How Tulsa, Oklahoma Got Its Name From an Old Creek Town

In 1903, a booklet history of Tulsa, Oklahoma, admitted it didn’t know where the name came from. The answer was already in its own pages: Tulsa is the name of one of the old Muscogee (Creek) towns.

Spain, India, or right here

Philip Jackson Dickerson wrote History of Tulsa, I.T. in 1903, when the I.T. still stood for Indian Territory. He explains that the Creeks had “47 different original towns or bands constituting a confederacy,” and that “The name Tulsa was taken from one of the 47 towns or bands above referred to by J. C. Perryman, one of the oldest residents of the place, and the first postmaster.”

Then he goes looking much farther away. The name, he writes, “must have been given to this tribe of Indians by the Spanish, but we do not know just where it originated, nor its signification. It may be a corruption of the word Tolosa or Tulasi, a town in North Spain,” or it may come “from Toolsi, a specie of basil or Ocymum, held sacred by the worshippers of Vishnu.”

So the booklet tied the name to a Creek town, then went searching in Spain and India for what it meant.

A town name with a long past

A fuller picture came from the Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnology. In 1922, John R. Swanton published Early History of the Creek Indians and Their Neighbors, a study of the Creek towns of the Southeast. Tulsa is one of them. Swanton writes about Big Tulsa and Little Tulsa, and notes that Little Tulsa stood on the Coosa River.

He also makes a careful guess about how old the name is. Big Tulsa, he writes, “may be identical with that which appears in the De Soto chronicles under the synonymous terms Talisi, Tallise, and Talisse.” Hernando de Soto’s Spanish army came through a town called Talisi and left it on October 5, 1540. Swanton says “may,” and you should read it that way. But if he’s right, the name was around more than three centuries before Tulsa got its first post office.

You’ll also see the name spelled a different way in Oklahoma’s early records. Joseph B. Thoburn and Isaac M. Holcomb’s 1908 A History of Oklahoma describes Confederate troops gathering in December 1861 “at Tulsey Town (Tulsa).”

What “Tulsa” means

Here the sources don’t line up perfectly, so it’s worth looking at each one.

• “Old town.” Swanton leaned this way. He wrote that “it is more likely that Gatschet is right” in deriving the name from the Creek words for “town” and “old,” and then added the catch: the name is “now so much abbreviated that its original meaning is totally obscured.”
• “Town taken.” Benjamin Hawkins, describing the town in 1799, took the name from the words for “a town” and “taken.” Swanton mentions a Creek story that the town was once “captured” by the Tukabahchee, but he thought it was made up to explain the name.
• A town’s name, not a phrase. The English and Muskokee Dictionary of 1890, put together by the missionary R. M. Loughridge and the interpreter David M. Hodge, lists Tvlsa simply as “the name of a town.” It gives “old town or deserted town” for a different entry, Tvlvhasse, the word behind the name Tullahassee.
• Unknown. The 1903 booklet, as you saw, said it didn’t know.

So the source of the name is clear: an old Creek town. What the word meant is less settled. “Old town” has the strongest backing, but even Swanton called the original meaning “totally obscured,” and the 1890 dictionary doesn’t translate Tvlsa on its own.

Sources & further reading

• Philip Jackson Dickerson, History of Tulsa, I.T. (1903), pp. 11-12. The 47 Creek towns, J. C. Perryman as first postmaster, and the guesses about Spain and India.
• John R. Swanton, Early History of the Creek Indians and Their Neighbors (Bureau of American Ethnology, 1922). Talisi in the De Soto accounts (pp. 137, 151), Big and Little Tulsa (pp. 242-243), and Hawkins’s and Gatschet’s readings of the name (p. 244).
• R. M. Loughridge and David M. Hodge, English and Muskokee Dictionary (1890). The entries Tvlsa and Tvlvhasse.
• Joseph B. Thoburn and Isaac M. Holcomb, A History of Oklahoma (1908). “Tulsey Town (Tulsa)” in the Civil War campaign of 1861.
• GNIS feature 1100962 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record for Tulsa.