A town that turned down an easier name

In 2020 a news crew drove up from Boise to ask the question everyone gets around to eventually, which is how a town of seven hundred people came to be called Athol. The segment is below. It runs two and a half minutes, and the anchor does not make it through with a straight face. He is in good company.

I have heard every version of the joke, so the segment held no surprises for me. What interests me is the part it leaves out. This town was once offered an easier name, and it said no.

Where the name came from

The version you hear at the counter in town is that a Scottish duke passed through and the place took his name. The city’s own history page tells it more carefully. The settlement was first called Colton. A settler who had come from Athol, Massachusetts renamed it for his hometown, and that town had taken its name from a district in Scotland tied to the Duke of Atholl. So there is a duke in the story, three steps back and four thousand miles off, and the city says plainly that nobody knows whether the name came west with a descendant of that family or simply in somebody’s memory. I like them for saying so.

It is a pity, because the real duke would have been worth the trip. The title was created in 1703 and belongs to the head of Clan Murray, and its holder keeps the Atholl Highlanders, the only legal private army in Europe, a privilege Queen Victoria granted after a visit in 1844. There is no evidence that a man with a private army ever stood in this valley. It is easy to see why people wish one had.

The neighbors

Once you start looking, Athol is the plain name around here.

Coeur d’Alene, twenty-six minutes south of us, is French for “heart of an awl,” the spike a saddler uses to punch leather. French-speaking fur traders hung the name on the Schitsu’umsh people, and the usual explanation is that it was a grudging tribute to how hard they bargained. The old fur company ledgers render it as “Pointed Hearts.” The Schitsu’umsh call themselves something closer to “those who were found here,” which is the better name, and not the one on the map.

Traders called the Kalispel that for the shell ornaments they wore. The Kalispel call themselves Ql̓ispé, the camas people, after the blue-flowered bulb they lived on. The largest lake in Idaho is named after someone’s earrings.

Then there is the state. Around 1860 a lobbyist named George Willing carried the word Idaho into Congress as the name for a new territory near Pike’s Peak, and told the committee it was Shoshone for “gem of the mountains.” Congress liked it, and was close to a vote when word got around that it was not a Shoshone word, and possibly not a word at all, and that Willing had made it up. That territory became Colorado. The word should have died there, but people had already started saying it. It went onto a steamboat, then a mining town, then a county, and when gold came out of the Clearwater the workings were called the Idaho diggings. By 1863 there was an Idaho Territory, whatever anyone thought of the name. Historians have since gone looking for a Nez Perce, Shoshoni or Arapaho word it might have come from, and come back with nothing.

Even the hoax is not settled. Willing’s claim first appears in print in 1875, fifteen years after the word does, and the steamboat launched in 1860, so no one can say whether he coined it or claimed it afterward. The state is named for a word that was probably invented, by a man who may or may not have invented it.

The name they kept

At one point the town considered calling itself Silver City, after the theme park down the highway. It would have ended the jokes, and it went nowhere. People had grown used to the name and to the ribbing that came with it, and they kept both. The man the news crew interviewed said the jokes roll off him, and that most of the town is the same way. After a while, an easier name starts to look like the thing you would have to explain.

The businesses in town, the ones still open and the ones we have checked ourselves, are on the town page.