Untangling the complicated history of Pocatello's name

Studying Idaho history can be an exercise in frustration. Studying Pocatello history can drive the historian mad. You would think it would be pretty simple. After all, Idaho Territory was founded in 1863 just after the Industrial Revolution and much of the state’s formation occurred in the middle of the Gilded Age. Literacy was on the rise with around 80 percent of the population able to read at some level. Schools were becoming more common. Newspapers were in every city, and most towns had one or even two papers. States, counties, cities and courts kept records. Books were bought, sold and traded. People traveled on railroads and mail flowed freely across the country. For all that, though, finding primary sources explaining why something happened is ridiculously difficult. We find many sources telling us that something indeed happened, but from there the writers often spring off into how great and prosperous a place like Pocatello was set to become. History was nodded at, but the real question on everyone’s mind was, “What’s going to happen next and how fast?”

To illustrate, let’s start with how Pocatello got its name. Of course, everyone knows it was “named after Chief Pocatello.” Except “Pocatello” was not the guy’s name. The name he used for himself was Tondzaosha (or Tonaioza). So how did the name “Pocatello” come to be and how did it become the name of our city? Nobody truly knows, but guesses abound. Moreover, nobody seemed to care enough at the time to really figure out what the name truly meant, how it was actually pronounced, or where it came from, or if they did, to actually write it down. The settlers, emigrants, missionaries and soldiers who first met with the tribes mangled Native words so badly that even if it did come from some Native American word it was completely unrecognizable once it rolled off a white man’s tongue. Various phonetic spellings make the original word even more cloudy. Was it Pocatello, Pokatello, Pocataro, Pocatilo, Pocatilla, or something else? If it did have an “l” or two in it, how did it get there since the Shoshone language does not have an “l” sound? Moreover, some of the occurrences of the word were clearly contractions like Pocatilla. Even the city nickname Poky has been around for more than one hundred years.

Still, Tondzaosha accepted that white people called him Pocatello and went with it. Why? Nobody knows, or if they did, nobody wrote it down. All we can do is guess. We do know that he accepted a form of the name as far back as the written records show. Frederick Lander first met with him in 1858 and he knew him as Pocatara and said the name meant “White Plume,” but is that what it really meant? Lander was one of the few reasonable men who dealt with the bands of Shoshone and Bannock, but he had more important issues to deal with than etymological minutiae.

OK, so if Chief Pocatello’s name is a bit of a mystery, what about naming the city? Some commentators say it was named to “honor the chief.” Can anyone point out the meeting minutes where the name was chosen? Not likely. The city was granted its charter in May 1889 by Bingham County, but before that the town was already known as Pocatello. Before the townsite was established, it was known as Pocatello Junction where the Utah & Northern and Oregon Short Line met. Before that, there was a Pocatello Station on the U&N line, but that was northeast of where Pocatello Junction was built.

So did the U&N choose the name then? Not really. In September 1878, the Bozeman Avant Courier wrote, “The terminus of the Utah & Northern railroad will be changed to Pocatello in a short time, but the winter terminus will be located at Black Rock, a point fifty-five miles from Oneida.” In other words, there was a place called Pocatello before the railroad arrived.

The place the Avant Courier mentioned was the first “Pocatello station,” a stagecoach station, and it was a well-known stop on the road to the gold mines in Montana. The Corinne Mail wrote in February 1875, “A freight train of eight teams came in from Pocatello this morning, and will be followed by another in a day or two. This is the point where several of our freighters have been wintering their stock.”

In fact, one of the earliest newspaper reports speaking of the place “Pocatello” is from 1866 when the Virginia City newspaper said, “Our citizens will be pleased to learn that the (telegraph) wire is in perfect order as far as Pocatello, and messages pass frequently between the operators.” So not only was it a stage stop and wintering area for freighters, it also had a telegraph operator.

Can we go back any farther in time? Well, the stagecoach station had already been there for a while. So who put it there and why? Some historians say it was old Ben Holladay in 1864 who put the station there, but that is wrong since Holladay showed up as a competitor a year after the A.J. Oliver & Company first ran their coaches down from Virginia City to Salt Lake during the summer of 1863.

So was that stage station named “in honor of the Chief”? It’s a bit hard to believe that is the case since the stage stop “Pocatello Station” was on Pocatello Creek, which was a pretty good place to water horses. Just as there was a Port Neuf Station in the Port Neuf valley and there was a Black Rock Station in the area full of black rocks, there, too, was a station named Pocatello Station on Pocatello Creek. Besides, in 1863 not too many white people were looking to “honor” Chief Pocatello since most of the news reports of the time were calling for him to be hunted down.

