry back the thought to the poetic period of our territorial history, when the original drapery in which nature was enveloped under the dominion of the laws o-f vegetation, spread out in one vast, continuous interm inable forest, broken here and there by the opened patches of corn land-s and the Wigwams and villages of the redmen; secondly, to ascertain the meanings of the aboriginal names, recognizing fully that, as Dr. Trumbull wrote, They were not proper names or mere unmeaning marks, but significant appella'tives conveying a descrip tion of the locatives to which they 'were given. Coming down to us in the crude orthographies of traders and um-le'ttered men, they are not readily recognized in the orthograph-ies of the educated mis sionaries, and especially are they disguised by the varying powers Oi the German, the F renoh, and the English alphabets in which they were written by educated as well as by uneducated scribes, and by traders who were certainly not very familiar with the science of representing spoken sounds by letters. In one instance the same name appears in forty-nin'e forms by different writers. Many names, however, Ihave been recdgniz-cd under missionary standards and their meanings satisfactorily ascertained, aided by the features of the localities to which they were applied; the latter, indeed, con1n111, \n 1111110111. 11111-1135.

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.