RIVER CITY JOURNAL: `PLACE TO GROW POTATOES' IS ALL BALONEY

A new book that attempts to explain how the capital of Kansas got its name is a mile off the facts. Here is the real story, which is probably only a quarter-mile or so off.

Sometimes history goes wacko. That certainly seems to be the case with a new book entitled "Why Do They Call It Topeka?" which is receiving some notice from reviewers around the nation. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which chooses its stories carefully, devoted the front of an Everyday section to the book this week.

The book is the kind that interests a lot of folks. It is all about place names and how they got started. There are some really funny place names, like Tightwad and Peculiar in Missouri. The title of the book, however, is drawn from the name of the Kansas capital. As with many of the other place names described in the book, much of what is presented as fact is really little more than anecdotes and tall tales.

As a four-year resident of Topeka until moving to Cape Girardeau last year, you were surprised to see the book's author has fallen for the tall tale that Topeka is an Indian word meaning "a good place to grow potatoes." That has been something of an inside joke among Topekans for many years. Obviously, it doesn't take much to amuse Kansans.

As a public service, you are about to tell the accurate and true account of how Topeka got its name, as handed down from generation to generation of the Potawatomi tribe. This story has never been told outside the most inner circles of tribal historians. Here goes:

It all started with the landing of Columbus somewhere down in the Caribbean. As with much of history, no one knows for sure exactly where, even though the explorer wrote in his log: "Novo escaparde per tutti arbores a India" -- can you tell he was practically illiterate? -- which roughly translates "We landed by a lot of trees in India," which is virtually no help to historians these days.

Things weren't all peaches and cream for the crew of the Italian navigator. Some of the men saw it was going to take four or five centuries to build up tourism in the area, so they stole a rowboat and headed for what had been described by the locals as Big Swamp That Hangs Out in the Great Water. European explorers would call the place Florida, where the first settlers had started immediately to drain the swamps in order to provide land on which to build roadside stands to sell oranges and curios made of seashells and driftwood, because tourism developed very early in Florida.

The AWOL crew members were, in fact, the very first boat people to land on the sandy beaches of Florida, a footnote in history during the reign of a great Seminole leader known as Chief Commanderbill, who at first thought it was a good idea to welcome visitors, some of whom would become permanent residents and start beach cabana businesses. Then Chief Commanderbill, in the now-famous Edict on Moving Around, decided the boat people should stay at home, even if it meant having to set sail back across an uncharted ocean with a half-crazed Italian.

The wayward crew members slipped in just before the borders were closed. At first they considered taking the overland route to the country of the Aztecs, who had just signed an agreement with the League of Indian Nations to move most of the canoe-assembly jobs south. But the wandering crew members ran across an elderly Cherokee who told a story about having traveled, as a young man, to a place on Fork of the Big Muddy That Feeds the Father of All Rivers (place names were considerably longer -- and extremely accurate -- in those days) run by the Kansa tribe, which later married into the Potawatomi clan. In fact, the old Cherokee said, it was a great place to raise potatoes, which interested the crew members a lot, since they had become overly fond of French fries, which really aren't French at all but are just good ol' bubba food from Florida. Betcha didn't know that either.

It was the old Cherokee's intriguing story that both lured the crew members to make the trek to what is now Topeka and gave rise to the erroneous account as to how Topeka got its name. You can see it was just an honest mistake in the retelling of the story, which can happen, as newspaper folks know.

Now skip forward a few centuries to the early 1800s when the wave of European settlement reached the fertile valley known today as the Kaw Valley, through which the on-again, off-again Kansas River flows. The settlers found a band of what they took to be natives of the area, but, in fact, they were the descendants of the runaway crew, operating a ferry service across the river, which greatly enhanced the site because of its public transportation system.

When the new settlers asked about the name of this place, the descendants of the crew who had abandoned Columbus generations ago said "Two Peaks," referring to Burnett's Mound, which is little more than a high spot on the horizon, and another mound that had long been hauled away, one willow basket at a time, to make the access road and some off ramps for the river ferry, where the operators were seriously considering starting a gambling casino so passengers could while away their time and money while making the hazardous river crossing. As fate would have it, the crew descendants still retained a bit of an Italian accent, so "Two Peaks" sounded like "Two Peaksa," which was quickly transformed by the German and English-speaking new arrivals into "Topeka."

There you are, plain and simple. The real story of how Topeka got its name, told for the first time with any degree of accuracy. Let this be a lesson to all who accept history at its face value.

R. Joe Sullivan, editor of the Southeast Missourian, was executive editor of the Topeka Capital-Journal before moving to Cape Girardeau. He has absolutely no history credentials, a fact that doesn't deter his ability to recount historical details.