Missouri State Names

Missouri Name Etymology and State Nicknames

Midwest

• Show-Me State

• Bullion State

• Iron Mountain State

• Lead State

• Cave State

• Puke State

• Ozark State

• Bullion State

• Cave State

• Pennsylvania of the West.

Origin of Missouri State Name

Missouri gets its name from a tribe of Sioux Indians of the state called the Missouris. The word "Missouri" often has been construed to mean "muddy water" but the Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology has stated it means "town of the large canoes," and authorities have said the Indian syllables from which the word comes mean "wooden canoe people" or "he of the big canoe."

Nicknames

There are a number of stories and legends behind Missouri's sobriquet "Show-Me" state. The slogan is not official, but is common throughout the state and is used on Missouri license plates.

The Missouri Bootheel is the southeasternmost part of the state of Missouri and is called the "Bootheel" because of the shape of its boundaries. Strictly speaking, it is composed of the counties of Dunklin, New Madrid, and Pemiscot, but the term is sometimes broadly used to refer to the entire southeastern corner of the state.

Show-Me State:

There are a number of stories and legends behind Missouri's sobriquet "Show-Me" state.

The most widely known legend attributes the phrase to Missouri's US Congressman Willard Duncan Vandiver, who served in the United States House of Representatives from 1897 to 1903. While a member of the US House Committee on Naval Affairs, Vandiver attended an 1899 naval banquet in Philadelphia. In a speech there, he declared, "I come from a state that raises corn and cotton and cockleburs and Democrats, and frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I am from Missouri. You have got to show me." Regardless of whether Vandiver coined the phrase, it is certain that his speech helped to popularize the saying.

Other versions of the "Show-Me" legend place the slogan's origin in the mining town of Leadville, Colorado. There, the phrase was first employed as a term of ridicule and reproach. A miner's strike had been in progress for some time in the mid-1890s, and a number of miners from the lead districts of southwest Missouri had been imported to take the places of the strikers. The Joplin miners were unfamiliar with Colorado mining methods and required frequent instructions. Pit bosses began saying, "That man is from Missouri. You'll have to show him."

However the slogan originated, it has since passed into a different meaning entirely, and is now used to indicate the stalwart, conservative, noncredulous character of Missourians.

Resources:
Rossiter, Phyllis. "I'm from Missouri--you'll have to show me." Rural Missouri, Volume 42, Number 3, March 1989, page 16.

Official Manual of the State of Missouri, 1979-1980, page 1486.

Iron Mountain State, Bullion State

Attributed to politician Thomas Hart Benton, an advocate of hard money, or gold and silver.

Lead State, Ozark State, Puke State, Cave State, and the Pennsylvania of the West.

Others includes the Lead State, the Ozark State, the Puke State (possibly a corruption of "Pike", as there is a Pike County in Missouri, and another just across the river in Illinois), the Cave State, and the Pennsylvania of the West.

Slogans

Where the Rivers Run

Missouri Postal Code

MO

Missouri Resident's Name

Missourian