How Minnesota Got Its Name (Picture Milk in Water)

If you want to see what Minnesota means, drop a little milk into some water: that’s how Dakota women explained the word to Mrs. Moses N. Adams. The cloudy swirl you get is “Minne sota.” The state took the name from its river, and the river got it from that color. At least, that’s one reading. Not everybody agrees.

Sky-tinted, or somewhat clouded

Warren Upham, who wrote the 1920 book Minnesota Geographic Names, says the Dakota, or Sioux, name means “sky-tinted water,” from minne, water, and sota, “somewhat clouded.” That’s the translation he credits to Neill, who had it on the authority of the missionary Gideon H. Pond. When the river floods, Upham adds, it turns “whitishly turbid.”

The milk story came to Upham from Mrs. Moses N. Adams, the widow of a well-known missionary to the Dakota. She told him that, at various times, Dakota women explained the word to her by dropping a little milk into water and calling the whitish, clouded water “Minne sota.” The U.S. Geological Survey’s 1905 list of place names gives about the same meaning: “cloudy water” or “sky-tinted water.”

Here’s the catch. Upham also notes that Major Long wrote in 1817 that the Mississippi above the St. Croix had a name meaning “Clear river,” and that Dr. Folwell concluded in 1919 that Minnesota means just that, clear, as opposed to the very muddy Missouri. So depending on whom you ask, the name means cloudy water or clear water.

The river that used to be the St. Peter

For about 150 years before 1849, French and English explorers and writers mostly called the river the St. Pierre, or St. Peter. Upham thinks that name probably honored Pierre Charles Le Sueur, one of its first explorers.

Once the new territory took the Dakota name, the river followed. On March 6, 1852, the territorial legislature asked the President to drop “St. Peter” and use only the Native name for the river, the same as for the territory. Congress made that official on June 19, 1852.

Itasca, Chippeway, Jackson, or Minnesota

Between 1846 and 1848, Henry H. Sibley and Morgan L. Martin, Wisconsin’s delegate in Congress, proposed the name for a new territory. They were following Wisconsin’s lead, Upham writes, in naming a territory for a big river inside it.

It wasn’t the only idea. The missionary William T. Boutwell pushed for Itasca, the name he’d helped Henry Schoolcraft make up in 1832 for the lake at the head of the Mississippi. In Congress, people suggested Chippeway, Jackson, and Washington. The choice was “virtually decided,” Upham says, at a convention in Stillwater on August 26, 1848, which asked Congress for a territory. Minnesota Territory was organized in 1849, and the state was admitted in 1858.

The spelling took a while, too. Jonathan Carver, who spent the winter of 1766–67 with the Sioux on the river, was the first writer to record the name, as “Menesotor.” After him came Menesota, Menisothe, Minisotah, and “Minnay sotor.” Martin and Stephen A. Douglas wrote “Minesota” in the bills they introduced in Congress. It was Sibley who spelled it “Minnesota” at the Stillwater convention. So the spelling you know is the one Sibley used at Stillwater, and the meaning, cloudy or clear, is still up for grabs.

Sources & further reading

• Warren Upham, Minnesota Geographic Names (1920), pp. 2–4, 80, 95, 132, 252. The river’s old name, St. Pierre or St. Peter, for about 150 years before 1849 (p. 2); the 1852 memorial and the act of Congress of June 19, 1852; the St. Peter name and Le Sueur; “sky-tinted water,” minne and sota, Neill and Gideon H. Pond; the river “whitishly turbid”; Mrs. Moses N. Adams and the milk in water; Major Long’s “Clear river” and Dr. Folwell’s 1919 view; Sibley and Martin, 1846 to 1848, and the example of Wisconsin (p. 3); Itasca, Boutwell and Schoolcraft; Chippeway, Jackson and Washington; the Stillwater convention of August 26, 1848; Carver’s “Menesotor” and the later spellings (p. 4); Jonathan Carver (p. 80), Boutwell’s mission (p. 95), Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (p. 132), and Gideon H. Pond as “the missionary to the Sioux” (p. 252).
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), p. 210. “A Sioux Indian word meaning ‘cloudy water’ or ‘sky-tinted water.’”
• William E. Connelley, A Standard History of Kansas and Kansans, vol. 1 (1918), p. 182. “Minnesota in 1858,” in a list of the years new states were admitted.
• U.S. Census Bureau, state codes (2020). Lists Minnesota’s permanent federal place-name record number (GNIS 662849).