How Kalamazoo got its name

Kalamazoo, Mich. Ask anyone in Kalamazoo why the city is called Kalamazoo and you will hear about a footrace: a young man running to the river and back before a pot of water boiled away. Ask why it is not still called Bronson and you will hear about a stolen cherry tree. You will find both on the city’s own website. Neither one, it turns out, rests where people think it does.

We went back to the paper: a Jesuit’s route notes of about 1760, a French map of 1744, a French memoir of the lake shore, a British road description and a Royal Navy log of the 1770s, Henry Schoolcraft’s journal of 1820, the treaty of 1821, the Senate journal of 1836, an atlas map of 1822, the act of the legislature that changed the name in 1836, the county’s first histories, and the linguists who have argued over the word for 170 years. Then we set beside them the names that the Potawatomi people use for the place and the river today. The record does not hand over a single tidy answer. It does show which stories are old, which are new, where the letter L came from, and which explanation has the oldest written support.

The case in brief

Story or record? Play along

Kalamazoo tells itself some good stories. Here are eight things people say about the name. For each, make your call: true, false, or no record either way. Then see what the paper shows.

Who’s who

Match-e-be-nash-she-wish Potawatomi leader · village at the head of the river, 1821

The 1821 Treaty of Chicago reserved a tract “at the village of Match-e-be-nash-she-wish, at the head of the Kekalamazoo river,” on ground that is now the city. The reserve was ceded in 1827. The Gun Lake Tribe, the Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Band of Pottawatomi Indians, carries his name today.

Father Pierre Potier 1708–1781 · Jesuit missionary at Detroit

Missionary to the Wyandot at the Assumption mission across the river from Detroit. His papers include route notes for travelers; the one that names the “kikanamaso” is dated by his modern editor, Robert Toupin, to the autumn of 1760. Toupin also showed that Potier copied out itineraries drawn up by other travelers.

Titus Bronson 1788–1853 · founder of the village

Connecticut-born pioneer, known in his day as “Potato Bronson.” He settled on the site in 1829, platted the Village of Bronson in 1831, and left after the name was changed. He died in Connecticut, at his brother’s house, and his gravestone stands at Middlebury.

Henry Rowe Schoolcraft 1793–1864 · explorer and Indian agent

Passed the mouth of the river on 4 September 1820 and wrote it “Kikalemazo” in his journal, printed in 1821: the first L we can find. In 1855 he published the explanation that the name describes stones in the riverbed that look like swimming otters.

A. J. Sheldon and George Torrey early Kalamazoo residents and writers

Torrey’s history of the village, printed in the directory of 1867, quotes Sheldon’s version of the race to the river: the oldest printing of that story we have found. Torrey wrote the county history in the directory of 1869 too, with the race again and a reason for the renaming.

Mr. Comstock state senator, 1836

Moved the amendment that added the village of Bronson to the bill renaming Arcadia township. The Senate journal’s roll names him: Horace H. Comstock, senator for the third district, the founder of Comstock and Otsego.

Samuel W. Durant compiler, History of Kalamazoo County (1880)

Reprinted Torrey’s account and the act of 1836, and wrote that the name came from a Potawatomi word meaning “the boiling-pot.”

Father Chrysostom Verwyst 1841–1925 · Franciscan missionary and Ojibwe scholar

In 1892 explained Kalamazoo as a corruption of the Ojibwe kikanamoso, “it smokes, or he is troubled with smoke.”

William R. Gerard 1841–1914 · student of Algonquian languages

In 1911 took Schoolcraft’s otters apart and argued for a smoke word, kikalâmozo.

Virgil J. Vogel 1918–1994 · historian

Author of Indian Names in Michigan (1986), the standard reference, which weighs every theory and accepts none outright.

The river and its places

Every place in this story lies along one river. Durant, in 1880, puts the race on “Galesburg, or Toland’s Prairie,” east of the town.

Drawn for this page. State outline: U.S. Census Bureau, via us-atlas; the river: Natural Earth (public domain), simplified. Places are placed by town.

Exhibit A: the oldest spelling, about 1760

DocumentedThe oldest form of the name we can find on paper is in the writings of Father Pierre Potier, the Jesuit at Detroit. Among his papers are itineraries: lists, stage by stage, of the rivers and portages along routes through the Great Lakes country. In them the word appears as two rivers, a “little” one and a “great” one: le petit and le grand kikanamaso. His editor, Robert Toupin, prints them in Les Écrits de Pierre Potier (1996), pages 144 to 151, and dates the itinerary to the autumn of 1760.

