The Secret Lives of Used Books (Names on the Land, by George R. Stewart)
This copy of George R. Stewart’s Names on the Land (1945) comes from the public library in Douglass, Kansas.
In the spirit of Stewart’s book, and according to Vol. P. Mooney in History of Butler County Kansas (1916), I’ll report that the town, which was settled in 1869, was founded by and named after Joseph W. Douglass, who was shot and killed in his namesake in 1873. Per Mooney:
He [Douglass] had taken a lively interest in the suppressing of thieving in the community, and on the night of his murder had arrested, without a warrant, a camper he suspected of stealing chickens. The man had chickens in his possession and did not give a plausible account of where or how he obtained them. Douglass marched his prisoner to several places where he had said he purchased the fowls, but the parties denied having sold them to him. The prisoner, evidently fearing the fate of others, shot his captor with a small pistol he had in his possession. Douglass was armed with a large revolver, but had failed to disarm his prisoner. The man ran and Douglass fired at him several times but failed to hit him. Douglass lived a day or two after being wounded and requested that no injury be inflicted upon the murderer. He was captured, tried and sent to the penitentiary for ten years.
The town of Douglass also sits along the old Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad, made famous by lyricist Johnny Mercer in a song that was a hit the year Stewart’s book was published.
Of the origin of Kansas, Stewart had this to write:
At the mouth of that river [the Missouri] the Indians told also of other tribes, and the names of three of them stand on the earliest maps as Maha, Kansa, and Ouaouiatonon . . . To Kansa the French added an s for a plural, and so got Kansas, first for the tribe and then for the river. But the meaning is lost except for guesswork. This tribe, from 1601, had been known to the Spaniards as Escansaques, but the tradition of the name followed the French form.
Stewart also notes, with explanation, how Maha mutated into Omaha, and how Ouaouiatonon got shortened to Ouaouia, which mutated into various spellings, one of which was Iowa. Fascinating book.
