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

Weber, Carl J

The origins of place names hold particular fascination for many of us. Curiosity about the origin of "Chicago" has had a lively history. Theories of the "true" origins of Chicago's name have passed in and out of history like so many fashions. The three theories that have had their strongest adherents are "skunk," "great," and "smelly onion" (or "garlic"/"leek").

The etymological theory that in current history entertains the most conspicuous rank is the "smelly onion" theory. The theory is likely to be offered with curious, if not wry, amusement. Yet, the historic truth, behind the humor, is that the smelly onion theory wobbles on the feeblest historical underpinnings and, for lack of a more apt characterization, is linguistically absurd.

John E Swenson1 and Michael McCafferty2 have published articles supporting the smelly onion theory. The Swenson/McCafferty claim is that the original name of the city was "Chicagoua." It was the regular Indian word for "skunk." But it was not only the word for "skunk"-it was also a word used, because of the association, for a certain repulsively smelling plant in the onion family, the Allium tricoccum.

At the center of the problem is the "skunk" word, "Chicagoua," ends with the sound of the letter "a." It is true that in some of the languages related to the Miami/Illinois, the terminal "a" dropped away. In Miami / Illinois, it did not. More technically, we are discussing the terminal morpheme-the singular animate gender marker. The "-a" was sounded, heard, and, as McCafferty says, should have been written. The fact that 99.9% of the time it was not written is sufficient to disqualify the theory.

McCafferty was aware of the dilemma and the challenge faced by the smelly onion theory. He could see that Swenson's brand of linguistics exposed a gaping wound in the smelly onion defense. Swenson seems to have thought that, at the end of "Chicagoua," the "a" was really there, so to speak, but that it was, simply, not heard by the French ear. This rule, applicable to some of the related language families, was not applicable to the Miami/Illinois.

Swenson, not having consulted with experts, sensed nothing wrong with his onions word having only "-ou" at the end. He did not know the "a" sotmd at the end of the skunk/onion word was present. Swenson sweeps away the question, "Why wasn't the "-a" sound written down?" He states, the "-a" was "conventionally dropped."3

McCafferty, an academic linguist, cannot allow the "conventionally dropped" explanation to stand, and he rightfully says, "there is no linguistic basis for such a notion."4 Accordingly, McCafferty provides another account for why the "-a" was not present in 99.9 per cent of the examples that have come down to us. He knew that to save the smelly onion theory he had to explain why the "-a" was not written. He had to come up with something, and what he came up-published last year-is amazing. But first, a very modest lesson in French/Indian spelling.

The omicron-upsilon, "8," is a Greek digraph character. It shows two letters graphically united into one. In this case, an "o" with a "u" balanced on top. The Jesuit missionaries appropriated this character to the service of representing either of two sounds in the Indian Languages. These sounds were inadequately suggested by any of the Roman alphabet. Linguists have long been of one mind that "8" at the end of a word in these early French studies represents French "ou" (the English vowel in "too"). In defending the smelly onion theory, in "A Fresh Look," McCafferty discovers another use of "8," a use that had for the past few hundred years been overlooked.

McCafferty explains:

"Thus, given the fact that the 8 could be rewritten as oua [i.e., the fact of his own newly discovered theory], there loomed over the uninformed and unsuspecting scribes, such as La Salle, the royal hydrographer Jean-Baptiste Louis Franquelin, whom the emplorer employed, and in fact everyone else in La Salle's linguistically challenged troupe, the possibility that they would unintentionally create ambiguous or nonsenical terms."5

His "fact," i.e., his new interpretation of "8, " has yet to be tested.6

McCafferty assaults La Salle for his garbled, ambiguous, nonsensical spelling of the Chicago word. McCafferty acknowledges, nonetheless, that he, himself, does not actually know how La Salle spelled the word! The information is available-he spelled it "Checagou."7

