Origin of the name "Oregon" (financing, interior)

[hamellr]

One of the Pacific Northwest's oldest mysteries is the exact origin of the word "Oregon."

Kevin Brown in the Geographicus Antique Map Blog says:

"The debate over the term “Oregon” has been ongoing for over a century. Most scholarship ascribes its first known use to a 1765 manuscript petition by Major Robert Rogers to the King of England’s Privy Council requesting financing for an expedition to discover a river based “Northwest Passage” from the Great Lakes to the Pacific. Variants later appear in Jonathan Carver’s 1778 Travel’s Through the Interior Parts of North America. Carver was an associate of Rogers from whom he no doubt derived the term. Modern scholars have delved deeper into the term associating it with various American Indian languages. The most recent scholarship on this subject by anthropologist Ives Goddard and linguist Thomas Love (Oregon Historical Quarterly, Vol. 105, No. 2 (Summer, 2004), pp. 238-259) traces the etymological root of “Oregon” to Abenaki term “wauregan” meaning “good” or “beautiful”. The Abenaki (and later the French in the form of Le Page’s Map), with whom Rogers was intimate, used this term to refer to the Ohio River – a westward flowing waterway that empties into the Mississippi. The most interesting remaining question seems to be, ‘How did this term become associated with a river that emptied into the Pacific?’"

I highly recommend reading the rest of the article, he does a great job giving us a good over view of the origin of the word.

[Larry Caldwell]

The debate keeps going. A few years back I heard it was originally an Assiniboine word that meant "river with all the fish." It's the sort of thing that keeps philologists employed, but only of passing interest to the rest of us.

[Hawk J]

I heerd it was derived from when a mountain man was sayin', "most of the high quality gold Ore is now mostly all gon."...

[BayAreaHillbilly]

Now what I'm wondering about is the origins of the words "Oreeeegawn" and "Oreeegahyan."