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I have looked up the spelling of most of these names on the lithographed copies of the original land-plats of the firstofficial surveys of the state. The references given in the present paper under the head of "plats" are to the lithographs, not to the original sheets themselves. The field notes of the surveyors who did this work are preserved in the office of the Land Commissioner at Little Rock. It would be of interest to find how the names are spelled in those notes, for while it is not to be supposed that the names were all properly written down in them, changes are liable to have been made in putting those memoranda upon the original plats, and others may have been made when they were lithographed. It is a remarkable fact that some of the names now in use have originated, not by any process of philological evolution, but simply in clerical errors in copying them. "Bodcaw" seems to be a good illustration of a name of this kind.
No doubt some of the difficulty in tracing these names is due to the fact that travelers in new and unsettled countriesoften name places from trivial events, or for persons, rather than from some local feature or characteristic.
Certain habits regarding these names have been pretty firmly fixed upon the state by these French settlers. For example, streams having several large branches, generally known in the northern part of the state as "forks" (as Buffalo Fork and North Fork of the White River), in the southern part of the state are often called "fourche," as Fourche a Loup, Fourche a Caddo. We even find the "South Fork of Fourche La Fave."
In some instances the original French names have been preserved intact, as in the case of the Vache Grasse, Petit Jean, Bayou de Roche, Fourche A Loup (3), Terre Rouge, etc.; in others, one may occasionally see sometimes the French form, and sometimes the Anglicized word, as in the case of the Terre noir or Turnwall.
It is not to be supposed that in the substitution of an English word, or of an English-sounding word, for a French one, the changes are necessarily, or even likely to be, of a kind that would take place among a people using a patois or some provincial form of French, but they are often nothing more nor less than a complete abandonment of the French word for an English word that it seems to resemble, or that strikes the fancy.