Written assaults against La Salle date from the 187Os. They were initiated by J.G. Shea, who attacked Pierre Margry, the French archivist.8 Margry claimed certain documents showed that La Salle had, in fact, been to the Mississippi before Jolliet and Marquette, in 1673. Given the (1) context of La Salle's life, (2) the need for an explanation about his "missing periods," (3) documents found by Margry, and (4) the Ellington Stone (in the Quincy Illinois Museum) with the year 1671 inscribed on it-La Salle may have, in fact, been the first to partially navigate the Mississippi. Shea said that Margry's documents about La Salle where hoaxes and frauds, and that they were motivated by anti-Jesuit sentiment.9

In the etymological literature, only one writer identified a year for the earliest use in a text and on a map of the Chicago word. But Virgil J. Vogel had not gone back early enough in either text10or map."

My identifications of an earlier text and map led to my conclusion that "La Salle should be credited with popularizing the word and literally putting it on the map." The history cartography, and linguistics all come together to point in that direction.

Le Boulanger12 compiled a dictionary in the early French period. The dictionary is documentation that the word normally used for "skunk" was at times abnormally used for the smelly onion. In his dictionary, Le Boulanger wrote the French word for a kind of onion, as the entry. He then wrote the Indian word for this onion. And then, he inserted the word for skunk, indicating it could be used for the onions also. But when the word for skunk was used for the smelly onions, Le Boulanger noted it was "abusive." I think it is a misleading simplification to reinterpret Le Boulanger's word, as McCafferty does, as meaning "slang."

In opening his, "A Fresh Look at the Place Name Chicago," Michael McCafferty states his intention as one of dual purpose: "to round out the study of 'Chicago' by providing new, important historical linguistic information about this place name and to clean up some problems in the literature previously published on it." The new linguistic information, a newly discovered use of "8," tries to rescue the smelly onion theory by explaining why the final "-a" of the skunk/onions word was not written in the place name.

By way of introduction, McCafferty refers his readers to his footnote. It says: "For definitive guidelines that apply to research in Native American place names, see Floyd G. Lounsbury, lroc\uois Place-Names in the Champlain Valley."

It seems reasonable to assume MaCafferty's "Fresh Look at the Place Name Chicago," uses the highly esteemed Lounsbury as an authority for his own place name ideas. The reader might be erroneously led to believe that items from Lounsbury's definitive guidelines would be cited by McCafferty in his own place name arguments for why the smelly onion (Allium tricoccum) named the city.

He lays ground work for his conclusion by discussing the Indians' land and waterway naming practices. Then follows a summary, seemingly from Lounsbury. Native Americans had a penchant in their naming practices for communicating "geophysical, spiritual, biological, or ethnonymic information" as the most salient features of their practices. We are then moved to "water body names" as defined by "very important cultural items." We are given as an example the Vermilion River in Illinois. On its banks is found a mineral compound used for body painting, a "very important cultural item," a "vital, information-rich place name."14

Lounsbury had said nothing about this place name custom. Why this entire "vital cultural element" argument fails is found by way of the answer to the query, "Why name the place after the onions?" The Swenson/McCafferty smelly onion theory rests on the importance of this plant to the well being of the Indians and French. There is nothing in Joutel, Swenson's only source, however, to remotely suggest this. On the contrary, if there was an important resource that Joutel speaks highly of, it is maple syrup.

In "A Fresh Look," McCafferty says Swenson has determined the onion plant under consideration was the Allium tricoccum.15 McCafferty says, "the term we today write 'Chicago' is a French spelling that represent sikaakwa. This would be the name of the skunk used for the plant, a use Le Boulanger calls "abusive."

McCafferty credits Swenson with identifying "Chicagoua" with the Alliuni tricoccum."' Apparently the compendious works on Chicago history by John Kirkland had not been consulted. Kirkland makes the identification of the Allium tricoccum as the plant with claims of having given Chicago its name. Nearly a century before Swenson wrote, the plant had been identified by Kirkland.17 Kirkland provides an illustration of the plant, provides the Latin nomenclature of this allium (albeit with a misspelling), and he specifies, "the wild onion, leek or garlic, 'Chicagou.'"

