The Rivers of America: Colonialism and the History of Naming

Abstract

American rivers retain Native names twice as often as mountain ranges and four times as frequently as basins and summits. If renaming the landscape was, as historians argue, the handmaiden of colonialism, then this pattern has important implications for our understanding of American history. With case studies of four rivers, this article explores why rivers like the Housatonic and the Mississippi retained Native names, while waterways like the Charles and the Columbia did not. The ease of water travel meant that White newcomers explored major American rivers at an early date, when they still depended on Indigenous Americans for their survival. Although Europeans often tried to strike Indigenous names from the map, they could not always remove them from broader usage—and names, of course, were useful only insofar as they served as a common shorthand for particular places. Renaming the landscape, therefore, was as complicated and contingent as conquering it.