Columbia Slough - Name

Name

Slough usually rhymes with shoe in the U.S. except in New England, where it usually rhymes with now, the preferred British pronunciation. Slough may mean a place of deep mud or mire, a swamp, a river inlet or backwater, or a creek in a marsh or tide flat. The Columbia Slough is classified as a "stream" in the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) of the United States Geological Survey (USGS). The slough takes its name from the Columbia River, of which it was historically a side channel or anabranch. Robert Gray, a Boston fur trader and whaler who sailed partway up the Columbia River in 1792, named the river after his ship, Columbia Rediviva. The Columbia part of the ship's name belonged to the tradition of naming things after explorer Christopher Columbus.