THE NAMES OF THE MOOSE 



237 



Atlantic coast — probably in Virginia — met two 

 species of deer. The smaller they called "deer," 

 and by this name the Virginia, or whitetail, deer 

 {Cariacus virginianus) has been popularly known 

 ever since. The other species, the wapiti, was 

 unknown to them, as doubtless the red deer and 

 the elk of Europe were. Seeing the great size of the 

 wapiti, and knowing that the European elk was a 

 large animal, the colonists gave the name *'elk'' 

 to the wapiti, thus leaving the true elk, alces^ 

 without a name. Later, when Englishmen met 

 the true elk in the more northern forests, they 

 gave him the Algonquian name moose. 



According to the Handbook of American Indians ^ 

 issued by the Smithsonian Institution in 1910,^ 

 the names of the moose in various Algonquian 

 dialects were as follows: Narraganset and Massa- 

 chuset, moos; Delaware, mos; Passamaquoddy, 

 mus; Abnaki, monz; Chippewa, mons; Cree, 

 monszva. The Montagnais of Quebec, another 

 Algonquin tribe, called him moosh. "'All these 

 words signify *he strips or eats off,' in reference 

 to the animal's habit of eating the young bark 

 and twigs of trees. 



* Part I., p. 940. 



' The differences in spelling in the various dialects are partially ex- 

 plainable perhaps by the fact that the Indians employed a sound which 

 cannot be closely indicated by letters of the English alphabet, Sebas- 



