The Pequawket Abenaki of the Saco Valley
Near North Conway, New Hampshire
Long before there were hotels or highways here, this valley belonged to the Abenaki. The band that lived along the upper Saco River, near the shadow of Mount Washington, were the Pequawket, sometimes written Pigwacket, with their main village near what is now Fryeburg, just over the line in Maine. They belonged to the wider Penacook Confederacy, whose founding leader, the sagamore Passaconaway, was remembered as a diplomat and peacemaker who tried for decades to keep the peace with the arriving English.
To the Abenaki, the great peak we call Mount Washington was Agiocochook, most often translated as the home of the Great Spirit. According to accounts recorded by settlers, they held the summit sacred and did not climb it, regarding the high peaks as the dwellings of powers not to be disturbed. The peace Passaconaway worked for did not hold.
During a conflict called Dummer's War, on the ninth of May, seventeen twenty-five, an English company hunting for scalps clashed with Abenaki fighters in what became known as Lovewell's Fight, near the Pequawket village. The war leader called Paugus was killed, and though the English company was badly mauled, the Pequawket afterward abandoned their homeland and withdrew north to Canada. The names remain in the mountains and the rivers, the last echoes of the people who knew this valley first, and who believed its highest mountain belonged to the Great Spirit alone.
