Malheur: Bad Times or Bad Luck?
There is general recognition that the name of Malheur County comes from the Malheur River that flows through it. The name of the river, to the best of my knowledge, first appears in the journal of Hudson’s Bay Company trader Peter Skene Ogden:
Tuesday, Feb. 14, 1826 We encamped on the River au Malheur (unfortunate river) so called on account of goods and furs hid here discovered and stolen by natives.
This is all pretty clear, and the attribution has been made in successive histories of the area.
There are differences, however. While later histories each explain the name’s meaning (it is not clear whether the rendering in parentheses above is by Ogden or the editor), they also offer detail beyond what Ogden recorded, mostly following the 1902 Illustrated History of Baker, Grant, Malheur and Harney Counties, which relates,
It is quite probable that the name which this county bears was given to the river of the same name by a party of French trappers attached to this old trading post [i.e., Fort Boise]. Tradition relates that some time during the fore part of the nineteenth century a party of French trappers and traders ascended this stream to its headwaters in search of furs. The trip was an unsuccessful one, they were attacked by the Indians, several of the party were wounded, others were killed, and still others fell sick. So it was quite natural that this long train of misfortune should cause the name of the river ”Mal (bad or unfortunate) heur (hour of time),” or, translating freely, the “unhappy” river.
“Freely” indeed! More than the writer realized.
Jacob Ray Gregg in his 1950 Pioneer Days in Malheur County follows this account nearly verbatim with minor changes in word order. Neither writer provides any citations, but they in turn became the source for later works such as Mike Hanley’s Owyhee Trails and Lewis MacArthur’s Oregon Geographic Names. The latter also cites Ogden’s journal. Mark Highberger’s Untamed Land: The Death of Pete French and the End of the Old West translates Malheur as “French for ‘bad hour’"and attributes the name to Ogden, though Ogden’s journal does not support that conclusion.
It will be noted that the Illustrated History introduced a bit of etymological misinformation that has been repeated by later writers, including Hanley and MacArthur. This is the exegesis of malheur as being composed of the elements mal (“bad”) and heur, which they gloss as “hour.” Hanley, for example, renders malheur as “bad time.” But the French word for “hour” is l’heure, with a final -e and feminine gender. L’heur on the other hand is a now rare masculine noun meaning “chance” or “fortune,” which has been generally replaced by bonheur or “good fortune.” Le malheur is simply the standard word for misfortune. MacArthur’s suggestion that “mal heur is ‘bad hour,’ an idiom for misfortune used by the French-Canadian hunters after they discovered their cache had been rifled, is simply incorrect.
The choice of name was in itself considered unfortunate by some. In February 1931 a bill was introduced into the Oregon legislature to change the name to Sinnott County in honor of Nicholas J. Sinnott, who had been a state senator and died July 20, 1929. Although the bill made it through the house, it died in the senate.
While not obviously germane to the present subject, the naming of the small gold mining town of Malheur in the northern part of the county warrants a comment. Lewis MacArthur speculates that the town’s name came from the same source as the river. He notes “there is a story to the effect that the place was named Malheur (‘French for evil hour or misfortune’) because a tunnel caved in and killed a French miner. The compiler has no evidence that this event did not happen, but thinks it highly improbable that the name of the town originated in such a manner, and places no credence in the story.” But the town was in Willow Creek valley, two watersheds distant from the Malheur River, and in the absence of any other evidence the story seems reasonable enough. Towns have been given stranger names for less logical reasons.
Complete citations may be found in the Sidebar under RESOURCES: HISTORY, CULTURE, GEOGRAPHY & GEOLOGY