Buffalo, New York: Bison, Basswood or a Bad Translation?

Nobody has settled where Buffalo, New York, got its name, and in 1865 a local historian said there was nothing left to add to the argument. The city took the name of Buffalo Creek, which runs into Lake Erie there. Why the creek was called Buffalo is the part people still can’t agree on.

A creek before a city

Orsamus H. Marshall wrote that line in The Niagara Frontier, a paper he read to the Buffalo Historical Club. “The origin of the name, Buffalo, has already been so thoroughly discussed in and out of this Society,” he said, “that no additional light can be thrown upon the subject.”

What he could do was say when the name shows up. The first time, he wrote, is in the narrative of the Gilbert family, who spent 1780 and 1781 as captives among the Senecas; it came out in 1784. H. Perry Smith’s 1884 history of Buffalo and Erie County adds that a treaty signed at Fort Stanwix in October 1784 was the first public document to use it. As Smith gives the treaty line, it ran to the mouth of “Tehoseroron (or Buffalo) creek.” Four years later, the Rev. Mr. Kirkland, visiting the Senecas, wrote in his journal about their “village on the Buffaloe.”

So the name started on the creek and the Seneca village beside it. Smith says the cluster of cabins at the creek’s mouth was first called “Lake Erie,” and that “Buffalo Creek” moved there from the Seneca village once the land surveys began.

Three ways to explain it

The Senecas had their own name for the spot, and it had nothing to do with an animal. Marshall gives it as Do’-syo-wa, “the place of basswoods,” a tree that grew thick there. Smith writes it “To-se-o-way” with the same meaning, and both say the treaty’s “Tehoseroron” is the Mohawk form of that word. That’s where the trouble starts.

The animal. Henry Gannett’s 1905 list of U.S. place names puts Buffalo, New York, with the many places “usually so named because of the former presence of the buffalo.” Smith took that side too. He argued that the buffalo “once visited, at least occasionally, the shores of Buffalo creek,” and pointed to open plains in the county and to old travelers who mentioned the animals nearby.

A bad translation. Smith also reports the other view: “It is therefore believed by some that the interpreter made a mistake in calling the stream ‘Buffalo creek’ in the treaty of Fort Stanwix, and that the Senecas afterwards adopted the name.”

A French map. William Beauchamp’s 1907 book on New York’s Indian place names offers a third idea. On Pouchot’s French map, he says, the creek appears as “R. au boiblanc,” which works out to river of basswoods, “and Buffalo may be a corruption of this.”

Notice the hedges. Smith says “believed by some,” and Beauchamp says “may.” Smith himself was sure it was the animal (“there can be no reasonable doubt,” he wrote), and Gannett went along with it. But if you want an answer every writer agreed on, you won’t find one here.

The name the Amsterdam investors tried

The Holland Land Company, backed by merchants in Amsterdam, owned the land and had other plans. Smith writes that in 1799 it was decided the city laid out there “should be called ‘New Amsterdam,’” and Joseph Ellicott, the surveyor in charge, started dating his letters that way. A state law of 1808 even put the county seat at “Buffaloe or New Amsterdam.”

It didn’t last. In February 1810 the legislature created the town of “Buffaloe,” which Smith calls the first time the name was “legally applied to a definite tract of territory.” Marshall put it more bluntly: the village fathers, “with great good sense, rejected the substitute.”

Which version wins?

The record holds up on what happened: the city took its name from Buffalo Creek, and the creek had that English name by 1784. It just doesn’t say why. The animal story has the most old sources behind it, including the federal government’s 1905 list. But the Seneca name meant basswoods, not buffalo, and the state’s 1907 study of Indian place names left the door open to a mistake. Marshall said in 1865 that no more light could be thrown on it, and nothing in these sources proves him wrong.

Sources & further reading

• Orsamus H. Marshall, The Niagara Frontier (1865), pp. 38-39. The Seneca name Do’-syo-wa, “The place of basswoods,” with Te-hos-e-ro-ron as the Mohawk form; “The origin of the name, Buffalo, has already been so thoroughly discussed in and out of this Society, that no additional light can be thrown upon the subject”; first use in the Gilbert narrative, published in 1784; Kirkland’s “village on the Buffaloe”; the Holland Company’s “New Amsterdam” and the village fathers who “rejected the substitute.”
• H. Perry Smith, ed., History of the City of Buffalo and Erie County, vol. 1 (1884). The October 1784 treaty at Fort Stanwix and “Tehoseroron (or Buffalo) creek” (pp. 55-56); the Seneca name “To-se-o-way,” “the place of basswoods”; the interpreter theory and Smith’s case for the buffalo (pp. 56-57); “Lake Erie” and the move of the name “Buffalo Creek” (p. 78); Ellicott and “New Amsterdam” (p. 80); “Buffaloe or New Amsterdam” in 1808 (p. 98); the town of “Buffaloe” in 1810 (p. 116). Page numbers read from the scanned text.
• William M. Beauchamp, Aboriginal Place Names of New York (New York State Museum, 1907), pp. 62-63. Do’-syo-wa, place of basswoods; Pouchot’s “R. au boiblanc” and “Buffalo may be a corruption of this.”
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), p. 60. Buffalo, “city in Erie County, New York,” among places “usually so named because of the former presence of the buffalo.”
• GNIS feature 973345 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record for Buffalo, with its location.