This one is from Webster's New World -- not one of my regular dictionaries, but the only one anywhere in the office where I work. (It's an accounting firm, so there aren't a lot of dictionaries....)

The other day I happened to be looking through the R's and I noticed the Republican River listed. This is one of the many rivers crossing America's Great Plains. I'm really not familiar with the Republican River at all -- in fact, without looking at a map, I couldn't even tell you if it's in Kansas or Nebraska -- but I assume it's probably just a big dry ditch during much of the year. (I grew up in Alaska where rivers are fed by snow-melt and thus run year-round. It wasn't until much later in life that I discovered this isn't standard for rivers worldwide.) But I've seen the blue line on the map often enough, noticed the name, and wondered about its origin. Was it named for the party of Lincoln? the party of Jefferson?

As it turns out, neither. Like so many U.S. rivers, it was named after a Native American tribe. Today, this particular band of the Pawnee are properly known as the Kitkehahki, but in those days they were called the "Republican Pawnee", as the result of some Frenchman's dubious notion, in the late 1700s, that they practiced a republican form of political organization. In the early 1800s, right about when Anglophones were sufficient aware of the Republican River to need to refer to it by name, a band of Republican Pawnee were settled on the river, and thus it came to be called the Republican River.

Now I'm wondering about the Canadian River. (That one's in Oklahoma, I think. Definitely nowhere near Canada.) In my younger days, even without a modern marvel like Google, I'd have wasted no time in looking it up. And I hope that when I'm a parent I'll revive that bookish habit long enough to pass it on to my progeny. But not today.

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