FLUVIAL NOMENCLATURE

Before we leave the subject of Buchanan streams, however, we desire to say a few words in regard to their names. All names are more or less significant; and it is probable that no one was ever given without there being, in the mind of the giver, a definite reason why that particular one, and not another was assigned to the object named. The reason may never be announced, or, if once made known, may become forgotten; or it may be thought too trivial to remember. But the fact remains, that every object named must have both a namer and a reason for its name. And the reason may continue to be known long after the namer has been forgotten. Thus it is probably at present unknown who first gave

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the name of Bear creek to the stream last mentioned; but there can be no reasonable doubt as to the reason why that name was given. As it would be bare nonsense to call a stream Bear creek if no bears had ever been found upon its banks, so we may safely take it for granted that the name was given to perpetuate the memory of the fact that bears were once found there. This stream, therefore, and also, Buck, Otter, and Buffalo creeks, are standing (or rather running) monuments to a fauna which, in this county, has become extinct. And we cannot help thinking that, if certain other species that once abounded here, but have now disappeared or are fast disappearing (such as the elk, beaver, muskrat, wolf, wild turkey, grouse, etc.), could have been commemorated in a similar way, it would have been a very graceful thing to do.

What the names of the streams above mentioned have done for the fauna of the county, the name of Pine creek has done for the flora—that stream being so named on account of the white pines which grow along its banks. They are found mostly in Liberty township, with the deciduous trees. It is believed that no native pines are found anywhere in the county, except along this stream.

The name of Lime creek does not seem specially significant, since limestone is the principal outcropping rock found in the county. As a name, however, it probably serves its purpose as well as another. The personal names given to several of the streams are those of prominent individuals now or formerly living in their vicinity. These individuals will be suitably mentioned in the sketches of their several townships. The name of the Mayuoketa is evidently of Indian origin, but we have not as yet been able to ascertain its meaning.

As to the Wapsipinicon, the Indian legend, said to be connected with its name, is sufficiently romantic to satisfy the most sentimental of novel readers. Wapsie and Pinicon (so the story goes) were a brave Indian youth and a beautiful girl of the same race, but of a different tribe. We may suppose (for the location favors the supposition, and there is nothing in the legend to contradict it) that Wapsie was one of the warlike Sioux, and that Pinicon belonged to the equally warlike and hostile tribe of Sacs. Love laughs at tribal prejudices; and so this ill-fated pair, who had thus far resisted all amorous attractions within their individual tribes, having met by chance, the usual way, up somewhere on the neutral ground, fell desperately in love with each other at first sight. Both had the blood of a long line of chieftains in their veins—which circumstance, while it gave a heroic intensity to the ardor of their passion, interposed a mountain of obstacles in the way of its gratification. Love may laugh, as we have hinted, at tribal and family prejudices, but parental authority is very apt to make an inflexible religion out of those unamiable sentiments. Thus it was in the present instance. When Pinicon's father discovered that his daughter had turned a favorable ear to the addresses of a scion of a hostile house, his rage knew no bounds, and he sternly forbade her to have any further communication with the presumptuous and impudent young warrior, or even to think of him again as a desirable or possible husband. The law of love, however, is stronger than that of a parent's will; and the lovers still found means to continue their correspondence—but with a circumspection that entirely eluded the father's vigilant eye.

At length, weary of the long frustration of their hopes, and despairing of the paternal consent, they determined upon an elopement. Pinicon, though she could not tell a lie, had not hesitated to let her father believe that she had yielded to his wishes, and given up her ill-starred attachment. By this he was led to relax his accustomed vigilance, and he set out upon a hunt of several days, without leaving anyone specially charged with the duty of watching her movements. The faithful Pinicon contrived to inform her constant Wapsie of this favorable opportunity, and he hastened to avail himself of it to bear her away to his northern home. But as bad luck would have it, the father returned unexpectedly, just as they were preparing for their flight. Finding the hated Wapsie under his roof, he exclaimed in a towering rage: "Wah beh jobangunk! Kommensie in diesen ort nicht zurück, wenn sie auch nicht hangen wollen, wo die vogel ihre hirnschalenhaut picken werden!" Which means, freely translated, "Get out of this! And if you ever darken the door of my wigwam again, I'll hang your scalp on a crabapple tree for the birds to pick at!" The brave Wapsie, though taken by surprise, was not at all frightened; but he was too magnanimous to fight her father in the presence of his adorable Pinicon. So he retreated backward, bowing like a courtier as he went, and calmly saying, as he left the door: "Auf wrederschen! Yach goonic Filippimini weeho!" That is "good bye! We'll meet again at Phillip!"

