«' DID THE ROMANS COLONIZE AMERICA ? " 64S 



See-pea. Ojibwa of Michilimackinac, See-bee (pronounced as spelled). Miami, 

 Se-pe-we. Chippewa, Si-pi (pronounced See-pee). Other bands of the Chippe- 

 was living north of the Great Lakes pronounce it Nee-pee, the spelling of which, 

 as I have frequently seen it, is Ni-pi. 



I have made it clear, I think, that the Indian name of the Mississippi comes 

 to us from the Ojibwa or Chippewa, and that its meaning was oris " Big River." 

 De Soto, on reaching its banks some years before La Salle, found that the In- 

 dians in his vicinity called it " Big River," and I know that the Sioux called it in 

 Hennepin's time, and do to-day call it, Wak-pa-ha-ha; Wak-pa meaning river, and 

 ha-ha meaning falls, or literally River of the Falls, for its great feature in their 

 vicinity was the Fall of St. Anthony. I further know that from St, Anthony's 

 Fall to its mouth, the river was known to all the Indians along its banks, as the 

 " Big River," down to its mouth, except perhaps an Illinois band who called it 

 Mis-seek-si-pi, meaning "The Grassy River," or better "The River of the Grassy 

 Plains." Now I would ask of Mr. Moore his authority for his rendering of the 

 word as he has it on page 241, Messi-apa. If it is possible to twist orthography 

 and etymology so as to derive Missis-si-pi from Aba, Aub or Ab, then all we 

 shall need in future research of the kind, is a Latin dictionary and a Sanscrit 

 Bible. What is the use of a knowledge of the exact meaning of the words in any 

 language if we are to do as Mr. Moore has done in his paper ? To pick out cer- 

 tain words in an obsolete tongue signifying whatever they may, and then culling 

 over the thousand and one tongues spoken over the world and taking from them 

 all words which have a like sound with our selected standard, and then assume 

 that they also have a like meaning with the words of our standard. 



That Mr. Moore has done this in his paper I affirm, nor is he alone in this 

 matter, for many writers have fallen into the same error, but have not been willful 

 in doing so as Mr. Moore seems to be ; for when the original word has not the 

 slightest resemblance in its pronounciation to any of his so-called ''Terms," he 

 willfully misspells it, so as to make an apparent agreement. Mr. Moore on pages 

 364-5, Vol. VIII, wades through a large number of names derived from, or given 

 by Spanish explorers to rivers and places in America, to prove that the Latin 

 word Aqua was as he says : " Well and thoroughly known and correctly spoken 

 * by the native peoples of the American continent." Now I challenge him to 

 produce a vocabulary of a native American tongue, in which the Latin word 

 Aqua occurs, or any of its forms as spoken by people of Latin origin, and at the 

 same time meaning water. I also challenge him to find a vocabulary of a native 

 American language in which words, if there are any, beginning with Aq, Ag, 

 Ack, Aqu, Agu, or any other forms, having a similarity with the words Aqua, 

 or Agua, in which the said native American words have a meaning expressive 

 of the word water. It is plain that all the names which he quotes, and which 

 have come to us from Spanish geographers, are words of their own invention. 

 The Spaniards, who with their priests, of the time of the American discoveries, 

 were noted for refusing everything native, abhorred the natives, for they were 

 heathens, and refused them a place in their literature. Hence we know less 