ReadingSpelled with an N, not an L. That one letter matters a great deal, as we will see. The date is the editor’s dating of the notes, not a date written on them, and route notes of this kind could be copied from other travelers; so “about 1760” is the safest way to put it. Either way, the river had this name well before any American surveyor saw it.

New findingIt is not the only one. A French memoir of the lake shore, “Mémoire sur la partie occidentale du Canada, depuis Michillimakinac jusqu’au fleuve du Mississipi,” printed in the Bulletin des recherches historiques in 1920, walks the east shore of Lake Michigan from north to south. Three leagues past the Maskigon comes the Ouichitanon, the Grand River; then: “A quinze lieues de celle-ci est celle de Kikanamaso plus considérable et qui est navigable vers le sud l’espace, de quarante lieues.” Fifteen leagues on, the Kikanamaso, larger, navigable southward for forty leagues. Its author is unknown. The editor of 1920 thought it written “en 1763 ou peu après,” in 1763 or a little after; it calls the Ottawa settlement at L’Arbre Croche “le nouveau village,” and that village was founded about 1741 or 1742, so it can be no older than that. Either way it is an eighteenth-century witness to the N.

DocumentedThe British wrote it with an N too. A description of “The Road from Detroit to Fort St Josephs by land,” printed among the Haldimand papers in the Michigan Pioneer and Historical Collections (vol. 10, 1886, p. 248) between papers of 1771 and 1772, lists the crossings: “To Reccanamazo River, or Pusawpaco Sippy otherwise the Iron mine river.” And in the autumn of 1779 the log of His Majesty’s sloop Felicity, sailing down the east shore, records: “We kept her along shoar for the Kikanamaso, as Mr. Gautly told me…” (printed in Michigan History, 1929). Neither is new to the story of the name: William L. Jenks tied the road description’s “Reccanamazoo” to the Kalamazoo in 1912, taking the R for a misprint of K; the Sons of the American Revolution’s Minute Man, reporting a talk by Claude T. Hamilton, printed the Felicity’s “Kikanamaso (Kalamazoo)” in March 1925; and Albert F. Butler listed “Reccanamazo” among the river’s old spellings in Michigan History in 1949.

Reading“Reccanamazo” is very likely, as Jenks thought, a misreading of “Keccanamazo,” the R and the K being easy to confuse in an old hand. Either way, French, British and naval writers kept the N for some sixty years, from the French regime until Schoolcraft’s L of 1820.

DocumentedIn an earlier article, in 450 ans de noms de lieux français en Amérique du Nord (Québec, 1986), Toupin explains how Potier worked. During the English occupation of Detroit in 1760–1761, Potier “a pris soin de transcrire pour son usage personnel les itinéraires dressés par d’autres voyageurs,” travelers such as Charleau, Pascal Chevalier and Derouen; and “ces rédactions ne prouvent pas que Potier a parcouru tous les chemins.” He took care to copy out, for his own use, the routes drawn up by others; the copies do not prove he walked them.

OpenWhy autumn 1760 for this route in particular? Toupin ties the date to a journey of Potier’s, on page 144 of the 1996 edition; we have seen that page only through a search of the borrowed book, and have not yet read his reasoning in full.

DocumentedWhich river was the “little” kikanamaso? Toupin answered in 1986. He prints the stages, “Le Ruisseau a Baptiste (aux balots) 2 lieues jusqu’au Grand Kikanamaso 5 lieues jusqu’au Petit Kikanamaso 3 lieues jusqu’au Ruisseau Bourbeux 4 lieues jusqu’a la Grande Riviere,” and glosses them: “Le petit kikanamaso [Kalamazoo River],” “Le grand kikanamaso [Kalamazoo-north branch].”

OpenThat is the editor’s identification, and he does not give his reasons in the passage we have read. The 1996 edition’s notes, pages 144 to 151, may; the book is on loan through the Internet Archive and in university libraries.

Exhibit B: the French maps

DocumentedThe French named the river differently. Jacques-Nicolas Bellin’s Carte des Lacs du Canada of 1744 marks the rivers on Lake Michigan’s eastern shore. Going north from the St. Joseph, the map shows the “Riv. Noire,” then “R. Marameg,” then “R. a la Barbue” and the “R. au Raisin,” and then the Grand River.

ReadingRead from the St. Joseph northward, the order matches the real coast: the Black River, then the Kalamazoo, then the Grand. That puts “Marameg” where the Kalamazoo should be. The Kalamazoo Public Library also reports the river called by forms of “Marame” on maps of the early 1800s, and the historian Larry Massie gives “Meramec” or “Merame” for the French name. Marameg was also the name of a band of the Miami people; Vogel says the river’s name in the French period was Meramec, which he translates “catfish.” And the next river north on Bellin’s map, “à la Barbue,” is French for “of the catfish.”

