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Reader Response: A Critique of the Swenson/McCafferty Linguistic Analysis of The Word "Chicago"

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Summer 2004 by Weber, Carl J

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When McCafferty quotes Swenson for support, McCafferty is referring to the Des Plaines River of the Des Plaines Valley, the fifty miles connecting Lake Michigan to the Illinois River. This is oriented in a southwesterly direction. Regarding the habitat where the "chicagoua" was found, he uses Swenson26 as the authority. However, as just mentioned, Swenson is referring to a small area west of lower Lake Michigan.

McCafferty is saying that the onions grew on the watersheds of the Des Plaines Valley. He realizes that the onions would have to be, if not dominant, at least in "eye catching places" on the Des Plaines River in the Des Plaines Valley, and not simply in the Des Plaines estuaries in the woods up north and to the west of Lake Michigan, where Swenson located them.

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Much of the waterway of the Des Plaines Valley dried up in the hot summer months and was consequently ill-suited as a habitat for the "Chicagoua." La Salle applied his "Checagou" to this relatively much larger geography connecting the area at the southwestern edge of Lake Michigan to the Illinois River. McCafferty and Swenson are discussing two different geographies when they say "Des Plaines River."

There is "no problem," says McCafferty, in explaining why La Salle and others wrote the beginning of the words "Che-" instead of "Chi-."27 He ineffectively explains that French speakers who wrote it "Che-" had little experience with the language and heard and wrote it incorrectly. McCafferty provides no evidence from this early period to support this. The one example he gives is from a different period and of little weight.

This is the real problem with the smelly onion thesis. McCafferty says, "there is no way that our Miami-Illinois word could be written correctly with Ou' for '8'."28 Why did 99.9 per cent of the people write "-ou" then? He calls it a "hitherto unrecognized incorrect transliteration," and alleges in the 1600s and 1700s they "did not completely understand for what the letter stood?"29

"A Fresh Look" provides two examples of his discovery "of an uninformed re-transcribing of an original final '8'," i.e., where someone transliterated "-8" as "-ou."

One he gives is of,

the historically recorded names of two Miami-Illinoisspeaking Tamaroa leaders in the late 1600s and early 1700s - each known as "Chief Chicagou." He cites the Jesuit Relations (Vol. 67: 294, Vol. 68: 202-4, 214, 328 [this last should be p. 329]).

The Jesuit Relations, however, can not be used to support his historical interpretation. An analysis of the seven instances of the word in the Relations shows there was only one leader, not two. He was leader of the Mitchigamias, not the Tamaroa. The earliest date supported in the Jesuit Relations is not from the late 1600s, but specifically 1725. Two of McCafferty's own four citations from Wayne Temple support this view. His other two seem to be taken from a travel narrative written more than a few years later. They would hold much less claim to authenticity than the Relations. Chief Chicagou is not infrequently mentioned in Chicago etymology.

Reader Response: A Critique of the Swenson/McCafferty Linguistic Analysis of The Word "Chicago"

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Summer 2004 by Weber, Carl J

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