Day 39: Idaho’s made-up name
I saw this map in an Instagram post and absolutely had to figure out what it meant. (I couldn’t get the embedding to work on that link, and I’m pretty mad about it)
Note: This is all kind of in the “allegedly” category, so take that for what it’s worth. History isn’t entirely sure what happened and neither am I.
So there was this guy, George M. Willing, who didn’t get elected to Congress, but ended up showing up anyway when Congress was figuring out what to do with a new territory in the Rocky Mountains.
He suggested “Idaho” as the name of the new territory, claiming that it was a Shoshone word. It turns out it wasn’t a Shoshone word and since everyone knew he fabricated the name, they decided to got with “Colorado Territory”.
However, by the time the name had been selected, a town called Idaho Springs, Colorado had already been named using Willing’s suggestion. Not sure why he wanted stuff to be called Idaho so badly, but he shopped the name around, apparently.
That same year Idaho County had been created in the Washington Territory, which had been named after a steamship. It’s unclear whether that ship was named at Willing’s suggestion also, but it seems like too big of a coincidence, doesn’t it?
Eventually, part of Washington Territory was used to create what is now Idaho.
This whole thing was very confusing and very strange, but I guess George M. Willing got his way in the end and got his fake name chosen for a state.
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