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

6.) Despite McCafferty's mention of Lounsbury's guidelines for Indian place name research, nowhere in Lounsbury is there support for the implications of what McCafferty is saying. He is saying the Des Plaines River was named for a plant that he cites Swenson said grew near that river. McCafferty, however, is quite certainly talking about the much larger Des Plaines River, that I had introduced in 2001 as the "real" La Salle's "Checagou." When McCafferty cites Swenson for support that the plant grew near the Des Plaines River, Swenson is talking about that small part of the river west of Lake Michigan, not the stretch that flows into the Illinois River.

Is it possible that in 1687-8 his informant was punning with Joutel? The theme was the repulsive smell-an obvious candidate for word-fun. The last hold-out of the smelly onion theory is Joutel's one-liner explanation from an anonymous source that is best interpreted as follows: the place was named after the skunk word, "chicagoua," used "abusively" for the smelly onions that grew locally. La Salle's "Checagou" extended to much more than a local geography. McCafferty tries to fix La Salle's "Checagou" with "new important linguistic information" critical of how La Salle spelled it. Yet McCafferty did not know how La Salle spelled it (i.e., "Checagou"). McCafferty invents a place name model he associates with the authority of Lounsbury, where no association exits.

Could this punning be in some way comparable to someone in modern times saying the name of our city is "Shitcago"? In Joutel's case the pun was on the word "skunk," sharing a homonymy with La Salle's word. This kind of punning seems to have been not unusual. McCafferty himself was featured in an article in the Des Moines Register which detailed how some Indians, in giving to the Europeans the name of a rival tribe, used a word that would translate "politely" as "the excrement-faces."35

In the article, "McCafferty insists that rather than denoting the tribe's true identity, the name was a ribald joke. McCafferty says he immediately recognized the work of a prankster and broke out laughing." One might believe that the use of "Chicagou" by Joutel's informant was closer to the prankster than McCafferty's "slang" explanation would suggest.

McCafferty attempts to circumvent the implications by saying that "abusive" written next to the "skunk" word used for the plant "is no doubt a slang term for the same plant," and leaves it at that.36 As much as the onion theorists would like to make a connection between the Allium tricoccum and the place name, there is only one bit of evidence, Joutel's, that connects the place name with the plant, and it is seriously flawed. It seems to have originated with a prankster, based on similarity of sound with La Salle's "Checagou" (cf. McCafferty's Des Moines pranksters cited above), and it seems to only refer to a small region near Lake Michigan, and not to the geographical provenance that had for several years appeared on maps, put there by La Salle.