OK, so then how did Pocatello Creek get its name? Nobody knows, or if they did, they didn’t write it down. One old history book said it was “undoubtedly” because Tondzaosha “pitched his teepee” there many times. Undoubtedly? Tondzaosha’s primary home ground was around Grouse Creek and Raft River. By the early 1860s, he spent a lot of time along Bannock Creek and around the north end of Salt Lake. Did he camp at Pocatello Creek at all? Maybe, but that seems to be after the reservation was created and the railroad came through. All we are left with is guesswork and the knowledge that early citizens of the city of Pocatello liked to camp up on Pocatello Creek around 1900 and believed Chief Pocatello must have, too.

It seems the name of the stream was Pocatello Creek before there was a station there. Stations were named to be identifiable. Red Rock Station, Black Rock Station and Ross Fork Station were named because that is where they were. Pocatello Creek is a rather substantial feature in the portion of the valley where it comes out of the hills and would have hardly gone unnoticed or unnamed. We are left to guess how Pocatello’s name became attached to it. Clearly somebody met him there, but who and when has been lost. Pocatello Creek is just Pocatello Creek and was Pocatello Creek long before there was a Pocatello City or Pocatello Junction.

There is still that nagging question though, what does the word “Pocatello” mean? An entire city is named that and we do not have a clear definition. The opinions and ridiculous efforts at figuring that out are all over the place. They have ranged from a racist and anachronistic portmanteau derived from “pork and tallow” claiming that’s what Tondzaosha went around the city begging for (which does not show in any old source and his name long predated the town anyway), to the pseudo-scholarly attempts at building compound words out of the Shoshone language with interpretations like, “he does not follow the road” which have no basis in actual linguistics.

So, we go back to Lander’s report where he said that he had an interview “with ten warriors, an outlying party of the band of Pocatara, or the ‘White Plume.’” Which is all fine and good, but does he mean that Pocatara means “White Plume” or does he mean there is another leader named “White Plume”? And if he means that is the definition of the word, how did he come by it since no recorded Shoshone dialect has a word for “plume”? Moreover, Lander was working through an interpreter. Presumably he would have gotten a good interpreter, but what were the words actually said to and by that interpreter? Is it possible to confirm the definition “white plume”?

What do Shoshone and Bannock dictionaries show for the word “white”? In Shoshone, it is dosa or dosabi. In Bannock, it is toha. It is possible a local dialect might make dosa or toha into poca, but what about feather? In Shoshoni, the words siiqya, pesipe and kwasi are used. In Bannock, it is kwasa or kwasi. None of those sound at all like “tello” or “tara” The only word even remotely like “feather” in any Shoshone dialect that might fit the second half of the name is “orra”, meaning “quill” in Goshiute. But a quill is not a plume. Was that some assumption made by Lander or was there a secondary use of “orra” that meant “plume”? Could it be that the name was actually toha-orra or something similar making it poca-ara in the local dialect? Was it actually “white quill” and not “white plume”? How could we possibly prove that without additional first-person accounts and actual interviews with the man? It seems plausible, but plausibility and proven fact are two different things.

In other words, we do not really know how he got the name Pocatello or Pocatara or Pocatillo or Poca-ara or however the word was originally pronounced before being mangled by soldiers, settlers, and government agents. We also do not know for certain what it meant. Does that matter though? The name is now used as a surname for the descendants of Tondzaosha. His daughter seemed to accept long ago that the original meaning was lost, but that it now has a new proud meaning that she gladly carried. Other families have done similar things throughout history and in every culture.

And let’s not forget the name that Chief Pocatello used when referring to himself. How does the name Tondzaosha/Tonaioza translate to “buffalo robe”? The Shoshone dictionary compiled around 1858 by Joseph A. Gebow (interpreter for Dr. Forney, the Superintendent of Indian Affairs) has coot-soo-hooe meaning “buffalo robe.” In Bannock, the word for buffalo robe is kutsuisikwi. Those two words are clearly related, but how in the world did Tondzaosha come to also mean “buffalo robe”? His daughter said that is what the name meant, but nobody thought to ask where it actually came from, or if they did, they did not write it down. We have no reason to doubt her, but we also have no way to clarify the details.

So today we have a city with a name that came from a name for a railroad junction, based on a name for a different nearby railroad station, based on a name for a stage station, based on a name for a creek that may or may not have had a chief camp there who’s name was not that name, but he went with it anyway when dealing with people who could not speak his language.

Before you race off to Google and start searching, don’t bother. You will find a typo saying Lander actually said “White Plum,” a similar (unrelated) Polish word, a similar (unrelated) Italian word, but no French, Spanish, Basque or other language word that is similar. There is a Lake Pocatello in Orange County, New York, but it was created in 1922 by damming Monhagen Brook and the name was applied to the newly formed lake much as developers might call a new subdivision Lincoln Estates today. Apparently there are some nice summer homes there.