Talk:Passaconaway

Untitled
He was said to have been gigantic in stature, nearly seven feet tall.

Merrimack?
I have seen sources that say he may have lived in Maine until the 1690s. Additionally, when did he live in Merrimack? He lived in Lowell at the top of the Pawtucket Falls by accounts I've read. I believe he was forcibly moved to Merrimack later, but I don't want to just change the article. CSZero 02:06, 22 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Ok, this has been here for two months - I'm going to make the change CSZero 22:10, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

The best collection of information on Passaconaway's life is probably "Passaconaway in the White Mountains" by Charles Edward Beals, Jr. (1916). It is available online here: http://danmahony.com/Passaconaway/PassContents.htm Cbmccarthy (talk) 13:30, 16 October 2015 (UTC)

Info submitted to article
Anonymous editor 69.144.160.105 submitted the following info to the article:
 * "I am adding some of what I read in English Records from the papers of Reginald Foster and Daniel Wood his Son in law.Daniel Wood was paid 3 shillings for helping disarming of the sachem of the Merrimac Passaconway on 4th. of Dec. 1643...He died in 1649 before March,27th His widow exicuted his will in Ipsiwch,Essex,Mass.U.S.A....This is off Ancestry.so should be valid."

I am moving it here until it can be verified and entered in a more presentable fashion. --Ken Gallager (talk) 13:47, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

Rename
Lotje (talk) 14:29, 12 July 2017 (UTC)


 * I assume you are suggesting the article be renamed on the basis of this memorial. Where is it, by the way? At any rate, I think the memorial's spelling is an outlier; see the Passaconaway Wildlife Refuge, the monument in the Edson Cemetery, and many other sources. I also just noticed that User:Rossi162 used the double-n in the caption to the statue picture; I updated the picture but didn't fix the caption. So I feel confident in correcting the caption, and I think a redirect with the "nn" spelling is appropriate. David Brooks (talk) 15:17, 12 July 2017 (UTC)

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Passaconaway's Name and Title
PASSACONAWAY’S NAME - A LINGUISTIC APPROACH

Historical accounts tell us that the name of the great sagamore of the Penacook Confederacy, Passaconaway, translates to “child of the bear”. While this seems to be a correct translation, what is most interesting and what, as a Linguist, has puzzled me for many years, is that the second half of his name does not seem to be derived from Abenaki.

The native language of Passaconaway’s people is what we today call Western Abenaki (to differentiate it from Eastern Abenaki, spoken in what is now central and northern Maine) – The language is still spoken today as one homogenous tongue, but in the time of Passaconaway would have consisted of several local accents or perhaps even dialects. Linguists suggest it was very likely that the dialect spoken in the south of what is present day New Hampshire (i.e. that of the Penacook) contained some elements of the Massachusett language since there was considerable interaction between the two peoples.

Though similar to Abenaki, the Massachusett language more closely related to its southern neighbors, Narragansett, Nipmuck and Mohegan-Pequot.

An important thing to keep in mind is that all of the various accents and/or dialects of a given language would have all been very mutually intelligible; a bit like say, the English of upper class London as compared with that of Glasgow, as compared to that of Georgia, as compared to that of New Hampshire. We may all sound a bit funny to each other and even a bit difficult to understand at times, but we’re all speaking the same language. The same would have been true of Abenaki or Massachusett.

Further, individual languages did not have sharply defined cut offs. In other words, the Abenaki language did not immediately change to Massachusett as soon as one “crossed the border” into Massachusett territory. Rather, the change from one language to another was more of a gradual blending. If one were in what is now northern New Hampshire and started traveling south, there would be a slight gradual change in the form of dialect and accent until before long you would find yourself in the heart of Massachusett territory and the people around you would be speaking Massachusett proper. In short, a speaker of the Penacook dialect could have ventured a ways into Massachusett territory before starting to have a difficult time understanding what was being spoken. So what is the issue, you may ask? Let’s take the first element of Passaconaway’s name since it is rather straightforward.

Most accounts of Passaconaway’s name indicate that it breaks into two parts: ‘papeioos’- ‘child’ and ‘konnawah/kunnawa’- ‘bear’.

In Western Abenaki the word for “child” or actually the word for the young offspring of any mammal is ‘babiws’. This word comes from a common Algonquian root which gives us the English word “papoose”. In the Massachusett language the cognate is ‘papeis’. So as can be seen, the derivation for the first part of the name is actually quite straightforward. It should be noted that on documents contemporary to Passaconaway’s time, his name is spelt “Papiseconaway”; somewhere along the line the medial “-pa-“ was lost.

