Note 86 — Chapter III · Concluding the Route to the Great Salt Lake City.

The French word is extensively used in the Rocky Mountains and Oregon, “where,” says Colonel Frémont (“Expedition to the Rocky Mountains,” p. 145), “it is naturalized, and which, if desirable to render into English, there is no word which would be its precise equivalent. It is applied to the detached hills and ridges which rise abruptly and reach too high to be called hills or ridges, and are not high enough”—he might have added, are not massive enough—“to be called mountains. Knob, as applied in the Western States, is their most descriptive term in English; but no translation or periphrasis would preserve the identity of these picturesque landmarks.”