21 March 2022
An 1843 map of the “Nebraska or Platte River,” as it flows through what is now Nebraska and Wyoming
The state of Nebraska takes its name from the Indigenous name for the river, Nibraska (Omaha) or Nibrathka (Otoe), from /ɳi/ (water) + /braska/ or /bráθge/ (flat/shallow), that is “shallow river.” The French translated the Indigenous name as the Rivière Platte (Platte River), the name the river bears in English to this day.
Indigenous peoples who have lived in present-day Nebraska include the Omaha, Missouria, Ponca, Pawnee, Otoe, Apache, and Lakota. Currently, the federally recognized tribes in Nebraska are the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska, Omaha Tribe of Nebraska, Ponca Tribe of Nebraska, Sac & Fox Nation of Missouri, Santee Sioux Nation, and the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska.
Perhaps because of the existing French name for the river, the name Nebraska makes its way into English discourse relatively late. Reference to the river appears in Washington Irving’s 1836 Astoria; or, Enterprise Beyond the Rocky Mountains:
On the 28th, they breakfasted on one of the islands which lie at the mouth of the Nebraska or Platte river; the largest tributary of the Missouri, and about six hundred miles above its confluence with the Mississippi.
Use of Nebraska as a name for the territory appears by 1843 in a map created by John C. Frémont and in 1844 in a report by the US War Department, ten years before the territory was formally organized:
A territorial organization of the country, and a military force placed on the very summit whence flow all the great streams of the North American continent either into the Gulf of Mexico, or the Pacific Ocean, would no longer leave our title to the Oregon Territory a barren or untenable claim. Its possession and occupancy would thenceforth not depend upon the naval superiority on the Pacific ocean. Troops and supplies from the projected Nebraska Territory would be able to contend for its possession with any force coming from the sea.
The United States acquired the territory that is now Nebraska from the French in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 created the organized Territory of Nebraska, which originally included the territory that is now the state plus most of what is now Wyoming and Montana and portions of Colorado and North and South Dakota. Over the next decade, the Colorado, Dakota, and Idaho territories were formed, reducing the Territory of Nebraska to its present size. Nebraska became the thirty-seventh state in 1867.
Sources:
[22 March 2022: Corrected a source.]
Bright, William. Native American Placenames of the United States. Norman: U of Oklahoma Press, 2004.
Everett-Heath, John. Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Place Names, sixth ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2020. Oxfordreference.com.
Irving, Washington. Astoria; or, Enterprise Beyond the Rocky Mountains, vol. 1 of 3. London: Richard Bentley, 1836, 262. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2003, s.v. Nebraskan, adj. and n.
“Report of the Secretary of War,” 30 November 1844. In Message from the President of the United States to the Two Houses of Congress, Doc. No. 2, House of Representatives, 28th Congress, 2nd Session, Washington: Blair and Rives, 3 December 1844, 124. Google Books.
“Report of the Secretary of War.” Alexandria Gazette (Virginia), 6 December 1844, 2. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Image credit: John C. Frémont, 1843. Library of Congress. Public domain image.