With the recent EO to “rename the Gulf of Mexico,” I’ve been thinking about place names & their significance. I’m sure many Pittsburghers are familiar with ‘the fight to keep the H in Pittsburgh.’ I’m less sure if we collectively know what it was called before Pittsburgh. Before European colonizers arrived, what was this place called?
Donehoo
Like any good search, mine began with “native name for Pittsburgh” into a search engine. The first result is one page on a collaboration between the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh & Common Knowledge: Pittsburgh titled “Bridging the Urban Landscape.” The page we want, buried deep in the website, is titled How to Spell Pittsburgh by George P. Donehoo, 1928. The five paragraphs of text is actual an exert from A History of the Indian Villages and Place Names in Pennsylvania with Numerous Historical Notes and References.
The first paragraph mentions three names given to this place by non-europeans:
Menachk-sink: Lenape gave this name when the French occupied the area. It translates to “where there is a fence.” The ‘fence’ most likely refers to the fort.
Cheondergoa: Haudenosaunee use this name to refer to any junction of two rivers.
Diondega: Confusingly, the Seneca (which are part of the Haudenosaunee confederacy) call it this in “The Code of Handsome Lake, the Seneca Prophet.” It roughly translates to “the forks” or “where the rivers meet”
Only the third was sited to have a non-European source. Searching the first two names come up with nothing, while the third populates with multiple art pieces & The Principle Indian Towns of Western Pennsylvania, by C. Hale Spire in 1930. The short section on Diondega seems to site Donehoo’s piece from above.
native-land.ca
This is a great website for seeing how nations overlapped prior to European colonization. At the confluence, this site lists three nations:
Monongahela: These people were mostly in modern day South West PA, but also ranged from eastern Ohio to northern West Virginia.
Shawandasse Tula (Shawnee): Their territory is charted from the start of the Ohio River & follows the Appalachian mountain range south.
Ni-u-kon-ska (Osage): Their territory also followed up the Ohio River Valley but went to the Mississippi river (where it spread both north & south).
Comparing these three nations to the ones above give is zero overlap. WESA did a great article looking into Pittsburgh’s Native History. Basically, this was a confluence of cultures meeting & using this space. I couldn’t find the name that any of these nations gave this location, so it may have been lost to history.