Whence "Sangamo"?

Here's what I found when I Googled Sangamo:

The nearly 1,000 people who work in the Illinois EPA's Springfield headquarters know they work in the Sangamo complex, which is located in Sangamon County. How either name evolved seems to be a historic matter for debate.
Chris Patton, a local history enthusiast, some years ago looked into the question and wrote a light-hearted but thorough and well-researched article titled "Whence the Name Sangamon?" which was published in Historico magazine. He has since donated the article to Lincoln Library's Sangamon Valley Collection.
According to Patton, Jacob Bunn in 1898 claimed he had it on "the most reliable information" that Sangamo was the name of the chief of the Illini tribe living in the area in 1815 when the first white settlers arrived. Unfortunately for Mr. Bunn's "reliable" sources, the first real settlers arrived some time after 1815, and the natives in residence at the time were Kickapoos. The Illini (actually the Illiniwek) were of the Algonquin nation and had been driven from northern Illinois by the Iroquois late in the 1600s. By the time white settlers arrived, the Illini were living in southern Illinois near Kaskaskia and across the river in what is now Missouri.
The Pottawatomies didn't live in this area either, though John Reynolds, fourth governor of Illinois, wrote a history of Illinois claiming "Sangamon" was a Pottawatomie word meaning "The Country Where There is Plenty to Eat." Early pioneers knew the region as the Sangamo country. Patton's research turned up earlier scholars who found the region spelled St. Gamo, and St. Gamee, and the river called the St. Gamoin, among other versions. Virgil Vogel researched the term for his "Indian Place Names" and found more than seven variants, all of which meant "place of the outlet" or "river mouth."
Patton's own conclusion was that Jesuit Pierre Francois Charlevoix deserves the honor of naming the river that in turn named the county as he was paddling down the Illinois River in 1721 on his way to New Orleans. In Patton's version:
"As the party comes abreast of the mouth of the Sangamon, he points to it and inquires through his interpreter "What is that?" The Indian guide to himself says, "Stupid white man, that's the mouth of a river!" but aloud he speaks the Indian word for river mouth, "san-ge-nong." Charlevoix, assuming he has been given the Indian name for the river, dutifully records in French orthography "Saguimont." And thus, today, our beautiful stream bears the undignified name of "River-mouth River."

Posts: 355 | Location: Northern Idaho in the U.S.A. | Registered: November 26, 2002

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