DocumentedThe same Handbook entry, though, writes the river as “Maramec (Kalamazoo) r.,” citing a French document of 1695 that places the “Miamis of Maramek” on it. What it rejects is the idea that the northern Marameg people lived there, not that the river was once called Maramec.

DocumentedOlder French sources point the same way. A county history of about 1925 reads Jean-Baptiste-Louis Franquelin’s “Carte de la Louisiane” of 1684 from south to north: “The St. Joseph is the Riviere des Miamis; the Black river, the Noire; the Kalamazoo, the Maramee;” and it quotes the Jesuit Charlevoix, who calls the river “Meremek, * * * one of the streams emptying into the eastern part of Lake Michigan.” The Michigan Historical Collections of 1912 gloss the French name: “Its meaning is Great Cat Fish, or possibly has the same derivation as Merrimac, and may mean in that case ‘rapid.’”

ReadingThe weight of the French evidence now leans toward yes: Franquelin in 1684, Bellin in 1744 and Charlevoix all put a Maramee or Meremek where the Kalamazoo runs. Whether “Marameg” on the 1744 map really is the Kalamazoo is still not proved. The Handbook of American Indians (1907) thought the Marameg people lived far to the north, near Sault Ste. Marie, and called the Kalamazoo identification of their name “certainly erroneous.” Only a full survey of the French maps and journals will decide it.

Exhibit C: the first L, 1820 and 1821

New findingThe first L we can find is not in the treaty. It is in Henry Schoolcraft’s Narrative Journal of Travels, printed at Albany in 1821. Coasting down the east shore of Lake Michigan with the Cass expedition, he wrote on 4 September 1820: “On travelling ten miles, we passed the river Kikalemazo, which appears from its mouth,” and, a little further on, “Eight miles beyond the Kikalemazo, there is a river of secondary size, called Black river.” When he revised the journal in 1855, the spelling became “Kalamazoo.”

ReadingSo the L was on paper a year before the treaty, in the hand of the man who was also the government’s expert on Indian languages, and who would later say that L was a French habit for N. The same “Kikalemazo” turns up in the books that drew on the expedition: Cleaveland’s Mineralogy (1822), Worcester’s Gazetteer (1823), Keating’s narrative of the Long expedition (1824) and Melish’s Traveller’s Directory (1825).

DocumentedThe earliest government document we have found that names the river is the Treaty of Chicago, signed on 29 August 1821 by Lewis Cass and Solomon Sibley for the United States and by the Odawa, Ojibwe and Potawatomi. Its second article reserved, among other tracts, “One tract at the village of Match-e-be-nash-she-wish, at the head of the Kekalamazoo river.” A note after the signatures, fixing the size of that tract at three miles square, spells the river a second way: “Ke-kal-i-ma-zoo.”

ReadingTwo spellings in one document, both with an L, both with the extra syllable in front: “Ke-.” The village of Match-e-be-nash-she-wish stood on the ground of the present city. The 1827 Treaty of St. Joseph took the reserve back, and the first settlers arrived two years later.

Exhibit D: the map of 1822

DocumentedThe Kalamazoo Public Library and others report that the river is spelled “Kikalemazo” on an atlas of 1823 (“five years before any white settlement,” in the library’s words; Titus Bronson came in 1829), without saying which atlas. Henry Carey and Isaac Lea’s American Atlas, published at Philadelphia in 1822 and reissued in 1823, includes a Geographical, Statistical, and Historical Map of Michigan Territory. Its river, rising in the interior and running west to Lake Michigan between the Grand and the St. Joseph, is lettered “Kikalemazo R.”

New findingWe think this is the atlas the library means. The map’s spelling has been noticed before: The Rag Picker, the journal of Michigan’s paper-money collectors, noted in 1984 that “an 1822 Michigan Territory map by J. Finlayson spells the Kalamazoo River as Kikalemazo.” What no one had done, as far as we can find, is tie it to the library’s unnamed atlas. The Carey & Lea map is dated 1822; the atlas came out again in 1823, “unchanged in most copies,” and its Michigan map was still not redrawn in the edition of 1827 (David Rumsey Map Collection); and its spelling matches the library’s exactly.

ReadingSo by the early 1820s the name had two forms on paper: a government spelling with “Ke-” and an L, and Schoolcraft’s “Kikalemazo,” which the map shares letter for letter. The map is very likely drawing on Schoolcraft’s journal, or on the expedition behind it, rather than on an older tradition of its own; but its “Kik-” at the front is still close to Potier’s “kikanamaso.”

