Natchitoches, Louisiana: A Caddo Name Locals Don't Say as Spelled

Natchitoches, Louisiana, takes its name from a tribe of the Caddo confederacy, and the way locals say it goes back to an old French spelling, not the one on the map. So if you sound it out the way it’s written, you’ll get it wrong.

The people behind the name

The Natchitoches were one of the tribes of the Caddo confederacy. The Smithsonian’s Handbook of American Indians, edited by Frederick Webb Hodge, says their villages stood near the present city and that their own form of the name was Nashi’tosh. The tribe and the French post among them were so prominent that, according to the handbook, the Red River itself was known as the Natchitock during the first half of the 1700s.

French traders had been dealing with the tribe for years before a post went up. The federal place-names database says Louis Antoine Juchereau de St. Denis, a French Canadian, founded the town in 1714 while he was on his way to Mexico on a trade mission. William Read’s 1927 book on the state’s Indian place names tells it in more detail: the governor sent St. Denis off around November 1, 1714, St. Denis left goods and ten men in the Natchitoches village on his way to Mexico, and a fort was built there in 1715 with the tribe’s help. One older account puts St. Denis there as early as 1713, so you’ll see a few different years depending on the book.

Chinquapins, pawpaws or red soil

What the word means is less settled. Read listed three translations he’d come across: “chinquapin eaters,” “chestnut eaters” and “pawpaw eaters.” He also passed along what John R. Swanton of the Bureau of American Ethnology told him: that the Caddo form, Nashitosh, means “pawpaws.” Swanton himself later added another version. In his 1952 survey of the tribes of North America, he wrote that pawpaw was the usual explanation, but that an early Spanish writer, José Antonio Pichardo, was told the name came from a native word, “nacicit,” meaning “a place where the soil is the color of red ochre,” first used for a small creek that ran through red soil. The sources don’t settle on one answer, so it’s fair to keep all of them in mind.

Nachitoches, Nassitoches, Naquitoches

The French wrote the name down in all sorts of ways. Read collected them. The explorer Tonti had “Nachitoches” in 1690, Iberville “Natchitoches” in 1700, Pénicaut “Nassitoches” in an entry for 1715, and later writers “Naquitoche” and “Naquitoches.” The spelling that won is the one on the map today, but the sound didn’t follow it.

Read said the local pronunciation is “based on Naquitoches,” and that a dictionary-style pronunciation that follows the spelling “is never used by natives of Louisiana.” The town’s visitors bureau spells it out in its visitor guides: “Nack-A-Tish.”

The river town that kept the name

By 1805, the handbook says, Sibley, in a report to President Jefferson, counted only 50 Natchitoches. Soon after, they stopped living as a separate tribe and joined the other Caddo peoples. The town kept their name, though, and for a long time it was the end of the line for river traffic. Until 1835, Alcée Fortier wrote, Natchitoches was the head of navigation on the Red River, because a giant logjam blocked the way north. The man sent to clear that jam ended up with a city named for him: Shreveport.

Sources & further reading

• William A. Read, Louisiana Place-Names of Indian Origin (1927). Early spellings from 1690 on; the three translations and Swanton’s “pawpaws”; the Caddo form Nashitosh; the local pronunciation; St. Denis, the 1715 fort and the 1713 date in Pénicaut (pp. 42–43).
• Frederick Webb Hodge, ed., Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico, Part 2 (Smithsonian, Bureau of American Ethnology). The Natchitoch entry: Caddo confederacy, the form Nashi’tosh, the Red River called “the Natchitock,” Sibley’s count of 50 in 1805 and the merger with the other Caddo tribes (pp. 37–38).
• John R. Swanton, The Indian Tribes of North America (Bureau of American Ethnology, 1952). Pawpaw as the usual explanation, and Pichardo’s “nacicit,” a place where the soil is the color of red ochre (p. 205).
• GNIS feature 1629983 (U.S. Geological Survey). Founded by St. Denis in 1714 on his way to Mexico from Mobile.
• Natchitoches Convention and Visitors Bureau, 2017 and 2024 visitor guides. The “Nack-A-Tish” spelling.
• Alcée Fortier, ed., Louisiana, vol. 2 (1914). Natchitoches as the head of navigation on the Red River before 1835 (p. 359).