Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
What Is a Butte?
First of all, say it like this:
beaut
as in
beautiful,
not like the body part you're sitting on.
This is the geographic word for what Bart Simpson's haircut looks like. Typical of the stark scenery of
the Badlands, a butte is a hill that rises sharply from the surrounding area and has sloping sides and a flat
top. A characteristic formation of the plateau region of the western United States, these flat-topped hills
are formed when hard rock sits on top of weaker rock like a helmet, keeping the weaker rock beneath from
being worn down by natural forces of erosion.
Sounds just like a mesa? Well, it is. Except that the butte (from the French word for a “mound behind
targets”) is smaller than a mesa
,
which is the Spanish word for “table.” Buttes are often produced from me-
sas that have been reduced in size through erosion. Going back a geological step, mesas are eroded forms
of plateaus, which are large highland plains raised above the surrounding land.
The word
mesa
is one of the many remnants of the Spanish domination of the New World for almost
one hundred years before the English arrived at their first permanent settlement, Jamestown, Virginia.
There is a rich array of Spanish terms that have become part of the language of America's geography.
Obvious examples can be found in the many Spanish-named places of South America, Mexico, and the
American West and South. Rio Grande, Los Angeles, San Diego, Ecuador, Florida (“feast of flowers”),
Colorado, Montana, and Sierra Madre are just a few. Besides
mesa
, the Spanish left behind such geograph-
ic terms as
cañon
(canyon in English);
arroyo
(for a deep gully cut in the desert by an intermittent stream;
the Arabs call it a
wadi
; in India it is a
nullah
); the
chaparral
, an area of low, dense scrub-brush. These
go along with such typical southwestern terms as bronco, corral, lasso, ranch, and rodeo, as Spanish words
that moved from the Spanish-influenced dialect of the Southwest into modern American English.
Geographic Voices
Mark Twain's description of the Continental Divide from
Roughing It
(1872)
We bowled along cheerily, and presently, at the very summit, we came to a spring which spent its
water through two outlets and sent it in opposite directions. The conductor said one of those streams
which we were looking at, was just starting on a journey westward to the Gulf of California and
the Pacific Ocean, through hundreds and even thousands of miles of desert solitudes. He said that
the other was just leaving its home among the snow-peaks on a similar journey eastward—and we
knew that long after we should have forgotten the simple rivulet it would still be plodding its patient
way down the mountain sides, and canyon-beds, and between the banks of the Yellowstone; and by
and by would join the broad Missouri and flow through the unknown plains and deserts and unvis-
ited wildernesses; and add a long and troubled pilgrimage among snags and wrecks and sand-bars;
and enter the Mississippi, touch the wharves of St. Louis and still drift on, traversing shoals and
rocky channels, then endless chains of bottomless and ample bends, walled with unbroken forests,
then mysterious byways and secret passages among woody islands, then the chained bends again,
bordered with wide levels of shining sugar-cane in place of the somber forests; then by New Orleans
and still other chains of bends—and finally, after two long months of daily and nightly harassment,
excitement, enjoyment, adventure, and awful peril of parched throats, pumps and evaporation, pass
the Gulf and enter into its rest upon the bosom of the tropic sea, never to look upon its snow-peaks
again or regret them.
I freighted a leaf with a mental message for the friends at home, and dropped it in the stream.
But I put no stamp on it and it was held for postage somewhere.
