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From: rudolph@cis.umassd.edu (Lee Rudolph)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
Subject: Re: What does "Oregon" mean?
Date: 22 Nov 1995 07:48:26 -0500

mwhite2@leo.vsla.edu (Matthew White) writes:

>According to a book I read long ago ("Names on the Land", I
>forgot the author),

By George R. Stewart, originally published in 1945.

>Oregon is a French cartographer's misspelling
>for Wisconsin (i.e: handwritten "Ouisconsin" looks like
>"OuraGon sin"), and "Wisconsin" originally described the whole
>unexplored northwest territory.
>
>This could be a folk etymology or a real one; I don't know for sure.

From Stewart's later "American Place Names" (Oxford, 1970):

OREGON. The most disputed of U.S. names. Many of the theories have been highly fanciful. The serious attempt to derive it from an Algonguian (especially Ojibway or Cree) word referring to a plate or bark dish meets difficulties in view of the fact that such a name is improbable, hot being in accord with known Indian habits of naming. I here abide by the theory, which I first presented in 1944, viz., that the name is from a mistake on a French map of 1715 (see the `Ornament' issue of Baron Lahontan's _Nouveaux Voyages_). Mistake names are a recognizable category of place-names; cf. Bogata, Nome, and others. This map was carelessly engraved. The name of the Wisconsin River was usually spelled Ouisconsink by the French, but the engraver made it Ouariconsint. Moreover, for lack of space, he put _sint_ below, so that the name appears to be Ouaricon. This name was associated in later documents with an alleged great river flowing to the Pacific, and was then spelled Ouiragon, Ourgan, and Ourigan. It finally appeared as Oregon int he work of Jonathan Carver (1778). After the discover of the Columbia River, this was generally supposed to be the Oregon, and the name was then applied to the country in its vicinity and later to the territory and state.

Lee "my spell-checker caught Bogata and Nome" Rudolph