Milwaukee, where did it come from?

[low_delta]

When I was a kid, the story I heard was that "Milwaukee" meant "the place where three rivers meet." Maybe I heard another story too, but this was the one I believed. And it stuck with me.

Then, in 1992, Wayne's World came out. In it, Alice Cooper is seen to explain, "actually, it's pronounced "mealy-wau-kay," which is Algonquin for, "the good land."

This was obviously a joke. It's a comedy movie (written in part by Mike Myers). I'd never heard that meaning. That's not how it's pronounced. And Algonquin was an eastern tribe. But ever since then, you hear it all the time - the good land. And Wikipedia picks it up, without citing a reputable source. And everybody repeats it, so it becomes truth. I had looked once or twice for a reputable source, but short of contacting a tribe and asking for a linguistics expert, I couldn't think of a way to determine the truth.

I just read a book called Milwaukee Streets: The Stories Behind the Names (1995). It is a listing of all the current streets in the city, and how they got their names. Who or what they were named for, who named them, and even what the names meant. When I got to the entry on Milwaukee Street, I discovered...

There seems to be little reason to doubt that Milwaukee means: good, fine, rich or beautiful land. Frederic Baraga, the man who wrote the first dictionary and grammar for Ojibwa, the universal language of the Wisconsin Indians, said that it means "good land." Louis Moran, an Ojibwa interpreter, described it as meaning "rich land" or "beautiful land." French traders translated "Milwaukee" as "La Belle Terre." The Potawatomi and Menominee languages, like Ojibwa, are part of the Algonquin group of languages, and scholars of both give it this meaning. And finally, place-name experts comparing it to the meaning of similar names in North America have arrived at the same conclusion.
From Milwaukee Streets: The Stories Behind the Names

So... Alice Cooper was right!

And I'm a little annoyed for not knowing any of this. Or for disbelieving it so adamantly.

Comments

[pondhopper.livejournal.com]

Sometimes what doesn't seem logical sounds fishy. Don't be annoyed at yourself for disbelieving. LOL

We have a Baraga County in Michigan's UP named for Frederic Baraga.

[low-delta.livejournal.com]

Baraga was a pretty famous guy at the time. He's got a street in Milwaukee.

[pondhopper.livejournal.com]

There's a Baraga street in the neighbourhood where I grew up.