Cooter: A Bootheel Name With Three Competing Explanations

Cooter sits at the southern tip of Missouri's Bootheel, a strip of land that juts down between Tennessee and Arkansas because a cotton planter lobbied the boundary commission in eighteen twenty. The town itself was settled before eighteen fifty-four, and its name is a minor mystery. Some say it comes from the French word coutre, meaning to cut, because the township was carved out of others.

Some trace it to the Coutre family, French settlers from New Madrid. And some say the early hunters here shipped so many coots, a type of diving duck that wintered on the nearby bayous, that the bird gave the place its name. Locals pronounce it Coo-tra, which is why the spelling has long wandered between Coutre and Cooter.