Alabama's Name: "Here We Rest" or "Thicket-Clearers"?

“Here We Rest” went on Alabama’s state seal in 1868, but a 1921 state history says no scholar had found an Indian word like “Alabama” with that meaning. What the name does come from is easier: a tribe, then a river, then the state.

A tribe, a river, a state

The 1921 history is Thomas McAdory Owen’s History of Alabama and Dictionary of Alabama Biography. Owen founded the Alabama State Department of Archives and History and ran it, and his entry on the state’s name gets right to it. Alabama “was the aboriginal name of a Muskhogean tribe of the Creek confederacy,” living in central Alabama when Europeans first showed up. “The principal river of the State received its name from the tribe, and the State in turn was named for the river.”

You’d have had trouble spelling it back then. Owen reprints a list of more than 30 versions from old books and maps, from “Alibamo” and “Allibamous” to “Halbama.” He says the name first turns up in three accounts of De Soto’s expedition of 1540, but there it meant a group of Chickasaws, “and not the historic Alibamu towns.” The names, he adds, “are, however, identical.”

Albert James Pickett, whose History of Alabama came out in 1851, saw it differently. He tells how De Soto’s men stormed “the fortress of Alibamo,” and in a footnote he says that fort, together with a Frenchman named Milfort’s account of where the Alabamas had wandered, proves the Alabamas of De Soto’s day and the later ones “were the same people.” Later, he says, they settled near where Montgomery stands now. “From these people the river and state took their names.”

Where “Here We Rest” came from

Owen calls “Here We Rest” the popular belief, one “incorporated in many current histories and geographies.” It got around through the writings of Judge Alexander Beaufort Meek. But the oldest appearance Owen could find was in the Jacksonville Republican, of Jacksonville, Alabama, on July 27, 1842, and “the real author of the suggestion has not been discovered.”

The story goes with a legend. An Indian chief reached the Alabama River after a long trip and said, in Owen’s telling, “We will go no farther. Our wanderings are ended. This is a goodly land. We have not found better. Here we rest.” It’s a nice scene, and in 1868 the phrase went on the state seal. But “no philologist has found, in any Indian dialect, any word or phrase similar or akin to the word ‘Alabama,’ having such a meaning.” Owen’s verdict is that it has to be dropped as a translation, though it “may be retained in the realm of poetry and romance.”

Thicket-clearers, mulberry people, or nobody knows

So what does it mean? Owen goes through the candidates. The Rev. Allen Wright, “a highly educated Choctaw,” read it as “Thicket-clearers,” from the Choctaw alba, plants or a thicket, and amo, to clear or gather. Henry Sale Halbert, working on his own, came up with “Vegetation-gatherers,” which is close to the same thing. Owen backs them both up with Cyrus Byington’s Choctaw dictionary, and says Albert Gatschet accepted Wright’s reading too.

Not everybody agreed. Dr. William S. Wyman of Tuscaloosa leaned toward “Mulberry people.” And Owen quotes Thomas Woodward, who remembered Colonel Hawkins saying he’d asked everywhere and never found that Alabama meant anything more than “the mere name of an Indian town.” Hawkins wondered if it could be an Indian garbling of the Spanish words for good water, “though he doubted that.”

Henry Gannett’s place-name list for the U.S. Geological Survey, published in 1905, gives two meanings in its Alabama entry: “burnt clearing,” from Gatschet, and “thicket clearer,” from a writer named Haines. That’s a small puzzle you can’t settle from these pages, since Owen says Gatschet went with Wright’s reading.

Owen picked “Vegetation-gatherers,” at least “until supplanted by something upon which no doubt rests.” He also thought it fit the people of the state better than resting did. Alabama Territory was created on March 3, 1817, and Alabama joined the Union on December 14, 1819. The motto on the seal says the people came to rest, but the best guess in Owen’s book is that the name was for people who cleared land.

Sources & further reading

• Thomas McAdory Owen, History of Alabama and Dictionary of Alabama Biography, vol. 1 (1921). Owen as founder and director of the Alabama State Department of Archives and History (title page); the entry “Alabama, State Name”: “the aboriginal name of a Muskhogean tribe of the Creek confederacy”; the river named for the tribe and “the State in turn was named for the river”; De Soto’s narratives, the Chickasaw subdivision, “and not the historic Alibamu towns”; “The names are, however, identical”; the list of spellings from the Handbook of American Indians; Allen Wright, “Thicket-clearers,” alba and amo; Halbert’s “Vegetation-gatherers”; Byington’s dictionary (p. 15); Gatschet accepting Wright’s reading; Wyman’s “Mulberry people”; Woodward and Hawkins, “the mere name of an Indian town” and “though he doubted that”; “Here We Rest,” Meek, the Jacksonville Republican of July 27, 1842, the seal of 1868, “no philologist has found,” “the realm of poetry and romance,” the chief’s words; “until supplanted by something upon which no doubt rests” (p. 16); the act of March 3, 1817, “establishing the Alabama Territory” (p. 202); the territory created March 3, 1817, and the joint resolution admitting the state on December 14, 1819 (p. 346).
• Albert James Pickett, History of Alabama, and Incidentally of Georgia and Mississippi, vol. 1, 2nd ed. (1851). De Soto’s assault on “the fortress of Alibamo” (p. 48); the footnote saying Milfort’s account and the Alibamo fort show “they were the same people,” their later towns “on the site of the modern Montgomery,” and “From these people the river and state took their names” (p. 49).
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), p. 18. Alabama, the state and the river: “named for an Indian tribe. Gatschet gives the meaning as ‘burnt clearing.’ Haines, in his ‘American Indian,’ gives ‘thicket clearer.’”
• U.S. Geological Survey, GNIS feature 1779775. The record’s history note: “Alabama gained Statehood on 14 December 1819. Named for a river which in turn was named for an Indian Tribe of the Creek Confederacy originally called the Alabamas or Alibamons.” (from a 1976 USGS news release).
• U.S. Census Bureau, state codes (2020). Lists Alabama’s permanent federal place-name record number (GNIS 1779775).