The number of broken place names seemed amazing. I didn’t know what led people to memorialize broken objects, just noted that they they did and it amused me. Broken Lakes, Broken Ridges, Broken Points, Broken Valleys and on and on. The list was so exhaustive that I had a terrible time limiting my selection. So I focused on the largest of populated places, a couple of different themes and some oddballs.
Native Americans Broke Stuff
That’s what I felt anyway after identifying several names related to the original inhabitants of the Americas.
They Broke Arrows
Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, the largest broken location I found, is a major suburb of about a hundred thousand residents on the eastern side of Tulsa (map). The image I selected didn’t have all that much to do with Broken Arrow per se except that someone took it there and it seemed to serve as a poignant commentary of one sort or another. They could have taken it anywhere, I suppose.
According to the City of Broken Arrow
“When a group of Creek Indians established a settlement near what is now our city, they called it ‘Broken Arrow.’ Broken Arrow is the name of the place where many of those same Creeks had lived when they were in Alabama – before moving west on the Trail of Tears. While many Americans think of the term ‘broken arrow’ as meaning an act of peace by Native Americans a few hundred years ago, the Creeks who got that name did so because they broke branches of trees to make their arrows, rather than cutting them.”
They Broke Bows
A broken arrow in Oklahoma paired nicely with a Broken Bow in Nebraska (map) although it was considerably smaller with about 3,500 residents. Broken Bow was the seat of local government in Custer County. So did the name refer to Custer’s demise at the Battle of Little Bighorn somehow? No, the explanation provided in the History of Custer County, Nebraska proved rather more mundane.
“Mr. Hewitt was a blacksmith and a hunter, and while out hunting one day he found, on an old Indian camping ground, a broken bow and arrow, which he carried home with him… some time afterwards he received notice that the third name [for the town] he had sent to Washington had been rejected, and going to the box after a piece of iron he picked up the broken bow, and the name ‘Broken Bow’ came to his mind quickly.”
I also discovered a similarly-sized Broken Bow in Oklahoma about a three hour drive from Broken Arrow. They named it for the Broken Bow in Nebraska, strangely enough.
Miners Broke Stuff Too
There was once a broken hill in a distant western corner of New South Wales, Australia, deep in the outback. Actually it was a string of hills “that appeared to have a break in them”. Then a ranch hand discovered silver ore in the late 19th Century. Naturally the broken hill became Broken Hill (map), a large mine and a settlement.
Miners extracted silver, zinc and lead from “a boomerang-shaped line of lode.” It was a dirty, dangerous job and more than 700 people died on the site. A memorial served as “a stark reminder of the fact that more people have died working the mines in Broken Hill than Australian soldiers died in the Vietnam War.”
Ironically, the broken hill that served as the town’s namesake no longer exists. The miners completely obliterated it in their search for ore.
Another broken hill, this one in Zambia, resembled the broken hill in Australia. Foreign prospectors noticed the similarities and named it Broken Hill [link no longer works] after the Australian location: “the mine became one of the biggest mines before the advent of copper mines on the Copperbelt.” Residents later renamed the town Kabwe (map) in the post-colonial era, an indigenous word meaning “ore or smelting.”
In 1921, a miner working at Broken Hill noticed a skull in the debris and he retrieved it. Paleontologists called it the Broken Hill skull, appropriately enough. It belonged to a distant human ancestor known as Homo heidelbergensis that lived more than a half million years ago. The skull appears today at the Natural History Museum in London.
Some Other Broken Stuff
New Zealand had a Broken River, and near there a Broken River Ski Field (map).
Finally, I noticed Broken Island in the Falkland Islands (or Islas Malvinas if one prefers, although I don’t really want to get into the geo-politics of the situation). Google misspelled the name. Every other source I consulted agreed on the name Broken Island.
I included that last one because I didn’t have a 12MC push-pin on the Falklands in my Complete Index Map. Now I do. I’m still waiting for my first website visitor from the Falklands by the way. Its Internet country code top-level domain is .fk. We could have a lot of fun with that one.
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