as “Wulach’neue” [or [oo]lakhanne[oo], as Eliot would have written it,] with the free translation, “a fine River, without Falls.”  The name was indeed more likely to belong to rivers ‘without falls’ or other obstruction to the passage of canoes, but its literal meaning is, as its composition shows, “best rapid-stream,” or “finest rapid-stream;” “La Belle Riviere” of the French, and the Oue-yo’ or O hee’ yo Gae-hun’-dae, “good river” or “the beautiful river,” of the Senecas.[20] For this translation of the name we have very respectable authority,—­that of Christian Frederick Post, a Moravian of Pennsylvania, who lived seventeen years with the Muhhekan Indians and was twice married among them, and whose knowledge of the Indian languages enabled him to render important services to the colony, as a negotiator with the Delawares and Shawanese of the Ohio, in the French war.  In his “Journal from Philadelphia to the Ohio” in 1758,[21] after mention of the ‘Alleghenny’ river, he says:  “The Ohio, as it is called by the Sennecas. Alleghenny is the name of the same river in the Delaware language. Both words signify the fine or fair river.”  La Metairie, the notary of La Salle’s expedition, “calls the Ohio, the Olighinsipou, or Aleghin; evidently an Algonkin name,”—­as Dr. Shea remarks.[22] Heckewelder says that the Delawares “still call the Allegany (Ohio) river, Alligewi Sipu,”—­“the river of the Alligewi” as he chooses to translate it.  In one form, we have wulik-hannesipu, ‘best rapid-stream long-river;’ in the other, wulike-sipu, ‘best long-river.’  Heckewelder’s derivation of the name, on the authority of a Delaware legend, from the mythic ‘Alligewi’ or ’Talligewi,’—­“a race of Indians said to have once inhabited that country,” who, after great battles fought in pre-historic times, were driven from it by the all-conquering Delawares,[23]—­is of no value, unless supported by other testimony.  The identification of Alleghany with the Seneca “De o’ na gae no, cold water” [or, cold spring,[24]] proposed by a writer in the Historical Magazine (vol. iv. p. 184), though not apparent at first sight, might deserve consideration if there were any reason for believing the name of the river to be of Iroquois origin,—­if it were probable that an Iroquois name would have been adopted by Algonkin nations,—­or, if the word for ‘water’ or ‘spring’ could be made, in any American language, the substantival component of a river name.

[Footnote 19:  Grammar of the Lenni-Lenape, transl. by Duponceau, p. 43. “Wulit, good.” “Welsit (masc. and fem.), the best.”  “Inanimate, Welhik, best.”]

[Footnote 20:  Morgan’s League of the Iroquois, p. 436.]

[Footnote 21:  Published in London, 1759, and re-printed in Appendix to Proud’s Hist. of Penn., vol. ii. pp. 65-132.]

[Footnote 22:  Shea’s Early Voyages on the Mississippi, p. 75.