How Wisconsin Got Its Name (Meskousing, Ouisconsin, Wiskonsan)

Wisconsin got its name from a river that Father Marquette called the Meskousing on his trip of 1673, and it took more than 170 years to settle the spelling. The word is an Indian name for the Wisconsin River, and what it means is still argued about. You’ll find at least four different answers in the old books.

Meskousing, Miskonsing, Ouisconsin

Henry E. Legler’s 1898 Leading Events of Wisconsin History walks through the spellings. On Marquette’s map, “where the stream is indicated for the first time, the word is spelled Meskousing.” Joliet’s map has Miskonsing. Friar Hennepin wrote it at least two ways, one of them Misconsin. The French traveler Charlevoix liked Ouisconsing.

Then the last letter dropped off, and Ouisconsin lasted until, in Legler’s words, “the present English spelling superseded the French version, and the harsher English pronunciation the euphonious French.” He clearly liked the French one better.

Strong current, great stone, or holes in the bank

Legler says the real meaning “is so obscure as to be in dispute.” The popular translation, “wild, rushing channel,” fits the river but is “of doubtful authenticity.” Another one you may have heard, “the gathering of the waters,” he says students of the Algonkin language call “absurd.”

Consul W. Butterfield thought the name came from the high river hills along the lower river, some with steep faces toward the water: missi, “great,” and os-sin, “a stone, or rock.” Elsewhere in the same book, a list of Wisconsin place names gives “strong current” as the usual reading, “but it has also been rendered as ‘great stone.’”

Henry Gannett, who compiled place-name origins for the U.S. Geological Survey, went a different way in 1905. He called it “a Sauk Indian word having reference to holes in the banks of a stream, in which birds nest.”

Chippewau, Huron, Superior, or Wiskonsan

The name of the river didn’t automatically become the name of the territory. Starting in 1824, Judge James Duane Doty pushed for a separate government for the land west of Lake Michigan, which was then part of Michigan Territory. During that long campaign, Legler writes, “various names were suggested for the proposed territory, among them Chippewau, Huron, Superior and Wiskonsan.”

Doty’s own petition had proposed calling it Chippewau, but Legler says he was partial to Wiskonsan. Congress passed the act creating the territory of Wisconsin on April 20, 1836, and the state joined the Union on May 29, 1848. But the spelling still wasn’t official until 1845, when the legislature “decided the official spelling of it as W-i-s-c-o-n-s-i-n.” So you could say the state’s name took an act of Congress to create and a resolution of the territorial legislature to spell.

Sources & further reading

• Henry E. Legler, Leading Events of Wisconsin History (1898). The place-name list, “strong current” and “great stone” (p. 27); Joliet and Marquette’s trip of 1673 and Marquette’s narrative calling the river the Meskousing (pp. 71–73); the synonyms Meskousing, Miskonsing, Misconsin, Ouisconsing, Ouisconsin, and Wisconche (p. 101); “so obscure as to be in dispute,” “wild, rushing channel,” “of doubtful authenticity,” “the gathering of the waters” called “absurd,” Butterfield’s missi and os-sin (pp. 102–103); the spellings on Marquette’s and Joliet’s maps, Hennepin, Charlevoix, and the French spelling replaced by the English one (p. 103); Doty’s campaign from 1824 (p. 181); his petition proposing Chippewau (p. 182); Chippewau, Huron, Superior, and Wiskonsan, and the official spelling of 1845 (p. 183); the act of April 20, 1836 (p. 185); the legislature’s 1845 resolution on the spelling and statehood on May 29, 1848, in the chronology (p. 188); statehood again at the start of Part V (p. 219).
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), p. 328. “A Sauk Indian word having reference to holes in the banks of a stream, in which birds nest.”
• U.S. Census Bureau, state codes (2020). Lists Wisconsin’s permanent federal place-name record number (GNIS 1779806).