The title here is not entirely juvenile. Les Grands Tetons, in French, means "Big Nipples," a circumstance that has brought some academic controversy to the mountain range. Some believe they were named by a French trapper; others by the Teton Sioux Indians. Recent historians tend to fall on the side of the Sioux. The main point in their favor is that if you look at the peaks carefully—or not so carefully-- they look nothing like nipples. Then again, if you were a lonely French trapper, a year or so from your last…. Personally, I'm going with the Sioux.
The park itself has an interesting history. Back in the day—the day being the turn of the last century—the national park movement not only tried to preserve beautiful places, but also animals. And when Teton was proposed, the pressing interest was not the mountains, which were relatively safe, but the elk herds that grazed in the north part of Jackson Hole. The same thing that was attracting the elk—lush meadows--was also attracting cattle ranchers. Soon, Teton was involved in a classic east-west standoff.
The conservationists were led by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and his lovely wife. Flush with cash from the conservationally tone-deaf Standard Oil, they started buying up land in and around the area with the idea of donating it to a national park. The plan was staunchly opposed by the locals, who signaled their disapproval by trying to lynch a man from the Department of Interior who came to explain it.
A compromise of the head-scratching sort was soon reached. In 1929, a bill was passed that established Grand Teton National Park. It included the mountains and the lakes at their base, but it made no one happy. The locals hated it because it made a national park where they didn't want one. The conservationists hated it because it didn't do anything to protect the elk, which was all they wanted to do in the first place.
In fact, it took twenty more years before the elk finally got their preserve. By then, cars had become more popular and roads better. The people of Jackson Hole soon realized that they could make a lot more money if they stopped herding cattle and started herding tourists instead. Wilderness areas were expanded and the elk were saved.
2 comments:
Please note my latet HJ comment regarding Grand Teton geology. Actually, Grand Tetons means big tits, not big nipples. Though I did notice the actual nipple was missing in your photo.
Actually, we're both about half right. I hope it was understood as a joke--for those interested, "teton" in modern French means nipple. I don't have an OED in front of me, but I'm pretty sure I can tease out the derivation.
150 years ago, teton was a synonym for then-English "teat," with which it shares the same root. It meant the part of a cow (or other animal) you pulled to get milk. The English teat developed a shortened form, "tit," which was later slangly applied to the human body. Nowadays, in English "tit" refers to a whole human breast. Its original sense only remains in the phrase "useless as tits on a bull." "Teat" still refers to cows and is rarely used for humans. Animal and human body parts usually have different names in English.
I think the French trapper, if he existed, was actually referring to cow teats, to which, the Tetons have a fair resemblence. "Big nipples" and "big tits" are both a little misleading, because in English they refer almost exclusively to humans.
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