Baton Rouge, Louisiana: The Red Pole Behind the Name

Baton Rouge, Louisiana, means “red stick,” and in March 1699 a French expedition on the Mississippi passed a pole painted red with fish and bear heads tied to it. That pole is the likeliest source of the name, though it isn’t the only story you’ll hear.

What Iberville saw in 1699

Iberville, the commander of the expedition, was heading up the river with the Bayogoula chief and eight of his men as guides. His own journal, published by Pierre Margry in 1880, has the entry for March 17. They stopped at a small stream on the right bank that, he wrote, marked the line between the hunting country of the Bayogoulas and that of the Oumas, or Houma. On the bank stood cabins and “un may sans branches, rougy,” a pole with no branches, reddened, “avec plusieurs testes de poissons et d’ours attachées en sacrifice,” with several fish heads and bear heads tied on as an offering.

Pénicaut, a ship’s carpenter with the expedition, described what looks like the same spot in his Annals of Louisiana, which he left in manuscript. In B. F. French’s 1869 translation, he says the high banks there were called Istrouma in the Indian language, “which signifies Baton Rouge (Red Post), because at that place there is a post painted red, which the Indians have placed there to mark the boundary line” between the Bayogoulas and the Houmas. The two nations guarded their hunting grounds so jealously, he adds, that they killed neighbors caught hunting past the red post.

Istrouma, the Indian name

William Read, an English professor at Louisiana State University, took up Pénicaut’s word in his 1927 study of Louisiana place names of Indian origin. He wrote that Istrouma “is thought to be a corruption of Choctaw iti humma, which signifies ‘Red Pole.’” Read also weighed what the pole was for. It might have been put up for mourning or sacrifice, he said, or, “what is more probable,” as the boundary between the two nations. So in his view, Baton Rouge is a French translation of a name the local people already used, not a French invention.

The tree story, and two more

Not everyone went with the pole. Le Page du Pratz, a French colonist, told a different tale in his History of Louisiana. In the 1774 English edition, he describes a huge cypress tree at the spot. One of the first Frenchmen to land there, he says, remarked that it would make a fine walking stick, “and as cypress is a red wood, it was afterwards called le Baton Rouge.” The encyclopedia of Louisiana that Alcée Fortier edited in 1914 gives both: Du Pratz’s stripped cypress and the red boundary stake.

The government’s own 1905 place-name book, by Henry Gannett of the U.S. Geological Survey, goes further and offers three choices. The tall cypress comes first. Then “some authorities say” the name came from an Indian chief whose name meant Baton Rouge in French. “Still another theory,” Gannett writes, ties it to a massacre by Indians when the first settlers arrived. He doesn’t say who those authorities were.

Which story holds up

The pole has the strongest paperwork by far. Iberville saw it and put it in his journal under March 17, and Pénicaut was there too. Du Pratz’s tree story was printed decades after their trip, and Gannett’s chief and massacre come with no source at all. If you want the version backed by an eyewitness, it’s a red pole hung with fish and bear heads, standing on a border that two nations took seriously enough to fight over.

Sources & further reading

• Iberville’s journal, in Pierre Margry, ed., Découvertes et établissements des Français, vol. 4 (1880). In French. The entry for March 17, 1699: the stream between Bayogoula and Houma hunting grounds and the reddened pole with fish and bear heads “attachées en sacrifice” (p. 173).
• Pénicaut, Annals of Louisiana, in B. F. French, ed., Historical Collections of Louisiana and Florida (1869). Istrouma, “which signifies Baton Rouge (Red Post),” the post painted red as a boundary, and the killing of trespassers (pp. 54–55). The French original is in Margry, vol. 5, p. 395.
• William A. Read, Louisiana Place-Names of Indian Origin (1927). Istrouma from Choctaw iti humma, “Red Pole,” and the boundary as the more probable purpose (pp. 32–33).
• Le Page du Pratz, The History of Louisiana (1774). The cypress tree and the walking-stick remark (p. 55).
• Alcée Fortier, ed., Louisiana, vol. 1 (1914). Both the Du Pratz cypress and the red boundary stake (p. 72).
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905). The cypress, the chief and the massacre theories (p. 39).
• GNIS feature 1629914 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record: “It is a French name, meaning ‘red staff’ or ‘red stick’.”