American Language Supplement 2 (89 page)

The surnames of the American Indians are in a state of apparently hopeless confusion, as the Indians themselves are in confusion. Some of them have adopted names wholly American,
e.g., Philip Marshall
,
George Williams
and
Alfred B. Richards;
²
others have hitched their native surnames to American given-names,
e.g., Moses Bull Bear, Charles Little Dog
and
Fred Cut Grass;
yet others have retained their native names unchanged. This last category, alas, is small and seems to be vanishing. I can find no example among the signatures to the petition just cited, nor among those to a similar petition from Choctaws,
³
nor in a list of graduates of the United States Indian Industrial and Training School at Carlisle, Pa., running from 1889 to 1913.
⁴
The original Redskins bore nothing properly describable as fixed surnames, and even their given-names were frequently changed. Said a contributor to the
Atlantic Monthly
in 1881:
⁵

When Indians began to come in from the warpath and settle on reservations this chaos gave great difficulty to the Indian agents, and eventually the Indian Bureau issued orders that every individual must have a surname and stick to it. The need for the regulation became even more pressing in 1887, when the passage of the Allotment Act made it necessary to identify precisely every Indian who received a parcel of the tribal land. In 1903 the Indian Bureau employed Dr. Charles A. Eastman to overhaul the surnames of the Sioux
¹
and various others were put to work at the same task among other tribes. Whenever a child entering school or an adult entering a government hospital lacked a name in the American fashion one was supplied. If there was already a native name it was commonly translated, which explains the origin of such surnames as
Little Cloud, Fast Horse
and
Lone Wolf
. Unhappily, many a poor buck, at the time of the registration, was bearing a derisive name, and in consequence it still afflicts his progeny,
e.g., Fool Head, Long Visitor
and
Broken Nose
.
²
Even more unhappily, the average Indian agent had only a meagre grasp of the native languages, and thus made some bad mistakes in translation, as when a name meaning
Young Man Whose Very Horses are Feared became Young Man Afraid of His Horse
. In the early days there were many names of like length, but the Indian Bureau discouraged them, and now it is rare to find an Indian bearing one. The surnames that survive mainly relate to personal characteristics,
e.g., Black Eye
and
Yellow
Boy
,
¹
or were suggested by a fancied likeness to some bird or animal,
e.g., Red Owl, Flying Hawk, Fast Horse
and
Crazy Horse
, or some feature of the landscape,
e.g., Howling Water, High Pine
or
Red Cedar
.
²
It is not surprising that many of these surnames should be opprobrious: the same is true of many Indian tribal names.
³
In the Indian tongues they tend to be jaw-breakers, and the early white colonists found them difficult. William Nelson lists the following monstrosities from the early days:
Abozaweramud
(1681),
Mokownquando
(1708),
Wallammassekaman
(1687),
Kekroppamont
(1677) and
Rawautoaqwaywoaky
(1709).
⁴
Sometimes these names embodied syllables which passed on from father to son, to become primeval equivalents of surnames,
e.g., baq
(bone),
ik
(pepper),
kok
(tortoise),
may
(tobacco),
pek
(stone),
seb
(clay),
yat
(fly),
gwuq
(seven) and
sam
(snot).
⁵

The surnames of American Negroes have been studied by Howard F. Barker,
⁶
Newbell Niles Puckett,
⁷
and Lorenzo D. Turner.
⁸
Barker estimates that of the 10,000,000-odd Negroes living on the American mainland in 1924, 7,500,000 bore English or Welsh surnames, 1,300,000 Irish names, and 1,200,000 Scottish names, with a very small minority bearing Dutch, German, Spanish, French or Jewish names.
¹
It is commonly assumed that the surnames of Afro-Americans are those of the masters of their ancestors in slavery times, but Barker shows that this is by no means always the case. The name of Samuel
Hairston
, the largest slave-owner in the South at the outbreak of the Civil War, is very rare among colored folk, and those of other large slave-owners,
e.g., Hampton, Haynes, Pinckney
and
Rutledge
, are anything but common.
²
The favorite is
Johnson
, which accounts for no less than 190 Negroes in every 10,000. Next in order come
Brown, Smith, Jones, Williams, Jackson, Davis, Harris, Robinson
and
Thomas
. It may be that the popularity of John
Brown
of Ossawatomie put his surname into second place, and the fame of George
Washington
apparently accounts for the fact that
Washington
is far commoner among Negroes than among whites,
³
but how are we to account for
Johnson?
It can hardly be a patronymic, for relatively few slaves had the given-name of
John
, and Andrew
Johnson
was certainly not its eponym, for Dr. Carter G. Woodson has shown that it stood in first place, and among free Negroes, so early as 1830.
⁴

