Mobile, Alabama: Named for Its Neighbors, the Mobilians

When the French built their first fort on the Mobile River in 1702, they named it for their nearest neighbors, a people they called the Mobilians. That’s settled. What nobody has managed to settle is what the word Mobile meant to the people who carried it.

A fort and the people next door

In January 1702, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, moved the French colony from Biloxi to a bluff on the Mobile River. Thomas McAdory Owen’s 1921 state encyclopedia, the History of Alabama and Dictionary of Alabama Biography, says the spot was six leagues below where the Mobilian Indians lived, and that the post was “named in full ‘Fort Louis de la Mobile’ in honor of Louis XIV, with the supplementary addition to show its proximity to the Mobilien Indians.”

Peter J. Hamilton, whose Colonial Mobile (revised in 1910) works “largely from original sources,” gives the fort’s name as Fort Louis de la Louisiane, though the 1702 French plan he reproduces is labeled “Fort Louis de la Mobille.” Either way, the Mobile part stuck to the town. Hamilton says Bienville was only 22.

After a spring flood that lasted a month and drowned the town, the settlers asked for a new site. Hamilton says Bienville moved everyone downriver to the spot where the city stands today, and his maps date the new fort to 1711. In 1720 the French company renamed the fort Fort Condé. It didn’t matter much. By 1721, Hamilton notes, the priests were calling the place by “the Indian name Mobile” again.

Mauvila, Mavilla, Maubila

The name is older than the fort. The Smithsonian’s Handbook of American Indians says the Mobilians’ early home was probably Mauvila, where Hernando de Soto’s army ran into the most stubborn fight of its whole expedition in 1540. That town was under a chief named Tascalusa, whose name lives on in Tuscaloosa. The Handbook lists how the name got written over the centuries. You’ll find Mavilla in the Gentleman of Elvas, Mavila in Biedma, Mauvila in Garcilaso de la Vega, and Maubela in Coxe’s Carolana of 1741, which said “Mouvilla, which the English call Maubela, and the French Mobile, is yet in being, tho’ far short of its former grandeur.”

Owen points to a church record that may be the closest you’ll get to how the Mobilians said it themselves. On July 27, 1715, at Fort Louis, Father Alexander Huve baptized a man as Jean Louis Mauvila, “ou comme l’on dit vulgairement Mobilienne nation,” or as it’s commonly put, of the Mobilian nation. Owen argues the people probably said it with a w, like Mo-wil-a, because there’s no v sound in their languages. He adds that the Choctaws of his day called Mobile “Mo-il-a.”

Henry Gannett’s 1905 federal list of place names sums up the result: the county, the city, the river and the bay are all “named from Maubila, an ancient Indian town upon the river.”

What the word meant

Here the trail runs out. The Handbook’s entry opens with “Mobile (meaning doubtful).” Hamilton writes that “no certain explanation of the word Mobile is given, unless Halbert’s suggestion be right, that it is from the Choctaw word which means ‘paddling.’” Henry S. Halbert spent years among the Mississippi Choctaws. In a later note, Hamilton points out that the scholar Albert Gatschet often gets credit for reading Mobile as “Paddlers,” but that Gatschet seems to have taken it from Halbert.

So “paddlers” is one scholar’s guess, passed along by another. None of these books treats it as a confirmed translation, and you shouldn’t either.

A name that traveled

The Mobilians, Owen says, were a small coast people related to the Choctaws, and about a century before he wrote, they had been absorbed into the Choctaw nation. Their name went a lot farther than they did. The Handbook says the “Mobilian trade language,” a jargon built on Choctaw, was used between tribes from Florida to Louisiana and up the Mississippi to about the mouth of the Ohio. The river, the bay, the county and the city all kept it too, so the name of the people the French met in 1702 is still on the map.

Sources & further reading

• Thomas McAdory Owen, History of Alabama and Dictionary of Alabama Biography, vol. 2 (1921). The move from Biloxi in January 1702 and “Fort Louis de la Mobile” (p. 1001); the abandonment of old Mobile after a flood (p. 1002); Mobile County named for the Maubila or Mauvila of the Spaniards (p. 1021); the Mobilians, Father Huve’s baptism of 1715, “Mo-wil-a” and “Mo-il-a” (pp. 1030-1031).
• Peter J. Hamilton, Colonial Mobile (revised edition, 1910). “No certain explanation of the word Mobile,” Halbert’s “paddling” (p. 8); Fort Louis de la Louisiane, named for Louis XIV, and Bienville’s age (p. 53); the flood and the move to the present site (pp. 85-86); Fort Condé, 1720 (p. 102); the priests using “the Indian name Mobile” by 1721 (p. 189); Gatschet, Halbert and “Paddlers” (p. 564).
• Frederick Webb Hodge, ed., Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico, part 1 (Bureau of American Ethnology), “Mobile,” p. 916. “Meaning doubtful,” Mauvila and De Soto, Tascalusa, the 1741 quotation, the spellings, and the Mobilian trade language.
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905). County, city, river and bay “named from Maubila, an ancient Indian town upon the river.”
• GNIS feature 155153 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record for Mobile; county seat in 1812, incorporated in 1819.