My thoughts are that Kirkland's works, found for more than a century in the Chicago Public Library and all the regional reference libraries, is the primary source for the smelly onion/garlic/leek theory in the twentieth century.18

McCafferty explains that the plant did not have to grow "everywhere [McCafferty's emphasis] along a river or a lake [in order to name the body of water], but that it only had to grow in eye-catching abundance at some point(s)."19 This is McCafferty's place name explanation: "it didn't have to grow everywhere." It is hard to see how a plant that grew in a relatively small area up near Lake Michigan could name a fifty-mile corridor through the Des Plaines Valley. As we will see, when McCafferty uses Swenson as his authority for where it grew, they are not talking about the same geographical area:

"As Swenson noted, these plants could be beneficial to humans. Especially as survival food."20 In an Internet article, no longer on-line, Swenson was more demonstrative in his enthusiasm over the place name. The article was entitled, "Chicagoua, food and medicine of Indians, pioneers and settlers, and tasty rescuer of starving French explorers and missionaries."21

This interpretation of the historical material from the seventeenth century is vastly exaggerated. Joutel's actual comments on the plant consists of no more than a few lines written in 1687-88. Nothing special at all. Passing remarks. But Swenson goes on and on about Joutel's preoccupation with the plant. He makes it appear the Joutel made special botanical field trips and linguistic investigations about this marvelous resource. None of this happened. The "vital cultural item" argument of McCafferty is based on Swenson's extreme hyperbole of Joutel.

"Chicagou": This form, first seen in Joutel's narrative of 1687, probably had more influence on the "Chi-" spelling of subsequent years than is generally recognized. Louvigny's map,22 from the closing years of the seventeenth century, seems to be the earliest map with this "Chi-" spelling. It seems obvious that Louvigny's "Chi-" spelling is derived from Joutel. Louvigny draws little dots for the trail of Joutel's journey from the Texas coast to the Arkansas River. There is little doubt that Louvigny drew the route taken by Joutel, and it is reasonable to assume that the "Chi-" spelling, the first on a map, he also borrowed from Joutel.

In Joutel's entire narrative there are only a sparse few lines in which he writes about the place and the onion. Joutel has no "meticulous" description promised by Swenson. McCafferty does not challenge Swenson's enthusiastic interpretation of Joutel-that Joutel was absorbed, if not possessed, by the plant. The Swenson/McCafferty argument that this plant provided the place name because it was a "vital resource" for the Indians and the French is an argument extremely feeble. Joutel says nothing to support this. Note his exact words:

(Late 1687) We arrived at a place which is named Chicagou, which, according to what we learned, has taken its name from the quantity of garlic which grows in this district, in the woods.23

There is also a species of garlic in quantity which is not entirely like that of France, having its leaf broader and shorter, and is also not so strong, though its taste closely approaches it but is not like the little onions or the onion of France.24

McCafferty accepts Swenson's analysis that Joutel sang high praises to the onions, based on these few lines of Joutel's text. They do not show it to be a critical "resource," a "very important cultural item," making it a "vital, information-rich place name." As a matter of record, what impressed Joutel was the maple syrup, of which he speaks glowingly-not the onion plant referred to by the Indians with the "abusive" use of the skunk word,

It is not unlikely that Henri Joutel was made the butt of a joke by some Indian linguistic pranksters. They told him that the place was named after the onions that grew in the woods in the district. But Joutel was not told that the central meaning of the word was "skunk," and that when the word was used for the onions, it was an "abusive" use of the word. The Indians seem not to have divulged that they were using the skunk word. Joutel was told by the Indians that Le Boulanger's "abusive" word named the place. Joutel's fun loving Indian guides told him the place was named after the onions. This seems to have been a nasty use of the "skunk" word, and the Indians had a good laugh. The skunk word would have been sufficiently homonymous with La Salle's "Checagou" to be ready ammunition for aggressive punning.