We will not attempt to describe the scene which followed—the angry rebukes of the father and the speechless grief of the daughter. Suffice it to say that the former, when the storm had spent itself, apprehending no further trouble, at least for the present, and remembering his daughter's skill in the preparation of venison, bade her in a kinder tone to dry her tears and get him his supper. He was very hungry and very tired, and as night set in before the repast was over, it had not long been finished when he lay down in his blanket and went to sleep. The dusky Pinicon, with eyes red with weeping, also retired, but not to sleep. She thought of many things; but especially she thought of the trysting place where she and her lover had so often met, and it occurred to her that, led by the sacred associations of the place, and perhaps by an undefined presentiment that she would follow him, he might now be awaiting her in that hallowed spot. At any rate it would not take her long to visit it herself, as it was little more than a mile, partly through the oak openings and partly across the prairie. If she found him not, it would at least afford her a melancholy pleasure to be there alone, as she had so often been; and she could easily return to the wigwam before her father would awake. So she arose, wrapped her blanket around her and went quietly out. The October moon was shining brightly, and she had no difficulty in making her way to the well known spot. It

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was just on the border of the grove where, in the shadow of a spreading oak, lay a huge rock, on which they were accustomed to sit in the deepening twilight, bewailing their unhappiness or discussing plans for bringing it to an end.

As soon as she came in sight of the tree she beheld a dark object beneath it, which she soon recognized as the form of her lover, the noble Wapsie. Almost at the same instant, he, too, beheld an indistinct figure gliding in and out among the shadows. At first he suspected that it might be a deer, and immediately became convince that he was not mistaken—that it was his dear deer, Pinicon! He flew to meet her, and clasped her in his arms, exclaiming: "Not even death shall ever part us more. Let us fly to my northern home,where parental tyranny can never separate us." And so, looking to the north star for guidance, as many duskier fugitives have since done, they set out upon their flight.

But they had not proceeded far when ominous sounds were heard in the distance behind them. They paused and listened, and soon distinguished angry voices. They turned and looked, and at first could discover nothing; but a moment after they discovered four tall forms emerging from the grove. "It is my father and the other chiefs," exclaimed the frightened Pinicon. "The river! the river! Let us die rather than be taken!" The stream was about a mile to the west of them, and toward it they turned in eager flight, as if to reach it were life instead of death. Their pursuers perceived them at the same moment, and redoubled their speed. About half the distance was across the open prairie, and the rest through a grove of straggling trees. When the fugitives reached this grove the pursuing chiefs were so near that the trees afforded no concealment; and when the former arrived at the bank of the river, the latter were hardly a rod behind them. There was no time for the young hero (who is said to have been the best soloist of his tribe) to sing his death song, nor was any needed. The murmuring river was singing it even then, and, without waiting for encores, it was going to repeat it through all the coming days.

With one backward glance of mingled despair and forgiveness at the angry faces glaring upon them in the moonlight, the devoted lovers, clasped in each other's arms, leaped into the stream. The enraged father reached the bank only to behold them sinking, rising, struggling in the waves. At once his anger was changed to sorrowing love.

"Come back! come back!" he cried in grief,
"Across the stormy water;
And I'll forgive your Highland chief—
My daughter! O, my daughter!"

