[ganong] INDIAN PLACE-NOMENCLATURE. 289 



edition of Bartlett's Dictionary, used it twice in his book, and then was quoted as an 

 authority by Bartlett in his second edition! The earliest original use of the word 

 that I have been able to find, however, is by Thoreau, who, in 1848, in his paper 

 "Ktaadn," reprinted in The Maine Woods, 51, uses this sentence, — "Now and then 

 we passed what McCauslin called a pokelogan, an Indian term for what the drivers 

 might have reason to call a poke-logs-in, an inlet that leads nowhere." Later (op. cit. 

 100), he writes, — speaking of moose tracks he saw, — -"They were particularly numer- 

 ous where there was a small bay, or pokelogan, as it is called, bordered by a strip of 

 meadow, or separated from the river by a low peninsula covered with coarse grass, 

 wool-grass, etc." Thoreau heard the form later as SPOKELOGAN, from an In- 

 dian, who, in response to a question as to the meaning of the word, answered "no 

 Indian in 'em" (op. cit. 248). Thoreau's expressions show that he was referring to 

 those shallow, usually mud-bottomed, coves found especially at the lower ends of 

 former islands as relics of old passages now closed at the upper ends. Nowadays 

 such a place is called by the lumbermen and guides, a LOGAN, an obvious ab- 

 breviation of POKELOGAN. The difficulty with the logs is not simply a pleasantry 

 of Thoreau's, but a real one to the river-drivers, who sometimes find parts of their 

 drives eddied into the pokelogans and caught there, though at other times these 

 places are said to be used deliberately for storing the logs over a season. This 

 prominence of the logans in Maine river life has led to the elevation of the word into 

 a verb, and one is said to be "loganned," when he enters such a place and has to 

 return, as is made very clear by Mrs. Eckstorm (Miss Hardy) in one of her articles 

 in Forest and Stream, XXXVI, 1891-2, and also by her father, Manly Hardy, in the 

 same journal LXXIV, 1910, 731. Mrs. Eckstorm tells me also that lumbermen 

 speak of "loganning" logs, when they store them in logans. The word, by the way, 

 both as Pokelogan and Logan is found also in the forests of the Northwest, to which 

 presumably they have been carried by Maine lumbermen (Terms used in Forestry 

 and Logging, Washington, 1905. 



In later editions of his Dictionary, Bartlett adds other illustrations of the use 

 of the word and this statement: "the word is the equivalent of Chippewa pokenogun, 

 and related to pokegoma and — gomig, a recess or one-sided lake connected with the 

 principal lake or with a river by a short outlet" citing in support Owen, Geological 

 Survey of Wisconsin, 280. This latter work, by the way, merely explains the use of 

 Pokegoma, and says nothing of Pokenogun, which I cannot find in Baraga's Dictionary 

 or elsewhere. In DeVere's Americamisms, of 1872, the word is said to be defined as 

 "a marsh," but this would be wrong. Murray's Dictionary follows Bartlett. In 

 1896 the identity of the New Brunswick Place-name POCOLOGAN-POPELOGAN, 

 in the form PEC-E-LAY'-GAN, with the Maine word, was implied in a note of mine 

 in these Transactions, II, 1896, ii, 263, a suggestion which was adopted by Chamber- 

 lain in 1902 (Journal of American Folk-lore, XV, 1902, 254), and is the origin, I 

 think, of the statement in Clapin's Dictionary of Americanisms that the Maine poke- 

 logan is also spelled popelogan. In 1903 (Journal, cited, XVI, 1903, 128), I pointed 

 out the identity in use of the Maine word LOGAN and the New Brunswick word 

 BOGAN, with the word POKELOGAN, and emphasized the probability that the 

 two latter are corruptions, through abbreviation, from the former; and these sug- 

 gestions have been incorporated into the definitions of LOGAN and POKELOKEN 

 in the supplementary pages of the Century Dictionary, and in the Handbook of Am- 

 erican Indians. If, by the way, illustrations of the use of the New Brunswick term 

 are desired, they may be found in an article by G. Stead in the Bulletin 

 of the Natural History Society of New Brunswick, III, 1893, 29, and in another by M. 

 Foster, in the Atlantic Monthly, LXXXVI, 1900, 239, while typical illustrations of the 



