1891-92.] THE ABENAKIS OF SAINT JOHN RIVER, 195 
THE ABENAKIS OF SAINT JOHN RIVER. 
By EDWARD JACK. 
(Read 23rd Fanuary, 1892.) 
When Champlain landed at the mouth of the St. John River in the 
year 1604, he found a number of Indians living there. In answer to his 
inquiries as to what they called this river, he received this reply, 
Ouigoudi; now the name of St. John River in Abenaki as well as in 
Micmac is Wallostook, the word Ouigoudi meaning camping ground. 
Singularly enough this error has been continued down to our day, and 
one of the ferry boats which cross the harbor of St. John is called the 
Ouangondy, a corruption of the word Ouigoudi, arising from a misprint 
in a history of Nova Scotia in which the word was thus printed. Had 
the parties who thus misnamed this steamboat asked the Aborigines who 
were camped near the city, what they called the St. John, they would 
have received a correct answer. Lescarbot in his “Histoire de la 
Nouvelle France” says, that when in 1606 he came to the River St. 
John, “being in the town of Ouigoudi, for thus I can properly call an 
enclosed place full of people, he saw in a great thicket about eighty 
savages.” 
Just opposite the city of Fredericton also, there is a collection of mean 
huts in which some of the Abenakis of the St. John reside, this they to- 
day call Ouigoudi. At the time of Champlain’s arrival, the banks of the 
St. John were inhabited by the Abenakis, a branch of the great Algon- 
quin family; their descendants tell me that their ancestors came from 
the west, and that before the white men arrived among them they 
worshipped the sun and moon. 
The Great Spirit was called by them Ketsi Niouaskoo, and the Evil 
Spirit Matsi Niouaskoo. One of my Indian friends said to me he had 
read about the latter in his catechism, and that he is the devil. 
It is stated in the relations of the Jesuits that in the year 1642 some 
Algonquins who were attending a religious celebration at Montreal, 
having ascended the mountain, one of them pointing to the hills situated 
to the south and east;said to the French, that the Hurons who then were 
their enemies, had driven their ancestors from this country, some of 
whom had fled to the country where the Abenakis now live. The first 
