Moingona
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The "Des Moines River" has, since the mid 1800's referred to "the River of the Monks." Before that, the term "Moingona" referred to "an immense and magnificent Prairie, all covered with Beef and other Hooved Animals," literally a prairie that was "at the road." The "shit face" etymology is nothing more than an amusing pun. ——————————————

One notion currently getting a lot of internet interest is that "Des Moines" is derived from the Illinois Indian term "moingona" meaning "excrement face."

The notion is based on theorized scenarios about the expression "moingona" being coined during Marquette's 1673 meeting with the Illinois. Marquette’s record tells of finding "a narrow and somewhat beaten path leading to a fine prairie" and to three villages within about a mile and a half of each other. (Note that in the link, the sentence containing the quote begins in French at the bottom page 112, is in English at the bottom of 113, continues in French on 114 and in English on 115.)

One of the villages was "peouarea," and the theoretical scenario has the Peoria Indians acting as middle-men interpreters. They gave Marquette the dirty slur "mooyiinkweena" or "excrement faces" as the name for their arch rival Moingona Indians behind their backs. And so the Moingona were saddled with that slur from that time forward.

The linguist who came up with this scenario admits this theorizing about Marquette being duped is improbable ("strange," as he puts it).

That is an understatement. Nothing about the imaginary scenario fits the facts. The name "Moingona" was not coined at that 1673 meeting. Father Claude Allouez had documented the year before that the "Ilinoue" (Illinois), the "Peoualen" (Peoria) and the "mengakonkia" (Moingona) were among a gathering of people who "all speak the same language." The notion that Marquette had to use the Peoria to deal with the other villages makes no sense. As Marquette said "we easily understood each other."

There was no need for or mention of anything remotely like middle-men, no mention of adversarial squabbles among the people in the three villages Marquette visited. Virtually everything documented about the Moingona indicates they were closely affiliated with the Peoria; the distinction between the Peoria and Moingona was to some extent a distinction without much of a difference.

Marquette repeatedly demonstrated in his dealing with other Natives he did not just take other peoples' names for them at face value. He was interested in what could be learned from the people's names for themselves, as his eagerness to "make very careful researches" about the name "Puan" illustrates. The first thing he asked the Ilinois when he encountered them was who they were.

If the name given to Marquette were a  literal, bold-faced, obvious insult in the Miami-Illinois language  Marquette would have known it and not accepted it. Indeed, it is hard to believe that the only name anyone ever used in all the scholarly, formal discourse about these people was the "dirty-joke" name.

For example, Father James Gravier reports some years later speaking to the "Peouaroua" and "Mouingoueña" and other chiefs "in full council," a meeting of "respect and good will." Gravier is usually considered the author of the best and most extensive Miami-Illinois dictionary. He would not have used a "dirty joke" name for people as he was dealing with them.

The record is fairly straightforward. Pierre Charlevoix, a missionary who explored the region in 1721, recorded that "le Moingona" was "an immense and magnificent Prairie, all covered with Beef and other Hooved Animals." He italicized the term to indicate it was a geographical term.

Charlevoix spends two or three pages discussing the region. It was made up of this magnificent prairie and of a stretch of river noted for its rocks, capes, rapids and narrows that made it necessary "to make a detour of the river," that is, "necessary to unload and drag the canoe."

"This country was the Moingona" he said, and noted that "one of the tribes bears that name." The region and the people were named for the detour or road around the stretch of river that was not navigable by canoe. This road was the same "beaten path" Marquette referred to that led him to the Ilinois.

Joseph Nicolas Nicollet, a geographer who was commissioned to map the upper Mississippi basin, offers a very down-to-earth (literally), informed, sound discussion of the region and its people. He used Native guides for whom the region was home. The noted Algonquian linguist Henry R. Schoolcraft was also on his staff.

Nicollet spends a couple of pages discussing these rapids and the road around them and the problems the rapids present to the opening up of the area. For Nicollet, as for Marquette, Jolliet, and Charlevoix — and for virtually everyone else who had anything to say about the area — the defining idea embodied in the expression "Moingona" was the road around the unnavigable stretch of river out into the prairie.

Nicollet recounts Marquette’s account of finding a road along the river and following that road to three Algonquian villages. "Moingona," he records,

is a corruption of the Algonkin word Mikonang, signifying at the road; …alluding, in this instance, to the well-known road in this section of country, which they used to follow as a communication between the head of the lower rapids and their settlement on the river that empties itself into the Mississippi, so as to avoid the rapids; and this is still the practice of the present inhabitants of the country.

Which brings us to etymology — that very dubious exercise of imagining how things were pronounced and what sounded like what 300 years ago.

It is possible that the expression spelled "mengakonkia," or "Moingona" or "Mouingouena" hundreds of years ago is based on the expression Algonquian linguists today spell "mooyi" (meaning "dung"). But is it not at least as reasonable, and certainly much more in tune with the documented uses of the term, that it is based on the expression linguists spell "miiwi" (meaning "road, path") or "miiyonki" (meaning "on the path, road")?

Or consider the expression "m8nagami8i" or frequently "m8na8agami8i" found in Gabriel Gravier’s early dictionary (the "8" is pronounced "ou" or "w"). Gravier translates it as "small marsh, water which does not prevent from walking without trouble, timber, plants."¹

Isn’t that a reasonable etymological fit and remarkably precise semantic fit for the defining characteristic of the "Moingona" region? Is there any scholarly semantic or historical reason, on the other hand, to to consider the "shit faced" etymology anything more than an amusing pun?

Nicollet makes another point that is often made and worth reviewing. Regardless of the roots of the name used before the early-to-mid 1800’s to refer to what we now know as the Des Moines River, after that time it came to mean "river of the monks." In 1809 the Trappist monks established a monastery on top of the largest of the Cahokia Mounds on the banks of the Mississippi. It was a well-known landmark.

Over the next couple of decades the river that emptied into the Mississippi became known as the River of the Monks or Des Moines River, a name that seems to first appear in print in 1824. It is true the early Canadian historical/missionary records used the phrase "des moines" dozens of times before 1824, but those uses merely referred to monks in Europe or elsewhere. None of those usages remotely had anything to do with the river in Iowa.

And after the early-to-mid 1800’s, whatever long-ago meaning the name of that river might have been given in prehistory became replaced in public consciousness and the written record with the monks by the river. That prehistoric name for the region was replaced with the name with the straightforward meaning "the river of the monks."

Notes

¹Masthay, Carl.  Kaskaskia Illinois-toFrench Dictionary. Published by the author, 2002. Masthay transcribed, translated, edited and indexed the manuscript almost universally attributed to Gravier, although there is some question about its provenence. Nevertheless, it is by far the most complete and authoritative early work of its kind.

DOCUMENT INFO
This document: http://www.illinoisprairie.info/Moingona.htm
Home page: http://www.illinoisprairie.info
Author:  Jim Fay
Comments to: jimfay7@gmail.com
Posted on: 8/2/11