How Oregon Got Its Name: A River Nobody Had Seen

Oregon’s name first shows up in 1765 as “Ouragon,” a river a British officer named Robert Rogers said the Indians had told him about, and nobody knows for sure what the word meant. Nobody had seen the river, either. Rogers was asking the king to pay for an expedition to go find it.

The first time it was written down

Robert Rogers was famous in his day as the leader of Rogers’ Rangers in the French and Indian War. In August 1765, he was in London looking for a job and some money, and he sent the king’s ministers a proposal. He’d lead 200 men west from the Great Lakes, toward the head of the Mississippi, “and from thence to the River called by the Indians Ouragon,” which he said flowed into a bay off the Pacific. From there, he’d look for the Northwest Passage.

The proposal sat in Britain’s Public Record Office until the Oregon historian T. C. Elliott printed it in 1921. Rogers didn’t get his expedition. He got command of the fort at Mackinac, in what’s now Michigan. When he tried again in 1772, he spelled the river “Ourigan.”

How “Ouragon” became “Oregon”

The spelling we use comes from Jonathan Carver, a captain Rogers sent west in 1766 to explore. In 1778, Carver published a book about his travels, and in it he writes about “the River Oregon, or the River of the West, that falls into the Pacific Ocean at the straits of Annian.” It’s the first known appearance of “Oregon” in print.

So where did Carver get it? Elliott found the answer in a note on one of Rogers’s proposals: “Lent the two plans to Capt. Carver 15 Feb. 1775.” So Carver had Rogers’s paperwork in hand while he was finishing his book. Elliott’s conclusion was blunt: Oregon is “a corruption or variation by Jonathan Carver” of Rogers’s Ouragon.

The river itself was mostly imagination. In 1765, Rogers thought he could get from Minnesota to this River of the West with a short portage. The Straits of Anian, where Carver had it emptying, were a legend too.

So what did “Ouragon” mean?

That’s the part nobody’s settled. A few ideas have been floated, and none of them is proven:

• A French word for “hurricane.” Elliott pointed out that ouragan means windstorm or hurricane in French, and suggested that French traders, or Indians who’d picked up French, might have used it for a river in windy country. He wrote that this “seems to be the origin,” but he had no document to prove it.
• An Indian name. Rogers said that’s what it was. Elliott thought Rogers more likely got it secondhand, from French traders or from Mohawk and other Iroquois men he knew, than from the tribes out west. None of the sources we found matches the word to a specific language.
• Wild sage or “big ears.” The U.S. Geological Survey’s 1905 place-name book offers two older theories: that it comes from origanum, a kind of wild sage, or from the Spanish Oregones, which it says meant “big-eared men.” The book doesn’t pick between them.

From a rumor to a state

The name outlived the imaginary river. It even made it into poetry: William Cullen Bryant’s “Thanatopsis” sends the reader to “the continuous woods / Where rolls the Oregan,” spelled that way in an 1855 edition of his poems. Oregon became a state on February 14, 1859.

So the name of the state goes back to a rumor of a river, written down by a soldier who needed a job, and copied by a writer who borrowed his notes. What the original word meant is still a mystery.

Sources & further reading

• T. C. Elliott, “The Origin of the Name Oregon,” Quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society (1921). Prints Rogers’s 1765 proposal (Public Record Office, Colonial Office class 323, vol. 18) with the line about “the River called by the Indians Ouragon,” explains the 1772 spelling “Ourigan,” the note lending the plans to Carver in 1775, and Elliott’s “hurricane” guess.
• T. C. Elliott, “Jonathan Carver’s Source for the Name Oregon,” same journal (1922). Follows up on how Carver depended on Rogers.
• Jonathan Carver, Travels Through the Interior Parts of North America (London, 1778). The first known use of “Oregon” in print: “the River Oregon, or the River of the West.”
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), p. 232. Lists the origanum and Oregones (“big-eared men”) theories.
• William Cullen Bryant, Poems, vol. 1 (1855), “Thanatopsis.” The line “Where rolls the Oregan,” with that spelling.
• Hubert Howe Bancroft, History of Oregon, vol. 2 (1888). Gives the date Oregon entered the Union, February 14, 1859.
• U.S. Census Bureau, state codes (2020). Lists Oregon’s permanent federal place-name record number (GNIS 1155107).