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��BAKER'S RIVER.
��The Indian name of Baker's River was " Asqnamchuraauke," which means "the place of the mountain waters." This name was given to it by the natives, be- cause of the place where it rises, and also perhaps, because all the streams that flow into it, have their source in the mountains that lie on either side as it de- scends to the Pemigewassett.
Moosehillock, the name of the moun- tain on which Baker's River rises as it was formerly spelled and pronounced, would seem at first to be a compound English word, made up of moose (an an- imal) and hillock, meaning a little hill. But if this were the origin of the name, then it must have been most inappropri- ately applied. There is little reason iu calling this noble mountain, which is
4800 feet high, and the largest and high- est in all the northern part of New Hampshire or Vermont west of the White Mountains, a hillock, or little hill. If the word moose had any connection with the origin of this name, it surely should have been Moose Mountain instead of Moose Hillock. To have called it Moose Hill would have been entirely out of place, but Moose Hillock is still worse. But we understand that the name of this mountain is derived from the Indian words Mo-ose, meaning Bald, and auke, meaning place, the letter I being thrown in for the sake of euphony, making Moose lauke, the " Bald place" or the "Bald Mountain," a much more appropriate and significant appellation than to apply the word hillock to a mountain of that size and consequence. There are points from which this mountain may be viewed, where the resemblance to a bald head is most striking, and where every beholder would at once be struck with the appro- priateness of the Indian appellative. The name has now come to be spelled in accordance with this theory.
The original dwellers on Baker's River were a tribe of American Indians known as the Coos auks or Coosucks, as they were more frequently called. This is also an Indian name, made up of two words, Coos, meaning a pine tree and auke, meaning place, "the place of the pine tree," and the Coosauks were the
��dwellers in the place of the pine. The word auke in their language, meaning the same as place in English, was ap- plied to everything that had locality, like our word place. Rivers, mountains, countries, lakes were all places. Coos was the name given by the whites origi- nally to all that portion of New Hamp- shire, which was located north of Con- cord on the Merrimack River, and of Charlestown, formerly known as Charles- town, No 4, on the Connecticut river; these being for a considerable period of time, the most northerly towns that were settled in the State bjr whites. All north of this was called the Coos Country or the country of the pine tree, from the large quantities of pine that grew originally, in the valleys of the Merrimack and Con- necticut rivers and their tributaries.
Portions of the counties of Sullivan, and Merrimack and all of Grafton, have been made of what was once the Coos Country, and after taking all these, we have remaining the present country of Coos, still as large in extent of territory as any other in the State. The Coosauks thus named from the country they in- habited, wandered over the valley of the Connecticut to the country of the St. Francis tribe in Canada on the north, to the Green Mountains on the west, and to the White Mountain range and to Squaui Lake on the east, including the valleys of the Pemiegewassett and Ba- ker's River. The Squam Indians occu- pied the region east of Squam Lake and so north on the east side of the White Mountains and extended to the territory of the Penobscots in Maine.
On the south were the Penacooks, the largest, most warlike and most powerful tribe in the State, who used the territory now occupied by Concord, then called Penacook, for their hunting and fishing grounds and also for agricultural purpo- ses, to raise their corn and beans. The Coosauks and also the Squam Indians were subject to the Penacooks; received their laws, if laws they might be called, from them, and paid them tribute in furs and beads and ornaments, which in fact, constituted not only the currency, but all the personal property of the Indian,
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