Consider this: the Des Plaines River, much of which dries up in the summer, could not have provided a habitat for the "Chicagoua" plant. At the time that he wrote about it over ten years ago, Swenson seems not to have been aware of this fifty-mile geographical corridor - the Des Plaines Valley -of La Salle's "Checagou." From the way he wrote about it, Swenson's use of "Des Plaines River"-that is, where the "Chicagoua" grew, seems to have been referring to only a limited section of that waterway, running north and south-situated west of Lake Michigan.25 This is where the modern city stands. In contrast, McCafferty uses the Des Plaines River to include the fifty miles of valley from Lake Michigan to the Illinois River, the fifty miles that I had in my work identified as the original provenance of La Salle's "Checagou."

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.

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.

Of note, Temple, whom McCafferty cites, says that the "Illinois River was called Chicago [obvious respelling by Temple of 'Chicagou']."30 On the same page that Temple first speaks of Chief Chicagou of the Mechigamias, he speaks of this Illinois River as also having the name "Chicagou."31 It is not unreasonable to consider this mighty Illinois Chief to have been known by a name at this time for the Illinois River, a mighty tributary of the Mississippi. It is not unreasonable to argue that the Chief's name derived from La Salle's "Checagou." The Illinois pronunciation of La Salle's word.

McCafferty argues with no hesitation that the chief was named for the "skunk," which in the Illinois language would have a terminal, "-a," therefore "proving" with no small circumlocution, the nearly universal retranscribing errors of the French.

I can argue with the same conjecture, but with a more reasonable intuition, that the chief was named, not after the skunk, but after the great river associated with his people, which La Salle had literally put on the map.

McCafferty makes similar kinds of small errors in his citations of Father Gravier. Although they might seem too small to merit being pointed out-these kinds of small errors, to which most scholarship is liable, must be corrected "for the record."

Here we find the only written examples in the entire history of New France for the place name spelled with a final "-a." Consequently, these five examples are the only citations that have ever been offered for the "Chicagoua" smelly onion theory for the place name. Gravier, it should be noted, never says anything about onions, or gives an explanation of any kind-he merely spells the place name with an "-a" on the end.

In the Jesuit Relations, Vol. 65, Gravier's attestations appear in French and in English as follows:

McCafferty had said, Gravier,

...the Jesuit priest ... who spoke fluent Illinois, also wrote down our place name several times in a report compiled in 1701, although he no doubt knew of the name long before that year. Of course, Gravier wrote "Chicag8a," "Chikag8a," "Chikagoua," and "Chicagoua" [these are all the same pronunciation] ... the earliest authoritative [not McCafferty's emphasis]French spellings of it on record. Indeed, the spelling "Checagou" created by La Salle, as well as all the variants based on the explorer's term, are but garbling of the original native place name that Gravier spelled carefully and intelligently.32

Gravier's were not merely the "earliest" such spellings "on record," they are the only such spellings "on record." The creators of garbled forms would seem to include everyone (except Father Gravier) in French colonial history who wrote the Chicago word. Accordingly, La Salle was not the only garbler. It would take nearly two decades after La Salle first wrote it before anyone would write an ungarbled spelling. And then, afterward he wrote it, the word was regarbalized for the rest of French colonial history.

When it is said that Gravier "also wrote down our place name several times in a report compiled in 1701," the evidence can be more specifically distilled. Gravier wrote it twice in 1701, once in 1698, and twice in 1697. McCafferty left off the diacritic marks (dots) over the letter "u" in one of the 1701 citations.

There are many loose ends in Chicago etymology, more than can here be mentioned. McCafferty says that Swenson based his onion place name theory on the Dictionary of Father Le Boulanger.33 This is hardly the case, and Le Boulanger makes no connection whatsoever between a place name and the smelly onion. Le Boulanger does not mention the Chicago word as a place name.

Swenson carefully words the following to give the impression that Father Gravier wrote about and documents the onion theory. Hardly. Swenson says,

The name Chicago is derived from the local Indian word Chicagoua for the native garlic plant (not onion) Allium tricoccum. This garlic (in French: ail sauvage) grew in abundance on the south end of Lake Michigan on the wooded banks of the extensive river system which bore the same name, chicagoua. Father Gravier, a thorough student of the local Miami language, introduced the spelling chicagoua, or chicagou8 [sic], in the 1690s, attempting to express the inflection which the Indians gave to the last syllable of the word.34

Father Gravier, in fact, is not known to have ever said anything or written about onions. Swenson's tendencies here to link falsely the onions to the place name is unfair to the unsuspecting reader. The editing blunder, overlooking the impossible spelling "chicagouS," merits severe criticism.

In my Newberry Library Colloquium in October 2001, "Chicago's Not an Onion," I pointed out that the original Chicago encompassed the fifty-miles from Lake Michigan to the Illinois River. That fact, based on maps and texts of the pre-1700 period, had never been mentioned in prior Chicago etymological discussion. I identified the Chicago word on an earlier map and in an earlier text than had been previously identified. I mentioned that a full-scale copy of this map did not exist in Chicago until I purchased a copy from the Harvard Library and donated it to the Chicago Historical Society. I identified the normal form of the word as La Salle's "Checagou." I also mentioned other aspects of threads of Chicago etymology, which are not the subject of this current paper, and will be save for some other venue.

The Swenson/McCafferty's smelly onion theory, teetering on its "Chicagoua" balance, is extremely unlikely and tumbles for more than a few reason:

1.) It is a place name that never in French colonial history appeared on a map.

2.) The "original" form claimed by McCafferty and Swenson issued from the pen of only one person in all of French Colonial history.

3.) The "convincing case" that McCafferty claims that Swenson made, that the place name came from the plant, on the "vital cultural item" model (a model not found in McCafferty's place name expert, Lounsbury), is a convincing case that has yet to be made.

4.) The claim of both Swenson and McCafferty, built on the authority of Father Gravier (the only one ever to write the place name "Chicagoua") leads us to infer that Gravier associated the smelly onions with the place name. Gravier did not.

5.) The claim that except for Father Gravier, in the entire history of New France, everyone was deficient in their language skills and linguistically challenged, strains credulity.

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.

Notes

1 John F. Swenson, "Chicagoua/Chicago: The Origin, Meaning, and Etymology of a Place Name," Illinois Historical Journal 84 (1991): 235-48.

2 Michael McCafferty, "A Fresh Look at the Place Name Chicago," Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, 96 (2003): 116-29.

3 Swenson, 237

4 McCafferty, 119.

5 Ibid., 122.

6 I am very curious about why McCafferty did not consult with other Miami/Illinois experts. For such a substantial Amerindian linguistic discovery, a third use of "8," he could have shared with us a second opinion.

7 La Salle Autograph Letter, Sept. 1, 1683. La Salle Collection. Chicago Historical Society.

8 Margry had a decades-long association with numerous American historians and archivists. These included the great American historian Francis Parkman. Archivist Margry played an important researcher role in getting documents relating to early North American French history into scholars' hands in the United States.

9 The assault against La Salle was reinvigorated by Jean Delangley in the 1930s, and delivered in most recent decades by Lucien Campeau. Contemporary historians like Robert Weddle, instructing us that La Salle was "a failure as a person," a "bi-polar manic depressive" is telling us he, Weddle, has chosen to let the barbed footnotes of Delanglez dangle with impudence. Shea, Delanglez, and Campeau - are the mainstays of the anti-La Salle historical diatribe. They were also, of no small co-incidence, Jesuit apologists. They wrote from a particular point of view that sees La Salle as a dangerous enemy to late 17th century Jesuitism in the New World. McCafferty's contempt and disdain for La Salle speak for themselves.

10 Virgil J. Vogel, "Mystery of Chicago's Name," Mid-America, 40 (1958) 163. He cites a letter written by La Salle, June 5, 1683.

11 Ibid., 165. The map he identified was the 1685 La Louisiane of Minet (first name unknown). Vogel found it in the Sarah Jones Tucker collection, Indian Villages of Illinois Country, Vol. II, Scientific Papers. Illinois State Museum, Part I (Springfield: State of Illinois, 1942) Plate VII. Looking at this map, one sees 'Checago,' which undoubtedly has been confusing to scholarship. There should be a terminal '-u' that was obscured in the photocopying. This is certain because Minet, returning to France in 1685 from the Texas gulf coast on the ship Joly, used a map of La Salle's as a model, and La Salle wrote the word "Checagou."

