How Kansas Got Its Name From the People of the South Wind

Kansas takes its name from the Kansa people, and their word is so old that even they had lost its full meaning by the time Europeans showed up. What was left, one Kansas historian concluded, pointed to the wind. As he put it, Kansas is “the land of the People of the South Wind.”

Named for a people, by way of a river

The state, the Kansas River, and both Kansas Cities, one on each side of the state line, all got their name from the same source, according to Henry Gannett’s 1905 list of place names for the U.S. Geological Survey: “Named for an Indian tribe.” That tribe was the Kansa, also called the Kaw, a Siouan people who lived along the Missouri River.

William E. Connelley, secretary of the Kansas State Historical Society, dug into the word in his 1918 A Standard History of Kansas and Kansans. He threw out any idea that it came from a European language. “The word is a genuine Indian term,” he wrote, rooted in the Siouan languages “far back of historic times.”

Wind People

Connelley says the word Kansa is so old “that its full signification was lost even to the tribes of the Siouan family when they first met white men.” But everywhere it turns up in those languages, it has something to do with wind.

Among the Omaha, there was a clan called Kansa, known as the “Wind People.” Among the Kansa themselves, one clan was split into the Wind, or South Wind, people and the Small Wind, or Makes-a-Breeze-Near-the-Ground, people. In 1882, Connelley writes, the Kansa were still making offerings to the four winds, starting with the East Wind and turning next to the South Wind.

His conclusion: “While the full meaning of the word Kansa may never be known, it is established beyond question that it does mean—Wind People, or People of the South Wind.”

About a hundred ways to spell it

Early travelers couldn’t agree on how to write it down. Connelley lists Kansa, Kanzas, Konza, Kances, Cansas, Canceys, “and perhaps a hundred other forms.” If you’ve ever wondered where the tribe’s other name comes from, French traders shortened the word to Kau, or Kaw. The explorer Pike’s account prints it “Kans,” and Connelley suspects the printer got that one wrong.

Territory, then state

Congress created the Territory of Kansas in 1854, in the law you probably know as the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Its real title, though, was “an act to organize the territories of Nebraska and Kansas,” with Nebraska first. We get into that in How Nebraska Got Its Name. Nobody wrote down who came up with the name for the new territory. Connelley figured Senator Douglas left that call to Senator Atchison, and that the Kansas River, the main river running through the territory, made Kansas the obvious pick. Kansas was admitted as a state in 1861.

There’s one more twist. For a couple of centuries after the Spanish came through, the Kansa people didn’t hold much of the land that now carries their name. Connelley says that in Coronado’s day their country was “a narrow strip on each side of the Missouri,” and it was about the same nearly 200 years later. The Pawnees, the Wichitas, and perhaps others held the plains. None of that changed how Connelley felt about the word itself. He called Kansas “one of the most beautiful Indian words adapted to use in the English tongue.” And, he added, “As a name for a state it is unequaled.”

Sources & further reading

• William E. Connelley, A Standard History of Kansas and Kansans, vol. 1 (1918). The admission years, “Kansas in 1861” (p. 182); the narrow strip along the Missouri “in the days of Coronado,” the Pawnee and Wichita lands, and the rejection of any European origin (p. 193); the Omaha “Wind People,” the word’s lost meaning, and the Kansa wind clans (p. 194); the offerings to the four winds in 1882 (p. 195); “Wind People, or People of the South Wind,” and “the land of the People of the South Wind” (pp. 195–196); the many spellings, Kau or Kaw from the French traders, and Pike’s “Kans” (p. 204); “one of the most beautiful Indian words adapted to use in the English tongue” and “As a name for a state it is unequaled” (p. 205); no record of who proposed the name, and the Kansas River as the likely reason (p. 333); the 1854 act creating “the Territory of Kansas” (p. 334).
• J. Sterling Morton and Albert Watkins, Illustrated History of Nebraska, vol. 1 (1905), p. 155. The 1854 law’s title, “an act to organize the territories of Nebraska and Kansas.”
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), p. 172. “Kansas; State of the Union, river in same State, and nation in Oklahoma; Kansas City; cities in Wyandotte County, Kansas, and Jackson County, Missouri. Named for an Indian tribe.”
• U.S. Census Bureau, state codes (2020). Lists Kansas’s permanent federal place-name record number (GNIS 481813).