Place names show history and nonsense
Norman McFarlane Walker was best known as an editorial writer for the New Orleans Picayune beginning in the early 1870s, but he also wrote several treatises on Louisiana history, including one in which he claims that the state “is richer in historic and poetic names than any other state in the Union.”
Many of those names came from the state’s early French settlers, who he says “were much better at naming a country than at colonizing it.” But, he says, the French didn’t do it all by themselves. “On the map of Louisiana,” he writes, “one can read today the stories of the Indian, French, Spanish, and American dominions, and follow with absolute certainty every step and movement of the early explorers” (“The Geographical Nomenclature of Louisiana,” The Magazine of American History, September 1883).
He begins with Iberville and Bienville, the first French colonizers of Louisiana, claiming that Isle de Petits Pois off the Gulf Coast east of New Orleans, got its name because they forgot a bag of peas when they hurried away from the island to take advantage of a favorable breeze. “It is [Pea Island] to this day, although it has probably not seen a pea since 1699,” he claimed.
Walker lived and wrote in New Orleans and much of his essay deals with places near the city, but he does reach farther afield from time to time, sometimes with assertions that make me raise an eyebrow.
The only Spanish names remaining in south Louisiana, Walker said, were New Iberia and Cocodrie, which was a corruption of the Spanish word crocodillo (crocodile), “an alias for an alligator, which is as different from a crocodile as a frog from a turtle.”
Spanish priests were given the right to name many places, which may be part of the reason that Louisiana is the only state where counties are called parishes. He recalled that there was an attempt to change that by the new American government not long after the Louisiana Purchase, but Frenchspeaking, Catholic Louisianians regarded that as revolutionary, possibly blasphemous, and in 1817 the state went back to calling its civil divisions by their traditional, proper name.
He says the “most beautiful stream in Louisiana, the famous Teche” is a corruption of the word Deutsch, which means “German.” Shane Bernard, in his book about the bayou calls that theory “problematic” because very few Germans lived on the Teche, and those who did were more likely to be described as des Allemands (Teche: A History of Louisiana’s Most Famous Bayou,” University Press of Mississippi, 2016).
Walker notes that “even the prehistoric birds and beasts are recalled in the Louisiana nomenclature,” including places like Prairie Mamou, named after “mastodons, mammoth’s, and other prehistoric animals” that once roamed here; Chatagnier, French for persimmon; Prairie Faquetaique, French for turkey; Maringouin, mosquito; and Petite Anse, which he says means “gosling,” although I have always understood it to mean “little cove.” Father Daigle’s Cajun French dictionary defines anse as a “cove formed by woods or streams in a more or less semicircular shape” (Msgr. Jules O. Daigle, A Dictionary of the Cajun Language, 1984).
Walker says the “poor Acadian” Paincourtville community got its name from a traveling salesman who arrived there tired and hungry and who wanted a loaf of bread, “but in the town there was not so much as a loaf of baker’s bread to be found.” The salesman said the place should be called “Short-bread Town,” Paincourtville in French. I suspect this is a made-up story but have nothing better to offer.
The locals pronounce the name “Pankerville,” and it is one of the places ─ like Natchitoches (Naketish) and Tchoupitoulas (Chopitoolas) ─ that Walker says are used to identify strangers in their midst.
Laughing over pronunciation was probably a pretty good way to identify non-locals in his time and may still be in some places, but I think the best way to recognize them in south Louisiana nowadays is to watch them try to peel a crawfish.
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@ gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.