The fact is that freed slaves probably adopted the names of overseers as often as they took those of masters, and in even more cases chose names that were simply common where they lived and thus
seemed regular and proper and suitable to their station in life. Very few of them named themselves after Abraham
Lincoln
, and even fewer after
Garrison, Grant
and
Sherman
. Their favorite among all their liberators was General O. O.
Howard
, head of the Freedmen’s Bureau from 1865 to 1874. Barker says that more than one-third of all the
Howards
in the United States are now colored. Unusual surnames are rare among Negroes, though Barker calls attention to the fact that, as is the case with whites, they are relatively frequent among persons of distinction,
e.g., Du Bois, Chesnutt, De Priest, Vann, Douglass, Hastie, Schuyler, Robeson, Garvey, Bethune
and
Carver
. The female students in the Southern Negro colleges and normal schools, when they marry before graduation, often hook their surnames to those of their husbands, but this is not done to enhance their social prestige, but simply to identify their credits on the registrars’ books.
¹
Otherwise, hyphenated names are very rare among colored folk.
²

The popular literature of onomatology is largely given over to discussions of strange and unearthly surnames. Their collection was begun by William Camden, who listed some interesting specimens in his “Remains Concerning Britain,” first published in 1605,
³
e.g
.,
Bigot, Devil, Pentacost, Calf, Hoof, Loophole
and
Gallows
. The bibliography in the United States apparently began with N. I. Bowditch’s “Suffolk Surnames,” published privately in Boston in 1857 and brought out in enlarged form the year following. The Suffolk of the title was the Massachusetts county, but Bowditch also included names from other parts of the country. Some of his prize specimens were
Ague, Cheer, Darkies, Dudgeon, Gotobed, Lighthead, Oxx, Rain, Strachatinstry, Ugly
and
Wedlock
. Edward Duffield Ingraham, a Philadelphia lawyer, followed in 1873 with “Singular Surnames,” the materials for which came chiefly from the Philadelphia newspapers of the 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s. He listed, among others,
Allchin, Bitsh, Christmas, Forthfifth, Glue, Oyster, Toad, Whisker
and
Yeast
. The collection of such monstrosities still goes on, and the newspapers frequently report the discovery of one hitherto unwept, unhonored and unsung. I offer a few from my own archives:

Miss Mary C. Oursler, formerly administrative assistant in the Census Bureau, is authority for the statement that 30% of the heads of families in three of the thirteen original States in 1790, when the first census was taken, bore “names appearing as parts of speech in everyday conversation,”
e.g., Dumb, Looney, Gushing, Soup, Vinegar, Waffle, Grog, Grapevine, Petticoat, Hornbuckle
and
Turnipseed
.
¹⁰
Many of these have succumbed to the ribald humors of the populace, but the foregoing list shows that a liberal sufficiency remains. When such names are combined with the weird given-names that will be considered in the next section the effect is often startling,
e.g., Uffie Grunt, Sunny Piazzi, Ima Hogg, Byzantine Botts, Joline Joy
and
Sudis Fat
.
¹¹
A learned man in Canada tells me of a
pretty immigrant girl who came to school in Manitoba bearing the name of
Helen Zahss
, and was much upset when the first roll-call produced titters. All surnames in the foregoing list were gathered in the United States, but England can match them hands down. Charles Wareing Bardsley, in his “Dictionary of English and Welsh Surnames,” lists
Barefoot, Brass, Caitiff, Coiner
,
¹
Dam, Evilchild, Foulfish, Godspenny, Ham, Ironfoot, Jericho, Killer, Lent, Makehate, Obey
and scores like them, and other English professors of morbid onomatology have reported
Smallbones, Gotobed, Hogflesh
,
²
Allways, Body, Burnup, Calf, Catchpoll, Cheese, Cuss, Doll, Egg, Eye, Galilee, Gent, Goodbeer, Hustler, Kisser, Maggot, Pink, Poorgrass, Shoppee, Smelt, Tout, Venus
,
³
Candy, Shakelady, Ughtynton
,
⁴
Trampleasure
,
⁵
Hiccup
,
⁶
Bugg
,
⁷
Sucksmith, Smy, Ghost, Maw, Pitchfork
,
⁸
Eighteen, Whist, Gumboil, Handsomebody, Cutmutton, Sleep
,
⁹
Yallow, Gathergood, Gee
and
Rump
.
¹⁰

The American nomenclature shows nothing like the fearsome batteries of hyphenated surnames that are common in England,
¹¹
but it has a compensatory oddity of its own in the intrusion of second
capitals into names,
e.g., GaNun
,
¹
VirDen
,
²
KenMore
,
³
KlenDshoj
,
⁴
KleinSmid
,
⁵
RossKam
,
⁶
RiDant
,
⁷
and
VisKocil
.
⁸
Names that are really two names, separated by a space and not hyphenated, are occasionally encountered,
e.g., Be Bee
,
⁹
Bel Geddes
¹⁰
and
Ben Ami
,
¹¹
but the early American custom of hitching territorial or occupational appendices to surnames,
e.g., Charles Carroll of Carrollton, John Randolph of Roanoke, John Ridgely of Hampton
and
Charles Carroll the Barrister
, seems to have passed out, and so, save in a few areas, has the custom of affixing father’s initials to distinguish between two cousins of like given-name and surname,
e.g., Joseph Brown of A
(the son of
Albert
) and
Joseph Brown of D
(the son of
David
).
¹²