ReadingThe library calls that atlas the first appearance of a word like today’s spelling. The treaty of 1821, with its “Kekalamazoo,” is a year older than the map and two years older than the 1823 issue, and Schoolcraft’s journal is older still.

Exhibit E: the county, the village and the act of 1836

DocumentedKalamazoo County was laid out by a territorial act of 29 October 1829 and organized on 30 July 1830, when its northern half became the township of Arcadia. Titus Bronson and Stephen H. Richardson recorded the first plat of the village on 12 March 1831 (Durant, page 214), and named it Bronson. The county seat was Bronson. The Pioneer Society of Michigan’s county list of 1877 puts it in one line: “County-seat, Kalamazoo,—first Bronson, then changed to Kalamazoo.”

DocumentedThe change itself was made by the first legislature of the new State of Michigan, in “An act to alter the names of the township of Arcadia and the village of Bronson.” From 31 March 1836 the township and the village were both to be “known and called Kalamazoo.” It was approved on 2 March 1836, nearly eleven months before Congress admitted Michigan to the Union on 26 January 1837.

New findingThe Senate journal shows how the bill grew. On 17 February 1836 the Senate asked its committee on towns and counties “to inquire into the propriety of changing the name of the town of Arcadia in the county of Kalamazoo, to that of Kalamazoo.” Mr. Britain reported “A bill to alter the name of the township of Arcadia”: the township only. At the third reading, “on motion of Mr. Comstock,” the bill was amended to add “and also the name of the village of Bronson, changed and hereafter known and called Kalamazoo,” and the start was set at “thirty-first day of March next.” So amended, it passed the Senate. In the House, a “Mr. Burdick, of Kalamazoo,” sat among the members; a list in the House journal appears to name him as Cyren Burdick, of Bronson.

ReadingSo the village’s new name was added on the Senate floor, not written into the first bill, and one of Durant’s three men, Burdick, was in the House that passed it. Durant and the Pioneer Collections give the date as 3 March 1836; the printed act says approved 2 March. We follow the act.

DocumentedDurant’s History of Kalamazoo County (1880) tells it on page 220, under the heading “Changing Names.” In the winter of 1835–36, he writes, a movement was set on foot “for some good reason, we presume,” and “the change was brought about” mainly through “Messrs. Burdick, Sheldon, and Lyon,” probably with Anthony Cooley, a proprietor of the village. Bronson “felt that he had been deeply wronged,” stayed only a short time, and later “is said to have died in straitened circumstances.” Durant adds a footnote: some had said the act was passed by the territorial legislature, but the session laws show otherwise.

ReadingDurant gives only surnames. Lyon is almost certainly Lucius Lyon, the surveyor who became one of Michigan’s first two senators, and Burdick almost certainly one of the Burdick brothers: very likely Cyren Burdick, who began building the Kalamazoo House hotel probably in the spring of 1832 (Durant, page 214), and whom a list in the House journal appears to name as a member for Kalamazoo County in the House that passed the act (page 49). The town had more than one Sheldon. Durant himself, writing forty-four years later, did not know why they wanted the change, or would not say. He thought the new name “more musical and pleasing than Bronson,” but admitted it was hard to deny that the change had done the founder an injustice.

New findingGeorge Torrey did say why, eleven years before Durant. In the county history he wrote for the Kalamazoo County Directory of 1869: “This change of name was brought about through the influence of Burdick, Sheldon and Lyon, who, disgusted with the eccentricities, obstinacy, and want of enterprise in their co-partner, Bronson, determined the village should no longer bear his name.” Bronson, he adds, “went to Illinois, and finally died in Connecticut, at the house of his brother, in 1851 (I think ), a penniless man.” The year is wrong, and Torrey hedged it himself; there is no cherry tree.

The cherry tree

DocumentedToday’s histories say that Bronson was fined for stealing a cherry tree. The city’s own page adds that his rivals then had the town renamed; the Kalamazoo Public Library’s biography says the fine fed the discontent against him.

New findingWe could not find the cherry tree anywhere in the nineteenth-century record. It is not in Torrey’s county history of 1869; it is not in Durant’s History of Kalamazoo County (1880), whose full text we searched; it is not in Fisher and Little’s Compendium of History and Biography of Kalamazoo County (1906); and it is not in the county’s report to the Pioneer Society (1877). Durant, who writes at length about Bronson and the renaming, gives no reason for it at all.

ReadingThat does not make the story false. Justice-of-the-peace dockets of the 1830s seldom reached print, and a neighbor’s complaint over a cherry tree is exactly the sort of thing a small town remembers and a county history leaves out. But as things stand, the most famous fact about the renaming is the least documented one.

