How Louisiana Got Its Name From King Louis XIV

Louisiana is named for King Louis XIV of France, and when La Salle claimed it for him in 1682, the name covered nearly everything the Mississippi River drains. So the Louisiana you know today is what’s left of a name that once stretched across the middle of the continent. It’s still the king’s name, though.

La Salle’s column at the mouth of the Mississippi

Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, was a French explorer working out of Canada. In early 1682, he set off down the Mississippi with 22 armed Frenchmen, a priest, 18 Native people from New England, and several Native women. In early April, they reached the place where the river splits into three channels and runs into the Gulf of Mexico.

A notary named Jaques de la Metairie (that’s how the record spells it) traveled with them, and he wrote up an official record of what happened next. On April 9, 1682, they put up a column with the arms of France and this inscription: “LOUIS LE GRAND, ROI DE FRANCE ET DE NAVARRE, REGNE,” which translates to “Louis the Great, King of France and Navarre, reigns.” They sang the Te Deum and fired their guns.

Then La Salle, standing by the column, announced in a loud voice that, in the name of “Louis the Great, by the Grace of God King of France and of Navarre, Fourteenth of that name,” he was taking possession “of this country of Louisiana.” Everyone shouted “Vive le Roi,” long live the king.

How big was “Louisiana”?

Big. La Salle’s speech claimed “the seas, harbors, ports, bays, adjacent straits,” the peoples living there, and the Mississippi with every river that flows into it, “from its source beyond the country of the Kious or Nadouessious” all the way to the Gulf. Grace King and John Ficklen’s 1893 History of Louisiana says the name was applied, vaguely, to everything between the Allegheny Mountains and the Rockies, from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico.

Whether La Salle came up with the name that very day is a little fuzzier than it sounds. Benjamin French, who published an English translation of the record in 1846, says La Salle “gave it the name of Louisiana” that day. King and Ficklen say 1683. The notary’s record, signed on April 9, 1682, is the oldest of the three, and it uses the name all the way through, even calling the whole trip “the voyage to Louisiana.” Since it was written up after the ceremony, though, it can’t tell you whether La Salle had been using the name before.

Orleans or Louisiana?

France sold Louisiana to the United States in 1803, French notes. When Congress organized it, the northern part was called the “District of Louisiana” and the southern part became the “Territory of Orleans,” according to Everett Brown’s 1920 history of the Louisiana Purchase.

So when the southern territory was ready for statehood, you might expect it to become the state of Orleans. It didn’t. The act of Congress approved on April 8, 1812, admitted the new state “under the name of the state of Louisiana,” Brown writes, and Louisiana entered the Union on April 30, 1812. After 130 years, the name La Salle announced at the column finally belonged to a state, and it still pointed back to the same king.

Sources & further reading

• B. F. French, ed., Historical Collections of Louisiana, Part 1 (1846). The English translation of the notary’s record, the “Proces Verbal of the Taking Possession of Louisiana,” dated April 9, 1682 (pp. 45–50): the trip down the river, the column and its inscription, La Salle’s speech claiming “this country of Louisiana,” and the list of signers. The introduction says La Salle “gave it the name of Louisiana” (p. viii) and that France sold the country to the United States in 1803 (p. ix). We read the translation, not the French original, and the English version of the inscription above is ours.
• Everett S. Brown, The Constitutional History of the Louisiana Purchase, 1803–1812 (1920). Admission on April 30, 1812 (p. 80); the names “District of Louisiana” for the northern part and “Territory of Orleans” for the southern part (p. 102); the act approved April 8, 1812, admitting the state “under the name of the state of Louisiana” (p. 193).
• Grace King and John R. Ficklen, A History of Louisiana (1893). Says the name honored Louis XIV and was given by La Salle “in the year 1683,” a year later than the 1682 record, and that it was applied “vaguely” to the land between the Alleghenies and the Rockies (introduction); the admission act of April 8, 1812 (p. 170).
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), p. 191. “Named for Louis XIV of France.”
• U.S. Census Bureau, state codes (2020). Lists Louisiana’s permanent federal place-name record number (GNIS 1629543).