Brief by Central Staff
Geography – August 2006 – Colorado Central Magazine
Bayou mucho salade?
This South Park real-estate ad caught our eyes, since we’d never heard of “Bayou Salida” (Marsh Exit?), and we suspect they meant “Bayou Salado,” an old name for South Park.
As the story goes, early French traders and trappers named the valley “Bayou Salade,” or “Salt Marsh,” for the briny springs of Salt Creek. And over time that got altered to “Bayou Salado” (which is also the title an excellent history of the area by Virginia McConnell Simmons),
But when we checked the Cassell’s French-English Dictionary in Central World Headquarters, we found no entry in either language for bayou. Salade means salad, not salty, in French, and by extension from a mixed salad, salade can also mean a medley or confusion. Salt marsh has an entry: marais salant.
Our Diccionario Inglés/Español defines salado as salty, so that fits. But bayou isn’t in that dictionary, either. The American Heritage Dictionary explains that bayou is “a marshy, sluggish body of water,” and the word comes from Louisiana French, who took it from the Choctaw word bayuk.
So, if we could find record of an 18th-century Cajun trapper who also spoke Spanish, we might know who christened Bayou Salado. And salade, in the sense of mixture and confusion, seems to fit really well.
