How Arkansas Got Its Name, and Why You Say "Saw"

In 1881, the Arkansas legislature passed a resolution on how to say the name of the state, and it says the last syllable sounds like saw. The name itself comes from an Indian people the French called the Akansea, the people later known as the Quapaw. The river took the name from them, and the territory took it from the people, the river, or the region around it. Nobody’s sure which, or whether it was all three.

The Akansea on the river

According to the Centennial History of Arkansas, edited by Dallas T. Herndon in 1922, Marquette and Joliet reached the country of these people in June 1673 and called them the “Akansea.” Marquette’s map shows their village on the Arkansas River, some distance above its mouth.

Herndon writes that the tribe’s own name was “U-gakh-pa,” meaning “downstream people,” which got bent into Kappa, Kapaha, and finally Quapaw. The early explorers all started the name with an A, which he blames on their trouble hearing the Indian pronunciation. He says a federal handbook of Indian tribes lists about seventy-five spellings.

Herndon isn’t consistent, though. Earlier in the same book, citing J. O. Dorsey of the Bureau of Ethnology, he says the name “Akansa” or “Arkansa” was given to the tribe by the Illinois Indians. Gannett, for his part, calls the word “of Algonquin origin.”

If you ask what “Arkansas” itself means, you get a short answer from Henry Gannett’s 1905 list for the U.S. Geological Survey: “The meaning of the name is unknown.” Gannett also says it “has no connection with the French arc,” a story some people had been telling.

Where the extra s came from

Herndon says a writer named Pénicaut, in 1700, was the first to put an r in the name, giving the form used today. The early writers rarely added a final s, and when they did, it was only to make a plural. A federal record for the state agrees that “the ‘s’ was added as a plural,” but it doesn’t quite match Herndon on the r. It says the French wrote “Arkansa” around 1673, a generation before Pénicaut.

That final s caused a fight. Some people said it should be sounded, like in Kansas, with the accent on the second syllable. Others said it should be silent. In the early days, though, the name was usually written “Arkansaw,” and Herndon says nobody argued about how to say it. Herndon says the act of Congress of March 2, 1819, that created the territory uses the word ten times, always as “Arkansaw.” If you check the copy of the act he prints a few pages earlier, though, two of those ten come out as “Arkansas.” Governor Izard, he adds, always crossed out the final s in public documents.

The 1881 resolution

The legislature finally weighed in. W. L. Terry, a state senator from Pulaski County, introduced a resolution on February 22, 1881. It passed the Senate that day and the House on March 14. It fixed the pronunciation as if the word were spelled Ar-kan-saw, with the accent on the first and last syllables, and called the other way “an innovation to be discouraged.”

Tribe, river, or region

Why the name was picked is less clear. Herndon says Congress almost certainly gave it in answer to a petition from a meeting at Arkansas Post in the spring of 1818, which asked for a new territory “by the name of the Territory of Arkansaw.” Some people say the petitioners meant the tribe, some say the river, and some say the region known as the “Arkansaw Country.” Herndon’s verdict: “The petitioners have all passed to their reward, carrying their secret with them.” Arkansas became a state on June 15, 1836, and its name still ends in an s that the 1881 resolution says you shouldn’t pronounce.

Sources & further reading

• Dallas T. Herndon, ed., Centennial History of Arkansas, vol. 1 (1922). Marquette and Joliet in June 1673, the name “Akansea,” their village on Marquette’s map, and the name “Akansa” or “Arkansa” given to the tribe by the Illinois Indians (p. 53); “U-gakh-pa,” “downstream people,” Kappa, Kapaha, Quapaw, about seventy-five spellings in the federal handbook, and the early explorers’ A (p. 149); Pénicaut and the r in 1700, the final s as a plural, the argument over the s, “Arkansaw” ten times in the act of March 2, 1819, Governor Izard, and the 1881 resolution of W. L. Terry, “an innovation to be discouraged” (p. 150); the text of the 1819 act, with “Arkansaw” eight times and “Arkansas” twice (pp. 144–147); the 1818 meeting at Arkansas Post, “by the name of the Territory of Arkansaw,” the tribe, the river, the “Arkansaw Country,” and “carrying their secret with them” (pp. 150–151).
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), p. 28. “Marquette and other French explorers wrote the word Alkansas and Akamsea, from the Indian tribe later known as Quapaw. The meaning of the name is unknown, but it is of Algonquin origin and has no connection with the French arc, as has been asserted.”
• GNIS feature 68085, Arkansas (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record’s history note: statehood on June 15, 1836; the name from a river named for an Indian village and tribe; “Arkansa” about 1673; the s “added as a plural”; the territorial act’s “Arkansaw.”
• U.S. Census Bureau, state codes (2020). Lists Arkansas’s permanent federal place-name record number (GNIS 68085).