How Iowa Got Its Name, and Why the First Iowa Wasn't in Iowa

The earliest Iowa anyone has found in public records wasn’t in Iowa at all: it was an 1829 county across the Mississippi, in what is now Wisconsin. The name itself comes from the Iowa people, who gave it to the Iowa River. What the word means depends on who you ask.

A county called Iowa

Benjamin F. Gue tells the story in his 1903 History of Iowa, with a careful “so far as can be ascertained.” In 1829, the legislature of Michigan Territory, meeting in Detroit, created a new county out of the land south of the Wisconsin River, west of Lake Michigan, east of the Mississippi, and north of Illinois. It was called Iowa, and its county seat was Mineral Point.

Henry R. Schoolcraft, the writer on Indian subjects, reported the bill, but Gue couldn’t tell who wrote it. It was either Schoolcraft or Dr. William Brown, and “one of them undoubtedly suggested the name Iowa.” As for “what the name signified, or from whence it was derived,” Gue thought it “will probably always remain an unsettled problem.”

Lieutenant Lea’s “Iowa District”

Gue never says that county had anything to do with what came next. On the west side of the river, the name came from somewhere else. In 1835, Lieutenant Albert M. Lea, an engineer with an Army expedition, mapped the land west of the Mississippi. His little book of 1836 was called Notes on Wisconsin Territory, The Iowa District, or Black Hawk Purchase. Gue calls it the first record in which the name Iowa is used for the country that became the state. Lea called it the Iowa District because the Iowa River was the main stream running through it.

The settlers took to it fast. A writer in a Dubuque paper was soon calling it the future state of Iowa, and in 1837 a Burlington paper took the name Iowa Territorial Gazette. William L. Toole, a delegate to the Burlington convention of 1837, later said the delegates settled on Iowa for the new territory there, Gue writes, “after other names had been proposed and discussed.” Even so, the name didn’t appear in the convention’s memorial asking Congress to organize the territory. Congress created the Territory of Iowa on June 12, 1838, and Iowa became a state on December 28, 1846. Gue gives Lea “the honor of giving our State its beautiful name.”

“This is the place,” or “sleepy ones”

The Iowa people, Gue writes, were living near the Great Lakes around 1690 and later moved west across the Mississippi to the lower Iowa River, which took their name. The earliest French explorers called the river the Ayouas, and Lewis and Clark, in 1804, wrote the tribe’s name as Ayouways. Then came Ioway, and finally Iowa.

Antoine Le Claire, who knew several Indian languages, said Iowa meant “This is the place.” Gue also repeats a legend about a band that crossed the Mississippi, looked out over the valley from a high bluff, and called out “Ioway,” which in the legend means “This is the place.” Henry Gannett’s 1905 list for the U.S. Geological Survey gives a different answer. He says the tribal name means “sleepy ones” or “drowsy ones.” You can pick the version you like, but the books don’t settle it.

Sources & further reading

• Benjamin F. Gue, History of Iowa, vol. 1 (1903). The Iowa people near the Great Lakes in 1690 and their move west (p. 66); the Ayouas, Lewis and Clark’s Ayouways, Ioway, Antoine Le Claire’s “This is the place,” and the legend of the bluff (p. 67); Colonel Kearny’s 1835 expedition with Lieutenant Albert M. Lea (p. 161); Lea as civil engineer and the title of his 1836 book (pp. 162–163); Lea’s “Iowa District,” the Dubuque and Burlington papers, Toole’s account of the 1837 convention, and “the honor of giving our State its beautiful name” (p. 165); “so far as can be ascertained” (pp. 165–166); the 1829 act of the Michigan territorial legislature, Iowa County, Mineral Point, Schoolcraft and Brown, and “an unsettled problem” (p. 166); the act of June 12, 1838 (p. 213); statehood on December 28, 1846 (p. 229).
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), p. 165. “The name is derived from the name of an Indian tribe, meaning ‘sleepy ones,’ or ‘drowsy ones.’”
• U.S. Census Bureau, state codes (2020). Lists Iowa’s permanent federal place-name record number (GNIS 1779785).