MEGAN LEE Star-Tribune staff writer | Posted: Thursday, October 16, 2008 12:00 am
Hey, Answer Girl -
Many times, emerging from the Wind River Canyon and passing "the wedding of the waters" where the Wind River becomes the Big Horn River, I've wondered - how many other rivers in the U.S. have more than one name? I know the early explorers didn't realize when they named rivers that they were dealing with the same river. That's probably happened elsewhere, right?
- Dot C.
It's safe to say that most rivers in the United States, at some point, went by at least one other name.
The early explorers weren't equipped with GPS, and the paper maps back then weren't so great either. For the most part, maps of areas new to Europeans didn't exist.
So as the explorers found new areas of rivers, they named them whatever they wanted and moved on. What did they do if there was a big bend in the river or a place where two streams met? They started with a new name, of course!
Rivers were sometimes named after American Indian words or phrases - Mississippi is taken from the Ojibwe word "miss-ziibi," meaning "Great River" - and sometimes in the native language of the explorers, who were mostly French and Spanish.
Thus, a river could be known by several different names in numerous languages, depending on the location and who was naming the river at that time.
Even today, different geographic areas in the country can point to at least one example of a river that suddenly gets a new name at a designated point, as is the case with the Wind/Big Horn River at the "wedding of the waters."
The southeastern portion of the country has the Chattahoochee and Apalachicola rivers - the same river, actually, just named differently once it makes its way through small Georgia towns and Atlanta and ends up in Florida.
Another river goes back and forth with names - from Roanoke River to Staunton River back to Roanoke as it makes its way through Virginia. Interestingly enough, the Roanoke/Staunton River feeds into a lake with two names (the Buggs Island/Kerr Lake).
The Colorado River was once called the Grand River, but now becomes the Colorado, at the state's request, when the Grand and Green rivers meet in Utah.
Even the Platte River was known in the 18th century by French fur trappers as the Nebraska River.
One of the more famous examples of the double name game: the Rio Grande. To Texans, "Grande" says it all. But on the opposite side of the river, those in Mexico refer to it as the Rio Bravo.
Contact reporter Megan Lee at (307) 266-0616 or megan.lee@trib.com.
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Answer Girl tackles questions about Casper, the universe and everything else. Submit your questions by email to megan.lee@trib.com, or call reporter Megan Lee at 266-0616. You can also write to Answer Girl, Box 80, 170 Star Lane, Casper, WY, 82602.