“I, José da Silvestra, who am now dying of hunger in the little cave where no snow is on the north side of the nipple of the southernmost of the two mountains I have named Sheba’s Breasts, write this in the year 1590 with a cleft bone upon a remnant of my raiment, my blood being the ink…”
So reads the beginning of a document that sparks a search for ancient treasure in the 1885 novel King Solomon’s Mines by H. Rider Haggard. But José da Silvestra wasn’t the only one taking a trip down mammary lane to find an appropriate name for some geographical prominence. In fact, this thing is common the world over. There’s even a whole Wikipedia entry titled “breast-shaped hill” that catalogues the phenomenon. European explorers seem to have been particularly prone to such naming conventions. The Teton Range in the American West derives its titillating name from the French, Les Trois Tétons. Here in Arkansas, what we now call Pinnacle Mountain (pictured here on the left) was memorably dubbed Mamelle by the French, and the name survives in both the community of Maumelle and the Maumelle and Little Maumelle Rivers.
Sometimes, though, people like to name things after themselves: thus Zebulon Pike’s eponymous peak. Or sometimes, they choose a name to curry favor with a patron, as with the Colony of Virginia (named after virgin queen Elizabeth I of England) and one of its earliest European settlements, Jamestown (named after James I of England/James VI of Scotland). The Arkansas railroad town of Mena derives its name from the nickname of Folmina Margaretha Janssen deGeoijen, the wife of a man financing what became the Kansas City Southern Railway.
More rarely, people might name something after their opponents. My favorite story here at the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas relates to the creation of Craighead County. As per the EOA entry:
Running for the state legislature, William Jones made a campaign pledge to voters residing in the northern section of Poinsett County to use his influence to create a new county. After being elected, he proposed, in the 1858 legislative session, the creation of a new county in northeast Arkansas….The proposal called for the new county to incorporate land from the area represented by Jones’s fellow state senator, Thomas Craighead, who strongly opposed the idea. At a time when Craighead was allegedly absent from the Senate chamber (though some historians dispute this based on legislative records), the vote was taken, and the bill to create the new county was passed. The victorious Jones proposed that the county be named for Craighead—some say as a joke, others say as a gesture of goodwill. Craighead in turn proposed that the new county seat would be named for Jones, though some sources say it was named for Jones by its grateful citizens.
Another popular naming convention simply entails slapping the word “new” in front of an older place name. Out in the wider world, New York (previously New Amsterdam), New Jersey, New Zealand, New South Wales, and Nova Scotia (Latin for New Scotland) are all just older names with “New” affixed. Someone from York, England, might be impressed with New York. But part of me thinks that the average inhabitant of Edinburgh or London might be less impressed with Arkansas’s own New Edinburg and New London.
In 2011, Arkansas musician Bonnie Montgomery released a “folk opera” titled Billy Blythe, a reference to the last name with which Bill Clinton was born. And it makes you wonder: Would someone with the name Billy Blythe get elected governor and president? Tom Terral and Sarah Sanders seem to be our only governors with names exhibiting alliteration, and that latter one happened quite some time after Clinton. Looking at a list of American presidents, we do have Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, and Ronald Reagan as examples of alliterative presidents. However, the more formal William Blythe might have been a better bet for increasing electoral odds.
But what about place names? Might we imagine a counterfactual for the land we live on? I’ve often seen older news stories describing events occurring in Texarkana, Arkansas, but listed as happening in Texas, because the city straddles the state line (or, more properly said, the two separate municipalities on opposite sides of the state line both sport the name Texarkana), and because the “Tex-” portion of that name seems to weigh more heavily in the imagination. And I’ve met people from out of state, hanging out in North Little Rock, who did not know that North Little Rock was a municipality completely separate from Little Rock. They just thought it meant the northern part of Little Rock. Granted, West Memphis is not regularly conflated with Memphis, but I’m sure a state line and a great big river help to keep those separate in the minds of travelers.
What if North Little Rock had kept the name Argenta? What if West Memphis was still known today as Hopefield? What if we refused to give Texas priority and called our side of that line Arktexana? Would our history have been any different? “What’s in a name?” asks Juliet. “That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet.” But that which we call Argenta might stand a better chance of differentiating itself from its neighbor to the south, and that whom we call Billy Blythe might be encouraged to start up a rockabilly band rather than run for office. “Rockin’ Billy Blythe” has rather a ring to it. With a name like that, he’d be at the pinnacle of his career in no time.
By Guy Lancaster, editor of the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas
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