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    INDIANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY PUBLICATIONS

    VOLUME IV          NUMBER 2

    THE WORD HOOSIER

    _By_ JACOB PIATT DUNN

    AND

    JOHN FINLEY

    _By_ MRS. SARAH A. WRIGLEY
    (His Daughter)

    INDIANAPOLIS
    THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
    1907




THE WORD "HOOSIER."


During the period of about three-quarters of a century in which the
State of Indiana and its people have been designated by the word
"Hoosier," there has been a large amount of discussion of the origin and
meaning of the term, but with a notable lack of any satisfactory result.
Some of these discussions have been almost wholly conjectural in
character, but others have been more methodical, and of the latter the
latest and most exhaustive--that of Mr. Meredith Nicholson[1]--sums up
the results in the statement "The origin of the term 'Hoosier' is not
known with certainty." Indeed the statement might properly have been
made much broader, for a consideration of the various theories offered
leaves the unprejudiced investigator with the feeling that the real
solution of the problem has not even been suggested. This lack of
satisfactory conclusions, however, may be of some value, for it strongly
suggests the probability that the various theorists have made some false
assumption of fact, and have thus been thrown on a false scent, at the
very beginning of their investigations.

As is natural in such a case, there has been much of assertion of what
was merely conjectural, often accompanied by the pioneer's effort to
make evidence of his theory by the statement that he was "in Indiana at
the time and knows the facts." The acceptance of all such testimony
would necessarily lead to the adoption of several conflicting
conclusions. In addition to this cause of error, there have crept into
the discussion several misstatements of fact that have been commonly
adopted, and it is evident that in order to reach any reliable
conclusion now, it will be necessary to examine the facts critically and
ascertain what are tenable.

The traditional belief in Indiana is that the word was first put in
print by John Finley, in his poem "The Hoosiers Nest," and this is
noted by Berry Sulgrove, who was certainly as well acquainted with
Indiana tradition as any man of his time.[2] This belief is at least
probably well founded, for up to the present time no prior use of the
word in print has been discovered. This poem attracted much attention at
the time, and was unquestionably the chief cause of the widespread
adoption of the word in its application to Indiana, for which reasons it
becomes a natural starting-point in the inquiry.

It is stated by Oliver H. Smith that this poem originally appeared as a
New Year's "carriers' address" of the Indianapolis Journal in 1830,[3]
and this statement has commonly been followed by other writers, but this
is clearly erroneous, as any one may see by inspection of the files of
the Journal, for it printed its address in the body of the paper in
1830, and it is a totally different production. After that year it
discontinued this practice and issued its addresses on separate sheets,
as is commonly done at present. No printed copy of the original
publication is in existence, so far as known, but Mr. Finley's
daughter--Mrs. Sarah Wrigley, former librarian of the Morrison Library,
at Richmond, Indiana--has a manuscript copy, in the author's
handwriting, which fixes the date of publication as Jan. 1, 1833. There
is no reason to question this date, although Mr. Finley states in his
little volume of poems printed in 1860, that this poem was written in
1830. The poem as it originally appeared was never reprinted in full, so
far as is known, and in that form it is entirely unknown to the present
generation, although it has been reproduced in several forms, and in two
of them by direct authority of the author.[