What is a Hoosier to you? A basketball fan? An Indiana University alumni? Or a farmer harvesting his cornfields? With harvest season approaching and my small, water tower town preparing for such an event, I smirk at the soon-to-be-coming “Closed for Harvest” signs placed on local business doors. Then I pause, look around Bloomington and realize some students don’t even know when harvest is. Whether they’re an Indiana native or not, Indiana offers so many different backgrounds to its residents, ranging from the Indianapolis city setting to a down-home country environment.
Indiana was established in 1816, and since then has allowed for every walk of life to settle here and be a loud and proud Hoosier of any tradition. With its bicentennial soon approaching, our state is already preparing for this huge statewide party and none of us IU students are complaining about another reason to throw a party either!
The word "Hoosier" has made itself a name as one of the longest-living state nicknames across the USA, first really published by John Finley of Richmond, Indiana, when he wrote the poem “The Hoosier’s Nest”. After his poem was published in the paper, the applied name to any Indiana resident stuck as a Hoosier. Of course, we have no knowledge of where in the world Finley could have come up with such a word, and to be truthful to this day it’s not known, but there are a few theories as to its origin. Here are three of my favorites:
1. An Indiana native lost his daughter and he would go knocking on every door he could find asking “Who’s yere?” to every homemaker. Eventually, talk around the state recognized him to be “the who’s yere man” (also pronounced as “The Hoosier Man”). After finding his daughter, he returned home to his state and any Indiana resident traveling through the Midwest became referred to as a Hoosier. This is one of the stories that has been passed down in my family; however, I have never heard of anyone else having quite this version of Hoosier origin.
2. James Whitcomb Riley, a national phenomenon of a poet had quite the facetious story for our proud nickname claiming that we Indiana residents followed in the violent ways of early hunters and gatherers. Riley exclaimed that the enthusiastically vicious Hoosiers would violently “gouge, scratch and bite off noses and ears”. This was such a common occurrence among towns that when walking into someone’s home, ears would be slewed upon the ground to which the guest would casually ask, “Whose ear?”.
3. Apparently working along the river around the 1800’s came with many brawls and arguments that were illegal or viewed as inappropriate, but the rivermen became good at trouncing such events and became known as “hushers”, also pronounced Hoosiers.
Regardless of the story you want to follow, whether you are a native of Indiana or simply choosing to spend your college years here, you are a Hoosier. And the beauty of being a Hoosier is that whatever walk of life you love to live, you’ll always have a place here in our “Indiana Home,” warm in “The Hoosier’s Nest.”
