Name-a-Day Calendar, March 6: Indiana Hoosiers
Page 120 of 365
Chosen in: 1923
Chosen by: Football captain Stew Butler
“Hoosier” is the official demonym of the state of Indiana, so it stands to reason that the term was already used by the state at large before Indiana University took it for themselves, and that’s exactly what happened. The term “Hoosier” as a nickname for people from Indiana was popularized by poet John Finley in his 1830 work “The Hoosier’s Nest”, which painted Indiana’s people as hard-working, down-to-earth laborers.
Indiana University first used the nickname for their sports teams in exactly that context. In a July 1923 telegram to “I” Men’s Banquet chairman Dick Miller, football captain Stew Butler said, “let’s speak of this fall’s team as the ‘Scrapping Hoosiers’. We will live up to that title.” The community listened, though from day 1, the “Scrapping” part was often, well, scrapped, and they were just known as the “Hoosiers”.
And, for the past century, the university has had trouble pinning down how exactly to visualize their “Hoosier” identity. They’ve shuffled through several mascots, some officially recognized and some merely proposed, but far and away the most popular was the bison they used in the late 1960s.
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