Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 12.djvu/373

PRESERVATION OF INDIAN NAMES * 365 names, some concerted effort will have to be made by the his- torical societies while the country is still young. The purpose of this article is to point out a method by which this may be done without exciting too much opposition. It certainly cannot be done by any public meetings or by try- ing to stir up the feelings of imagination of any community. The effort put forth by the Oregon Agricultural College to have Mt. Chintimini called by its right name and the small results show the futility of agitation in effecting this. Names are not made that way. They are made by some one arbitrarily putting a name on a signboard, or map, or rock. More names have been made, by just putting them on a map than in any other way. How utterly different they would be if they were the result of the evolution of a community. In any public meeting the Indian word even though it may have been the very name of that spot for 500 years will seem to Anglo-Saxon ears, impossible. Suppose some one should propose the word Massachusetts or Mississippi for the first time. They would be laughed to scorn. The words of any new language must first be written and must be read many times (before they are spoken) to be accepted. The greatest makers of names are the map-makers. Not, however, because they want to be such, but because they cannot help it. The map-maker will grasp at a good name, if you just suggest it to him, that is, of course for a new place not yet named. There are thousands of names yet to be given in Oregon. Why not preserve the glory of that which was instead of steeping our- selves in the imitation of an imitation. As a practical plan for the introduction of new names, I would suggest the following: Every county engineer has a tracing on a moderately large scale of the county map; or if he has none one can be made up for a few dollars. Most of the high schools boys now learn to make such tracings. The historical society of each county should take up the map of its county and note the places where the names are either absent or not firmly fixed in the public mind. For instance many