It is with the second half of the name where we begin to see some issues.

There is only one Western Abenaki word for ‘bear’; ‘awassos’, which, as can be seen, bears no similarity to conaway/kunnawah, or any of its various spellings found in early accounts.

There is also no word for ‘bear’ in any of the northern New England and Maritime languages (Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Maliseet, or Mi’kmaq (Micmac)) that is in any way similar to “konnawa”. So, this begs the question of where does the second part of the sagamore’s name come from?

If we turn to some of the southern New England languages, we begin to be able to make sense of the last element of Passaconaway’s name.

In the Narragansett language of what is now eastern RI, the common word for ‘bear’ is actually a nickname for the animal: ‘paukùnawaw’ which literally means “one who goes in the dark/night” or “night wanderer”, referring to the bear’s nocturnal habits. This word is derived from the Narragansett word for ‘dark’, ‘paukùnnum”. In the Pequot language, the word for bear is ‘konooh’, so we can see that this forms of this word, all deriving form “dark”, seem to be a common variation of the word for ‘bear’ in what is now southern New England.

There are however no records of Passaconaway ever venturing into the land of the Narragansett, so we are left with having to take a closer look at the Massachusett language.

The Massachusett language is one of the oldest written Indian languages in North America and thus one of the best attested. In fact, the first Bible to be published in what is now America, was not in English; it was in the Massachusett language. If we examine older documents, we discover that there appear to be two attested words for ‘bear’. The more common word is ‘mosq’. This is the form that is cognate with virtually all other northeast Algonquian languages. The other attested word is “pakunnauwah”; a word apparently borrowed from the Narraganset.

Languages like to borrow words from each other. Occasionally though, some words are only borrowed for a short time; they quickly fall into obsolescence and are soon forgotten. Such words are often only attested in one or two written sources. If it weren’t for these written records, we’d never know these words even existed. Such seems to be the case for the last element in Passaconaway’s name. It seems plausible that the Penacook, influenced from the Massachuset language, also borrowed this nickname for the bear into Abenaki. It would have sounded a bit different in Abenaki though; more something like ‘konewa’ which would have been pronounced like “koo-n’-WAH”. This word however seems to have passed into obsolescence in Abenaki by the time of the Penacooks’ first encounters with Europeans. With the exception of Passaconaway’s name, ‘konewa’ is simply not attested anywhere else in Abenaki, nor does this word exist in the modern language.

With the above in mind, we can reconstruct the sagamore’s name in proper Abenaki:

Babiwsekonewa (bah-beews-s’-koo-n’-WAH)

Babiws – child, baby, young (animal) offspring – Abenaki word Konewa – a nickname for the bear – borrowed word from Massachusett (in turn borrowed Narragansett).

Knowing that the Massachusett word for ‘child’ is “papeisit” (the –it ending denotes ‘one who is/does x’), thus ‘one who is small’, i.e. a child, we can therefore postulate the Massachusett form of his name as: Papeispakunnauwah.

If we examine the two variations, and examine contemporary written records of his name (see the petition further below), it appears he used the Abenaki form of his name. Had he regularly used the Massachusett form, it would have come to us in English as something like “Passpaconaway” and not “Passaconaway”. Either version though would have sounded about the same to English ears. In the end, it was eventually Anglicized to the name we are all familiar with today.

There is also another story that is told regarding the origin of Passaconaway’s name – Though not at all historically correct, it bears mention as it occasionally comes up in various studies.

Supposedly, as the story goes, a certain sagamore’s son was befriended by an Englishman, one Lord Conway. The child was enamored by Lord Conway and, like many children do, often tried to imitate the English lord much to the amusement of Lord Conway. Others, taking notice, started calling him “Little Conway”, which in the child’s native tongue was rendered “babiwse-Conway” which became ‘Passaconaway’.

An interesting story, and one naturally may think of Conway, NH, which was named after Lord Conway, but Conway, a British general, lived 1721-1795. Passaconaway is reported to have died in the late 1600’s thus the two never would have known each other. A perfect example of what’s known as a ‘folk etymology’.

There is one more epithet that is given to the great sagamore, that of “Bashaba”. It is extremely doubtful that Passaconaway was ever known by this name as it does not, contrary to what Victorian era Romanticism seems to want us to believe, denote a position or title (a position somewhere above that of chief, sort of like “emperor”), but rather it is the name of a renown Penobscot chief, Bessabez (French spelling) or Betsabes (English spelling), who was killed in a Mi’kmaq raid in 1615.

