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 –