Pocatello, Idaho in 1892. A sepia-toned photograph of a town with mountains behind.
7 July 2021
Idaho is a place name taken from a Native American source, but exactly which one and what it means is uncertain, and several stories have arisen in attempts to explain the name. Complicating matters, exactly where Idaho is has changed, originally referring to an area that roughly corresponds to present-day Colorado. The name arises out of a nineteenth-century settler-colonist fondness for Indigenous facades with little regard for actual Indigenous culture.
The most likely source of the name is the Kiowa-Apache (Athabascan) word ídaahé (enemy), a reference to the Nʉmʉnʉʉ (Commanche) people, whose territory included eastern Colorado.
The name Idaho is first recorded as a potential name for the territory that would become Colorado. From Albany Evening Journal of 26 March 1860 (the “gem of the mountains” translation is patently false, as we shall see):
The Pike’s Peak Territory has plenty of names to choose from. The Senate Committee have before them the following names—“Tampa,” interpreted Bear; “Idahoe,” meaning Gem of the Mountains; Nemara,” “Colorado,” “San Juan,” “Lula,” interpreted Mountain Fairy; “Weapollah,” “Arrapahoe,” the name of the Indian tribe inhabiting the Pike’s Peak region, “Tahosa,” which means Dwellers on the Mountain Tops; “Lafayette,” “Columbus,” “Franklin” and “Jefferson.”
Idaho won out at first, but within a year the territory’s name had been changed to Colorado. From the New York Herald of 5 February 1861:
The bill providing a government for the Pike’s Peak region was taken up. The name of the territory was changed from Idaho to Colorado, and the bill passed.
But the name wasn’t dead. A county in the Washington territory was being called Idaho County by 1862. Washington’s Idaho County roughly corresponded to the territory of the present-day state. From an article in the Morning Oregonian of 28 June 1862 about a petition to the postmaster general for increased mail service in the territory that proposed, among other requests:
A route from Lewiston to Florence City, in Idaho county, 110 miles, a weekly service.
And the next year, the following notice was posted in the 6 March 1863 Buffalo Morning Express:
Dr. J.N. [sic] Wallace, delegate from Washington Territory in the Thirty-Seventh Congress, is talked of for Governor of Idaho Territory.
(The first governor of the territory would be someone else, William H. Wallace. He was the uncle of Lew Wallace, a Civil War general and author of Ben Hur.)
The Idaho Territory would become the forty-third state on 3 July 1890.
While the Kiowa-Apache word ídaahé is the most likely candidate for the origin of the name, there are several other explanations that are commonly proffered. One is that it is a Shoshone name meaning “sun coming down the mountain,” but this appears to be an after-the-fact assembling of Shoshone words to create a name. Working against this explanation is that while the Shoshone people resided in what is now present-day Idaho, they were not in Colorado, which is where the term originated.
Another, patently false, explanation is that it means “gem of the mountains” in some Indigenous language, which varies in the telling. This explanation appears to have been fabricated by George M. Willing, who was the territorial delegate for what would become Colorado in 1860. The following 1875 letter by a William O. Stoddard to the New York Tribune details Willing’s claim to have coined Idaho:
My eccentric friend, the late Dr. George M. Willing was the first delegate to Congress from the young mining community. At the time when the subject of the new Territory was under debate, he was, as a matter of course, on the floor of the House of Representatives. Various names had been proposed without any seeming[?] approach to agreement, and the Doctor, whose familiarity with Indian dialects was pretty well known, was appealed to by some of his legislative friends for a suggestion. One of the said: “Something round and smooth, now, with the right sort of meaning to it.” Now it happened that the little daughter of one of those gentlemen was on the floor that morning with her father, and the Doctor, who was fond of children, had just been calling her to him with, “Ida, ho, come and see me.”
Nothing could be better, and the veteran explorer promptly responded with the name, “Idaho.”
“But what does it mean?”
“Gem of the Mountains,” replied the quick-witted Doctor, with a glance at the fresh-face beside him, and the interpretation, like the name, has “stuck” to this day. Dr. Willing told me about it at the time, or soon afterward, with a most gleeful appreciation of the humor of the thing, and I have often heard him rehearse the story.
The bit about the little girl seems too fantastic to be true. But assuming this account is a somewhat accurate recollection, it is clear from reading it that Willing made the “gem of the mountains” claim out of whole cloth. What might have happened is that the name Idaho was proposed, and people asked Willing what it meant, and he fabricated an etymology on the spot. But the false explanation did have staying power, as you can hear it repeated even today.
Sources:
Albany Evening Journal (New York), 26 March 1860, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Bright, William. Native American Placenames of the United States. Norman: U of Oklahoma Press, 2004.
“By Telegraph.” Buffalo Morning Express (Buffalo, New York), 6 March 1863, 1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Everett-Heath, John. Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Place Names, sixth ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2020. Oxfordreference.com.
“Increased Mail Service.” Morning Oregonian (Portland), 28 June 1862, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
“The News.” New York Herald, 5 February 1861, 4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2019, s.v. Idaho, n.
Stoddard, William O. “How Idaho Was Named” (letter, 8 December 1875). New York Tribune (New York City), 11 December 1875, 4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Photo credit: 1892, probably taken by Charles Roscoe Savage. Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University. Public domain image.