Last Word I have never understood why this old


river town came to be named Colum- bus. I have read where the Georgia Legislature named us aſter Christopher Columbus, but this has never made any sense to me. I have a copy of the old boy’s log book, and it shows clearly that Columbus never came close to this part of the world. Other representatives of the Spanish did, but not Columbus, who wasn’t even Spanish anyway. I know there is a statue of Columbus down on the Riverwalk, and that’s fine and dandy, but the statue was put there 170 years or so aſter the city was founded. Tere are some scholars who say


the original name of Columbus was Wewoka, a Creek Indian word that means “barking or tumbling water” or, says another source, “goose.” Take your pick. It seems that shortly before Colum- bus was founded and named in 1827-28, there was a small cluster of Indian huts, cabins and a tavern or two at Kennard’s Ferry about a mile downriver from the future site of today’s Columbus. Te U.S. government had even established a post office there, which is where we get the name Wewoka. When Columbus was founded, so the


story goes, the little village was aban- doned and everybody beat it upriver to where Columbus was being carved out of the wilderness on a high bluff overlooking the Chattahoochee River. I guess our forefathers couldn’t resist the lure of big city lights. All this is what it says in the books,


and you can look it up in Dawson’s Laws or Martin’s history of Columbus if you don’t believe me. Be forewarned, how- ever, that the orthography of the Creek


64


Indian language is a slippery slope, indeed. Te Indians did not see the world as we do. Tey were much more apt to give a site a name that reflected its dominant feature, such as ekon chate, meaning red bluff, not a bad descrip- tion of the location of Columbus if you think about it. Tere is at least one such bluff downriver from us that we are fairly certain went by that name to the Creeks, and the bluff on which a portion of Montgomery, Alabama is located originally bore that name, I believe. In my youth, some local folks thought


the city should have been named Coweta, aſter the large


Indian town


located downriver on the Alabama side just below the site of today’s Alabama Docks. Tis was Coweta, Kawita in Creek, the so-called capital of the Lower Creeks. Coweta makes more sense to me than Columbus, but I understand why the whites of the time would have preferred not to give the frontier town an Indian name. By far the most reasonable name


I have come up with for our town is Troup or Troupville, a name taken from George M. Troup, governor of Georgia from 1823-28. Gov. Troup engineered the removal of the Creeks from Geor- gia through the fraudulent


treaty of


Indian Springs of 1828, by which the Creeks were ordered out of Georgia. He was the governor who stared down U.S. President John Quincy Adams in the mid-1820s when Adams was threaten- ing to send federal troops into Georgia to stop the state from surveying the Creek lands. Troup threatened to turn out the state militia if Adams persisted. Adams blinked and Troup had the


Columbus and the Valley


by Billy Winn


WHAT’S IN A NAME?


lands surveyed, even while many of the Indians were living on them, and then organized and carried out the Georgia Land Lottery of 1827 by which Musk- ogee County was created. Te Georgia Legislature


designated a five-square-


mile block of land on the river as the Coweta Reserve for the town of Colum- bus. It was by buying lots at a sale in the summer of 1828 that early settlers here acquired their property, thus creating the city we know today. Troup was also known in his day as


the Oracle of State Rights, having been the chief proponent of that political doctrine in this part of the South in the early part of the 19th century. From its very early settlement, Columbus was dominated by Troup disciples, men who had served on his staff in Milledgeville or were known to be political associ- ates and state rights advocates. Many of these men came here with foreknowl- edge that soon the Creek lands in Ala- bama would be available on the open market. Among these men were Sea- born Jones, Troup’s chief aide-de-camp; Mirabeau Lamar, his personal secretary; John Banks, who named a son aſter Troup; Alfred Iverson, a canny lawyer who allied himself with the interests of the Troup clique; Judge Eli S. Shorter, the best-known jurist in Georgia who became a banker and a notorious land speculator in Columbus; and many oth- ers. In 1832, the Troup clique formed the Columbus Land Company and proceeded to fleece the Creeks of their lands in Alabama. But that is a story for another day. Come to think of it, maybe Columbus is a better name aſter all. C


AUGUST 2013


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