George R. Stewart and the Unnaming of the Land

Words, when written, crystallize history; their very structure gives permanence to the unchangeable past. –Francis Bacon, essayist, philosopher, and statesman (1561-1626)  

George R. Stewart’s Names On The Land was published in 1945 just as World War II ended.  In a letter to Stewart, his friend, Pulitzer Prize Winner Wallace Stegner, jocularly said he was interested in reading the book to see if GRS had included some of the more salacious names on the American land or if he’d cleaned them up so as not to offend the blue noses.  Stewart was name-honest in the book, but discreetly so. 

Today, however, that approach would surely result in loud protests over his description and explanation of the origins of American place names. 

There is a wave of censorship about place names and an avalanche of renaming not unlike the practice in Orwell’s 1984 of changing history and word meanings on a frequent  basis:  Done for political reasons and ignoring the effect on the history of our nation and our times. 

Some names are clearly insensitive, and no one should oppose such renaming.  But many names which WE have made derogatory were in their original meanings only descriptive.  If the naming bluenoses insist on sanitizing them to the detriment of their true meanings it would be unfair to those who originally used them.  Much better to modify them so the original meaning is clear. 

“Squaw,” for example, originally meant “young woman” or woman to Algonquin and other indigenous peoples; when immigrants began flooding here certain of them made the word a slur; but to deny the honest name is to give the racists who changed its meaning another nasty victory over those first American peoples by corrupting their language.  If “Squaw Valley” is offensive, re-name it “Young Woman Valley.”

Place names are also often used to honor people who at particular times in our history had a profound effect on our nation and our world. Sometimes their influence is seen as glorious; sometimes, in hindsight, as dangerous.  Yet in removing “Washington” from the maps because he owned slaves we also remove reminders of him from our history.  Ironically, that could mean other countries who’ve honored the man who led our fight for independence would be celebrating him but Americans would forget who he was. 

One especially egregious example is the current attempt to remove Joseph LeConte’s name from the land.   LeConte and his brother John were Georgians who owned slaves during and before the Civil War.  Extremely racist, they supported the Confederate war effort.   After the rebels were defeated the LeContes moved west to California.   Excellent scientists and university administrators (they’d been professors in a southern university) the brothers were quickly hired by the new University of California to provide strong academic foundations for the new school.   It was a sound decision – John LeConte, Physicist and UC’s first President, established a physics program that would eventually lead to the discovery of new elements of matter – two of which, Californium and Berkelium are named for the University. Californium is at the heart of many smoke detectors. 

John’s brotherJoseph LeConte was a beloved geology professor, botanist, and namer of species, who with his close friend John Muir and a few others founded the Sierra Club.  The good work done by the club and its inspiration for the modern environmental and public lands protections movements are achievements on a summit of the greatest human accomplishments – like the Declaration of the Independence, written by another slave owner, Thomas Jefferson.   Yet the 21^st century Sierra Club, which owes its existence to Joseph LeConte, has “unnamed” the Lodge in Yosemite Valley which was built by the contributions of Sierra Club members and UC faculty and students to honor LeConte. 

There was also an attempt to tar John Muir with the brush of racism.  The true danger of Orwellian renaming is this: If those who founded the Sierra Club were racists, why, the Club may be a racist institution, so its arguments and programs for preservation of wild places can be ignored. 

There’s a name for this kind of argument in debate circles: “Ad Hominem” – “To the man” – in which you turn a question of fact into a slander on an individual or an organization to cloud the evidence for the other side’s (stronger) case. 

Another problem with such Orwellian “unnaming” is that it allows history to be forgotten.  As George Santayana wrote, Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. 

In the Lake Tahoe and Carson Pass area, many features and places are named for Civil War people and events.   Fredricksburg (a massive Confederate victory), Burnside Lake (named  in jest by former southerners?) for the Union General who lost the Battle of Fredricksburg), Jeff Davis Peak (named for the President of the Confederacy), Reno (named for a fallen Union General).  Those names are messages to help future scholars piece together the connections between the Lake Tahoe area and a Civil War thousands of miles away. 

The proper way to deal with offensive names or names which carry an offensive history behind them is to add a plaque or addendum on the map explaining why they are offensive and that they’ve been left so people will know their history and not repeat its mistakes. 

George R. Stewart was aware that such unnaming could happen, and he cautioned readers against it in Names On The Land:  “The classical interests of the later eighteenth century are as much part of the history of the United States as are the existence of the Indian tribes or the Revolution.  To maintain, as many have done, that Rome and Troy are mere excrescences on our map, is to commit the fallacy of denying one part of history in favor of another part–or else is to be ignorant of history.

“The ideals and aspirations of the Americans of that period deserve their perpetuation.”

In a similar way, Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein wrote in the LA Times (9-11-22): 

Do Americans today have the courage to look at the mistakes of our past for the sake of our improvement? Courage, in this case, includes our willingness to teach our entire history, to confront the difficult along with celebrating the positive. ….

