The following is the author’s response to a review by Della Collins Cook of the book, Native American Place-Names in Indiana, in the Journal of Folklore Research Reviews (09/03/08). Click here to read the original review.

I am grateful to Dr. Della Collins Cook for the many good words that she wrote in her recent review of my book, Native American Place-Names of Indiana. However, besides some points she raised that I would naturally take issue with, there were a few errors, which are quoted and/or discussed below.

"Many place-names refer to individuals or groups of people who lived there. Many important Native American figures in Indiana history are memorialized in this way, for example Turtle Creek for the late eighteenth-century Miami leader Little Turtle." Actually, as the book states, Turtle Creek was named after a mid-eighteenth century Miami-speaking leader who bore the same Miami name as that of the famous Little Turtle.

"...Big Raccoon Creek [can be traced] back through the French use of chat sauvage for both bobcats and raccoons to the Miami leader Pishewaw, or Bobcat." The book does not say that the French term chat sauvage (literally "wild cat") referred to the bobcat. The early French in North America used the French language expression loup cervier for the bobcat as well as the term pichou, an Algonquin-Ojibwe borrowing, but never chat sauvage. Chat sauvage was the French language expression for the raccoon.

Further on, I was criticized for not giving more attention to the work of Carl Voegelin and Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin. In truth, Voegelin’s Shawnee papers include next to nothing related to the Native American place-name heritage of Indiana, and his own Miami language material amounts to ten pages of notes of uneven quality taken on one day in Oklahoma from Nancy Stand, a woman who had earlier in her life been a speaker of Peoria, and contains no Indiana place-name data. Importantly, his well-known redaction of Jacob Piatt Dunn’s Miami language vocabulary is not only incomplete and often inaccurately transcribed, but it also contains no Miami place-names. Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin’s massive ethnographic and historical work also has very little in terms of Indiana Indian place names--it offers far more on Ohio than on Indiana. I thoroughly mined Wheeler-Voegelin’s material for what it had that was relevant to Indiana.

In addition, I had pointed out that only the Peoria name for the Wabash River tributary known as Sugar Creek could not be prehistoric, since it literally translates to “sugar creek.” The other attested Miami-Illinois language name for that stream, which translates to “sugar maple tree river,” could be prehistoric. But that name would simply describe the kind of tree that was most commonly seen along the valley of that creek, not the manufacture of maple sugar or maple syrup from those trees. Now, I realized after the book went to press that I should have mentioned Lucien Campeau’s important article on maple sugar production, or rather on the lack of aboriginal maple sugar. He arrives at the same conclusions as does Munson about this lack, but his historical-document research extends much further, working extensively and more deeply inside the French sources and concluding that there is simply no evidence for pre-contact sugar making. The earliest documented use of the sugar maple by Indians was a crude, broad slashing of the tree from which the water could be drunk first-hand. The Jesuit Relations, those extensive records of missionaries who spent year in and year out--and year round--with native peoples throughout the 1600s and 1700s, barely mention maple sap let alone maple sugar. Indeed, the only mention of maple sugar in the Jesuit Relations is from the late date of October 15, 1722 (JR, 67:95). This dearth of discussion of maple sugar, especially by the Jesuits, is strange if maple sugaring was such an important prehistoric and early historic aboriginal practice. In the end, the Peoria named Sugar Creek in their language with an expression that translates exactly to English "sugar,” a reference to "storable sugar," the post-contact material.

Finally, the reviewer states, “McCafferty strays across the state border in discussing the Kankakee drainage and the streams that drain into the Great Lakes, but unaccountably he fails to relate the Embarras River, a tributary of the Wabash in Illinois named for its blockade of driftwood, to the Driftwood River, an old, translated name for the East Fork of the White River that likewise contributes to the more-extensive, native conception of the Wabash River.” In truth, the Embarras River was named by the French. No historical documentation is found to support a native origin for this name. In another publication I will talk about the very interesting and in many cases long-forgotten French names that once arrayed the Wabash valley.

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[Review length: 792 words • Review posted on September 17, 2008]