Pensacola, Florida: Named for the "Hair People" of the Bay

The people who gave Pensacola, Florida, its name were gone when Spain built a town on their bay in the 1690s. The name is Choctaw for “hair people.” Almost nothing else about them survives.

A people who left only a name

John R. Swanton, who wrote the Bureau of American Ethnology’s 1922 history of the Creek Indians and their neighbors, put it bluntly: “The Pensacola disappear from history shortly after their appearance in it, and nothing of their language has been preserved.” He found them in Spanish letters from 1677, living near the Gulf, and in a 1686 letter that says the “Panzacola” were at war with the Mobile Indians.

By the time the Spanish came to stay, they were gone. Swanton quotes the Spanish account by Barcia: “They say that the province was called Pancacola because anciently a nation of Indians inhabited it named Pancocolos, which the neighboring nations destroyed in wars, leaving only the name in the province.” George R. Fairbanks’s 1871 History of Florida tells it the same way. The colony, which he dates to 1696, took its name, he writes, from “the locality having been formerly that of the town of a tribe of Indians,” who had been “entirely exterminated in conflicts with neighboring tribes.”

Swanton wasn’t so sure they were wiped out. French writers mention Pensacolas in 1699 and 1702, a French account from about 1725 puts their village near the Biloxi on the Pearl River, and a 1764 letter from Pensacola still counts “Panchaculas” among the tribes of the Gulf. His conclusion: “a remnant of the tribe continued a precarious existence” for “a long time after it was supposed to be extinct.” Gone from the bay, then, but maybe not gone.

Why “hair people”

Since the Pensacola’s own language is lost, the meaning comes from Choctaw. Swanton says the name “is plainly Choctaw and signifies ‘hair people.’” Albert S. Gatschet, writing in 1884, gives the same reading, “hair-people,” and says the name “is of Cha’hta origin,” his spelling of Choctaw. The 1905 federal place-name book from the U.S. Geological Survey goes along, more cautiously: the name is “said to be derived” from pan-sha-okla.

You can check the two halves yourself in Cyrus Byington’s Choctaw dictionary, published by the Smithsonian in 1915. There, panshi is “hair; the long hair of the head,” and okla is “a people; a tribe; a nation.”

Why hair? Swanton offers a guess and labels it one. The name “may have been given to them because they wore their hair in a manner different from that of most of their neighbors,” he writes, and he points out that the Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca noticed chiefs near Pensacola Bay who wore their hair long.

Ochuse, Santa Maria, Pensacola

The bay had other names first. Fairbanks says Hernando de Soto’s men found a big, sheltered bay to the west “called by them Ochuse, which was evidently Pensacola Bay.” A 1919 Florida history by Caroline Mays Brevard says early explorers called it Santa Maria. When Andrés de Arriola arrived with 300 men, in 1696 by her date, and built a fort, she writes, the name Pensacola “was then given to the town founded and to the magnificent body of water on the shores of which it was situated.”

A town in Spain?

Brevard is the only writer here who raises another possibility. She says it “is not quite certain” whether the settlement was named for a town in Spain (from her spelling, apparently Peñíscola) or for the tribe that had lived there. She doesn’t give any evidence for the Spanish town, though, and the older accounts, Barcia’s and Fairbanks’s, both point to the tribe. And a Spanish letter was already calling the people “Panzacola” in 1686, years before the colony. If you’re weighing them, the tribe wins easily.

So the Pensacola left behind no words of their own, as far as anyone knows, except a name. And even that one, Swanton thought, was in somebody else’s language.

Sources & further reading

• John R. Swanton, Early History of the Creek Indians and Their Neighbors (1922). “Plainly Choctaw” and “hair people,” the lost language, the long hair Cabeza de Vaca saw (p. 13); the 1677 and 1686 letters and Barcia’s account of the vanished tribe (p. 148); the later mentions and the surviving remnant (pp. 149–150).
• Albert S. Gatschet, A Migration Legend of the Creek Indians, vol. 1 (1884), p. 114. The Pensacola as “hair-people,” a name “of Cha’hta origin.”
• Cyrus Byington, A Dictionary of the Choctaw Language (1915). Okla, “a people; a tribe; a nation” (p. 297); panshi, “hair; the long hair of the head” (p. 310).
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), p. 242. “Said to be derived from the Indian word pan-sha-okla, meaning ‘hair people.’”
• George R. Fairbanks, History of Florida (1871). Ochuse as Pensacola Bay (p. 75); the colony, dated 1696, named for the exterminated tribe (p. 168).
• Caroline Mays Brevard, A History of Florida (1919), p. 64. Santa Maria, Arriola’s 1696 settlement, and her doubt between the tribe and a town in Spain.
• GNIS feature 294117 (U.S. Geological Survey). Lists Pensacola as a populated place in Escambia County, with no note on the name.