American Language Supplement 2 (128 page)

Dunn shows that all these etymologies save Riley’s were discussed, though with differences in detail, in an article in the Cincinnati
Republican
, republished in the
Indiana Democrat
so early as October 26, 1833. Mordecai M. Noah, then editor of the New York
Evening Star
, was therein credited with the story that the man who pronounced
hussar
as if it were
hoosier
(or
hooshier
) was not Lehmanowsky, but “a recruiting officer who was engaged during the last war in enlisting a company of hussars.” Another etymology cited by Dunn is to the effect that
Hoosier
comes from the patronymic of one of the contractors for the Louisville & Portland canal, under construction from 1826 to 1831. This contractor recruited his laborers from the Indiana side of the Ohio river, and “the neighbors got to calling them
Hoosier’s
men, from which the name
Hoosier
came to be applied to Indiana men generally.”
¹
Yet another seeks to derive
Hoosier
from
hoosa
, an Indian name for maize – but no such term has been unearthed by philologians. In 1851, when the Hon. Amelia M. Murray, the English tourist, visited Indianapolis, she picked up the story that the term “originated in a settler’s exclaiming ‘Huzza!’ upon gaining victory over a marauding party from a neighboring State,”
²
but Dunn, in 1907, dismissed this as moonshine.

His own inclination was to find the origin of the term in some old word brought from England, and he suggested three possibilities –
hoose
, indicating a cattle disease marked by “staring eyes, rough coat with hair turned backward, and hoarse wheezing”;
hoo
, an archaic English word signifying high, and surviving in a few geographical names; and
hoozer
, a Cumberland dialect term applied to “anything unusually large.” He showed that
hoosier
was used in the latter sense by the Vincennes
Sun
on November 29, 1834, in describing a load of giant pumpkins, and by the
Northwestern Pioneer and St. Joseph’s Intelligencer
on April 4, 1832, in recording the spearing of a huge sturgeon in the St. Joseph river. He also noted a Hindustani word taken into English, to wit,
huzur
, “a respectful form of address to persons of rank or superiority.” But this last etymology collided with the plain fact that the early Indianans were not notable for “rank or superiority,” and Dunn returned to his theory of an English origin, though without settling upon a definite one.
Hoosier
, he concluded, “carries Anglo-Saxon credentials. It is Anglo-Saxon in form and Anglo-Saxon in ring. If it came from any foreign language, it has been thoroughly anglicized.”
¹

The discussion of the nickname still goes on, but without plausible etymological result. It was revived in 1944 when Queen Elizabeth of England said to an Indiana flyer: “You come from Indiana. That’s the
Hoosier State
. What does
Hoosier
mean?” The flyer, it appeared, could not answer.
²
But on one point, at least, all authorities seem to be agreed: that
Hoosier
, at the start, did not signify an Indianan particularly, but any rough fellow of what was then the wild West. Dunn, in his 1907 paper, presented a great deal of evidence to this effect. The term, in fact, is still in more or less common use in Tennessee and the Carolinas and even in parts of Virginia to indicate a mountaineer or any other uncouth rustic. In 1857, as the DAE notes, E. L. Godkin was using it in the sense of a Southern
cracker
, and in 1900 J. F. Willard (Josiah Flynt) was
recording in “Tramping With Tramps” that in the argot of the road it was used for farmer.

In Indiana, however, the term apparently became restricted to a resident of the State at an early date. As far back as January 8, 1833, an orator named John W. Davis
¹
proposed a toast to “The
Hooshier
State of Indiana” at a Jackson dinner at Indianapolis, and on August 3 of the same year J. B. Ray
²
and W. M. Tannehill issued a prospectus at Greencastle for a weekly to be called the
Hoosier
.
³
When, in 1833, Charles Fenno Hoffman was making the explorations reported in “A Winter in the Far West,”
⁴
he encountered “a long-haired
Hooshier
from Indiana” and later entered “the land of the
Hooshiers
,” to find “that long-haired race more civilized than some of their Western neighbors are willing to represent them.” The term
Hoosier
, he went on, “like that of
Yankee
or
Buckeye
, [was] first applied contemptuously, but has now become a sobriquet that bears nothing invidious, to the ear even of an Indianan.”
⁵
Dunn says that the Finley poem of 1833 was “unquestionably the chief cause of the widespread adoption of [the term] in its application to Indiana.” This poem “attracted much attention at the time,”
⁶
and exactly a week after it was printed the word was used by the aforesaid speaker at a public dinner in Indianapolis. It threw off derivatives at an early date. Thornton shows that
Hoosierland
and
Hoosierdom
were heard in the debates of Congress in 1848, and the DAE traces
Hoosier State
to January 4, 1834.
Hoosierism
goes back to 1843 and
to hoosierize
to 1852. James Whitcomb Riley (1853–1916) was known universally as the
Hoosier
poet.

