Jonathan Clark Smith

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Jonathan Clark Smith | Not Southern Scorn but Local Pride: The Origin of the Word Hoosier and Indiana's River Culture | Indiana Magazine of History, 103.2 | The History Cooperative

Not Southern Scorn but Local Pride: The Origin of the Word Hoosier and Indiana's River Culture

Discovering the origins of Indiana's mysterious nickname "hoosier" requires a knowledge of when the word first came into use. Most standard reference works (including the Oxford English Dictionary) erroneously cite as the first known writing of the word a letter written in Missouri in 1826.¹ The error is significant because such an early reference, from a site so far west, gives credence to the assumption of Jacob P. Dunn (writing roughly a hundred years ago) that the word had been a term of contempt in general use in the South before it became specific to inhabitants of Indiana.² Dunn's work is still regarded as the most authoritative on this topic, and his assumptions form the basis for current conventional wisdom.³ While my own research is more indebted to Dunn's than at odds with it, my findings also demonstrate that his fundamental assumptions about the age and generalized use of the word bear questioning. In particular, my discovery of two previously unnoticed print references helps refocus attention on details that suggest that the term originated around 1830 with specific reference to Indiana farmer-river boatmen; the more generalized and contemptuous use came later.	1
The frequent reference to the Missouri letter of 1826 is decisively misleading because the letter was actually written in 1846.⁴ The manuscript—which is extant and has for some time been correctly catalogued in the manuscript collection of the Indiana State Library—bears in large letters at the top the town and county of its origin: Oregon in Holt County, Missouri. Holt County was organized in 1841, and the town of Oregon was newly named in the same year.⁵ The letter writer, James Curtis, did write "1826" as the date, but this was clearly a slip, perhaps influenced by his having just written the day as "2/24."	2
Although Dunn felt confident that evidence corroborating his assumption of an early nineteenth-century southern origin would steadily accumulate, it never has.⁶ For a full century since Dunn's time, researchers have examined a host of period letters, journals, papers, and published works—many prepared by observers keenly interested in regionalisms and language quirks—but not a single reference to the word "hoosier" has been found before February 11, 1831.⁷	3
If indeed "hoosier" was coined closer to 1830 than previously supposed, then more weight must be given to an 1833 attempt by a Cincinnati newspaper editor to explain the word's origin: "The appellation of Hooshier has been used in many of the Western States, for several years, to designate, in a good natural way, an inhabitant of our sister state of Indiana." The author notes that "[m]any of our ingenious native philologists have attempted, though very unsatisfactorily, to explain this somewhat singular term." The writer provides two examples—one that a troop of Hussars were mistakenly called Hooshiers and the other the familiar tale of surveyors being greeted with "Who's here?"—and deems neither "deserving any attention." The author finally explains: "The word Hooshier is indebted for its existence to that once numerous and unique, but now extinct class of mortals called the Ohio Boatmen.—In its original acceptation it was equivalent to 'Ripstaver,' 'Scrouger,' 'Screamer,' 'Bulger,' 'Ring-tailroarer,' and a hundred others, equally expressive, but which have never attained to such a respectable standing as itself." And regarding the term's tie to Indiana: "By some caprice which can never be explained, the appellation Hooshier became confined solely to such boatmen as had their homes upon the Indiana shore, and from them it was gradually applied to all the Indianians, who acknowledge it as good naturedly as the appellation of Yankee."⁸	. . .

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