Beaver What? Beaver Dick!

Note: This is an excerpt from The Road and the River: An American Adventure. 

I stop at a gas station to have a beer and a truck driver approaches me and asks what I’m doing with a bicycle loaded to the brim with gear. I tell him that I’m riding across the United States and ask if he knows anywhere to camp for the night.

“Definitely,” he says, “Beaver Dick Park is about twenty miles down the road.”

“Beaver what?” I ask.

“Beaver Dick,” he says again.

Is this guy messing with me? Certainly nobody would name a park “Beaver Dick,” would they? Especially in a rural county in Idaho where Mormons are the majority?

“Beaver Dick?” I say in a somewhat confused tone.

“Yes, Beaver Dick,” he says. “Like the thing you find between a girl’s legs and the thing you find between a boy’s legs—Beaver Dick.”

He’s got to be messing with me. I go back inside the gas station and ask the cashier who sold me a beer just a few moments ago: “Is there a park down the road called Beaver…something?”

“Yeah,” she says, “Beaver… something.”

Well, if it is Beaver Dick, she’s not willing to speak the words. I put in another twenty miles, and lo and behold, there it is, right where the truck driver said it would be—Beaver Dick Park. And there’s a sign telling me all about Beaver Dick. Not only is the park called Beaver Dick, but it’s named after a man who was known as Beaver Dick. And Beaver Dick wasn’t even his real name. It was Richard Leigh, and he was a red-headed Englishman who moved west to be a trapper without realizing that the fur trade was already over. So he did what any disappointed white man would do—he married a Native American woman and changed his name to Beaver Dick, unbeknown to him at the time, the hilarious sexual connotation it would represent over a century later.