Iowa is listed as the
Hawkeye State
in the
World
Almanac and by all other authorities that I know of, and is so called in the subtitle
of the volume on it brought out by the Federal Writers’ Project.
¹
The DAE traces the nickname to 1859, and
Hawkeye
as a designation for an Iowan to 1845, but both dates are probably too late. The origin of the name still engages etymologists, both professional and amateur. The Encyclopedia Americana derives it from that of “a great Indian chief, the terror of the early settlers,” and the New International calls it “apparently an allusion to J[ames] G[ardiner] Edwards, familiarly known as
Old Hawkeye
, editor of the Burlington
Patriot
, now the
Hawkeye and Patriot
.” Webster 1935 lists it as “of obscure origin,” but indicates (without directing attention to) its probable source in “one of the sobriquets of Natty Bumppo,” the hero of J. Fenimore Cooper’s “Leatherstocking Tales.” Natty, who figures under this name in “The Last of the Mohicans,” published in 1826, was everything that the pioneer of those days fancied himself to be – brave, resourceful and honorable. In “The Prairie,” which appeared in 1827, he died nobly. According to a “Commercial and Statistical Review of the City of Burlington,” published by local boosters in 1882, p. 63, the name was added to the title of Edwards’s paper at the suggestion of his wife, and began to be used on September 5, 1839. Mrs. Edwards, like her husband, was a romantic person,
²
and it is highly likely that she was a diligent reader of Cooper. Whether or not someone else had applied
Hawkeye
to the Iowans before she added it to the name of her husband’s paper is not known at this writing,
¹
but a search of the files of the early Iowa
Käseblätter
might furnish an answer. Edwards, though a printer by trade, was a very religious fellow, and indeed something of a fanatic. In all his papers he denounced the Catholics and the Mormons as agents of Antichrist. He died in 1851, but his widow seems to have survived for some time. It was not he who made the
Hawkeye
famous, but Robert J. Burdette, who joined its staff in 1873.
²
Shankle says that Iowa was once called
Land of the Rolling Prairies
, but this must have been no more than an invention of boosters that failed to please the customers, for it seems to have disappeared. In the town of Centerville there is an evening daily called the
Iowegian and Citizen
, but I have not found
Iowegian
elsewhere: perhaps it is only a compliment to local Norwegians. In Mt. Vernon (population, 1441) there is a weekly
Hawkeye-Record
.

Shankle lists no less than ten nicknames for Kansas – the
Battleground of Freedom
, the
Central State
, the
Cyclone State
, the
Garden State
, the
Garden of the West
, the
Grasshopper State
, the
Jayhawker State
, the
Navel of the Nation
, the
Squatter State
, and the
Sunflower State. Battleground of Freedom
seems to have been passed out with the Civil War; it referred, of course, to the sanguinary combats between Abolitionists and slavery men which reddened the soil of the State in the heyday of John Brown of Ossawatomie.
Garden State
is challenged by New Jersey and
Garden of the West
by Illinois, and neither has ever had much vogue, though the former was listed in preferred position by Schele de Vere in 1872.
Squatter State
, also listed by Schele de Vere, is long
obsolete, for no one remembers any more, nearly three generations after the Civil War, the once explosive issue of
squatter sovereignty
.
¹
Cyclone State
and
Grasshopper State
, of course, refer to two of the many calamitous acts of God from which Bleeding Kansas has suffered, and to them
Dust Bowl State
might be added. The DAE traces
Grasshopper State
to 1890, but does not list
Cyclone State
.
²
Sunflower State
seems to be favored in Kansas itself, for the sunflower is the State flower, and was used on his guidons and gonfalons by the Hon. Alf M. Landon, its Republican candidate for the presidency in 1936.
³
It has, however, a formidable rival in
Jayhawk
or
Jayhawker State
. The latter is traced by the DAE no further than 1885, but
Jayhawker
for a Kansan goes back to 1875,
⁴
and in the wider sense of a fighting Abolitionist to 1858. In the still wider sense of a hardy pioneer it is said to have been used in California so early as 1849.
⁵
“The name,” says Kirke Mechem, secretary of the Kansas
State Historical Society, “became common during the territorial troubles and was at first applied to both sides. Jennison’s regiment of Free-State men, as well as Quantrill’s raiders, were at one time called
Jayhawkers
.
¹
The name finally stuck to the anti-slavery side and eventually to all the people of Kansas.”
²

The common belief in Kansas is that
Jayhawk
was borrowed from the name of a predatory bird which lives by plundering the nests and food supplies of other birds, but there is no mention of it in any of the standard works on American ornithology. In 1932 Dr. Raymond C. Moore, professor of geology in the University of Kansas, suggested sportively that it might be a descendant of
Hesperornis regalis
, an extinct avian monster, six feet in height, whose remains have been found in the cretaceous rocks of Western Kansas. Dr. Moore proposed the name of
Jayhawkornis Kansasensis
for the
jayhawk
itself, but did not pause to describe it particularly or to tell where living specimens could be found.
³
The rest of the State
scientificos
held aloof, and no more was heard of the matter until early in 1944, when the supergogues of the State Board of Education discovered that one of the textbooks used in the State schools listed the
jayhawk
as a real bird and gave Kansas as its habitat. They set up a pother over this, and ordered all mention of the creature to be expunged, but this order was resisted energetically by various patriotic Kansas editors. One of them was Miss Marion Ellet, of the Concordia
Blade-Empire
, who let go as follows on January 20, 1944: