Names

Our family took a little homeschooling tour around the state last week to learn what we could about Washington’s history.  This is the beauty of homeschooling.  Rather than try to teach it from a book, we loaded up our motorhome and went to see it all for ourselves.

Either I slept through Washington State history, or it’s just been so darn long since I’ve been in school that I don’t remember a thing.  As I’ve now lived through so much of Washington’s history I love learning facts about what came before me and seeing how everything fits together in time and space.  Some of my favorite things we learned were how places got their names. 

After making it to Walla Walla, we headed west following the Columbia River down the Lewis & Clark trail where we landed at Fort Vancouver.  It was there we learned that Oregon was originally spelled Ouragan, and in the native’s language means “great river in the west,” referring to what we now call the Columbia River.  After Captain Gray “discovered” the river and named it after his ship, the surrounding tributaries that feed into the river were then referred to by the white folks as “Oregon Territory.” 

We also learned that the city of Portland ended up with that name only because the two men who co-founded the city flipped a coin, best two out of three, to see whose hometown it would be named after.  If the coin had landed on the other side, that city would now be known as Boston.

I thought it was funny that Cape Disappointment was named that by Capt. John Meares who was looking for the mouth of the “Great River in the West” and when he happened upon it, mistook it for a bay and was terribly disappointed he hadn’t found the river. He’d actually discovered the right place but just didn’t know it.  I’d have renamed it Cape Double Disappointment after that realization.

Our own beloved Seattle was known as Du-wamps for at least a year in it’s history, until Doc Maynard changed it’s name.  He’d asked Chief Seattle if he could rename the city in his honor, but the chief wouldn’t go for it.  Maynard then offered him $500 a year for life for using his name, which then changed his mind.  Maynard wanted to honor the chief for all the help his tribe had provided the early settlers.  Five hundred bucks was a small fortune back then, but Maynard knew the chief was old and in declining health so he figured he wouldn’t have to pay out too much.  The chief lived on 17 more years.  Touché. 

And lastly, our own state of Washington got named so because those in charge of naming such things wanted to call it “Columbia,” after the mighty river, but someone felt it would cause too much confusion with the country’s capital being called “District of Columbia.” Oh, the irony, that we are now known as “The Other Washington.”