Book Description

Excerpt from The Kansas Historical Quarterly, Vol. 21 According to an early edition of Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, the word "Kansas" in the Indian vernacular means "Smoky Water." This reference applies particularly to the stream commonly known as the Smoky Hill. Indians who had lived and hunted along this stream for ages considered the Smoky Hill and Kansas rivers one and the same stream. The Smoky Hill river is shown on early maps as the River of the Padoucas, from the fact that the stream has its source in territory occupied for ages by the Comanche Indians, or, as they were first known, Padoucas. The earliest reference to the stream we have located is found on D'Anville's map of 1732 which shows the Smoky Hill and Kansas as one river and calls it the River of the Padoucas. A map of British and French settlements in North America, published about 1758, names the stream the Padoucas river. Pike, the explorer, encountered the stream while on his way to the village of the Pawnees on the Republican river, in 1806, and his chart of this trip gives the name as the Smoky Hill, this being, so far as we have discovered, the first mention of the stream under this name, though the name must have attached some time prior to his visit. John C. McCoy, who surveyed the Shawnee lands in Kansas in 1833, reached the river at a point about 200 miles west of the Missouri state line, and he called it the Smoky Hill. Schoolcraft, the historian, called the stream the Smoky Hill or Topeka river; Fremont called it the Smoky Hill Fork; and Max Greene, in his The Kansas Region, published in 1855, mentions the river, and says the Indian name for it was "Chetolah." The Plains Indians had another name for it, calling it the "Okesee-sebo." James R. Mead, an early hunter, trapper and trader on the plains during the latter 1850's and 1860's, has the following regarding the origin of the name: "The Smoky Hill river takes its name from the isolated buttes within the great bend, landmarks widely known, to be seen from a great distance through an atmosphere frequently hazy from smoke." About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.