A M E R I C A N THE ORIGIN OF


Larry Tritten


Y FAMILY USED TO live in a mountain


valley near a mining community in the wilds of northern Idaho, and our mailing address was Star Route, Smelterville, Idaho. Before that we lived in a town called Coeur d’Alene, which the poet quoted above might have called a “sharp name.” The name Smelterville, however, is anything but sharp and isn’t exactly a “snakeskin title,” either. In any case, I became acquainted early in life with the linguistic architecture of the names of American places, which can range from homespun folk metaphor to foreign exoticism. An address such as Smelterville, Idaho, has an effect on one’s stylistic sensibilities. I remember how self- conscious I used to feel as a boy when I ordered things through the mail from such near-mythic metropolises as Chicago and New York City and was forced to give my location as Smelter- ville. And to people in those grand cities, my hometown probably sounded only a little less gauche than the Mudville of Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s “Casey at the Bat”—and Mudville was a fictitious name! I didn’t know then that “Idaho” is a Shoshone word that


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I have fallen in love with American names, The sharp names that never get fat, The snakeskin titles of mining claims, The plumed war-bonnet of Medicine Hat,


Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat. —STEPHEN VINCENT BENET


u The origin of some American place-names, like Why, Arizona, can be quite mysterious. D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 0 / J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 1


PHOTO: RICK GAYLE STUDIO/CORBIS


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