I don’t know if there’s any country in the world — unless it’s our friendly neighbor Canada to the north — where you can find a crazier variety of place-names than in the United States. And why shouldn’t there be? We were a spanking-new country, with people arriving from all over the world, speaking a lot of languages, not to mention the natives and their names; and as the soccer fans from Europe will have noticed, our variety in climates and mountains and lakes and rivers and deserts and caves and bluffs and canyons and grasslands is a geographer’s delight. It’s actually a lot of fun, and sometimes there are oddball stories to the naming. So I’d like to get to some of my favorites today, in a variety of categories.
Here then, the winner in the category “We feel like giving our place this name and we don’t care that it makes no sense”:
TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES, New Mexico. I’d love to tell you that the town was named for something that a hangin’ judge might have said when you fell afoul of the law there: “You’d better tell the truth, young fella, or there’ll be some consequences,” as he plays with a section of hemp rope. But no, it wasn’t so. In 1950, Ralph Edwards, the host of a radio quiz-and-stunt show called “Truth or Consequences,” announced that he’d broadcast the tenth anniversary show from whatever town in the United States was first to rename itself after the show. So a town called Hot Springs, in New Mexico, jumped at the chance, voting overwhelmingly for the name-change, and sure enough, they got the show the next evening. Edwards later would visit the town in the first week of May, and did so for the next fifty years, and to this day it’s the town’s big time for celebration. And yes, there are hot springs there, discharging about 2 million gallons a day.
Then there’s JIM THORPE, Pennsylvania, named for the man who was often called the greatest athlete of the century. Jim Thorpe excelled at everything — baseball, football, basketball, track and field, you name it. He was a Native American, from the Sac and Fox Nation, in Oklahoma, where he grew up. When he died in 1953, his widow tried to arrange for a nice memorial for him in Oklahoma, but it all fell through, not without some bad feelings, while a small borough in the Slate Belt of Pennsylvania, a borough with the fine Lenape name MAUCH CHUNK, having fallen on rough times, cried out to Mrs. Thorpe that they would erect the memorial, and would even change the borough’s name to honor the great man. She acceded — and to this day, Jim Thorpe’s mortal remains are in what half the people nowadays call Mauch Chunk, and the other half Jim Thorpe. The thing about it is, Thorpe never set foot in that town! But he did go to school at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, whose football team was managed by the renowned Pop Warner — both he and Thorpe are in the National Football League’s Hall of Fame. Thorpe made for himself quite a name there. In 1912, his Carlisle team clobbered Army, 27-6. There was a tow-headed young fellow from Kansas playing for the Cadets in that game, who got run over by Thorpe — or so I have heard the story since when I was a kid. That man was Dwight David Eisenhower, 34th president of the United States (1953-1961).
Thorpe, by the way, was a devout Roman Catholic, but a hard drinker, too. The baseball historian Bill James tells the story of how, both of them having had a couple of drinks, Thorpe dangled his zany friend and teammate Rabbit Maranville one-handed by the ankle out the twentieth-story window of their hotel, yelling that he was Big Tarzan, and Maranville yelling that he was Little Tarzan. Only in America!
And now for the category We Really Admire You Even Though You’re Not One of Ours: YPSILANTI, Michigan. I used to think that the place was settled by Greek immigrants, who named it after the great hero in the Greek war of independence from the Turks, Demetrios Ypsilantis. But no, there weren’t any Greeks there yet; it was just that the pioneers along that river decided that they would be proud to memorialize the man’s fight for freedom. For Americans early on considered that they had a stake in the freedom of every nation. That we have not always lived up to that ideal, I won’t deny. But that it was indeed an ideal, and that it did often guide us in our ways, I will affirm.
A close second: PAOLI, Pennsylvania. How’s this for an oddity of history? Ebenezer MacIntosh was one of the leaders in New England in opposing the Stamp Act. He got together a group of secret revolutionaries called The Sons of Liberty, which had cells here and there in New England and the Middle Atlantic states. The man he most admired was Pasquale Paoli, the Corsican general and statesman who fought for Corsican independence from France and the republic of Genoa — and for a time Paoli did win his island’s freedom. MacIntosh even named his son Paschal Paoli MacIntosh! One of the cells of the Sons of Liberty met in a tavern at a place called Woodruff’s Grove, in southern Pennsylvania. The owner of the tavern, a Welshman named Joshua Evans, renamed his place the Paoli Inn, after the Corsican general, and the village that grew up around it took the name of the inn.
My third category is You Sure You’re Saying That Right? — because native Indian names sometimes sound like an oddball thing in English, just as, in our family favorite A Majority of One, Mrs. Jacobi (Rosalind Russell) says to Mr. Saito (Alec Guinness), that “you’re welcome” in Japanese sounds like “Don’t touch my mustache!” So then, our winner is CHEESEQUAKE, New Jersey, named not because they make really strong cheese there, but because the Lenape word for “upland” sounded like that. But then, sometimes we’ll combine the Indian with the English or the classical, and that’s how we get MINNEAPOLIS, Minnesota, or we name a place after a great and brave Indian, like PONTIAC, Michigan; or we keep the names as they were, at least as English-speakers could hear them, and such are everywhere, and they sound colorful to us, too: TALLAHASSEE, Florida; PUNXSUTAWNEY, Pennsylvania; KALAMAZOO, Michigan; SNOHOMISH, Washington; KETCHIKAN, Alaska, and many, many more.
All right — I’ll end with a spree here! How many of our readers have been to these places, or can tell where they all are? COUNCIL BLUFFS, KING OF PRUSSIA, WALLA WALLA, CORPUS CHRISTI, INTERNATIONAL FALLS, DELAWARE WATER GAP, BILOXI, TRAVELERS REST, NATURAL BRIDGE, THE DALLES, SLIPPERY ROCK, BATTLE CREEK — and on and on, over this marvelous land.
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