Gringo Gulch, Dago Spring, and Polack Swamp

[Playinghardball]

Source: Slate

The family of GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry owns a hunting camp in Texas known to many locals as “Niggerhead,” a name that appears on a large rock on the property. Perry claims his father painted over the name as soon as he bought the land, although some in the area dispute the governor’s timeline. Niggerhead was a fairly common place name in the 19th century. How many racially offensive place names are still around?

Hundreds, at least. It’s impossible to say precisely how many offensively named towns and geographic features remain within the nation's borders. State lawmakers don't always agree with the federal government on geographical labels, and people have varying levels of sensitivity. (Is Florida’s Jew Point offensive, for example? What about Indiana’s Redskin Brook?) Government mapmakers have also been working for decades to clean up our toponyms. The U.S. Board on Geographic Names, a branch of the Interior Department, issued two blanket rules decades ago to erase racial slurs from federal maps. In 1962, they replaced “Nigger” with “Negro” in the names of at least 174 places. You can still find such locales as Free Negro Point in Louisiana and Little Negro Creek. (Negro wasn’t widely considered pejorative at the time.) Then they replaced dozens of occurrences of the word “Jap” with “Japanese” in 1974. A handful of state legislatures have also banished select racial slurs from their maps. Still, there are plenty of clearly epithetic names on the books. Consider, for example, Arizona’s Dago Spring and Gringo Gulch, New York’s Polack Swamp, and Chinaman Bayou in Louisiana, to name just a few.

Most offensively named places are in remote areas, like Rick Perry’s hunting camp. (New Mexico’s Kraut Canyon, for example, is in a county with fewer than 10 people per square mile.) If there's one in your area, think of it as an opportunity: State boards of geographic names typically welcome petitions to change controversial map labels, as long as you can suggest a suitable alternative. If you have, say, a relative with a strong connection to the area who has been dead for more than five years, you might get the naming rights.

As Mark Monmonier, a professor of geography at Syracuse University, explains in his book From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow: How Maps Name, Claim, and Inflame, it’s not always obvious whether a name is offensive, because many racial slurs have alternate meanings. A place like Coon Hollow, Colo., could be either an offensive reference to black people or a nod to a furry rodent. It’s also not known what motivated the people who named Wop Draw Valley in Wyoming.

More: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2011/10/rick_perry_s_hunting_camp_how_many_places_have_racial_slurs_in_t.html?GT1=38001
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There was an old mining town (now underneath Lake Natoma) on the American River near Folsom, CA that was called Negro Bar, which is now a boat ramp.

[provis99]

1. Oxford Mississippi has a street called "Coon Alley"

and no, it is not named for raccoons...Coon Alley used to be the black neighborhood in Oxford.

[gratuitous]

2. Certainly offensive place names exist

But there's a BIG difference between a geographic name and what someone names their own personal little acre. One of the things about a geographic name is that there may be reference to it in the legal description of a property, and changing that legal description is just slightly easier than raising taxes in California. Changing a geographic name requires a thorough search of public records to eliminate any unnecessary confusion. So, while we all dislike the name of Dead Injun Creek, changing it to Dead Indian Creek takes some time. Even trickier is when historians identify the Indian referred to, and try to name the creek to honor the long gone personage.

But a place name for a private residence, reserve, ranch or what have you can changed at the owner's whim. The fact that the owner in this case didn't see fit to change Niggerhead to something else should tell folks a lot about the owner. And in this case, probably more than he wanted to let on.

[sad sally]

3. Jon Stewart did a piece on this last night. Unbelievable.

[pinboy3niner]

4. From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow: How Maps Name, Claim, and Inflame

Mark Monmonier


Offensive toponyms fall into two categories. One type, examined earlier, denigrates racial and ethnic groups. The other variety, dealt with here, offends folks bothered by rude or otherwise impolite references to body parts, sex, excrement, and other no-no’s. A form of geographic cussing, rowdy feature names are markedly less controversial than their ethnically derogatory counterparts, partly because the irreverent miners and ranchers responsible for most of them avoided the F-word and similar shockers, and partly because questionable toponyms occur mostly in remote, sparsely inhabited areas with few eyebrows to raise. Indeed, an outsider who objects to a locally acceptable “naughty name” is quickly branded a stuffed shirt or prude.

...


A less humorous aspect of mammary toponymy is the denigration of Native American women by feature names like Squaw Tit, in its singular or plural form. Derogatory intent seems a bit obvious insofar as squaw is far more commonly paired with the mildly obscene tit than with the more numerous and clinically correct nipple. My canvass of GNIS found only two of the latter: Squaw Nipple (in Montana) and Squaw Nipple Peak (a variant for Squaw Dome, in California). By contrast, squaw is part of 19 of the country’s 28 tit-based names (fig. 4.1), and accounts for roughly equal portions of the 19 official names and 9 variants. What’s more, unlike the nipple appellations that affectionately commemorate white women named Elsie or Molly, none of the tit toponyms mentions anyone, white or Indian, by name. And of the six features with squaw variants, four still have squaw in their official name. Apparently tit was more offensive than squaw to whoever sanitized the official names of Arizona’s Squaw Butte (formerly Squaw Tit), Nevada’s Squaw Mountain and Squawtip (both formerly Squaw Tit), and Texas’s Squawteat Peak (formerly Squawtit Peak). By contrast, geometry edged out racism when features formerly known as Squaw Tit became Thimble Mountain in California and Pushtay (a Sahaptin Indian word for “small mound”) in Washington State. These subtle substitutes suggest a solution for state officials troubled by toponyms pointedly offensive to feminists and Native Americans.

...


http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/534650.html

[ProgressiveProfessor]

6. Look up the original meaning of Grand Tetons sometime

[ProgressiveProfessor]

5. You forgot Dago Red

I've been watching the Ken Burns series...