Too late! too late! The eloquent Indian words, reproduced centuries later in passable English by a Scotch poet, had scarcely died upon the air, when the two devoted lovers, casting another and more melting glance of forgiving love at the poor old despairing chief, weeping on the shore, sank in the engulfing waters to rise no more. The broken-hearted chief returned to his wigwam, a sadder and a wiser man. But his sadness got the better of his wisdom, and ended his days. He never smiled again. A settled melancholy took possession of his mind. The medicine men could do nothing to arrest his malady, and before spring bloomed again upon the prairies he sickened and died. but he left a will (no copy of which, we regret to say, has been preserved) requiring that a memorial mound should be erected on the bank of the river, near where the lovers perished; and that the stream itself should forever after bear their united names, WAPSIPINICON. The mound, we believe, has been carried away by some of the tremendous freshets which characterize the stream; but the name, barbarous as it sounds to some fastidious ears, has come down to the present day, and will probably never wash out.

As this legend will suit any river whose name contains the requisite number of syllables, we suggest that it may be applied to Maquoketa. We have not been able to find an interpretation of the Indian name given to that stream; but we have only to imagine that two Indian lovers, Maquo and Keta, drowned themselves in its waters, and all the reasonable demands, both of romance and of etymology, will be met and satisfied.

We hope the reader will not get impatient: we will try and let our balloon down in time dinner. But as we are speaking of rivers, we cannot think of leaving the subject without saying a few words about

THEIR FREQUENT VARIATIONS

What we have to say in regard to this matter will refer principally to the Wapsipinicon river, but will, of course, apply, mutatis mutandis, to all the other streams. The features of every landscape are always changing more or less rapidly, under the action of its watercourses. Every stream is liable to fluctuations. When rains are heavy, and general and long continued, it rises, overflows its banks or washes them away, changes its direction, makes new bends or cuts off old ones, covers green fields with beds of sand or gravel, washes away dams, bridges and other artificial structures, and scatters their debris along its banks. All of these changes, of course, tell upon the landscape. If we could take an accurate photograph of the scene that lies below us, and return again, in only a year's time and taken another, we should find the two very perceptibly different, in consequence of the fluvial changes brought about in that short interval.

Changeable as are streams in general, we think the Wapsipinicon is exceptionally so. The soil through which it flows is, for the most part, sandy, and therefore drifts readily with every overflow. This fact makes it difficult to bridge in many places where bridges are very necessary. The first crossing of the river below Independence, is a place of this character. The stream, before reaching this point, makes a sudden deflection toward the east; and since the present bridge was built, the stream has changed its bed to such an extent, and the detrition of the bank has been so great at the southern extremity of the bridge, that it has been thought necessary (now that the old structure has become dilapidated, and a new and more substantial one is about

29

to be built), to cross the river forty rods below—although the road will have to turn that distance out of its direct course in order to reach the new crossing.

The contrast which the Wapsie presents, between its usual condition in midsummer, with the water shrunk far within its banks; the cattle standing in the shade in the middle of the current; and the entire stream passing through mill-flume on its way—and the condition in which it often finds itself in early spring, in the "June rise," or in the "January thaw,"—is about as great a contrast as can be imagined. The Wapsie "with his back up" is always an imposing, and sometimes even a terrible, sight. If the stream freezes in a time of high water, and breaks up with heavy rains, look out for fearful floods, and much damage from floating ice. The writer of this will never forget the spectacle he witnessed at Independence, in the spring of 1871, in precisely such a conjecture as the one above mentioned. It had been a very cold winter, and the ice had formed to the thickness of three feet or more; consequently, when the "break up" came, the masses of ice that came crashing down the stream, were like floating islands.

The water was so deep that it made only a ripple as it passed over the mill-dam, which is some ten or twelve feet in height. Three or four ice breaks, placed above the dam, and consisting of large cribs filled with bowlders [boulders], were cut away by the immense ice shears that passed over them, as if they had been so many muskrat houses. The huge ice cakes, as they slid over the dam, just showed their thick edges as a token of their power, then dipped themselves gracefully, but majestically beneath the wave, lifted their monster forms again to the surface, and hurled themselves like battering rams against the piers of the bridge below. These, like the ice breaks mentioned above, were cribs built of large timber and filled with bowlders. The principal attack was upon the pier nearest to the eastern abutment. This, like the other (we believe there were but two), was protected by a wooden guard, built of heavy timbers and extending out into the water in the form of an angular inclined plane. Against this the huge masses of ice were hurled with such force that, sliding up the inclined plane to its summit, they fell back into the chaotic mass, sometimes with a dull, leaden thud, and sometimes with an explosive sound, like that of heavy ordinance. The guard was soon worn away, and then the giant rams came butting directly against the pier. The whole bridge trembled with every concussion. A cry goes up from the vast crowd of people gathered on the banks of the river, that the bridge is doomed. A breach is made in the crib. The bowlders begin to tumble out. The upper part of the pier settles down, and the floor of the bridge tips in that direction. The whole structure becomes more and more askew till suddenly the rest of the pier gives way, and that part of the bridge comes down with a tremendous crash. As the other pier and the abutments stood their ground, less than half the bridge was washed away; but the authorities wisely decided to remove the rest of the old structure and replace it with another more substantial, and likely to be permanent. The result is the present iron bridge of two spans, strong and graceful, resting upon two abutments and one immense pier, all of solid masonry, which, it is reasonably believed, no ice rams will ever be able to batter down.

Having studied the Wapsie in his varying moods, all of which, from the peaceful to the furious, are both picturesque and poetic, we trust we shall be pardoned, even by the prosaic reader (if we have any such) for embodying our impressions and recollections of those moods in a rhyme which shall at least have the merit of appropriateness.

SONG OF THE WAPSIPINICON

When vernal rains descend no more;
And summer skies are luminous;
He glides along each verdant shore;
With murmurs softly fluminous.
The children sport upon the brink,
Wile sultry noontide hies away;
The thirsty kine go in to drink,
And stand and whip the flies away.
The love-boats kiss the water's cheek,
When moon-lit nights begin again;
And rustic joys play hide and seek
Along the Wapsipinicon,
The sliding Wapsipinicon—
The gliding Wapsipinicon:
The rolly-poly, cheek-by-jowly, strolly Wapsipinicon.

But when the lowering clouds come back,
And o'er the green earth frown again;
And all along his winding track
The summer rains come down again;
The waters, gathering from the hills
And upland prairies far away,
Descend in thousand swollen rills
That bear each hindering bar away.
The farmers round in terror wake
To hear the deluge din again,
And see a spreading, surging lake
Where rolled the Wapsipinicon,
The welling Wapsipinicon—
The swelling Wapsipinicon:
The washy, swashy, splishy-sploshy, sloshy Wapsipinicon.

But winter comes with icy chain
To bind the north-land fast once more;
And Boreas, in a wild refrain,
Breathes forth is bugle blast once more.
Then Wapsie dons his cloak of ice,
Set round with snowy fur above;
And ne'er an ear, however nice,
Can hear the water stir above.
The skaters, shod with flashing steel,
Glide circling out and in again;
And joy, as sweet as summer's feel,
Broods o'er the Wapsipinicon,
The white-bound Wapsipinicon—
The tight-bound Wapsipinicon:
The snowing, knowing, stealthy-flowing, blowing Wapsipinicon.

But when he feels the touch of spring
Through all his kindling pores again,
And vernal clouds their treasures fling
Along his loosened shores again;
Upspringing from his wintry lair
He hurls his frosty chains abroad,
Which fierce destruction madly bear
Through vale and flooded plains abroad.
In aspect wild, in gesture grand,
A blustering giant Finnegan,
With ice shillelah in his hand,
Goes forth the Wapsipinicon,
The roaring Wapsipinicon—
The pouring Wapsipinicon:
The dashing, clashing, wildly smashing, thrashing Wapsipinicon.

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And thus, while seasons come and go,
Through all the years voluminous,
He marks their ever-changing flow
With his own changes fluminous.
The red men owned his verdant banks
But shortly after time began,
Which white men took with little thanks
Not long before this rhyme began.
But while the tide of time flows on,
Still, as old Saturn's minikin,
Till earth, sun, moon and stars are gone,
Shall flow the Wapsipinicon,
The changing Wapsipinicon—
The ranging Wapsipinicon:
The swopsy, whopsy, flipsy-flopsy, slopsy Wapsipinicon.

We fear that the reader may be getting a little weary of being kept so long "up in a balloon;" but, before descending to terra firma, we desire to take a cursory glance at the Buchanan

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