Driving along the Trans-Canada Highway through Banff National Park you pass by a massive castellate rock formation known as "Castle Mountain". After WW ll it was renamed "Mount Eisenhower" in honour of the general in charge of the triumphant Allied forces. A few decades later the name was quietly changed back to Castle Mountain.

  "Banff", the Canadian National Park and townsite, was named for a small town on the northeast coast of Scotland. In turn this designation, dating back to well before 1200 A.D., was derived from the Gaelic "banbh" (little pig), the Celtic name for the local river.

 I try to think of a way to conceptualize the naming process. Layering? Or perhaps sedimentation is the proper metaphor: fragments of information drifting and settling randomly, obscuring previous accumulations and creating new surfaces to read. Or perhaps it is "randomness": the relationship between name and named existing as an apparently arbitrary relationship of word to place. The reason for the naming remains hidden in a void separating the word from the site: unless, of course, the process is completely descriptive. The town of Lone Butte, for example, is characterized by the existence of a large flat-topped mountain in an otherwise flat landscape.

 But what do we make of a place named "Britannia Beach", a town reached by travelling north along the coast from the city of Vancouver. Nothing about the physical appearance of the place indicates a relationship to "Britannia", the allegorical figure of Britain. The rocky shore separating the town from the water seems to provide the "beach" portion of Britannia Beach. According to a gazetteer, the town was named for the adjacent mountains, the "Britannia Range". Further research indicates that the current name of the mountains dates to about 1859. A Captain Richards of the Royal Navy survey vessel "Plumper" named the range after the H.M.S. Britannia, a Royal Navy ship which had distinquished itself in various European conflicts. The Britannia had, however, never actually been anywhere near the area designated "Britannia Beach". There is no indication that Captain Richards inquired about preexisting names for the site. Instead he apparently believed (or was commanded to believe?) that the area was uninhabited. By labelling it as a marker of the presence of "Britain", he overlaid a map on the region. Richards put the site "on the Map" -- a map of Empire.

 "British Columbia" is the name chosen in 1858 by Queen Victoria for the new Crown Colony on the western coast of "British North America", a region previously administered by the Hudson's Bay Company. It was designated "British" in order to distinguish the territory from from the land south of the 49th parallel, the part of the Columbia Country -- the land drained by the Columbia River -- that was annexed by the United States after 1846. The Columbia river was previously known as the Rio de San Rogue by the Spanish but previous names are not recorded.

 Maybe the word I'm looking for is "filter": naming as a filtering process. Rather than a layering of information that can be excavated or read in a uniform manner like the rings of a tree, perhaps naming processes act as the mesh of an information filter. References that fit through the sieve become separated from context and slip through the grid while the mass of information is reduced to circulating in a jumble against the wrong side of the filter. Fragments torn from context and juxtaposed with other decontextualised fragments creating new meanings and new references. The raw material of historical construction is derived from the commonplace.
 

 DON GILL
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