DocumentedThe trail leads to Nick Kekic’s A Fine Place for a City: Titus Bronson and the Founding of Kalamazoo (1984), the book the library’s biography cites. Kekic tells it from “the court record”: in April 1833 Joseph Eddington “chopped down a cherry tree on unclaimed land ‘with the intention of using the same to make furniture.’” Titus Bronson “seized the tree and carried away the same.” The dispute came before Judge Basil Harrison, and “the next month a jury of six people decided that Bronson was guilty and fined him the cost of the tree, $4.62½, plus the court costs of $10.25.” Bronson appealed to the circuit court, Kekic adds, “but to no avail.” So the fine has a source, a court record of 1833 that Kekic cites in a footnote.

ReadingWhat has no source is the rest of the story: that the fine turned the proprietors against Bronson and cost him the name. Kekic himself says Lyon used his influence with the legislature for the change, and Torrey in 1869 blamed Bronson’s “eccentricities, obstinacy, and want of enterprise.” The cherry tree is a true story about Bronson; that it renamed Kalamazoo is a later joining of two stories. We have read Kekic only in search snippets; the original 1833 record, wherever it now is, is the next thing to find.

Exhibit F: the race to the river

New findingThe boiling pot is older in print than the race. John T. Blois’s Gazetteer of the State of Michigan (1838) begins its entry: “Kalamazoo river, (or Kekalamazoo, [Indian,] signifying a boiling pot,) takes its rise in the township of Wheatland.” And at the dinner for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the settlement, on 21 June 1854, a Mr. DeYoe raised his glass: “Ke Kalamazoo — the boiling pot, may it[s] aboriginal name be held ever sacred,” printed in the Quarter Centennial Celebration of 1855.

DocumentedThe oldest printing of the race story we have found is in George Torrey’s history of the village, in the Kalamazoo directory for 1867, as reprinted by Durant. Torrey quotes a letter from A. J. Sheldon, who said he “took great pains among the Indians” to learn what the word meant. On Toland’s Prairie, east of the town, a wager was made that a runner could not reach a point on the river and come back before a little pot of water on the fire boiled away. The race was run, and the river was named “where the water boils in the pot.” The name, Sheldon added, at first belonged only to that stretch of the river.

DocumentedDurant himself gives the meaning as “the boiling-pot, or where the water boils like a pot” (page 56), and so does the county report in the first volume of the Pioneer Collections of Michigan (1877): the river’s name was “Ke-Kenamazoo (the boiling pot).”

New findingTorrey told it again in 1869, in the county history of that year’s directory, and moved it to an Indian village on James Hopkins’s farm, “on the edge of the prairie”: “a wager was made that an Indian could not run to a certain place upon the river bank and return before the water then boiling in a little kettle upon the fire should have boiled away. The race was successfully accomplished, after a great many trials by the fleetest runners in the tribe, and hence the name commemorating the event, Ke-kalamazoo, ‘The Boiling Pot,’ or, ‘where water boils in the pot.’” The fleetest runner would become Fleet Foot.

DocumentedIn the 1867 telling the runner has no name, there is no bride and there is no date. The Kalamazoo Public Library’s files show the story growing. In a Kalamazoo Gazette article of 20 August 1922 the runner is “Fleet Foot,” he runs to win his bride, and the year is 1810. About 1951 the painter Zoltan Sepeshy put the race in a mural for the Fidelity Federal Savings and Loan on South Burdick Street.

DocumentedOther tellings kept multiplying. A county history of about 1925 says the river was called Kekalamazoo “because of its fanciful likeness to a ‘bright, bubbling kettle,’” and gives a later name for it, “Ki-ka-ma-sung,” the “race of the boiling kettle.” The Michigan Historical Collections of 1912 list the meanings in circulation: “bright sparkling water, boiling kettle (from the eddying waters), boiling water, beautiful water, and stones like otters.”

ReadingSo the boiling pot is genuinely old in local tradition: in print by 1838, seventeen years before Schoolcraft’s otters. The race to explain it is in print by 1867, and the romance came later. Sheldon also credited Schoolcraft with the “boiling pot” meaning, but Schoolcraft’s own published explanation, as the next exhibit shows, is about otters.

OpenWhere did Torrey get the story, and what did the Gazette of 10 March 1901, “Origin of the name Kalamazoo,” add? Torrey’s 1869 history is online; his 1867 directory and the 1901 Gazette are not. The library’s subject file holds both.

Exhibit G: the scholars

DocumentedCooper, 1848: the first syllable. James Fenimore Cooper set his novel The Oak Openings on the Kalamazoo, and once has his Indian scout call it “Kekalamazoo.” A footnote explains: “This is the true Indian word, though the whites have seen fit to omit the first syllable.” Cooper gives no meaning.

