A fresh look at the place name Chicago

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Summer 2003 by McCafferty, Michael

Despite its misshapen ending, La Salle's still holds an important secret. Its grammatical nature in Illinois indicates that it would have been the name of a waterway. In other words, the form "sikaakwa is expected for a stream name, but not for the name of a site. Had La Salle recorded the name for a spot particularly blessed with wild leeks, he would have gotten one of the following two possible Miami-Illinois forms. The first is sikaakonki 'at the striped skunk,' that is, 'at the wild leek.' This is a locative noun, which is a grammatical category used when creating names for places in Algonquian. Had La Salle recorded this particular term, it would have looked something like *Checagongi in his orthography. The second expected form for a site named after the wild leek would be *sikaak-wahkionki 'in the striped skunk land,' that is, 'in the wild leek land.' In La Salle's spelling, this would have looked something like *Checagoukiongi. In the earliest historical record, neither term seems to occur. However, after La Salle's time the sikaakonki form did exist historically as the Miami name for the site where Fort Dearborn later stood.29

As noted at the beginning, it was Swenson's work with the early historical and linguistic sources that led to the identification of Chicago's eponymous plant as Allium tricoccum. This was a major contribution to our knowledge of this place name. Perhaps it was this important success that, unfortunately, led Swenson to attempt a botanical identification of other plant terms in the Illinois language.

Although an annoyance for the scholar, the least serious of the problems in his article is Swenson's having presented his own interpolated Illinois terms while appearing to cite actual forms from the Illinois language manuscript dictionaries.30 In addition, his failure to recognize that in the Illinois-French dictionary and the form that he cites from Le Boullenger's dictionary are simply an older and a newer form of the same word is also a forgivable error.31

A major problem, however, occurred in his attempt to link an Illinois term with Allium canadense, a plant known in American English as the wild onion. In doing so, he offered the French expression "oignon doux," meaning "sweet onion," as the translation for his interpolated Illinois-French dictionary (that is, the "Gravier" dictionary) entry "Sapissipina" (actual , and .34 The latter term appears twice in this particular Jesuit missionary's dictionary, and the actual translations are "oignons venant dans leau, pomme de terre blanches (sic)," meaning "bulbs coming in water, white potatoes" (where "coming" means "growing out of") in addition to "especes d'oignons qui naissent dans Leau," meaning "kinds of bulbs that are born in water."35 The basis for much of this confusion on Swenson's part is that he misread La Salle's description of the edible roots of the Illinois Country: "La terre y produit quantite de racines bonnes a manger comme les ognons doux, ouabipena, ouabicipena, une autre racine excellente longue comme le doigt et grosse de mesme, les pommes de terre, l'ail, l'ognonnet et les macopins." ("The earth there produces many roots that are good to eat, such as sweet onions, ouabipena, oubicipena, another excellent root that is as long and fat as a finger, potatoes, garlic, the little onion, and wild sweet potatoes.") Swenson mistakenly assumed that La Salle's and were in apposition to "ognons doux,"36 whereas we know that all three names refer to different plants.