On the Origins of “Pickawillany”

Abstract

“Pickawillany” is the usual English name of a colonial-era Miami village located in western Ohio on the Great Miami River, near the site of present-day Piqua, in Miami County, Ohio. There have been many attempts to explain the etymology of “Pickawillany” as being related to “Piqua,” with a meaning “Place of the Ashes.” Using data drawn from various Algonquian languages, I will show that not only will this etymology not work, but I will demonstrate that the true etymology of “Pickawillany” is from the Shawnee name for the Miamis, and is unrelated to the word “Piqua.”

Keywords:

• Native American place names
• Miami-Illinois language place names
• Shawnee language place names
• Great Miami River
• Scioto River
• Piqua
• Ohio
• Illinois and Miami Indians
• Shawnee Indians
• Shawnee clans
• Algonquian languages

Notes

1 Voegelin never published this word, though it is found in this form in his unpublished notes. Morever, Gatschet (1879–1880) gives it as ‹pkíwi=léni› “Miami” in his unpublished Shawnee fieldnotes, and Charles Trowbridge (1939: 66) gives a plural form ‹peekeeweeleneekēē› “Miamis.” Additionally, Geor­ge Washington wrote the name of the village as ‹pikkavilinua› (see McCafferty, 2008: 216). In Voegelin’s Shawnee lexicon (1938–1940: 352), the only name given for the Miamis is loowaani, which is unattested in anyone else’s notes, and of unknown etymology.

2 In further support of the fact that Pickawillany and Piqua are not “the same name” is the fact that the first village of Piqua does not appear until the 1770s, some twenty years after the village of Pickawillany was destroyed.

3 This form is phonemicized from the original form ‹pkinakû^´thi›, found in Albert Gatschet’s (1879–1880) nineteenth-century Shawnee fieldnotes.

4 Ives Goddard, personal communication. In Mes­kwaki an extended form of this initial, pehki·n-, is also seen in several derived forms such as pehki·- nina·kosiwa “he looks foreign,” pehki·na·towe·wa “he speaks a different language,” and pehki·nikenwi “it is different” (Goddard, 1994).

5 The form pihkiwa is found in LeBoullenger’s and Gravier’s Illinois dictionaries as ‹piki8a›, while Gravier’s dictionary also has ‹pekita›.

6 In his 1895 Sauk fieldnotes, Albert Gatschet explicitly says that pehki·neni·ha literally means “stranger,” something which his speaker presumably told him.