Upper Mississippi River Valley Place Names: Rattlesnake Hills, Mountain Island River
Settler renaming of an Indigenous landscape.
In 1897 the first white historian of the Winona area, Lafayette Bunnell, wrote that his older brother Willard and their friend James Reed of Trempealeau, “by agreement, while hunting or fishing… applied nearly all of the names which the smaller streams and bluffs in our vicinity still bear.”
In his recollections of both 1883 and 1897, the younger Bunnell provides numerous location names and phonetic spellings representing Dakota (then Sioux), Ho-Chunk (then Winnebago), and some Ojibwe (then Chippewa) place names on the Upper Mississippi. Bunnell includes English interpretations, sometimes based on prior French interpretations (which, of course, were often based on Dakota, Ho-Chunk, or Ojibwe names).
All names for the rivers, villages, bluffs, sacred sites, and other landmarks familiar to current area residents have gone by different names in the past. The Trempealeau River, for example, was called Mountain Island River on J. N. Nicollet’s 1843 map. On their Dakhóta Thamákhočhe (Dakota land map) for the Prairie Island–Red Wing–Winona area, artist Marlena Myles and linguist Dawi (Huhá Máza) list the “mountain island” itself as Mní Čháŋ Kašká (Water and Wood Bound in Place). No doubt drawing from the Dakota reference, mid-18th century French-Canadian voyageurs of the fur-trade era called it la montagne qui trempe à l’eau, the mountain soaked in water, from which the modern name for the river, town, county, and “mountain island” are derived.
In Lafayette Bunnell’s 1897 book Winona (WE-NO-NAH) and its Environs on the Mississippi in Ancient and Modern Days, he also recalls the mostly forgotten name of Rattlesnake Hills in reference to the Trempealeau area. This appellation was meant as a slight by settlers such as Hercules Dousman — early empresario of Prairie du Chien. According to Bunnell, Dousman sent letters via steamboat to the “Rattlesnake Hills” instead of Trempealeau in an effort to scare travelers away from the emerging riverside village.
In the mid-1800s, settlers such as the Bunnells, Reed, and Dousman took it upon themselves to apply names which surveyors and mapmakers then also used to simply erase or alter Indigenous names while formalizing settler preferences. As a result, the Upper Mississippi River Valley has a complex linguistic mixture of place names derived from combinations and creative re-interpretations of Dakota, Ho-Chunk, Ojibwe, French, and English words.
While names may seem permanent now — because they’ve been here “forever” in the settler imagination — they were generally amended and applied by a handful of white men over a few short years. When Dakota peoples, the Ho-Chunk Nation, or state or federal agencies suggest changing names that are considered offensive — or for any other reason — settler-descendants might do well to pause and consider the patterns of erasure evident in the (re)naming of regional landmarks a mere 200 years ago. By contrast, Indigenous people have been living in (and naming) places along the Upper Mississippi Valley for at least 12,000 years.
The renaming of locales such as Bde Makhá Ska (meaning White Earth Lake, in Minneapolis) and Hemníčhaŋ (meaning Hill-Water-Woods, aka Barn Bluff in Red Wing) are part of an active re-Indigenization of place names. These efforts assert language and identity which honor long standing relations between ancestral homelands and the region’s Indigenous peoples.
To learn more about regional Dakota place names in southern Minnesota, visit https://marlenamyl.es/project/dakota-land-map/ or the Hoocąk Waaziija Haci Language Division for information from the Ho-Chunk Nation, at https://www.hoocak.org/.
Originally published in Ocooch Mountain Echo, Issue 6, Fall 2023. https://www.ocoochmountain.co/echo