…“If we’re going to be a country in the future, then we have to have a view of our own history which allows us to see what we were,” historian Timothy Snyder told us. “And then we have to become something different if we’re going to make it.”

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Centuries ago, Thomas Jefferson wrote   …a name when given should be deemed a sacred property….

George R. Stewart would heartily agree.  Fortunately, through his writings on place names – some in his books, some now preserved in hidden places – future scholars will be able to discover why we named places for certain things or certain people at certain times.  And while they will surely wonder at our glorification of the ignorance of our own history, they will honor George R. Stewart for his celebration of Names On The Land.

NAMES ON THE LAND

Wallace Stegner’s  fine essay, “George R. Stewart and the American Land,” originally written for a re-issue of Stewart’s Names On The Land is now more easily found in Stegner’s last work, Where The Bluebird Sings To The Lemonade Springs.  Written a year after Stewart’s death, the essay is a consideration of  Stewart and his work.  But the focus is on Stewart’s unprecedented work about American place-naming.  In another essay, Stegner described Names on the Land as an unprecedented book – “Nobody ever wrote a book like this before…”  fine praise from a great writer, who recognized the quality and uniqueness of Stewart’s book.

Stewart described the book like this:  “There’s no model for that book… It is absolutely on its own.” Others had collected the meanings of place names.  But no one before Stewart had attempted to write a national history of place-naming – that is, a history which explained why we Americans chose to name places in certain ways at certain times in our history.  As usual, Stewart wrote the book with the general literate reader in mind, as well as the scholar, so although it is meticulously-researched, the book is also beautifully written and easy-to-read.

It begins, thus:

Once, from eastern ocean to western ocean, the land stretched away without names.  Nameless headlands split the surf; nameless lakes reflected nameless mountains; and nameless rivers flowed through nameless valleys into nameless bays.

Read those opening words and you know the author has done his share of historical research, and he understands the music of language.

Stewart begins with the words of Those Who Preceded Europeans, the Native people – the people whose names still sprinkle the land, east to west,  from Massachusetts to Mississippi to Tuolumne, and north to south from Dakota to Arkansas to Acoma.  As each different language group settles, and sprinkles names on the land, he tells their story.

Names often reflect culture.  The Spanish usually named places for the Catholic saint whose day was being celebrated on the day the Spanish “discovered” the place. The San Andreas Fault is so named because the Portola Expedition found a small lake in the fault valley on the feast day of Saint Andrew.  The French also named for Saints – St. Louis – but also for more earthy things – Grand Tetons.  Americans heading west by wagon, however, were more practical, naming landmarks in a way that would help those who followed:  Pilot Peak was a landmark to steer your wagon toward, but Stinking Water Pass was not the place to drink or fill water containers (you waited for the next pass, Sweetwater).

In some cases, original names were so modified by later settlers that original meanings are lost – “Purgatoire River” became “Picketwire” to the cowboys, for example. In the mixed American culture, names often combined languages’ words and grammar – thus “the Alamo” and Paso Robles (rather than the proper Spanish name, “El Paso de los Robles”).

When all was said and done, we had names to inspire us, and the world.  Many of the names were so beautiful in sound and spelling, and so poignant in history, that they became legendary: Golden Gate, Yosemite, Florida, Montana, the Grand Canyon, the Painted Desert, Route 66,  Mt. Shasta, Death Valley, the Great Plains, the Colorado River, the Rio Grande, the Missouri, Hollywood, Annapolis, and on and on.  Others were simple American names, often given with a touch of good American humor.  Bug Tussle, Cutlips, Accident, Nameless, Difficult, Nipple Butte, Show Low, Weedpatch, Punkin Center, and their kin are spread across this land.

Stewart’s book was a major success, even inspiring a program in the literate radio detective series,  “The Ghost Town Mortuary” in The Casebook of Gregory Hood. (An actor portraying Stewart helps Hood locate a kidnapper’s hideout when he identifies the one-word message from the victim as the name of a town.)  The book has been reprinted several times, most recently by The New York Review of Books Press.

Stewart once said that Names on the Land would never be translated  because of all his books it was the most specific to our nation’s use of plac name words.  But if current plans work out,  it is going to be translated, into Chinese.  Translator Junlin Pan, and Meng Kai, Geographic Editor of China’s most prestigious publishing house, Commercial Press,  have accepted the challenge.  The Chinese people are deeply interested in America – in how we have accomplished what we have accomplished – and are trying to learn as much about our culture as possible.  Names on the Land is certainly as good an introduction to American culture as anything every written, so it’s a good – if difficult – work to translate.

I’m sure that if George R. Stewart were alive he would be following the Chinese publishing project with keen interest. Of all the books he wrote,  Names on the Land  was his personal favorite.  It was as challenging for him to research and write the book as it will be for Junlin Pan to do a  translation that captures the nuances, the cross-linguist nature, and the wry humor of the names on our land, as sung in Stewart’s fine book.  I wish Junlin Pan and the Commercial Press all the best, and I wait with bated breath for the result.