DocumentedSchoolcraft, 1855: otters. In the Summary Narrative of his 1820 expedition, published thirty-five years later, Henry Schoolcraft explained in a footnote that “Kalamazoo” contracted a phrase describing “the stones seen through the water in its bed” which, through the moving current, looked like an otter swimming beneath the surface. His original word was “Negikanamazoo,” from negik, an otter. He added a note that the letter L came in as Indian words passed into French.

DocumentedVerwyst, 1892: smoke. Father Chrysostom Verwyst, who spent his life among Ojibwe speakers, called the name a “corruption of kikanamoso (it smokes, or he is troubled with smoke—e.g., in his wigwam),” pronounced kee-kah-nah-mo-zo.

DocumentedGannett, 1902 and 1905: all of the above. The federal Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States gave “otter tail” on “one authority,” and listed “beautiful water” and “boiling water” besides, without choosing; the edition of 1905 added “stones like otters.”

DocumentedGerard, 1911: not otters. William R. Gerard, writing in the American Anthropologist, called Schoolcraft’s explanations “etymological absurdities” and showed why the otter word could not be built that way. He argued that the name was an old Ojibwe word, kikalâmozo, “he is inconvenienced by smoke in his lodge,” and guessed, admitting it was only a guess, that it had once been a person’s nickname.

DocumentedVogel, 1986: none proven. Virgil Vogel’s Indian Names in Michigan treats “the boiling pot” as an alleged meaning, rejects the otters and the “mirage or reflecting river,” and suggests that the smoke explanations deserve Gerard’s label too. He thought it more credible that the name meant something like “it runs fast,” or that it was a mangled form of another river’s name, and he noted that forms with an L may come from the Miami language.

New findingThe “mirage” or “reflecting river” meaning, still repeated on many websites, is not modern. Charles R. Brown’s The Government of Michigan, printed at Kalamazoo in 1874, has it: “An Indian name, signifying ‘the mirage or reflecting river,’ applied to the stream which waters this county and parts of Calhoun and Allegan. It was originally spelled Kikalamazoo.” By 1912 the Michigan Historical Collections credit it to a name, “W. S. George says the name signifies the mirage or reflecting river,” and Walter Romig’s Michigan Place Names (1973) carried it into the modern books. Nobody gives a word it comes from, and Vogel rejected it.

DocumentedThe Kalamazoo Public Library also records a forest-fire legend, in which the name is translated “smothered.” It sits close to the smoke words of Verwyst and Gerard, though no early source for it has turned up.

Exhibit H: the missing L

DocumentedPotawatomi has no L sound. A Potawatomi language specialist made the point on WMUK in 2018: if “Kalamazoo” comes from a Potawatomi word, it is not a close copy. The linguistic descriptions of the language agree. In Ojibwe, too, the old Algonquian sound that became L in some languages became N.

ReadingNow set the spellings side by side, in the order they were written:

• c. 1760 kikanamaso (Potier)
• c. 1763 Kikanamaso (a French memoir)
• c. 1771 Reccanamazo (a British road description)
• 1779 Kikanamaso (log of HMS Felicity)
• 41 years later
• 1820 Kikalemazo (Schoolcraft)
• 1821 Kekalamazoo; Ke-kal-i-ma-zoo (Treaty of Chicago)
• 1822 Kikalemazo (Carey & Lea)
• 1829–30 Kalamazoo (the county)
• 1838 Kekalamazoo (Blois’s gazetteer)
• 1848 Kekalamazoo (Cooper)
• 1855 Negikanamazoo (Schoolcraft, explaining)
• 1867 Kih-Kalamazoo (Torrey and Sheldon)
• 1869 Torrey: “the fleetest runners in the tribe,” and the partners “disgusted” with Bronson.
• 1874 Brown: “the mirage or reflecting river.”
• 1877 Ke-Kenamazoo (Pioneer Society)
• 15 years later
• 1892 kikanamoso (Verwyst)
• 134 years later
• 2026 Giknamezo zibé, the river (Gun Lake Tribe)

ReadingThe oldest form and the tribal form of today both have an N in the middle. The L belongs to the years when American officials and mapmakers wrote the word down, beginning, so far as we can find, with Schoolcraft in 1820, and it may come from interpreters who spoke a language that had one, as Vogel and Gerard both suggested in different ways. The “Ke-” or “Kik-” at the front, lost in the English name, is in the oldest and in the newest forms alike.

Exhibit I: the names today

DocumentedPotawatomi has its own names for the place and the river. On WMUK in 2018, a Potawatomi language specialist gave Gzigmezé as the Potawatomi name for Kalamazoo and said it describes a boiling, adding that he was not sure of the word’s origins.

