Hoosier

“ Pardon my delay in answering your question concerning the word "hoosier" in this section. The word means a native of Indiana, and has a rare popular sense of a backwoodsman, a rustic. One hears: "He is a regular hoosier."
Mrs. John M. Judah, of Memphis, writes:
About the word "Hoosier"—one hears it in Tennessee often. It always means rough, uncouth, countrified. "I am a Hoosier," I have said, and my friends answer bewilderingly, "But all [Pg 21] Indiana-born are Hoosiers," I declare, "What nonsense!" ”

“ This same frontier jocularity furnishes an explanation for the origin of several of the theories of the derivation of the name. If an assuming sort of person, in a crowd accustomed to the use of "hoosier" in its general slang sense, should pretentiously announce that he was a "husher," or a [Pg 22] "hussar," nothing would be more characteristically American than for somebody to observe, "He is a hoosier, sure enough." ”

“ Vanblaricum claimed that while passing through southern Tennessee he met a man named Hoosier, and this man said that a member of his family had a contract on the construction of the Louisville and Portland canal; that he employed his laborers from the Indiana side, and the neighbors got to calling them "Hoosier's men," from which the name "Hoosier" came to be applied to Indiana men generally. ”

“ With specimens of Hoosier life."
The word Hoosieroon was coined for the poem, and "Hoosier" no longer designated a rough, uncouth backwoodsman but a self-reliant man who was able to subdue the wilderness, defend his home, and command the respect of his neighbors:
"He is, (and not the little-great)
The bone and sinew of the State." ”

“ The Palladium also had an annual "address." These were rhyming reviews of State and National questions or humorous references to peculiarities of candidates for public office. They were of local interest but did not arrest general attention as the graphic description of Hoosier life had done. After a lapse of seventy-five years "The Hoosier's Nest" is still in demand at Old Settlers' Picnics, and at the reunions of the many "Hoosier Clubs" springing up wherever Indiana's sons have become prominent in the Great West. ”

“ The one-horse station wagon continued to symbolize the quiet domesticity of the citizens of the Hoosier capital: women of unimpeachable social standing carried their own baskets through the aisles of the city market or drove home with onion tops waving triumphantly on the seat beside them. ”

“ They understood him to say that he was a "hoosier," and thereafter applied that name to everybody from Indiana. This theory has several shapes, one being presented by the Rev. Aaron Wood, the pioneer preacher, thus:
The name "hoosier" originated as follows: When the young men of the Indiana side of the Ohio river went to Louisville, [Pg 14] the Kentucky men boasted over them, calling them "New Purchase Greenies," claiming to be a superior race, composed of half horse, half alligator, and tipped off with snapping turtle. ”

“ On Oct. 26, 1833 the Indiana Democrat republished from the Cincinnati Republican a discussion of the origin and making of the word "Hoosier," which will be quoted in full hereafter, which shows that the term had then obtained general adoption. C. F. Hoffman, a traveler who passed through the northern part of the state, says, under date of Dec. 29, 1833:
I am now in the land of the Hooshiers, and find that long-haired race much more civilized than some of their Western neighbors are willing to represent them. ”

“ These taunts produced fights in the market house and streets of Louisville. On one occasion a stout bully from Indiana was victor in a fist fight, and having heard Colonel Lehmanowsky lecture on the "Wars of Europe," who always gave martial prowess to the German Hussars in a fight, pronouncing hussars "hoosiers" the Indianian, when the Kentuckian cried "enough," jumped up and said: "I am a Hoosier," and hence the Indianians were called by that name. This was its true origin. I was in the State when it occured. [8]
Unfortunately, others are equally positive as to their "true origins." ”

“ The Middle Western people are preëminently humorous, particularly those of the Southern strain from which Lincoln sprang. During all the years that the Hoosier suffered the reproach of the outside world, the citizen of the capital never failed to appreciate the joke when it was on himself; and looking forth from the wicket of the city gate, he was still more keenly appreciative when it was “on” his neighbors. The Hoosier is a natural story-teller; he relishes a joke, and to [84] talk is his ideal of social enjoyment. ”

