17-05-2025
From Nowata to Bugtussle: How 9 Oklahoma cities, towns and places got their unique names
Outsiders and locals alike can agree Oklahoma has an abundance of town names that are hard to pronounce.
Besides the pronunciation, many of these towns leave one wondering how the name came about to begin with.
Here are nine Oklahoma towns and how they got their unique names.
In far northeast Oklahoma, there's a city of about 3,500 people called Nowata.
Not to be confused with Lotawatah Road near Lake Eufaula, the city of Nowata was given its name by the Chief of the Delaware Tribe, according to the city's website. The story goes that Delaware Chief Charles Journeycake named the area "no-we-ata," Delaware for "welcome."
According to the Oklahoma Historical Society, another version of the towns origin says that a traveler, finding a dried up spring, posted a sign saying "No Wata" as a warning for others.
While Slapout is unincorporated, we couldn't leave it off of this list. The service station and restaurant still bears the name "Slapout" along State Highway 3 leading into the Oklahoma Panhandle.
Legend has it a man named Tom Lemmons moved a chicken coop to where the newly constructed highway passed his land during the Great Depression. He started a store inside the coop, and decided to start a town called Nye, but locals started calling the town Slapout because Lemmons sister would always tell them the store was "slap out" of whatever they wanted.
A northeast Oklahoma census-designated place of about 1,300, Bushyhead was named for the Dennis W. Bushyhead, who was Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation from 1879 to 1887.
Another now-unincorporated community, Frogville is found in southeast Oklahoma just north of the Oklahoma/Texas border.
The town was said to have got its name thanks to the "great plethora of frogs so large they reputedly ate young ducks." However, according to a 2001 visit by Gary Horcher, the duck-eating frogs no longer make their home in Frogville.
Located just west of Okmulgee, Nuyaka is a populated place in Okmulgee County, reportedly named after the Creek pronunciation for New York.
The story goes that a delegation of Creek chiefs and President George Washington met in New York, and the Creeks in present-day Alabama renamed the village Tukpafka to Nuyaka to honor the 1790 treaty they signed in the then-United-States-capital, according to the book "Okfuskee: A Creek Indian Town in Colonial America."
The town was destroyed in the Creek War in 1813 and was never rebuilt. When the Muscogee (Creek) Nation was removed to Indian Territory, the name was given to the new settlement near Okmulgee.
Just south of Seminole on U.S. Highway 377 is Bowlegs, a bedroom community of less than 400.
According to the Oklahoma Historical Society, there are three theories about how the town got its name. It was either named to honor Seminole Chief Billy Bowlegs, Lizzie Bowlegs on whose land oil was discovered, or David Bowlegs who was murdered in the mid-1910s.
Northeast of Muskogee off of Oklahoma State Highway 16 is a town that's not "great," not "terrible," it's just "okay."
No, literally — it's Okay, Oklahoma. The town got its name in 1919 when the postal office became known as Okay, "honoring the O.K. 3-Ton Truck and Trailer manufactured there by the Oklahoma Auto Manufacturing Company," according to the Oklahoma Historical Society.
Situated on the shores of Lake Eufaula, north of McAlester on Highway 69, is the unincorporated community of Bugtussle, Oklahoma.
The town was reportedly named Bugtussle by Mr. Ran Woods who started the settlement in 1903 with a two-room schoolhouse. It is said he called it Bugtussle because there were so many bugs, it was a never ending "tussle" for him to deal with.
Former Speaker of the House Carl Albert lived with his family on a farm near Bugtussle and attended the school. Some tried to rename the town Flowery Mound, but the original name persisted.
An unincorporated community just northeast of Weatherford, Oklahoma, also known as Dead Women Crossing, the area is named for the unsolved murder of a woman more than a century ago.
In July 1905, Katie DeWitt James was murdered and her body found near Big Deer Creek in August, her head severed from her body, Oklahoma Today reported. All that remained was her skeleton, some jewelry and a gun identified as belonging to a woman named Fannie Norton.
James had reportedly been riding in a buggy with her 13-month-old daughter, Lulu Belle, and Norton, whom she had met the day before on the train from Clinton, Oklahoma.
According to Oklahoma Today, witnesses saw the buggy disappear into a field near Big Deer Creek, and then returning with Norton and James' daughter at "breakneck speed." One wheel was stained with blood when Norton returned the buggy, as was Lulu's dress when Norton handed her off at the home of a nearby farmer.
Norton was found and arrested in Shawnee, and while she denied killing James, she died of ingesting poison that same day, according to "Dead Woman's Crossing: The Legacy of a Territorial Murder." With Norton's death, the murder was never solved, and it is said James' ghost still haunts the area. Some even say you can hear the sound of wagon wheels going over the bridge.
This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Dead Woman's Crossing to Okay, Oklahoma; How 9 places got their names