DocumentedIn July 2026 the Gun Lake Tribe (the Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Band of Pottawatomi Indians) presented a talk in Kalamazoo under the title “Gzigmezék mine Giknamezo Zibé.” The event notice glosses Gzigmezék as the past Potawatomi village and present-day Kalamazoo, and Giknamezo zibé as the Kalamazoo River.

ReadingTwo names, then: one for the place, which describes a boiling, and one for the river, which is very close to the oldest spelling on paper. Giknamezo and Potier’s kikanamaso share their consonants in the same order. Verwyst’s kikanamoso of 1892, the “it smokes” word, is close too. If that is right, the old river name and the old village name may both lie behind the English “Kalamazoo,” and the town’s favorite story, the boiling pot, may preserve the place name while the spelling preserves the river’s.

OpenWhat Giknamezo means, and how Gzigmezé and Giknamezo are related, are questions for the people whose language it is. We have not asked them to confirm anything on this page, and nothing here should be taken as their view.

What became of Titus Bronson

DocumentedBronson left Kalamazoo soon after the change. The library’s biography follows him to Davenport, Iowa, where he lost what he had in a land swindle in 1842, the year his wife Sally died, and then to Illinois. He went home to Connecticut and died there, at his brother’s house, in January 1853. His gravestone, in the Middlebury Cemetery, calls him “A Western Pioneer, Returned to Sleep with his Fathers.”

ReadingDurant thought Kalamazoo had forgotten him; in 1880 not even a street bore his name, only the park. Today a hospital, the park and a boulevard do.

The other Kalamazoos

DocumentedKalamazoo has been the name of other places too. Larry Massie told WMUK that two other communities once called themselves Kalamazoo: one in Sheridan Township near Albion, and the village at the river’s mouth that became Saugatuck. The first was a post office: Reuben Abbott’s, in Calhoun County, called Kalamazoo from 1834 until it became Waterburgh at the end of 1835. The second was William G. Butler’s village, platted in 1833 and recorded as Kalamazoo in 1834; its post office was named Saugatuck in 1835, but in 1838 the state gazetteer still called the village “Newark, (called Kalamazoo on the maps).” Allegan County’s histories of 1880 and 1907 also record a paper town, Kalamazoo Harbor, laid out at the mouth of the river.

DocumentedThe painting at the top of this page, William Greason’s Bayou on the Kalamazoo River, Douglas (1934), was made near that mouth, at Douglas, across the river from Saugatuck.

OpenThe Sheridan Township Kalamazoo is in no Calhoun County history we have read; its dates come from the postmaster records as compiled by postal historians (and Kit Lane, 1992). We have not yet seen the appointment record itself.

DocumentedThe name itself became famous for sounding like nowhere in particular: “from Timbuktu to Kalamazoo.” Carl Sandburg put it in a poem title, “The Sins of Kalamazoo” (1920), and Glenn Miller’s orchestra took “(I’ve Got a Gal in) Kalamazoo” to the top of the charts in 1942.

A glossary

Plat

A surveyed map of a new village, dividing it into streets and lots, recorded with the county.

Reserve

Land held back from a treaty cession for a band or a person. The reserve at Match-e-be-nash-she-wish’s village lasted from 1821 to 1827.

Zibé

Potawatomi for “river,” as in Giknamezo zibé, the Kalamazoo River.

Folk etymology

An explanation of a word made up afterwards to fit how it sounds, rather than traced from what it once meant.

Itinerary

In Potier’s papers, a list of the stages of a journey, river by river and portage by portage.