“ Its statement is as follows:
Hoosier. A nickname given at the West, to natives of Indiana.
A correspondent of the Providence Journal, writing from Indiana, gives the following account of the origin of this term:
Throughout all the early Western settlements were men who rejoiced in their physical strength, and on numerous occasions, at log-rollings and house-raisings, demonstrated this to their entire satisfaction. ”

“ Upon a certain occasion there one of these rustic professors of the "noble art" very adroitly and successfully practiced the "fancy" upon several individuals at one time. Being himself not a native of the Western world, in the exuberance of his exultation he sprang up, exclaiming, in a foreign accent, "I'm a hoosier, I'm a hoosier." Some of the New Orleans papers reported the case, and afterwards transferred the corruption of the word "husher" (hoosier) to all the boatmen from Indiana, and from thence to all her citizens. ”

“ Harwood's white-gloved hand led her hither and thither through the intricate maze; one must have been sadly lacking in the pictorial sense not to have experienced a thrill of delight in a scene so animate with grace, so touched with color. It was ungracious to question the sincerity of those who pronounced Marian the belle of the ball when Colonel Ramsay, the supreme authority in Hoosier pulchritude, declared her to be the fairest rose in a rose-garden of girls. ”

“ The real problem of the derivation of the word "hoosier," is not a question of the origin of a word formed to designate the State of Indiana and its people, but of the origin of a slang term widely in use in the South, signifying an uncouth rustic. There seems never to have been any attempt at a rational philological derivation, unless we may so account Mr. ”

“ There has never been a uniform folk-speech peculiar to the people living within the borders of the State. The Hoosier dialect, so called, consisting more of elisions and vulgarized pronunciations than of true idiom, is spoken wherever the Scotch-Irish influence is perceptible in the West Central States, notably in the southern counties of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. It is not to be confounded with the cruder speech of the “poor-whitey,” whose wild strain in the Hoosier blood was believed by Eggleston to be an inheritance of the English bond-slave. ”

“ To ‘set’ was the right way to sit; an Indian did not scalp, he ‘skelped’: a child did not long for a thing, he ‘honed’ for it,—slang retains this Hoosier archaism; a woman was not dull, she was ‘daunsy’; commonly a gun was ‘shot’ instead of fired in all moods and tenses. ”

“ My remark was caught up by some bystander, and the word hussar construed to mean the men of the State of Indiana (from which I had just come) , and thus the word "Hoosier" came into existence. Such is the irony of fate! Learned men have labored long to introduce some favored word of the most approved classic derivation, and as a rule have failed. Here a chance word of mine, miscalled by an ignorant loafer, catches the popular fancy and passes into Literature. ”

“ I think—a noble philanthropic young Southern woman is reproached by her haughty father for teaching the poor children in the neighborhood—"a lot of hoosiers," he calls them. I have seen it in other books, too, but I can not recall them. In newspapers the word is common enough, in the sense I referred to.
It is scarcely possible that this widespread use of the word in this general sense could have resulted if the word had been coined to signify a native of Indiana, but it would have been natural enough, if the word were in common use as slang in the South, to apply it to the people of Indiana. ”

“ It is an odd fact that when Hosier J. Durbin joined the Indiana Methodist Conference, in 1835, his name was misspelled "Hoosier" in the minutes, and was so printed. The word "Hoosier" always had the sense of roughness or uncouthness in its early use.
At the time this statement was made, neither Mr. Goodwin nor I knew of the existence of the last four lines of Finley's poem, in which this same term "hoosier-bait" occurs, they being omitted in all the ordinary forms of the poem. The derivation of this term is obvious, whether "bait" be taken in its sense of a lure or its sense of food. ”

“ The more the Hoosier travels, the more he likes his own town. Only a little while ago an Indianapolis man who had been in New York for a week went to the theatre and saw there a fellow-townsman who had just arrived. He hurried around to greet him at the end of the first act. “Tell me,” he exclaimed, “how is everything in old Indianapolis?”
The Hoosiers assemble at Indianapolis in great throngs with slight excuse. In addition to the steam railroads that radiate in every direction interurban traction lines have lately knit new communities into sympathetic relationship with the capital. ”

