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River Story
Hardly half a dozen women’s names are split among the three million miles of American river. These names were given by men: in 1805 Captain Clark gave Judith River his cousin’s name and one week later, in Montana, Captain Lewis did the same to Marias River. There is a Maries River in Missouri and a Mary’s River in Illinois and a Marys River in Oregon, which Adam Wimple named for his sister, Mary, before hanging for the murder of his wife, Mary, in 1852.
There is Hutchinson River in the Bronx, honoring the antinomian Anne Hutchinson, banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1637, and killed, in 1643, on the muddy east bank by the Siwanoy; and Elizabeth River, named by the settlers of Jamestown for the Winter Queen Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of James VI and I, Queen of Bohemia for a single winter, in 1619.
In California, Gaspar de Portolá named the Santa Ana, Santa Clara, Santa Ynez, and Santa Margarita Rivers; in eastern Texas, Spanish missionaries named Angelina River for the “little angel” Hasinai girl who extended them a hand in friendship. In Northern Minneosta, settlers named Ann River for the Ojibwe woman they called “Old Ann,” “Old Moose,” and “The Monument.”
Among the male the near three millions of miles of American creek, run, and stream that still remain only the feminine genera: Woman Creek, White Woman Creek, Crazy Woman Creek, Woman Hollering Creek, Dirty Womans Creek, Strangle Woman Creek. The cold morning that Grand Army of the Republic Highway brings us to Huron, on our tour of the Great Lakes, I pull onto the shoulder of a little coastal bridge to watch Old Woman Creek run out from the woods, under our feet, and mix with the ocean.