American Language Supplement 2

by H. L. Mencken

  My recollection is that the word began to be used in this country1 in the Fall of 1824, but it might have been as late as 1826 or 1827, when the Louisville & Portland canal was being made. I first heard it at a corn-husking. It was used in the sense of rip-roaring,2 half horse and half alligator,3 and such like backwoods coinages. It was then, and for some years afterwards, spoken as if spelled husher, the u having the sound it has in bush, push, etc. In 1829, 1830 and 1831 its sound glided into hoosier, till finally Mr. Finley’s “Hoosier’s Nest” made the present orthography and pronunciation classical, and it has remained so since.4

  In 1838, in the first edition of his “Dictionary of Americanisms,” John Russell Bartlett gave the following account of the term by “a correspondent of the Providence Journal”:

  Throughout all the early Western settlements were men who rejoiced in their physical strength, and on numerous occasions, at log-rollings and house-raisings, demonstrated this to their entire satisfaction. They were styled by their fellow citizens hushers, from their primary capacity to still their opponents. It was a common term for a bully throughout the West.5 The boatmen of Indiana were formerly as rude and as primitive a set as could well belong to a civilized community, and they were often in the habit of displaying their pugilistic accomplishments upon the levee at New Orleans. Upon a certain occasion there one of these rustic professors of the noble art very adroitly and successfully practised the “fancy” upon several individuals at one time. Being himself not a native of this Western world, in the exuberance of his exultation he sprang up, exclaiming, in foreign accent, “I’m a hoosier, I’m a hoosier.” Some of the New Orleans papers reported the case, and afterward transferred the corruption of the epithet husher (hoosier) to all boatmen from Indiana, and from thence to all her citizens. The Kentuckians, on the contrary, maintain that the nickname expresses the gruff exclamation of their neighbors, when one knocks at a door, etc., “Who’s yere?”

  To the second of these etymologies Schele de Vere added the following variorium version in 1872, quoting “America by River and by Rail, or, Notes by the Way in the New World,” by William Ferguson:1

  The … Hoosiers … are proverbially inquisitive. They are said to have got their nickname because they could not pass a house without pulling the latchstring and crying out, “Who’s here?.”

  Dunn rejects both etymologies. “Nobody,” he says,2 “has ever produced any evidence of the use of the word husher as here indicated,… and there is no greater evidence of the use of the expression ‘Who’s yere?’ when approaching a house. As a matter of fact, the common custom when coming to a house and desiring communication with the residents was to call ‘Hallo the house!’ ” Dunn then rehearses an equally improbable etymology that was circulated on the authority of “the Rev. Aaron Wood, the pioneer preacher,” as follows:

  When the young men of the Indiana side of the Ohio river went to Louisville, the Kentucky men boasted over them, calling them New Purchase greenies, claiming to be a superior race, composed of half horse, half alligator and tipped off with snapping turtle. These taunts produced fights in the market house and streets of Louisville. On one occasion a stout bully from Indiana was victor in a fist fight, and having heard Colonel Lehmanowsky3 lecture on “The Wars of Europe,” who always gave martial prowess to the German hussars, pronouncing hussars hoosiers, the Indianan, when the Kentuckian cried “Enough!,” jumped up and said: “I am a Hoosier,” and hence the Indianans were called by that name. This was its true origin. I was in the State when it occurred.

  But this is folk-etymology at its worst, and Dunn disposes of it without difficulty. Only one of his points needs noting – that it is impossible to imagine a Polish officer mispronouncing the word hussar. Dunn ascribes another incredible derivation of the term to James Whitcomb Riley, the poet, as follows:

  The early settlers … were very vicious fighters, and not only gouged and scratched, but frequently bit off noses and ears. This was so ordinary an affair that a settler coming into a barroom on a morning after a fight and seeing an ear on the floor would merely push it aside with his foot and carelessly ask, “Who’s year?”

  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. Davis1 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. Ray2 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:

  I’m pretty sore at the pedagogues who want to take all the color and romance out of Kansas history. They’ve told the boys and girls of Kansas that there isn’t any Jayhawk and they’ve set out to bar the pot-bellied little bird from the textbooks. It’s facts they want. Or so they say. Well, I’ll tell you a few facts.

  Sure, Virginia, there’s a Jayhawk. And don’t let your skeptical school teachers tell you there isn’t. There were Jayhawks in the early history of Kansas, and there are Jayhawks yet. The first Jayhawks came from down around Trading Post in Linn county. They were there before the Trading Post massacre. They were Free Staters and they were raising their kids to be good Free Staters. They were raising them up proper in the little red district school house.

  But the school district happened to be half in Missouri and half in Kansas. The school house was built on the Kansas side very near to the State line. Of course, some Missouri kids attended the school. Their parents were known as something worse than Jayhawks. They were called Pukers. Yes, Virginia, there were Pukers in Missouri in those days. There are Pukers in Missouri yet. And don’t let any fastidious school teacher tell you it’s an improper word.

  These early day Pukers decided that the school house which their kids attended should be on sacred soil – in Missouri. So they up and stole the school house, moved it over the border. The Kansans set up a terrible hullabaloo, as Kansans will. And they moved the school house back. The Pukers moved it again. And the Kansans, raising their habitual hullabaloo, moved it back.

  Because they raised such an unconscionable racket and because they lifted the little red school house so many times, the Pukers called the Kansans after the two Kansas birds which raise the biggest racket and do the most plundering. The scrapping Kansans were christened Jayhawks. And they have borne the title proudly ever since.

  Sure, Virginia, there’s a
Jayhawk. Wherever there is habitual scrapping “for the principle of the thing,” wherever there is argumentation and high temper and political plundering there is a Jayhawk. And don’t let any bluenosed pedagogue tell you different.1

  This adroit parody of the New York Sun’s famous editorial on Santa Claus2 had a powerful effect, and Mechem reports that when the smoke cleared away and the roars of indignation ceased to reverberate “it was hard to tell from appearances whether the educators were the hunters or the hunted.” Having learned from the combat that there was no description of the jayhawk in the official literature of Kansas, he at once unearthed one from the pages of “a famous Spanish ornithologist” of Coronado’s day, “now unfortunately apocryphal,” and it was printed in his brochure, lately mentioned. It ran as follows:

  [The Jayhawk] has a narrow short face, except for the beak, which is long and grotesque, being yellow in color and curved to a sharp point. The brow of those of the commonest size is two palms across from eye to eye, the eyes sticking out at the sides so that when they are flying they can see in all directions at once. They are blue and red, the feathers shining like the steel of a Toledo sword, iridescent, wherefore it is not possible to say where one color leaves off and another begins. They have long talons, shaped like an eagle’s. These claws are so powerful that many of our men, among which even the priest was one, aver that these birds have been seen to fly off with one of those hump-backed cattle in each claw.1