"I" Before "E" Doesn't Help if the Word's Wrong to Start With

A friend e-mailed me to let me know I had a name wrong in an earlier post. I had called southwestern Oklahoma's Wichita Mountains southeastern Oklahoma's Ouachita Mountains. I made the correction, put out a contract on his life, and thought some about the two words, which on their surface don't much resemble each other.

Like many of our Oklahoma names, they derive from Native American names -- tribal names and place names both. We have towns, streets, counties, rivers, creeks, lakes, mountains and what have you that take their names from one Native American language or another because during the last part of the 19th and first part of the 20th centuries, many native people were resettled here. Towns grew up and maps were drawn well before the lands were opened for white settlement and later statehood, They were named by the people living there and many of those names remain. Until I went to college in Chicago, I never considered that there would be people who didn't know how to say Tahlequah, Pottawatomie, Pushmataha, Kiowa or Okfuskee.

Those names may often be spelled quite differently, because phonetic attempts to render the Native words into European languages didn't always match. In the town where I grew up, there was a street called Chickasaw, and I learned to say that pretty much the way it's spelled: "chik-uh-saw." But when I moved into the area southwest of Oklahoma City, I found a city there that spelled its name "Chickasha" and pronounced it "chik-uh-shay," not the "chik-uh-shah" I would have expected. My mispronunciation was but one of the many lessons I needed to learn there, of course.

It gets weirder when the words migrated into different European languages. Wichita and Ouachita are related and refer to related tribal groups, although not the same group. The first Europeans the Ouachita people met were French. This happened around 1700, when they were living in what is now northern Louisiana. The French explorers wrote the closest phonetic equivalent they could to the people's name for themselves, calling them the "Ouachita" because when you write in French the sound that English represents with "w" you use "ou," like in oui. Also, the French language usually renders the written "ch" to sound a lot more like what English writes as "sh."

Although the Ouachita people were mostly absorbed into the Natchitoches Tribe by 1720s and today are enrolled in the Caddo Nation, their name remains on several geographical features in southeastern Oklahoma, southern Arkansas and northern Louisiana. Some of them, like the mountains mentioned above, use the French-derived spelling, while some, like the town of Washita or Washita County, use the Anglicized spelling.

The Wichita people, by contrast, were found in western Kansas, western Oklahoma and west-central Texas. Their name can be found on cities, rivers and mountains through this area, ranging from Wichita, KS down to Wichita Falls, TX. Their language belonged to the Caddoan family of languages, like the Ouachita people in Louisiana, and the first Europeans they met were Spanish, coming up through what is now Mexico (I'd never rely on Wikipedia for something I was turning in for a grade or publishing, but since this article is pretty comprehensively footnoted and I'm just writing a blog post, it'll do unless you want to go the the library yourself).

Rather than a single tribe, the Wichita people seemed to be some smaller tribes that shared the common Wichita language. They were mostly village-based, although they did follow the bison during a hunting season and only returned to their villages after the season was finished. First compressed by aggressive Apache and Osage people and then by European settlement and disease, they now have a tribal government headquartered in Anadarko, OK, for what is known as the "Wichita and Affiliated Tribes," and includes the Wichita, Keechi, Waco and Tawakonie peoples. Their name, as mentioned above, is used today for several cities, towns and geographical features.