peon, cayuse, burro, mesa, tornado, sierra and adobe. To them, as soon as gold was discovered, were added bonanza, eldorado, placer and vigilante. Cinch was borrowed from the Spanish cincha in the early Texas days, though its figurative use did not come in until much later. Ante, the poker term, though the etymologists point out its obvious origin in the Latin, probably came into American from the Spanish. Thornton's first example of its use in its current sense is dated 1857, but Bartlett reported it in the form of anti in 1848. Coyote came from the Mexican dialect of Spanish; its first parent was the Aztec coyotl. Tamale had a similar origin, and so did frijole and tomato. None of these is good Spanish.[1] As usual, derivatives quickly followed the new–comers, among them peonage, broncho–buster, ranchman and ranch–house, and the verbs to ranch, to lasso, to corral, to ante up, and to cinch. To vamose (from the Spanish vamos, let us go), came in at the same time. So did sabe. So did gazabo.
This was also the period of the first great immigrations, and the American people now came into contact, on a large scale, with peoples of divergent race, particularly Germans, Irish Catholics from the South of Ireland (the Irish of colonial days "were descendants of Cromwell's army, and came from the North of Ireland "),[2] and, on the Pacific Coast, Chinese. So early as the 20's the immigration to the United States reached 25,000 in a year; in 1824 the Legislature of New York, in alarm, passed a restrictive act.[3] The Know–Nothing movement of the 50's need not concern us here. Suffice it to recall that the immigration of 1845 passed the 100,000 mark, and that that of 1854 came within sight of 500,000. These new Americans, most of them Germans and Irish, did not all remain in the East; a great many spread through the West and Southwest with the other pioneers. Their effect upon the language was not large,
- ↑ Many such words are listed in Félix Ramos y Duarte's Diccionaro de Mejicanismos, 2nd ed. Mexico City, 1898; and in Miguel de Toro y Gisbert's Americanismos; Paris, n. d.
- ↑ Prescott F. Hall: Immigration…. New York, 1913, p. 5.
- ↑ Most of the provisions of this act, however, were later declared unconstitutional. Several subsequent acts met the same fate.
