l82
��THE GRANITE MONTHLY.
��made the acquaintance of its early inhabitants, he found dwelling in the beautiful " valley of the Merrimack," a half dozen or more tribes, each independent in itself, but all owning allegiance to one powerful chief, Pas- saconaway of the Penacooks. His centre of power, or seat of council, was about where the city of Concord now is. This valley afforded superior advantages for Indian settlement. Its rich intervales were easily cultivated even by the rude implements and with the slight knowledge they possessed. The forests abounded in game, and the various falls along the course of the river afforded unsurpassed fishing advantages, where, during the favorable season, the fishermen of the various tribes gathered for their annual supply of fish. The most noted of these re- sorts was called Namaoskeag ; from namaos, fish, and auke, a place, mean- ing therefore fishing place, and the native tribe inhabiting the section around the falls, was known as Nama- oskeauks. In those primitive days the name was applied to the succession of falls from the country of the Penne- cooks to the Souhegan, but as the country became settled by the white man, the name became limited to the falls now known as Amoskeag, a cor- ruption of the original Namaoskeauke. During the two hundred and fifty years it has been known to the English, it has suffered many transformations in or- thography, one of which by Dr. Cotton Mather we will quote. The river had become noted far beyond its native bounds on account of other wonders than its fish, its falls, and its broad ba- sins.
In the "Philosophical Transactions," published in London, Mather writes thus : "A little above the hideous falls of the Merrimack River, at a place called Amniiskeag, is a huge rock in the midst of the stream," etc.
When in after years the remnants of these Merrimack river tribes, deci- mated to a scanty few, were forced to quit their native valley, the homes of their ancestors and their ancient hunt-
��ing and fishing grounds, they fled north,, and around the head waters of the Connecticut they found a new " Coo- ash " country, and themselves became the Cooashaukes, and the mountain streams abounding in trout, their native food, from the rivers of lower Cohos (Haverhill) to the upper Cohos (Lan- caster) intervales, were soon known as their Namaos-coo-anke, easily trans- lated into " Pine-tree Fishing Place," and as easily transformed by some Cotton iNlather of later years into the present briefer but not less euphoneous title, Ammonoosuc, and clinging still to three distinct wild streams included within the ancient domain of the Coo- ash-aukies.
The writer has seen or heard a. dif- ferent signification of the name Coos, as meaning crooked, and applied to the country as descriptive of the winding course of the river in those named lo- calities, but this cannot be the true translation, for although the English word might descriptively be applied, the Abenekies term for crooked would be penaqiiis, from which could not well be derived the name Coos.
There exists no Indian title of moun- tain, lake or river, but is a concentrated description, often clothed in poetic imagery, illustrative of some peculiar- ity, real or imaginary, or perhaps com- memorative of some strange legend or savage romance.
The aboriginal name once borne by Lancaster's eastern branch of the Con- necticut, Israel's river, seems to have departed with the nation or tribe which conferred it, and it is so lost va tradition, so warped by attempts to re- concile English orthography and pro- nunciation with the Indian tongue, that it has become corrupted into al- most a meaningless title. In the tradi- tional " Singrawoc," we can trace no Abenequis save the terminal ocoxauke. Shvooganock, as written by some one-, whom, we know not, is nearer the orig- inal, which was doubless Sawa-coo- nai/kc, with the n thrown in for eu- jjhony. This in the Indian dialect would signify " burnt pine place," or
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