How to convert quotes of character elements to be surrounded by backticks instead of quotes in R

I have some characters stored as cols. The resulting output is as below:

cols = c("big creek", "gage creek", "garvey creek", "larches creek", "little usable")
cols
[1] "big creek"       "gage creek"      "garvey creek"    "larches creek"   "little usable"

However, I want the quotes to be replaced with backticks and the resulting output should be like this:

[1] `big creek`       `gage creek`      `garvey creek`    `larches creek`   `little usable`

Is there any way to get the same output for cols object in R?

Your help will be highly appreciated.

Regards, Farhan

You cannot have a vector that contain backtick quoted names. Since you said you are using for loop, you can transform each name to contain the backticks within the for loop using as.name:

as.name(cols[1])
`big creek`

lapply(cols, as.name)
[[1]]
`big creek`

[[2]]
`gage creek`

[[3]]
`garvey creek`

[[4]]
`larches creek`

[[5]]
`little usable`