Pishgatikuk (Pachgatgoch)

(Kent, Connecticut)

Main attributes of this Native American place: Native name; In Tribal history; Native practices; Landscape; In historic documents.

“Pishgatikuk” is an Eastern Algonquian word meaning “at the meeting of two waters”. This definition was given to W.C. Reichel by Schaghticoke culture keeper Eunice Mauwee, the granddaughter of the tribe’s first known sachem Mauwehue, aka Gideon Mauwee, when Reichel visited her on the Schaghticoke reservation in 1859.

Indigenous names for geographic localities were normally descriptive terms for the surrounding landscapes. In this particular case, Pishgatikuk was the location of the main Schaghticoke settlement at the confluence of the Housatonic and Scatticook rivers when the English began to settle in northwestern Connecticut in the early 1700s. The Scatticook River is now called Macedonia Brook. The German ministers of the Moravian Church, who ran a mission among the Schaghticoke from 1743 to 1770, pronounced the term  “Pachgatgoch”. The English mispronounced the name as “Scatacook” (AKA
Schaghticoke).

Contributor: Lucianne Lavin

SOURCES

References/further reading:

• W.C. Reichel 1860 A Memorial of the Dedications of Monuments Erected by the Moravian Historical Society. New York: C. B. Richardson and Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott and Co.), pg. 75.
• Lucianne Lavin 2013 Connecticut’s Indigenous Peoples: What Archaeology, History, and Oral
  Traditions Teach Us about Their Communities and Cultures, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Page 341.