12 Joseph Ignatius Le Boulanger. "French Miami-Illinois Dictionary." Mss. ca.1720. Newberry Library: Ayer MS 1975, Folio-Flat.

13 Floyd G. Lounsbury. Iroquois Place-Namcs in the Champlain Valley. (Albany: University of the State of New York State Education Department, 1960). Reprinted from the report of the New York-Vermont Interstate Commerce Commission on the Lake Champlain Basin, 1960, Legislative Document 9:23-66.

14 McCafferty, "A Fresh Look at the Place Name Chicago," 116-17.

15 John F. Swenson, "Chicagoua/Chicago: The Origin, Meaning, and Etymology of a Place Name." 246.

16 Ibid., 116, 124.

17 John Kirkland, The Story of Chicago (Chicago: Dibble Publishing, 1892) 8.

18 From the mid 180Os to the 1930s, "something great" was the most intellectually popular etymology-it was still authoritatively supported by historians (Quaife, Pierce) into the 1930s .

19 McCafferty, "A Fresh Look at the Place Name Chicago," 117.

20 Ibid.

21 In Swenson, "Chicagoua/Chicago: The Origin, Meaning, and Etymology of a Place Name," he is extremely dramatic in his many paragraphs suggesting the meticulous botanical description and linguistic investigation that had been made of this critically important plant-almost as if the fate of the French colonial empire hinged on its proper identification and the knowledge of its correct location. This is not in any way an exaggeration of Swenson's enthusiastic hyperbole. It is for this vitally significant reason that the place name was chosen. McCafferty defers to Swenson, apparently accepting the explanation for why the place name was chosen. What is the total sum of evidence for the dazzling display in many paragraphs of Swenson's glowing report of why Chicago was named after this praiseworthy plant? It is built on literally no more than a few short, dull, passing sentences of reference in Joutel's narrative.

22 Louis de la Porte de Louvigny, Carte fleuve Mississippi... Its date is either 1697 or 1700.

23 Henri Joutel. Relation de Henri Joutel, in Pierre Margry, ed., Decouvertes Établissements des Français dans l'ouest et dan sud de l'Amérique Septentrionale 1614-1754 (Paris: Jouast, 1876-1886), III, p. 485.

24 Swenson 1991, 239-40 (Swenson's translation).

25 Swenson. On pages 238, 239, and 240 he is not talking about the same part of the Des Plaines River that McCafferty is when the latter is using the former for support.

26 McCafferty, 118.

27 Ibid., 119

28 McCafferty, 126.

29 Ibid., 120.

30 Of note, Louis Hennepin also referred to the Illinois River with the Chicago word.

31 Wayne Temple, Indian Villages of the Illinois Country: Historic Tribes. Revised edition. Vol. 2, part 2 (Springfield: Illinois State Museum, 1966), 12.

32 Ibid., 123.

33 McCafferty, "A Fresh Look at the Place Name Chicago," 126.

34 John F. Swenson, "Chicago: Meaning of the Name and Location of pre-1800 European Settlements," Ulrich Dankers and Jane Meredith, Early Chicago. A Compendium of the Early History of Chicago to the Year 1835. When the Indians Left (River Forest, IL: Early Chicago Incorporated, 1999). 377.

35 Des Moines Register. Mary Challender, Register Staff Writer, 09/14/2003. (http://www.dmregister.com/news/stories/c4788998/22247528.html)

36 McCafferty, 126.

Carl J. Weber is a professor of history and humanities at DeVry University. As a member of Newberry's Chicago Map Society, he has spoken on aspects of seventeenth and eighteenth century French colonial history. He will soon be published in the Journal for the Center for French Colonial Studies where he re-examines the reputation of Rene-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, and challenges some long standing interpretations of Jesuit historian Jean Delanglez.

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