196 ARKANSAS AND RED RIVER. 
Akansa,* from a tribe of the Dahcotah or Osage 
stock, who lived near its mouth. This river 
has numerous tributaries, some of which are 
of great length, yet there is not one that is at 
all navigable, except the Neosho from the 
north, which has been descended by small 
boats for at least a hundred miles. 
Red Rwer is much shorter and narrower 
from the frontier westward than the Arkansas, 
bearing but littleover half the volume of water. 
Even in its serpentine course it can hardly ex- 
ceed 1200 miles from the Arkansas boundary 
to its source. This river rises in the table 
plains of the Llano Estacado, and has not, as 
I have been assured by traders and hunters, 
any mountainous elevations about its source 
of any consequence; although we are conti- 
nually hearing the inhabitants of its lower 
borders speak of the “June freshets produced 
by the melting of the snow in the mountains.” 
e upper portions of this river, and em- 
phatically from the mouth of the False Wa- 
shita (or Faux Ouachitta) upward, present 
little or no facilities for navigation ; being fre- 
quently spread out over sand-bars to the width 
of several hundred yards. A very credible 
Indian trader, who had been on Red River 
* A stranger would be led to suppose we were without a system 
of orthography, from the fact of, our so generally adopting the 
French sparing. ct Indian names, whereby all sight is soon lost of 
the original. e French first corrupt them, and we, by adapting 
our pronunciation to their orthography, at once transform them into 
new names. Thus ‘polite usage’ has converted into Arkan'sas the 
plural of the primitive Arkansa or Arkonsah ; though an approxl- 
mate, Ar’kansaw, is still the current ‘vulgar’ pronunciation. Osage 
and @ great many others have suffered similar metamorpho 
