The stories and/or legends behind some actual names of some actual places you can actually find in…Canada.
WITLESS BAY
This is the name of a body of water, as well as a small town, in southern Newfoundland. According to local lore, the name was originally “Whittle’s Bay,” so named after one of its early inhabitants, a Captain Whittle of Dorsetshire, England. When he died, his wife packed up the kids and belongings and went back to England—and Whittle’s Bay became “Whittle-less Bay” . . . because there were no Whittles there anymore. That was eventually shortened to the name it bears today, Witless Bay.
PUNKEYDOODLES CORNERS
This is a tiny hamlet located north of Lake Erie in Ontario. According to the local Waterloo Region Museum, a German blacksmith who lived in the town in the late 1800s had a (possibly annoying) habit of regularly singing the song “Yankee Doodle”—except his thick accent made it come out more like “Punkey Doodle”—and that’s how the town got its name.
One notable Punkeydoodles Corners’ moment of fame: On June 26, 1982, former prime minister Joe Clark kicked off a week of Canada Day ceremonies in the hamlet. To celebrate the occasion, an official Canadian post office was opened in Punkeydoodles Corners—for six hours—so they could issue commemorative stamps.
BLOW ME DOWN
Blow Me Down was a tiny fishing village on the west coast of Newfoundland. Today the village is gone, but in its place is Blow Me Down Provincial Park. Local legend says Blow Me Down was named by legendary explorer James Cook. Further research says this is almost certainly wrong.
Cook was indeed a member of the British expeditions that charted Newfoundland between 1765 and 1767, but maps drawn some years earlier by Joseph Gilbert, a surveyor who sailed with similar British exploration teams, and who himself would later sail with Cook on his Pacific voyages, showed a nearby mountain as “Blow Me Down Mountain.” Whether or not Gilbert, who is known to have named other nearby locations, named Blow Me Down Mountain himself is unknown, but the mountain was almost certainly the source of the name of the settlement, and through it the modern provincial park. (The mountain—probably got the name simply because it’s a windy place.)
In 2010, a purple octopus was one of 11 possible new species found off Canada’s Atlantic coast.
SAINT-LOUIS-DU-HA! HA!
Yep—that’s a real town name. It’s a very small town (technically a “parish municipality”), in southern Quebec. Now that we have that out of the way: Ha ha! What a funny town name! Actually, it’s not that funny, according to the experts.
The exact origin of the name is unknown, but the “Louis” part is almost certainly an homage to 13th century French King Louis IX, the only king of France ever canonized into sainthood by the Catholic Church, and who, for this reason, became a popular namesake for French explorers. (St. Louis, Missouri, for example, is named for Louis IX.) The “Ha! Ha!,” according to the Geographical Names Board of Canada, comes from the archaic French term haha, meaning the same thing as a “dead end” or “cul-de-sac.” The haha here is Lake Témiscouata, which was deemed by early French explorers unpassable by canoe, forcing them to carry their canoes and gear on an 80 km detour around the haha that was the lake. (Which isn’t funny at all.) Bonus: It’s the only town in North America with two exclamation points in its name.
DILDO
Yes, it really is Dildo. The first known reference to this one goes all the way back to 1711, although then it was spelled Dildoe, and referred to nearby Dildoe Island. The name was subsequently used for the body of water there, Dildo Arm, a section of Trinity Bay, and the town of Dildo itself.
As for the origin of the name…nobody quite knows. The word “dildo” itself, with its well known adult meaning, has been around for a long time—since at least the late 1500s—and the fact is that Dildo Island (that’s how it’s spelled today), Dildo Arm, and the town of Dildo, may all have gotten their names simply because someone back in the early 1700s had a naughty sense of humor.
Canada’s Mourning Cloak and Compton Tortoiseshell butterflies can live up to 11 months.
Located near the Rocky Mountain foothills town of Fort Macleod, Alberta, this is the site of an ancient aboriginal “buffalo jump”—a cliff used by native buffalo hunters. How it worked: Hunters would induce a bison herd to stampede toward the cliff, which is roughly 1,000 feet long and 35 feet high. Bison aren’t stupid—they won’t simply jump off a cliff, but the hunters would do their jobs so deftly that they’d cause some of the bison to go over simply by being pushed by the panicked herd behind them.
The fall would break the legs of the unlucky front-runners, allowing the hunters to get close enough to kill them. Archaeological evidence, including bison remains, as well as the stone tools used to butcher them, shows that Canadian First Nations peoples have been using this buffalo jump in this fashion—for at least 6,000 years. But that’s not the source of the full name, “Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump.”
Blackfoot Indians, who have inhabited the region perhaps for millennia, say the name comes from an old Blackfoot legend about a young man who positioned himself at the bottom of the cliff—so he could watch the bison plummet to their deaths. When his hunting mates later found him—under the bodies of the fallen bison—his head was smashed in. (The Blackfoot name for the site, Estipah-skikikinikots, literally translates to, “Where we got our heads smashed in.”) In 1981 UNESCO made Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump a World Heritage Site, a status shared with sites like the Egyptian pyramids and Stonehenge.
Some more interesting Canadian place names:
• Asbestos, Quebec
• Ochiichagwe’babigo’ining, Ontario
• Finger, Manitoba
• Shag Harbour, Nova Scotia
• Eyebrow, Saskatchewan
• Pekwachnamaykoskwaskwaypinwanik Lake. This is a lake in Manitoba and Nunavut. The name is a Cree word meaning “where the wild trout are caught by fishing with hooks,” and it’s the longest place-name in Canada.
• Adanac, Saskatchewan—that’s “Canada” spelled backwards.
The water is warmer on the north shore of PEI than it is in North Carolina.