Where the name 'Adirondack' comes from — a Mohawk word for their Algonquin neighbors, and not a kind one.
Here's a little something to turn over as you drive through the Adirondacks: the name itself is an insult. A good old-fashioned insult, aimed by one people at another, that somehow ended up on the map.
These mountains sat on the borderland between two great Native nations — the Mohawk, part of the powerful Iroquois confederacy, down in the valleys to the south and west, and the Algonquin-speaking peoples up to the north. And they were rivals, these two, for a very long time. Now, the Mohawk were people of the cornfields — farmers, with stores of food laid by. The northern people were hunters of the deep woods, and in a hard winter, when the game was scarce and the snow was deep, the stories say they'd sometimes be driven to strip the bark from the trees and eat the soft inner layer just to survive.
And so the Mohawk had a mocking name for their northern neighbors — something that came out, in English, as 'Adirondack,' and it meant, more or less, 'they eat bark.' Bark-eaters. It was a jeer, a way of calling them poor, desperate woods-folk who couldn't feed themselves proper.
Well, the centuries rolled on, the surveyors and mapmakers came through, they heard the old name floating around, and they slapped it on the mountains — and it stuck. So today, these six million acres of some of the most beautiful protected wilderness on the planet, this crown jewel of the American East, wears a name that started as one tribe poking fun at another for eating tree bark in the lean times. History's a funny thing. The insult outlived everybody, and turned into something grand. Drive on through bark-eater country.
Photo: J. H. Colton · Public domain
