Name Origin
"Oconee" is the Anglicized form of the Itsati (Hitchiti-Creek) word Okvni, which means "born from water" or "living on water." This branch of the Creek was historically also referred to as the Ocute, the name used by the Spanish chroniclers of the Hernando de Soto Expedition in 1540, who transliterated the Hitchiti word Okvte. Okvte means "Water People." According to Oconee-Creek tradition, their original homeland was in the Okefenokee Swamp of southeastern Georgia. A branch of the Oconee still lived in this vast expanse of wetlands during the 1600s, when it was nominally under the domain of Spain. Most of the Oconee Creek's traditional territory and towns were in present-day northeastern Georgia, northwestern South Carolina and in the Great Smoky Mountains. Colonists adopted the name of the local people for the Oconaluftee River in the Great Smoky Mountains; in the Hitchiti language, Oconaluftee means "separated Oconee people."
Read more about this topic: Oconee River
Famous quotes containing the word origin:
“Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed,—a, to me, equally mysterious origin for it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Someone had literally run to earth
In an old cellar hole in a byroad
The origin of all the family there.
Thence they were sprung, so numerous a tribe
That now not all the houses left in town
Made shift to shelter them without the help
Of here and there a tent in grove and orchard.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)