Sucker State
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As early as 1840, Illinois, a state in the United States, was called the "Sucker State". There are at least three stories behind this name. The first is that, because much of the early population of the State bought land, sight unseen, from East Coast land speculators, the population was a bunch of "suckers". One problem with this version is whether the term "sucker" had this meaning as early as 1840.
The second story is that, in order to survive on the prairie, early settlers had to obtain water by sucking it through a hollow reed out of a crawdad hole. This also seems unlikely. For one thing, there is no documentation that people actually engaged in this practice. The early settlers avoided the prairie, and settled along creeks. Moreover, water was plentiful on the prairie.
A slightly different version of the second version is that a man from Illinois was traveling with two men from Missouri, and they were thirsty. When they came to a crawdad hole with water in it, they all three sucked up some water from it. The two men from Missouri both got sick, but the man from Illinois didn't. Then, the two men from Missouri, afterwards, joked about it and called the man from from Illinois a "sucker" because he could suck up the water and not get sick.
A third version of the "Sucker Story" is that some of the earliest American settlers worked the mines in Galena, Illinois, on the Mississippi River, in the far northwest corner of the state. At first mining was a seasonal occupation, the miners traveling north on the river in the spring, and returning in the fall. The migration of the miners corresponded with the seasonal migration of "suckers", a type of fish. The problem with this version is that the fish today known as a "sucker" does not make this migration. Furthermore, nobody has identified any other fish that made such a migration.
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