Note IX-1 — Chapter IX · VOCABULARY OF MISSISSIPPIAN PLACE-NAMES.[IX-1]

This article formed Doc. No. 2, pp. 52, 53 of the App. to Part III. of the orig. ed., entitled "Explanatory Table of Names of Places, Persons, and Things, made use of in this Volume." But there is not a name of any person in it, and not a name of anything in it that does not belong to Part I., i. e., to the Mississippi voyage alone. Having thus been obviously out of place in Part III., it is now brought where it belongs, and a new chapter made for it, with a new head, which more accurately indicates what it is. But even as a vocabulary of Mississippian place-names, it is a mere fragment, neither the plan nor scope of which is evident, as the names occur neither in alphabetical nor any other recognizable order, and include only a very small fraction of those which Pike uses in Part I. of his book. He may have intended to make something of it which should justify the title he gave it, and left it out of Part I. for that reason; but nothing more came of it, and it was finally bundled into Part III. The lists include a few terms which do not occur elsewhere in the work, as for example, "River of Means"; but are chiefly curious as an evidence of the difficulty our author found in spelling proper names twice alike.