(1910 census) 24,062. It is served by the Grand Trunk, the Père Marquette, the Grand Rapids & Indiana, and the Grand Rapids, Grand Haven & Muskegon (electric) railways, and by steamboat lines to Chicago, Milwaukee and other lake ports. There are several summer resorts in the vicinity. As the gifts of Charles H. Hackley (1837–1905), a rich lumberman, the city has an endowment fund to the public schools of about $2,000,000; a manual training school, which has an endowment of $600,000, and is one of the few endowed public schools in the United States; a public library, with an endowment of $215,000; a public hospital with a $600,000 endowment; and a poor fund endowment of $300,000. In Hackley Park there are statues of Lincoln and Farragut, and at the Hackley School there is a statue of McKinley; all three are by C. H. Niehaus. The municipality owns and operates its water-works. Muskegon lake is 5 m. long and 112 m. wide, with a depth of 30 to 40 ft., and is ice-free throughout the year. The channel from Muskegon lake to Lake Michigan has been improved to a depth of 20 ft. and a width of 300 ft. by the Federal government since 1867. From Muskegon are shipped large quantities of lumber and market-garden produce, besides the numerous manufactures of the city. The total value of all factory products in 1904 was $6,319,441 (39·6% more than in 1900), of which more than one-sixth was the value of lumber. A trading post was established here in 1812, but a permanent settlement was not established until 1834. Muskegon was laid out as a town in 1849, incorporated as a village in 1861, and chartered as a city in 1869. The name is probably derived from a Chippewa word, maskeg or muskeg, meaning “grassy bog,” still used in that sense in north-western America.
MUSKET (Fr. mousquet, Ger. Muskete, &c.), the term generally applied to the firearm of the infantry soldier from about 1550 up to and even beyond the universal adoption of rifled small arms about 1850–1860. The word originally signified a male sparrowhawk (Italian moschetto, derived perhaps ultimately from Latin musca, a fly) and its application to the weapon may be explained by the practice of naming firearms after birds and beasts (cf. falcon, basilisk). Strictly speaking, the word is inapplicable both to the early hand-guns and to the arquebuses and calivers that superseded the hand-guns. The “musket” proper, introduced into the Spanish army by the duke of Alva, was much heavier and more powerful than the arquebus. Its bullet retained sufficient striking energy to stop a horse at 500 and 600 yards from the muzzle. A writer in 1598 (quoted s.v. in the New English Dictionary) goes so far as to say that “One good musket may be accounted for two callivers.” Unlike the arquebus, it was fired from a rest, which the “musketeer” stuck into the ground in front of him. But during the 17th century the musket in use was so far improved that the rest could be dispensed with (see Gun). The musket was a matchlock, weapons with other forms of lock being distinguished as wheel-locks, firelocks, snaphances, &c., and soldiers were similarly distinguished as musketeers and fusiliers. On the disuse, about 1690–1695, of this form of firing mechanism, the term “musket” was, in France at least, for a time discontinued in favour of “fusil,” or flint-lock, which thenceforward reigned supreme up to the introduction of a practicable percussion lock about 1830–1840. But the term “musket” survived the thing it originally represented, and was currently used for the firelock (and afterwards for the percussion weapon). To-day it is generically used for military firearms anterior to the modern rifle. The original meaning of the word musketry has remained almost unaltered since 1600; it signifies the fire of infantry small-arms (though for this “rifle fire” is now a far more usual term), and in particular the art of using them (see Infantry and Rifle). Of the derivatives, the only one that is not self-explanatory is musketoon. This was a short, large-bore musket somewhat of the blunderbuss type, originally designed for the use of cavalry, but afterwards, in the 18th century, chiefly a domestic or coachman’s weapon.
MUSKHOGEAN STOCK, a North American Indian stock. The name is from that of the chief tribe of the Creek confederacy, the Muskogee. It includes the Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Seminoles and other tribes. Its territory was almost the whole state of Mississippi, western Tennessee, eastern Kentucky, Alabama, most of Georgia, and later nearly all Florida; Muskhogean traditions assign the west and north-west as the original home of the stock. Its history begins in 1527, on the first landing of the Spaniards on the Gulf Coast. The Muskhogean peoples were then settled agriculturists with an elaborate social organization, and living in villages, many of which were fortified (see Indians: North American).
MUSKOGEE, a city and the county-seat of Muskogee county, Oklahoma, U.S.A., about 3 m. W. by S. of the confluence of the Verdigris, Neosho (or Grand) and Arkansas rivers, and about 130 m. E.N.E. of Oklahoma City. Pop. (1900), 4154; (1907), 14,418, of whom 4298 were negroes and 332 Indians; (1910), 25,278. It is served by the St Louis & San Francisco, the Midland Valley, the Missouri, Kansas & Texas, and the Missouri, Oklahoma & Gulf railways. Fort Gibson (pop. in. 1910, 1344), about 5 m. N.E. on the Neosho, near its confluence with the Arkansas, is the head of steam-boat navigation of the Arkansas; it is the site of a former government fort and of a national cemetery. Muskogee is the seat of Spaulding Institute (M.E. Church, South) and Nazareth Institute (Roman Catholic), and at Bacone, about 2 m. north-east, is Indian University (Baptist, opened 1884). Muskogee is the commercial centre of an agricultural and stock-raising region, is surrounded by an oil and natural gas field of considerable extent producing a high grade of petroleum, and has a large oil refinery, railway shops (of the Midland Valley and the Missouri, Oklahoma & Gulf railways), cotton gins, cotton compresses, and cotton-seed oil and flour mills. The municipality owns and operates the water-works, the water supply being drawn from the Neosho river. Muskogee was founded about 1870, and became the chief town of the Creek Nation (Muskogee) and the metropolis and administrative centre of the former Indian Territory, being the headquarters of the Union Indian Agency to the Five Civilized Tribes, of the United States (Dawes) Commission to the Five Civilized Tribes, and of a Federal land office for the allotment of lands to the Creeks and Cherokees, and the seat of a Federal Court. The city was chartered in 1898; its area was enlarged in 1908, increasing its population.
MUSK-OX, also known as musk-buffalo and musk-sheep, an Arctic American ruminant of the family Bovidae (q.v.), now representing a genus and sub-family by itself. Apparently the musk-ox (Ovibos moschatus) has little or no near relationship to either the oxen or the sheep; and it is not improbable that its affinities are with the Asiatic takin (Budorcas) and the extinct European Criotherium of the Pliocene of Samos. The musky odour from which the animal takes its name does not appear to be due to the secretion of any gland.
In height a bull musk-ox stands about 5 ft. at the shoulder. The head is large and broad. The horns in old males have extremely broad bases, meeting in the middle line, and covering the brow and crown of the head. They are directed at first downwards by the side of the face, and then turn upwards and forwards, ending in the same plane as the eye. The basal half is dull white, oval in section and coarsely fibrous, the middle part smooth, shining and round, and the tip black. In females and young males the horns are smaller, and their bases separated by a space in the middle of the forehead. The ears are small, erect, pointed, and nearly concealed in the hair. The space between the nostrils and the upper lip is covered with short close hair, as in sheep and goats, without any trace of the bare muzzle of oxen. The greater part of the animal is covered with long brown hair, thick, matted and curly on the shoulders, so as to give the appearance of a hump, but elsewhere straight and hanging down—that of the sides, back and haunches reaching as far as the middle of the legs and entirely concealing the very short tail. There is also a thick woolly under-fur, shed in summer, when the whole coat comes off in blanket-like masses. The hair on the lower jaw, throat and chest is long and straight, and hangs down like a beard or dewlap, though
