How the Chattahoochee Got Its Name
By Billy Winn
Billy Winn is the former editorial page editor of the Columbus Ledger Enquirer 
and is the author of The Old Beloved Path: Daily Life Among the Indians of the Chattahoochee River Valley. Illustration by Garry Pound.
The first mention that I know of in literature about the river occurs in Indian agent Benjamin Hawkins’s travel log of the Chattahoochee River and the Creek country in the year 1798, 1799. And basically, what Hawkins says in there is that Chattahoochee was a town north of us here at that time, which he says is the founding town on this part of the river. And he says that it got its name from the Creek ‘Chatto,’ a stone, and ‘hoche,’ marked or flowered. There’s no way to spell it exactly because the Creeks didn’t have a written language at the time, but basically it would be Chato oochee.
The Chattahoochee River. Some historical references say that the word “Chattahoochee” means marked or flowered stone, but author Billy Winn has his doubts.
Unfortunately, the elements in the words that supposedly mean all that also appear in other words which are translated variously as stony creek or red river and so Chattahoochee meaning river of painted rocks or river where there are marks on the rocks is merely the most generally accepted translation, but I have a lot of trouble with that, too. Mainly because of vowel shifts and the way that the English, French and Spanish transposed prefixes and suffixes and garbled Indian words. For example, Chattahoochee is very close to Chatahachee, which means red creek or red river. ‘Chata’ being the Creek word, the Muscogee word, for red and ‘hachee’ for stream or creek. So it could very easily, in my mind, mean red river or red stream. Which would make some sense. However, in the absence of any other concrete evidence, most people rely on Hawkins. After all, he was here, and he was a very good linguist, and he had a chance to interview Indians that lived on the river; and according to him, they say that the word meant river of painted or marked rocks.
Well, I can live with the river of marked or painted rocks; but the only problem is I’ve spent my lifetime on the Chattahoochee and I’ve never seen a marked or painted rock. And of course, that doesn’t mean that at one time they weren’t here. It could refer to something as simple as a place where the moss grew on the rocks in a peculiar way or lichens had marked the rocks or the rocks were stained red with a particular kind of algae or something. It could mean all of those things. But the Indians also were good linguists, and they were very careful about words. So I think it’s up in the air, and I don’t think we’ll ever know.
Links:
- Read a profile of Benjamin Hawkins and see the location of his Indian Agency on the Flint River.
- Read more about the Chattahoochee River, one of Georgia’s 14 major watersheds, that starts in the North Georgia Mountains and flows to Apalachicola Bay (with a merger and a name change along the way).
- See a map of all the dams on the Chattahoohee.
- “Lock through” Jim Woodruff Dam, the dam that separates the Chattahoochee and Flint rivers from Florida and the Apalachicola River.
- Learn more about the Upper Chattahoochee Riverkeeper.
- Order a copy of the Riverkeeper’s Guide to the Chattahoochee.