A Tale of Two Cities

"You’d best load your flintlock, Hiram"

Grandma: We’re from Kansas. Jayhawkers, and proud of it.
Shopkeeper: I know how you feel. I’m a Hoosier, myself.
Grandma: Personally, I don’t think much of Hoosiers, neither.
— The Outlaw Josey Wales

We were walking our dogs around our neighborhood a few days ago, thoroughly enjoying the early spring weather, when the bumper sticker on a parked car stopped us in our tracks: HOOSIERS AIN’T SO BAD.

I don’t have a clue what this means, and that bothers me. Is it intended as understatement? Irony? Sarcasm? Is this person pandering by using ain’t, or is he just a folksy guy? Does he really think Hoosiers ARE bad? Is he trying to say you should try living here?

The sticker seems to imply that Hoosiers are maybe a little bad, but not as bad as some others, like maybe John Wilkes Booth or Ivan the Terrible or Wile E. Coyote.

I have moved around a lot in my life, but lately, not so much. We’ve spent the past 12 years living in either Santa Fe, where we first retired, or Indianapolis, where we live now.

There are some similarities between these two cities – both are state capitals, both tend to be politically progressive oases in the middle of more conservative landscapes – but they are fundamentally very different from each other.

I know, for example, it’s a lot easier to become a Hoosier than to become a real Santa Fean. To oversimplify just a tad, Indianapolis wants you to stay, but Santa Fe, maybe not so much.

Back in the 1980s - long before I moved there - a populist Santa Fe mayor famously complained about all the retirees moving to the city, “with their money and higher education,” and she was applauded. Surprisingly, money and higher education weren’t seen as much of a plus by her supporters.

Not much has changed. Four decades after she made those remarks, this guy was running for mayor of Santa Fe. He had lived there for 20 years, and had done all the right stuff, but the locals widely criticized him for being “just off the bus.” His chief flaw was that he wasn’t born there.

                                          Painting by Marcus Mote, “The Hoosier’s Nest,” 1890

We managed to make plenty of dear friends in Santa Fe. It’s just that 98 percent of them came from other places to settle there in retirement, just as we had done. We all paid taxes, voted, volunteered with local charities and pumped money into the economy, but we would always be “just off the bus.”

Santa Fe natives could be eloquent in reacting to newcomers, that’s for certain. For several years, I wrote a humor column for a local alternative weekly. One letter to the editor, noting that I obviously was a newcomer, predicted that “Santa Fe will chew you up and spit you out.”

So much for the Santa Fe Welcome Wagon.

But let’s get back to Indianapolis. One question I get a lot from friends out of state is, “WTF is a Hoosier?” Nobody knows for sure where the word came from, but it dates back almost 200 years. Folks here seem perfectly willing to accept the description proudly, whatever the hell its origin was.

When I was growing up in Indianapolis, they taught us that Hoosier was a variation of the phrase, “Who’s there?”

Our grade school teachers explained that back in the frontier days, if you were approaching someone’s log cabin you would call out to make your presence known, in order to avoid being shot.

The inhabitants of the cabin would then reply, ‘Who's there?’ and that’s where Hoosier came from.

We were young and stupid, so we believed that story.

Wait. Hold the phone. Something doesn’t sound right. What the hell was so different about people in Indiana? What about settlers in Illinois and Kentucky?  Didn’t they ever ask, “Who's there?” Why weren’t they called Hoosiers?

Were total strangers encouraged to just waltz through your cabin door unannounced in Michigan? Did Ohio promote itself as the “Don’t bother to knock” state?

There are subtle variations on this “Who’s there?” theory, but a common thread is the desire to avoid being shot.

Apparently, people from Indiana were reputed to be so trigger-happy that weary travelers learned to answer that “Who’s there?” question out of fear for their lives.

“Hiram, did you just hear gunshots? I reckon somebody must be trying to visit the Smiths, next door. You’d best load your flintlock in case they stop by here.”

If you think about it, it’s surprising we didn’t come to be known as Indiana, the “Please-Don’t-Shoot-Me” state.

I guess this explains why the earliest known knock-knock joke in Indiana did not catch on elsewhere.

“Knock-Knock”

“Bang!”

In time, other theories evolved to explain the derivation of the word. James Whitcomb Riley, the so-called “Hoosier Poet,” facetiously suggested that early Indiana settlers loved their barroom brawling, and that occasionally someone would find a detached appendage on the saloon floor and say, "Whose ear?"

I’m not a huge fan of Riley’s poetry, but I do like his Hoosier explanation more than the others currently on offer.

I’ve been pondering what to do about that bumper sticker. The car is still parked about two blocks from my house, and it’s very tempting to just walk up, knock at the door and ask about it.

But this is Indiana, so I know the owner is going to shout, “Who’s there?”

Unless, of course, he just decides just to grab his gun for an old-fashioned Indiana welcome, instead.