“ No reader of Hoosier chronicles can fail to be impressed by the relation of the great forests to the people who came to possess and tame them. Before they reached the Indiana wilderness in their advance before civilization, the stalwart pioneers had swung their axes in Pennsylvania or Kentucky, and had felt the influence of the great, gloomy woodlands in their lives; but in Indiana this influence was greatly intensified. They experienced an isolation that is not possible to-day in any part of the country, and the loss of nearly every civilizing [37] agency that men value. ”

“ It's so wild and rough over there, an' them people are so teetotally ignorant an' so full of curiosity that, whenever a gentleman from Kentucky crosses the Ohio and goes along one of their rough roads, up they pop everywhere, and call out to him: 'Who's yer?' meaning 'Who are you?' and that started the word Hoosier, which all over the world to-day means the people from Injiany. ”

“ Sister Mary Genevieve was born at Vevay, of Protestant parents, and died at the convent of St. Mary’s of the Woods near Terre Haute. Albion Fellows Bacon, Mrs. D. M. Jordan, Richard Lew Dawson, and William R. Williams have also been creditable contributors to the Hoosier anthology.
Indiana offers, on the whole, a fair field for poets. The prevailing note of the landscape is tranquillity. There is hardly a spot in the State that touches the imagination with a sense of power or grandeur, and yet there are countless scenes of quiet beauty. ”

“ The southern Hoosier is seen in their roads and fields and buildings and towns, as readily as in the peculiar phrases and wanging tone of voice of the people. Where the country has been settled from the eastern and middle states, the progress has been truly wonderful. ”

“ At least one generation benefited by the instruction of John I. Morrison, sometimes called “the Hoosier Arnold,” who sent out from the Salem Seminary in the third decade of the century a group of men destined to take high place in nearly every field that called for character and intelligence. Hanover, the seat of Hanover College, enjoyed a somewhat similar atmosphere, and Noble Butler, who afterward became, at Louisville, the teacher in literature and elocution of Mary Anderson, the actress, was one of the Hanover faculty. ”

“ That is something we leave behind us with our youth," he said; and looking down at the bent head and sturdy shoulders, and watching the strong fingers turning the key, Dan wondered what the man's youth had been and what elements were mixed in him that soft textures of leather and delicate tracings of gold on brown and scarlet and olive could so delight him. His rather jaunty attitude toward the "Home Life of Hoosier Statesmen" experienced a change. Morton Bassett was not a man who could be hit off in a few hundred words, but a complex character he did not pretend to understand. ”

“ Where, as in Indiana, the appearance of artistic talent follows naturally an intellectual development that uplifts the whole, [2] the condition presented is at once interesting and admirable. Owing to a misapprehension of the State’s social history, an exaggerated importance has been given to the manifestations of creative talent perceptible in Indiana, the assumption being in many quarters that the Hoosier Commonwealth is in some way set apart from her neighbors by reason of the uncouthness and ignorance of the inhabitants ”

“ As we came to a road which wound off to the south toward where there was a settlement of Hoosiers who had made a trail to the Wade place, I turned off and followed it, knowing that when I got to the Hoosier settlement, I should find a road into the Centre. It was a mistake made a-purpose, done on that instinct which protects the man who feels that he may be trailed. I was on an unexpected path to any one waiting for us. Finally Virginia spoke to me.
"How is our farm?" ”

“ Hand-Out: a bundle of food handed out to a beggar at the back door.
Hang-Out: the hobo's home.
Hit the Road: to go tramping.
Hobo: a tramp. Derivation obscure. Farmer's "Americanisms" gives: "Ho-Boy, or Haut-Boy: a New York night-scavenger."
Hoister, or Hyster: a shoplifter.
Hoosier: a "farmer." Everybody who does not know the world as the hobo knows it is to him a "farmer," "hoosier," or outsider.
Horn, The: a triangular extension of the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad, running from Red Oak, Iowa, southwest some twenty miles, and then northwest to Pacific Junction on the main line. ”