Detail of a map by George Washington that accompanied his 1753 “Journal to the Ohio.” A hand-drawn map showing a portion of the course of the Ohio River.
25 March 2022
The name Ohio is from the Seneca (Iroquoian) name for the Allegheny-Ohio River, ohi:yo, literally meaning good river. The Seneca name came to English via French.
The name appears in English-language discourse in reference to René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle’s 1669 expedition, although historians today are skeptical of the claims that La Salle actually ever reached the Ohio River valley. Regardless of the truth of the claim, the name Ohio, in reference to the river, appears in a 1698 translation of Louis Hennepin’s A New Discovery of a Vast Country in America. Hennepin had accompanied La Salle on the expedition. It first appears with the spelling Hohio:
The Savages came to meet us, repeating often this Word Otchitagon, meaning by it, that the Bare-foot was return’d from the great Voyage he had undertook, to visit the Nations that are beyond the River Hohio and Meschasipi; and tho’ our Faces were burnt by the Sun, and my Clothes patch’d up with wild Bull-Skins, yet they knew me, and carry’d me with my two Men into one of their Officer’s Cottages.
Later in the book, in a section titled “An Account of M. la Salle’s Voyage to the River Mississippi,” it is spelled Ohio:
The Country between the Lake of the Illinois and the Lake Erie, is a row of Mountains for a hundred Leagues together, from whence spring a great number of Rivers, which run to the Westward into the Lake of the Illinois, to the North into the Lake Huron, to the East into the Lake Erie, and to the South into the River Ohio.
Use of the name Ohio to refer to the region was in place by the middle of the eighteenth century. It appears in an account of treaty negotiations between the English and the Iroquois at Lancaster, Pennsylvania on 2 July 1744. The name appears in reference to a discussion of the deaths of three Indigenous people at the hands of settler-colonists and is also of interest because of the formalities of the discussion and the use of wampum belts as commemorative items and records of the event:
Brother Onas,
These Things happen frequently, and we desire you will consider them well, and not be too much concerned. Three Indians have been killed at different Times at Ohio, and we never mentioned any of them to you, imagining it might have been occasioned by some unfortunate Quarrels, and being unwilling to create a Disturbance. We therefore desire you will consider these Things well, and to take the Grief from your Heart, we give you this String of Wampum.
Which was received with the usual Ceremonies.
The reply by George Thomas, deputy governor of Pennsylvania reads:
Brethren,
I have considered this Matter well before I came from Philadelphia, and I advised with the Council there upon it, as I have done here with the honourable the Commissioners of Virginia and Maryland. I never heard before of the Murder of the three Indians at Ohio; had Complaint been made to me of it, and it had appeared to have been committed by any of the People under my Government, they should have been put to Death, as two of them were, some Years ago, for killing two Indians.
The territory that now forms the state of Ohio was acquired by the British from the French in 1763, following the French and Indian War (Seven Years’ War). Ohio, formed out of the Northwest Territory, became the seventeenth state in 1803.
Sources:
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.
Hennepin, Louis. A New Discovery of a Vast Country in America. London: M. Bentley, et al., 1698, 275, 311–12. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2004, s.v. Ohio, n.
A Treaty Held at the Town of Lancaster, in Pennsylvania, by the Honourable the Commissioners of the Provinces of Virginia and Maryland, with the Indians of the Six Nations, in June 1744. Philadelphia: Benjamin Franklin, 1744, 27, 28. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO). [The title of the work says June, but the portion from which the quotations are taken is dated 2 July 1744.)
Image credit: George Washington, 1753. Library of Congress. Public domain image.