hackmatack

[Earlier hakmantak, hacmontac, perhaps from Western Abenaki.]

Go to the wetlands of North America's northern woods, to bogs, or to the shores of lakes and streams, and you may find yourself face to face with a hackmatack. It's a kind of larch, a pine tree with an odd habit. Like other pines, it has a tall central trunk and cones and needles, but it sheds its needles in the fall and grows new ones from buds in the spring, thus being technically a deciduous tree rather than an evergreen. As a result, the hackmatack isn't good winter cover for game or hunters. But it does have its uses; it's not so hard to hack a hackmatack, as the tree is known in the north. (To the south it is more commonly called a tamarack. No one is sure where that name came from, though it is probably also of Algonquian origin.)

Before English speakers came to North America, Indians used the wood of the hackmatack for toboggans and arrow shafts, its roots for sewing canoes and weaving into bags, and its bark and needles as medicine. "The bark used as a decoction," wrote Mrs. Maud Grieve in A Modern Herbal in 1931, "is laxative, tonic, diuretic and alterative, useful in obstructions of the liver, rheumatism, jaundice and some cutaneous diseases." The tree makes good firewood, too.

From the Indians English speakers learned not only the name of the tree (mentioned in a history of New Hampshire in 1792) but some of its uses as well, and the settlers added new uses of their own: the roots made "knees" to support the decks of ships, the trunks became ribs of clipper ships, the soft needles filled mattresses and pillows. And the tree's root, "hard as briar," made good bowls for handmade pipes.

Western Abenaki, like Eastern Abenaki discussed under cohosh, belongs to the Algonquian-Ritwan family. Its speakers live in northern New England and southern Canada, but there are hardly any left; in 1991 there were only about twenty speakers of Western Abenaki, all elderly. No other words from Western Abenaki have settled into English.

The noun has one meaning:

Meaning #1: poplar of northeastern North America with broad heart-shaped leaves
  Synonyms: balsam poplar, tacamahac, Populus balsamifera