Tuscaloosa, Alabama: A Chief's Name, or the River's?

Tuscaloosa, Alabama, comes from two Choctaw words that mean black warrior, the same name the river beside it carries in English. What the old books disagree on is the next step: whether the town was named for Tascalusa, the chief who fought Hernando de Soto in 1540, or simply for the river and an old place on its banks.

Two Choctaw words

The meaning is the easy part, and the sources line up. The state history Thomas McAdory Owen published in 1921 says the name is from the Choctaw “tashka,” warrior, and “lusa,” black. The Smithsonian’s Handbook of American Indians spells them taska and lusa and says they’re Choctaw and Alibamu words. The federal place-names record uses yet another spelling, “tusko” and “loosa,” and hedges with “reportedly.” You’ll see slightly different spellings depending on the book, but nobody in these sources offers a different meaning.

The chief at Mabila

The first version starts with a man. The Handbook describes Tascalusa as “a powerful chief, apparently of the ancient Alibamu tribe,” who led the fight against De Soto’s army at the battle of Mabila on October 18, 1540. The chroniclers of the expedition called him very tall and strongly built, seated on a raised platform with his son beside him, while one of his men held up a painted deerskin banner. The Handbook says his name “is perpetuated in Black Warrior r. and Tuscaloosa town, Ala.”

Henry Gannett’s 1905 list for the U.S. Geological Survey puts it more directly: Tuscaloosa, county and city, “named for an Indian chief, the name meaning ‘black warrior.’”

The place on the river

Owen, who founded Alabama’s state archives, tells it differently. He says Tuscaloosa County “bears the name of the river which flows through it,” and he traces the name on that river to a place, not a person. The oldest record he found is De Lisle’s map of 1707, which marks “Taskaloussas” there. In 1759 a French captain named Bossu met Choctaws who said they’d crossed the river “at a place, called in their language, Taskaloussas.” Owen thought that by then it was the name of an abandoned town site at the ford above the falls.

Then he adds a careful disclaimer. “It is not implied by this statement that there is any connection between the name of the Maubila Chieftain, Tuscalusa, and that of the town bearing same name on the Black Warrior.” In other words, the same words, but not necessarily the same man.

Owen also says the river once had a completely different Choctaw name, Apotaka Hacha, which he translates as Border River, because it ran between Choctaw and Creek country. Toward the end of the 1700s, he writes, people stopped using it and began calling the river Tuscaloosa, or by the translated name, Black Warrior.

How the town got there

The town itself is young compared with the name. Owen says that in 1809 a Creek chief, whose name he spells Ocechemotla, got the Choctaws’ permission to settle at the falls of the river, and the place was known as Black Warrior Town. It was destroyed during the Creek War of 1813. In 1815 new settlers came in, and the legislature incorporated Tuscaloosa on December 13, 1819.

So which story wins? Gannett and the Handbook connect the name to the chief. Owen, who dug furthest into the local record, connects it to a place name and pointedly declines to connect it to the chief. None of them quotes the people who picked the name in 1819, so you can’t call either version proven. What both agree on is the meaning, black warrior, and that the same name ended up on the river in two languages.

A capital for twenty years

For a while the name was on the state’s letterhead. Owen says the capitol moved from Cahaba to Tuscaloosa in 1826 and stayed until it went to Montgomery. The chief’s story runs south, too. Owen calls him the chief of Maubila, the town De Soto destroyed in 1540, and he counts the Mobilians, who gave their name to Mobile, as descendants of the Maubilas.

Sources & further reading

• Thomas McAdory Owen, History of Alabama and Dictionary of Alabama Biography, vol. 2 (1921). Ocechemotla and Black Warrior Town, the 1815 settlers, incorporation on December 13, 1819, the capitol from 1826 (p. 1333); the county named for the river, “tashka” and “lusa,” De Lisle’s map of 1707, the sentence denying an implied link to the chief, Bossu in 1759, Apotaka Hacha and the change to Tuscaloosa or Black Warrior (p. 1334); the Mobilians as descendants of the Maubilas (p. 1030).
• Frederick Webb Hodge, ed., Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico, part 2 (Bureau of American Ethnology), “Tascalusa,” pp. 694-695. The chief at Mabila on October 18, 1540, the meaning from taska and lusa, and the name “perpetuated in Black Warrior r. and Tuscaloosa town.”
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905). County and city “named for an Indian chief, the name meaning ‘black warrior.’”
• GNIS feature 153742 (U.S. Geological Survey). “Tusko” and “loosa,” the 1809 Creek settlement at the falls, and the capital years 1826 to 1846, citing Alabama: A Guide to the Deep South.