Detail of a c.1819 map of the Northwest Territory (i.e., what is now the state of Wisconsin) showing the Ouisconsin River
28 May 2021
[Edit, 9 June 2021: corrected a fact regarding Marquette’s death.]
The origin of the name Wisconsin is a mystery. Not only is its original meaning uncertain—a rather common occurrence with indigenous placenames—but which language it comes from is also in doubt—all a result of the casual disregard that early European explorers and colonists had for indigenous languages.
We do know that the name was first applied to the Wisconsin River. Many sources point to an Ojibwa (Chippewa) origin, but Michael McCafferty contends that the name is from the Miami-Illinois meeskohsinki meaning “it lies red,” probably a reference to the red sandstone banks along portions of the river. Other hypotheses about the original meaning include “gathering place of the waters.”
The first Europeans to record the name were Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet in 1673. A translation of their travel narrative from the French reads:
The river on which we embarked is called Meskousing. It is very wide; it has a sandy bottom, which forms various shoals that render its navigation very difficult. It is full of islands covered with vines. On the banks one sees fertile land, diversified with woods, prairies, and hills. There are oak, walnut, and basswood trees; and another kind, whose branches are armed with long thorns. We saw there neither feathered game nor fish, but many deer, and a large number of cattle.
Marquette died before he could return to Quebec, but Jolliet took the name Meskousing back with him. There René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle mistook Marquette’s and Jolliet’s <M> to be an <Ou> and rendered the name as Ouisconsing. Others followed Cavelier’s lead. That spelling was later Anglicized to <W> and the final <g> dropped.
The name appears in English by 1698 in Louis Hennepin’s A New Discovery of a Vast Country in America:
No Rivers, as I have already said, run into the Meschasipi between the river of the Illinois and the Fall of St. Anthony, from the Westward, but the River Ottenta, and another which falls into it within eight Leagues of the said Fall: But on the Eastward we met with a pretty large River, call'd Ouisconsin or Misconsin, which comes from the Northward. This River is near as large as that of the Illinois; but I cannot give an exact account of the length of its Course, for we left it about sixty Leagues from its Mouth, to make a Portage into another River, which runs into the Bay of Puans, as I shall observe when I come to speak of our return from Issati into Canada. This River Ouisconsin runs into the Meschasipi about 100 Leagues above that of the Illinois.
The area that would become the state of Wisconsin was acquired by the United States by the 1783 Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War. The area was called by various names until the Wisconsin Territory was created in 1836. Wisconsin was admitted to the Union on 39 May 1848.
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 Extending Above Four Thousand Miles Between New France and New Mexico. London: Printed for M. Bentley, et al., 1698, 180–181. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Marquette, Jacques and Louis Jolliet. “The Mississippi Voyage of Jolliet and Marquette, 1673.” Early Narratives of the Northwest, 1634–1699. Louise Phelps Kellogg, ed. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1917, 235–36.
McCafferty, Michael. Native American Place-Names of Indiana. Urbana: U of Illinois Press, 2008, 190n.
———. “On Wisconsin: the Derivation and Referent of an Old Puzzle in American Placenames.” Onoma, 38, 2003, 39–56.
Image credit: Map of the North Western and Michigan Territories. Fielding Lucas and Bartholomew Welch, c.1819. Library of Congress. Public Domain.