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Frémont’s Folklore: Or the Naming of the Green, Sevier, and Virgin Rivers, Revisited
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WYSO N G
In the spring 1961 issue of Utah Historical Quarterly, Rufus Wood Leigh argued “that the names of the Green, Sevier, and Virgin rivers have their genesis in these original Spanish names respectively: Rio Verde, Rio Severo, and Rio de la Virgen.”1 Leigh contended that the then-current explanations for the name derivations “are the sort of stuff of which folklore is made-up,” and he sought to credit the names with the Spanish and Mexicans who first encountered the rivers.2 But in trying to correct the past, Leigh relied on another source of “folklore”—John Charles Frémont.3 Prior to the publication of Frémont’s 1845 report of his first two western expeditions and his 1848 memoir written after his third expedition, others had published maps and narratives depicting and naming the subject rivers, but Frémont’s were the first that were widely dispersed, and it was the names on his maps and narratives that survive to this time. Lingering with the names, however, are also Frémont’s assertions about Spanish origins—assertions that, upon closer review, were unauthenticated and likely incorrect. There are indeed a few rivers in Utah whose names are undoubtably of Spanish origin, notably the Colorado, but also the San Juan, Santa Clara, and San Rafael, among others. The Spanish Fork River was not named by but for the Spanish Fathers Atanasio Dominguéz and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante. No documentation suggests that the Spanish called the Green River “Rio Verde.” “Sevier” is likely not derived from a Spanish word, and “Virgin” either had an Anglo origin or was a corruption of another currently unidentified word. As such, the following analysis provides a corrective to Leigh’s conclusions. Leigh’s choice of analyzing the Green, Sevier, and Virgin Rivers in one article was prophetic; the connections between their names are stronger than Frémont’s assertion of Spanish origins. Both the Green and Virgin Rivers—tributaries of the Colorado—were confused by early explorers with the Sevier, whose waters were confined to the Great Basin. This confusion, documented on early nineteenth-century maps, had been
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