I’m over forty years old. I have an advanced degree in mathematics. I have lived in Michigan for four years. I have only just this weekend stopped to wonder: what battle is Battle Creek, Michigan, named after?
My best guess: French explorers named the spot for where they refilled their water stocks. Then when the English poked in they figured ‘Bottle Creek’ must be some crazy moon-man mistaken pronunciation and they fixed it to ‘Battle Creek’ and we’ve been stuck with that since. So, yeah, please lock that in as my answer, won’t you? Thank you.
And according to Wikipedia, it’s actually named for a battle in the winter of 1823-24 in which two of the natives got into a fight with two people from a federal government survey party. In the fight one of the natives was wounded. After the fight the survey party fled. So, yeah, it involved not quite as many people as were needed to play the classic game show Password Plus. Although I guess there is a folk etymology that the river’s native name, Waupakisco, itself is some kind of name meaning “battle creek”, for some battle they dunno when it happened or what over, which makes people who know the language roll their eyes and sigh. So there we go.
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Funnily enough there is a “Bottle Creek’ near Wellington NZ, on one side of the Paremata inlet. And a Battle Hill (named after an 1847 stoush) but no Battle Creek.
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I am genuinely surprised there aren’t more Battle Creeks around the world. It seems like an inevitable name, what with there being all sorts of bodies of minor water and chances for people to fight.
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The odd thing about Bottle Creek is that there is a creek on the opposite side of the inlet where a battle was fought in 1847. I don’t know why Bottle Creek got its name.
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That is a pleasant odd thing about Bottle Creek. Maybe the name is itself a corruption of Baffle Creek, representing people not being sure where the name comes from.
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