An alternate name for the area was Loblolly Marsh. This name has been said to have been derived from a Miami language word for "stinking river," related to the sulfur smell of marsh gas). However, the Oxford English Dictionary says that "loblolly" means a thick gruel or porridge, and that it occurs in the US as a colloquialism for a mud-hole. One quotation given by the OED, from "The Log of a Cowboy" by the Western writer Andy Adams, is "His ineffectual struggles caused him to sink farther to the flanks in the loblolly which the tramping of the cattle had caused."