As a complete aside, it is interesting to note that ‘Massasoit’, sagamore of the Wampanoag at the time of Passaconaway, is in fact a title with the meaning of “one who is great”, or “great one” (‘massa’ – big large, great; ‘-it’ – one who is x). His given name was actually Ousamequin.

Getting back to Betsabes….According to one source, “Bessabez” was the chief of a large region of land between Mount Desert Island and the Saco River, known as Mawooshen. Historians believe Bessabez controlled much of the trade that went on between Europeans and Indians in most of western Maine. Champlain met Bessabez on a journey he made up the Penobscot River in 1604. Bessabez welcomed him in a ceremony Champlain describes here:

On the sixteenth of the month, some thirty Indians came to us. . . . Bessabez also came to see us with six canoes. As soon as the Indians on shore saw him arrive, they all began to sing, dance, and leap, until he had landed, after which they all seated themselves on the ground in a circle, according to their custom when they wish to make a speech or hold a festival. . . . Bessabez, seeing us on shore, bade us sit down, and began with his companions to smoke. . . . A Father Biard also met Bessabez, in 1611, and describes him this way: The most prominent sagamore [chief] was called Betsabes, a man of great discretion and prudence; and I confess we often see in these savages natural and graceful qualities which will make anyone but a shameless person blush, when they compare them to the greater part of the French who come over here.

So, perhaps it is due to Betsabes’ great distinction among chiefs that the later association with another great chief, Passaconaway, came about and was promulgated in later Romantic era stories. In any event, Passaconaway should not be confused with Betsabes; they are two separate historical individuals belonging to two separate Native nations, in two slightly different time periods.

So there we have it, a short sketch of the origin of the name of one of New Hampshire’s greatest leaders – Passaconaway – based not on the stories and folk traditions handed down through the generations, but rather purely on Linguistic evidence leaving two facts without question – first, that the modern translation of his name, “Child of the Bear” is indeed correct and not the product of Victorian era Romanticism as many unfortunately are, and second, that his name seems to be an Abenaki rendering of a name having half of its ultimate origins in the Narragansett language.

A quick note on nomenclature – many believe that the terms sagamore and sachem (along with ‘bashaba’) make some sort of Indian ruling hierarchy and break it down like this:

Sagamore – a local chief. Sachem – an overlord; a paramount chief with lesser chiefs (sagamores) under him. Bashaba – a paramount sachem; a chief with lesser sachems under him, i.e. an Indian “emperor”.

This hierarchy is completely inaccurate and is an invention of Europeans who simply did not understand the concept of chieftainship amongst the native people of North America. The English in particular seemed to have the most difficult time with this concept. This is perhaps because English society of the time was so heavily influenced by ‘titles’ and ‘nobility’, that they simply tried putting what they saw into a context they could relate to.

As we have seen, there is no such title as “Bashaba”. Both Sagamore and Sachem simply mean chief; they are nothing more than the same word coming to English via several different languages. Sagamore is more northern New England; Sachem is more southern New England. The two words derive from the Proto Eastern Algonquian word *sâkimâw meaning ‘chief’. There is no hierarchy involved at all; what you’re called just depends on where you’re from. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Wewaotuq (talk • contribs) 11:45, 23 May 2022 (UTC)

Passaconaway's Age
Passaconaway is purported to have been born somewhere between 1550 and 1570; however, if we apply some basic genealogy, we can perhaps narrow the timespan down considerably.

One Daniel Gookin, an English Magistrate and acquaintance of the missionary John Eliot, was present at the conversion of Passaconaway’s son, Wonalancet to Christianity. In an account Gookin penned, precisely dated 5. May, 1674, he and Eliot met Wonalancet at his wigwam in Pawtucket. Wonalancet, by the way, professed his conversion the next day. 6.May, 1674.

On this date, Gookin reports him to be “of yeares between fifty and sixty.” If we split it down the middle, say 55, that would make his birth year about 1619.

Assuming a two year difference in birth between Passaconaway’s known children, taking the genealogical average age of a man at the birth of his first child (20 years old), we can postulate an approximate birth year for Passaconaway at about 1590, give or (most likely) take about 5 or so years. So, about twenty years later than most ‘modern’ stories report.

When the Pilgrims arrived in 1620, Passaconaway was most likely somewhere in his early 30’s. Given that he was deceased before the start of King Philip’s War in 1675, in all likelihood, Passaconaway was in his early 80’s (maybe mid 80's at the most) at the time of his death; not the 120+, as most legends relate. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Wewaotuq (talk • contribs) 11:49, 23 May 2022 (UTC)