An interesting idea - from Frozen Trail:
Frozen Trail to Merica
Hypothisis: During the Little Ice Age ancestors of the Lenape-speaking people walked, en masse, on the ice from Norse Greenland to Merica
The similarities between the Old Norse and the Algonquin languages are erie. From this page:
Little Known American History - Names Found to be Norse
Quite by chance, many years ago, Reider T. Sherwin heard a certain New England place name before he saw it in print. The speaker said it the name was of American Indian origin, but Sherwin, a native of Norway before moving to the United States, disputed that because he recognized the word as one he had long known.
Sherwin was familiar with dialectal Norwegian, which is much closer to the Old Norse language than literary Norwegian. And the meaning of the word Sherwin knew was identical to the meaning of the place name the speaker was identifying as Indian.
His curiosity piqued, Sherwin began to look upon New England maps for other place names of Indian origin. He closed his eyes to the spelling and considered only the pronunciation. Several of these he could readily identify as Norwegian or as strings of Old Norse root words put together.
Familiar with Leif Ericson’s attempted settlement of Vinland (later known as America) around 1000 A.D., Sherwin began to study the Old Norse language more intensely to see if it was more than coincidence that certain places bore descriptive names which were called Indian names but which mirrored the sound and meaning of Old Norse names for the same types of places.
He also studied the language of the Algonquin tribes in dictionaries compiled by early French, English, Swedish and German missionaries who worked among various tribes of these Indians as European colonists began to arrive in great numbers in the early 17th century. Those tribes included the Cree, Chippewa (Ojibway), Ottawa, Algonquin, Potawatomi, Sauk, Fox, Kickapoo, Abnaki, Micmac, Mohican, Shawnee, Illinois, Blackfoot, Pequot, and others who speak dialects of the Algonquin language.
Some examples:
SASKATCHEWAN (name of a province in western Canada and also of a river) — saxad sjoe vann (choppy watercourse); note that in Old Norse, v is sounded as in the German u or w.
MICHIGAN (one of several states in the U.S.A. with Old Norse names) — midh sjoe-kumme (midh means “middle” or “lying in the middle,” while sjoe-kumme means “sea basin” or “sea reservoir,” which is very fitting as Lake Michigan is the middle of the Great Lakes.
SUNWICK (a creek at Astoria, Long island) — sunds vik (a small bay in the sound); Sherwin writes, “It is quite easy for me to determine which names were given to places by the Indians and which were given by the Norsemen. There is no doubt at all in my mind that this name was given to this place by a Norseman. There are any number of Sunwicks in Norway.”
MILWAUKEE (Milwaukee, in Wisconsin, the Indian name meant good, beautiful land) — milde aake (the pleasant land)
GITCHE GUMEE (this is from Longfellow’s poem and means “big sea water, or what is now known as Lake Superior) — geis sjoe-kumme (great sea reservoir)
And then there is this:
The “Indian” game of lacrosse is almost identical to the Old Norse game knattilikr. Bone with Scandinavian rune (letters of an alphabet) have been dug up from Indian sites.
Very curious...
