Who gave the name "Indiana" to the western part of the Northwest Territory when it was set off as a new territory in 1800, is not now known, but it was evidently borrowed from a preceding "Indiana" that may be found on maps dating back into the eighteenth century. The map best showing the exact boundaries of this forgotten tract is one by Thomas Hutchins, published in 1778. Roughly described it occupies the approximate triangle formed by the Little Kanawha and the Ohio rivers and the western ranges of the Allegheny Mountains. In other words, it covers all of six and parts of five other counties not within the State of West Virginia, and it contains about five thousand square miles, or an area equal to the State of Connecticut.

The little chapter of forgotten history connected with this original Indiana is interesting and runs as follows: After the French and Indian War, when the territory in question had passed into the possession of Great Britain, a trading company was organized at Philadelphia to establish an extensive fur trade with the Indians of the Ohio Valley. A large consignment of goods sent by this company down the river was forcibly appropriated by some predatory bands of savages despite the nominal peace then existing between the white and the red men. The powerful Iroquois confederation known as the "Six Nations," which claimed jurisdiction over the marauders, was appealed to for redress; it admitted the justice of the claim, and, as its wealth consisted chiefly of land, it gave the company, by way of indemnity, the Virginia land in question. The value of the goods had been placed at something like a half-million dollars. Its new owners called the vast tract thus acquired "Indiana". The name may be interpreted "the land of the Indians," and in it may be detected the classical bias that is traceable in Louisiana, Virginia, Carolina, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and many other geographical names.

This was in 1768. Either then or later the owners took the name of "the Indiana Land Company," under which title it figures in the Congressional Journals for several years, beginning in 1779, with a memorial from the company praying for relief. The occasion of this memorial was the refusal of Virginia to recognize the company's title to the land. The case dragged along in Congress as such things do; finally that body decided that it could do nothing in the matter, and in the end Virginia swallowed it all, leaving the Indiana Land Company to dorp our of history and Indiana as a region to pass from the maps. By 1798, "Indiana" had ceased to exist.

Two years later, when the "Territory Northwest of the Ohio" was divided, a name had to be found for the western part of the region. The name of the now defunct Indiana across the river seemed to be equally applicable to this country, and so in some way, now lost to history, the application was made. In the subdivisions that followed, the State of Indiana was the first to take on permanent boundaries, and it retained the name. This time it stuck, and so the red men have the monument that the old land company contemplated.

In western Pennsylvania there is a county bearing the name "Indiana," which is probably a reminiscence of the old Virginia tract. This county was erected in 1802.

An interesting and little known monograph on this subject is "The Naming of Indiana," by Prof. Cyrus W. Hodgin, of Earlham College, published by the Wayne County Historical Society some years ago.