A timeline

• 1684 Franquelin’s map puts a “Maramee” where the Kalamazoo runs.
• 60 years later
• 1744 Bellin’s map shows a “R. Marameg” on Lake Michigan’s east shore, where the Kalamazoo should be.
• 16 years later
• c. 1760 Potier’s itinerary names the “little” and “great” kikanamaso.
• c. 1763 A French memoir of the lake shore, by its editor’s dating, names the “Kikanamaso.”
• c. 1771 A British road description from Detroit to Fort St. Joseph: “Reccanamazo River.”
• 1779 The log of HMS Felicity: “the Kikanamaso.”
• 41 years later
• 4 Sep 1820 Schoolcraft passes the “river Kikalemazo” (printed 1821): the first L.
• 29 Aug 1821 Treaty of Chicago: a reserve “at the head of the Kekalamazoo river.”
• 1822 Carey & Lea map of Michigan Territory: “Kikalemazo R.” (reissued 1823).
• 1827 Treaty of St. Joseph: the reserve is ceded.
• 1829 Titus Bronson settles on the site; the county is laid out on 29 October.
• 30 Jul 1830 Kalamazoo County organized; Arcadia township created.
• 12 Mar 1831 The Village of Bronson platted.
• Apr 1833 A cherry tree cut on unclaimed land; Bronson fined $4.62½ (the court record, as quoted by Kekic, 1984).
• 17 Feb 1836 The Senate asks about renaming Arcadia; Comstock’s amendment later adds the village of Bronson.
• 2 Mar 1836 Act approved changing Bronson and Arcadia to Kalamazoo, effective 31 March.
• 1838 Blois’s Gazetteer: Kekalamazoo, “signifying a boiling pot.”
• 1848 Cooper’s Oak Openings: “Kekalamazoo,” “the true Indian word.”
• Jan 1853 Titus Bronson dies in Connecticut, at his brother’s house.
• 21 Jun 1854 A toast at the quarter-centennial: “Ke Kalamazoo — the boiling pot.”
• 1855 Schoolcraft’s otters.
• 1867 Torrey’s village history prints Sheldon’s race to the river.
• 1877 Pioneer Collections: “Ke-Kenamazoo (the boiling pot).”
• 1880 Durant’s History of Kalamazoo County.
• 1892 Verwyst: “it smokes.”
• 19 years later
• 1911 Gerard rejects the otters.
• 20 Aug 1922 Kalamazoo Gazette: “Fleet Foot,” his bride, and the year 1810.
• 29 years later
• c. 1951 Sepeshy’s mural of the race.
• 33 years later
• 1984 Kekic’s A Fine Place for a City: the cherry tree, from the court record of 1833.
• 1986 Vogel’s Indian Names in Michigan.
• 32 years later
• 2018 Gzigmezé, “describes a boiling,” on WMUK.
• Jul 2026 The Gun Lake Tribe’s Gzigmezék and Giknamezo zibé.

The poster

The whole story on one page, for a classroom, a library wall or a refrigerator door: “How Kalamazoo Got Its Name,” from about 1760 to today, every date from the record, with the spellings in order along the foot. Letter size, landscape; it prints well larger.

What we are not saying

• Not that we know what Kalamazoo means. Nobody has a speaker’s explanation on record from the time the name was first written down. Every meaning on this page is somebody’s explanation.
• Not that the race never happened, or that the cherry tree is false. We say only where each story first appears in print, so far as we can find.
• Not that “Marameg” on Bellin’s map is certainly the Kalamazoo. The position fits; the identification is disputed.
• Not that Potier walked the river in 1760. The date is his editor’s, and the notes may have been compiled from other travelers.
• Not that we speak for any Potawatomi nation. We report the names as they have been published, and nothing more.

If anyone can show the cherry tree in a record of the 1830s, or the race story in print before 1867, we will say so on this page, with thanks.

The picture album

Every picture on this page in one place. The maps, the painting, the portrait and the book pages are all in the public domain; each caption names the library that holds the original. Press any picture to see it full size.

Pictures we know of but cannot yet show. The photograph of Zoltan Sepeshy’s mural of the race, about 1951, is in the Kalamazoo Public Library’s collection; whether the mural itself survives we have not learned. The original plat of the Village of Bronson, 1831, is at the Kalamazoo County Register of Deeds. Titus Bronson’s gravestone stands in Middlebury, Connecticut.

The case file: what we asked, and what we found

The questions this story set out to answer, and what the record showed.

1. Answered Who brought the bill, and why? The Senate journal has it. A resolution of 17 February 1836 asked about renaming Arcadia township; Mr. Britain’s committee brought in a bill for the township alone; and at the third reading, “on motion of Mr. Comstock,” the village of Bronson was written in. A “Mr. Burdick, of Kalamazoo,” sat in the House that passed it; a list in the House journal appears to name him as Cyren Burdick of Bronson. As for why, George Torrey said it plainly in 1869: Burdick, Sheldon and Lyon were “disgusted with the eccentricities, obstinacy, and want of enterprise” of their partner. The Senate’s roll gives Comstock’s first name: Horace H. Comstock, of the third district.
2. Answered What else did Torrey say? More than we knew. His county history in the directory of 1869 is online. It moves the race to an Indian village on James Hopkins’s farm, calls the runners “the fleetest … in the tribe,” and gives the reason for the renaming that Durant would not.

The pages

Read them yourself. Every book on this page is free online, and the passages are short. The page photographs are below; the full books are linked under Sources.

To cite this page: Michael Urbanski, “How Kalamazoo got its name,” Project Scroll, first published 22 October 2026, revised 25 October 2026, https://projectscroll.com/news/how-kalamazoo-got-its-name/. To cite a single finding, use its own link on our Discoveries page. Corrections are welcome, and any we make are noted on this page.