Map of the Arkansas River basin as the river flows through the states of Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas to the Mississippi River
15 June 2021
The river and later the state of Arkansas take their name from Akansa an Algonquian name for the Quapaw, a Dhegiha Siouan-speaking people, who had settled along the banks of what is now the called the Arkansas River. The a- is an Algonquian prefix used in names of ethnic groups, and kką́ze is the Siouan name for the tribe, which the Algonquian languages borrowed. The unpronounced terminal <s> is a French plural. Despite the Siouan root at its heart, it is not a name the Quapaw use or used for themselves.
The name Kansas, as one might expect, comes from the same root, although here the reference is to a different Dhegiha Sioux people, the Kansa, also known as the Kaw. The name Kaw was originally a French abbreviation for Kansa.
Both tribal names appear in English by 1722, when they show up in Daniel Coxe’s A Description of the English Province of Carolana:
Sixteen Leagues further upon the West side, enter the Meschacebe two Rivers, which unite about 10 Leagues above, and make an Island call’d by the Name of the Torimans, by whom it is inhabited.
The Southerly of these two Rivers, is that of the Ousoutiwy upon which dwell first the Akansas, a great Nation, higher upon the same River the Kansæ, Mintou, Erabacha and others.
It’s commonly asserted that the name kką́ze or Kansa means “people of the south wind,” and others assert that the root means “downstream.” But there is no particular reason to think the name originally meant anything like that. The original sense has been lost to the ages.
Arkansas was admitted to the union as the twenty-fifth state on 15 June 1836, and Kansas as the thirty-fourth on 19 January 1861.
Sources:
Bright, William. Native American Placenames of the United States. Norman: U of Oklahoma Press, 2004.
Coxe, Daniel. A Description of the English Province of Carolana. London: B. Cowse, 1722, 11. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).
Bailey, Garrick A. and Gloria A. Young. “Kansa.” Handbook of North American Indians: Plains, vol. 13, part 1 of 17 vols. Raymond J. DeMallie, volume ed. William C. Sturtevant, general editor. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2001, 474–75. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Everett-Heath, John. Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Place Names, sixth ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2020. Oxfordreference.com.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. Kansa, n.
Young, Gloria A. and Michael P. Hoffman. “Quapaw.” Handbook of North American Indians: Plains, vol. 13, part 1 of 17 vols. Raymond J. DeMallie, volume ed. William C. Sturtevant, general editor. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2001, 511–12. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Image credit: “Shannon1,” 2019. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.