How Indiana Got Its Name, by Way of the Indus River

Indiana’s name goes back to the Indus River in Asia, says a 1909 book by the secretary of the Indiana Historical Society, Jacob Piatt Dunn. The word itself, he writes, was made up for a piece of land that wasn’t in Indiana.

From the Indus to Columbus

A few pages into the book, Dunn traces the word itself. “Surely no Hindoo would lay claim to ‘Indiana’ as of his language,” he writes, but it comes from the same root as Hindu. That root, he says, is “Sindhu,” the native name of the Indus, which means “the river.” The Persians turned it into Hindu, the Greeks into Indos, and the Romans into Indus.

Then Columbus “supposed it was India,” Dunn goes on, so he called the people he met “Indios,” “and the name has abided.” So the Indiana you know is, in Dunn’s telling, built on a mistake.

A land deal out east

The next step came at the treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768. Dunn writes that the Indians gave a tract of land to some traders whose goods they had “taken or destroyed,” and that the English owners came up with the name “Indiana” for the tract and the company set up to make money from it. It’s built like Florida, Georgia, and Virginia, he says, and “means a place of Indians, or pertaining to Indians.”

Where exactly was that land? Dunn himself gives two answers. In 1909 he puts it in western Pennsylvania, where Indiana County, he says, still carries the name “at the place of its birth.” In his 1888 history of the state, he called it a tract of some 3,500,000 acres “in what is now West Virginia,” granted to Samuel Wharton, William Trent, George Morgan, and other traders, and controlled by “The Indiana Company.” Back then he also called another writer’s claim that it was in present-day Indiana “a wild error.” Logan Esarey’s 1915 history adds that a tract called “Indiana” was also part of a larger grant a London banker’s company was chasing.

That old Indiana wasn’t some obscure claim. Dunn says it was “the subject of much dispute in Virginia and Pennsylvania, and of several memorials to Congress.” In a 1784 letter that Dunn quotes, Thomas Jefferson wrote about “the people of Indiana” and worried that “the Indianians and Kentuckians” might “take themselves off” from Virginia. Dunn says the Indiana in that letter was the tract out east.

The name moves west

According to Dunn, the name “was passed on to us when Ohio was cut off from Northwest Territory in 1800.” Esarey says the act creating the new territory was set to take effect on July 4, 1800, with its capital at Vincennes. Its last territorial governor, Thomas Posey, served until the territory became a state in 1816.

Henry Gannett’s 1905 place-name book for the federal government offers other explanations. He thought it was “probably” named for the purchase from the Indians of a tract along the Ohio River, and gives “another authority” who said it came from the Indian tribes who settled in western Pennsylvania. Both sound like pieces of the same land-deal story. Gannett doesn’t say which authority said what, but his list of sources for Indiana includes Dunn’s own 1888 history, so he isn’t a separate witness. If you follow Dunn instead, the name runs from a river in Asia, through a sailor who guessed wrong about where he was, to a company out east.

Sources & further reading

• Jacob Piatt Dunn, True Indian Stories, with Glossary of Indiana Indian Names (1909), pp. 6–7. “Surely no Hindoo would lay claim to ‘Indiana’”; “Sindhu,” the Indus, “the river”; Hindu, Indos, Indus; Columbus and “Indios”; the 1768 treaty of Fort Stanwix and the tract in western Pennsylvania; the name “evolved by the English owners”; “a place of Indians, or pertaining to Indians”; “passed on to us” in 1800; Indiana County, Pennsylvania, “at the place of its birth.”
• Jacob Piatt Dunn, Indiana: A Redemption from Slavery (1888; 1890 printing), pp. 182–183. Jefferson’s 1784 letter, “the people of Indiana” and “the Indianians and Kentuckians”; the footnote on the tract of some 3,500,000 acres “in what is now West Virginia,” the 1768 grant to Wharton, Trent, Morgan, and other traders, “The Indiana Company,” “the subject of much dispute in Virginia and Pennsylvania, and of several memorials to Congress,” and “a wild error.”
• Logan Esarey, A History of Indiana from Its Exploration to 1850 (1915). The Walpole Company and the tract “called ‘Indiana’” (p. 43); the act of separation that “was to take effect July 4, 1800,” and the capital at Vincennes (p. 154); Governor Thomas Posey serving until the territory became a state in 1816 (pp. 162–163).
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), p. 165. “Probably so named because of the purchase from the Indians of that tract of land lying along the Ohio River; by another authority said to have been named from the Indian tribes who settled in western Pennsylvania.”
• U.S. Census Bureau, state codes (2020). Lists Indiana’s permanent federal place-name record number (GNIS 448508).