How Oklahoma Got Its Name From One Quick Answer in 1866

When a U.S. official asked tribal delegates in 1866 what they would call their territory, a Choctaw minister named Allen Wright said “Oklahoma” on the spot. In Choctaw, okla means people and humma means red, so the name means “red people.” Not everyone in the room liked how fast he answered. But nobody ever offered a better one.

“What would you call your territory?”

The story is told in Joseph B. Thoburn’s 1916 A Standard History of Oklahoma. After the Civil War, delegations from the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Seminoles, Creeks, and Cherokees went to Washington to sign new treaties with the federal government. In the spring of 1866, the drafts were handed to them to look over. Part of the plan was a council for all the tribes of the Indian Territory, which Thoburn calls “the beginning of a territorial form of government.”

During one of those talks, the commissioner of Indian Affairs “suddenly asked the question, ‘What would you call your territory?’” Allen Wright, one of the Choctaw delegates, “instantly answered ‘Oklahoma.’”

Why “red people”

Thoburn points out that in most of their old treaties with the government, the Choctaws weren’t called Indians. They were “the Choctaw Nation of Red People.” In Choctaw, red people would be okla (people) plus homma or humma (red). Thoburn guesses that Wright, the scholar of the group, may have been translating the treaty draft into Choctaw, so the phrase would have been on his mind. That part is his guess, not a fact on record.

The name wasn’t brand new, either. Back in Mississippi, among the Choctaws who got land under an agreement attached to the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, there was someone named “Oaklahoma,” which Thoburn says meant “red people.” When Henry Gannett put together his place-name list for the U.S. Geological Survey in 1905, Oklahoma was still a territory, and he gave it the same meaning: “A Choctaw Indian word meaning ‘red people.’”

The man who said it

If you want to know who Allen Wright was, Thoburn tells you, and the story is a hard one. He was born in Mississippi in November 1826, and his Choctaw name was Killihote. When his family moved west to the Indian Territory around 1833, his mother died on the way and was buried by what the Choctaws called “the Trail of Tears.” His father died soon after.

A Presbyterian missionary, Rev. Cyrus Kingsbury, took the orphan in. His last name, Wright, came from another missionary, Rev. Alfred Wright. He graduated from Union College in New York in 1852 and from Union Theological Seminary in 1855. While he was in Washington in 1866, his people chose him as their principal chief. He knew Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, wrote a Choctaw-English dictionary, and at the end of his life translated the Psalms straight from Hebrew into Choctaw. He died at Boggy Depot on December 2, 1885.

How the name stuck

Wright’s quick answer didn’t please everyone. Several delegates from the other tribes, Thoburn writes, “showed evident displeasure at the precipitate haste,” because a matter that big was supposed to be talked over first. Still, “neither then nor afterward did any of them see fit to try to suggest a better name.”

The Choctaw-Chickasaw treaty said the new territory would be called Oklahoma. Later, Elias C. Boudinot of the Cherokee Nation advised that the same name be used in a bill in Congress to organize the Indian Territory, and it kept showing up in bills after that. In the end, Thoburn says, it got so tied to the idea of one state that took in the old Indian Territory that it “practically attached itself to the region now included in the State of Oklahoma” without “the sanction of legislative act or resolution.” So the name you see on the map started as one man’s answer to one question.

Sources & further reading

• Joseph B. Thoburn, A Standard History of Oklahoma, vol. 1 (1916). The allotment to a Choctaw named “Oaklahoma,” meaning “red people,” under the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, and “the Choctaw Nation of Red People” (p. 90, note); the 1866 treaty and the “Territory of Oklahoma” (p. 380); the spring 1866 drafts and the inter-tribal council (p. 381); Allen Wright’s life, from his birth in November 1826 to his death at Boggy Depot on December 2, 1885 (p. 382); Wright’s Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, okla and humma, Thoburn’s guess about the translation, the commissioner’s question, Wright’s answer, and the delegates’ “displeasure” (p. 383); Boudinot’s advice and the name that “practically attached itself to the region” (p. 384). A note on p. 383 credits “personal information secured by Rev. Dr. J. S. Murrow from Rev. Allen Wright.”
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), p. 230. “A Choctaw Indian word meaning ‘red people.’”
• U.S. Census Bureau, state codes (2020). Lists Oklahoma’s permanent federal place-name record number (GNIS 1102857).