The name Pascagoula, which means "bread eaters," is taken from a group of Native Americans found in villages along the Pascagoula River some distance above its mouth.
Hernando De Soto seems to have made first contact with them in the 1540s, though little is known of that encounter.
Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville, founder of the colony of Louisiana, left a more detailed account from an expedition of this region in 1700.
The first detailed account comes from Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, younger brother of Iberville, whom the Pascagoula visited at Fort Maurepas in present-day Ocean Springs, shortly after it was settled and while the older brother was away in France.
There are few details that are certain about these peoples, except that their language seemed not to have shared an etymological root with the larger native groups to the north, the Choctaw particularly.
Instead, their language seems more akin to that of the Biloxi or Natchez people, both of whom have been linked in this way to the Sioux, Crow, and Ho-Chunk.
The territory of the Biloxi peoples seems to have ranged from the areas of what are now called Biloxi Bay to Bayou La Batre (Alabama) and twenty-five miles up the Pascagoula River, and then the Pascagoula people's territory seems to have ranged between some distance north of there to the confluence of the Leaf and Chickasawhay rivers.
The first settlers of Pascagoula were Jean Baptiste Baudreau Dit Graveline, Joseph Simon De La Pointe and his aunt, the Madame Chaumont.
Local legend says the Pascagoula tribe chanted and waded hand-in-hand into the Pascagoula River, drowning together rather than become enslaved and killed to an enemy tribe, the Biloxi. Thus, the legend of the "Singing River" was born. It is said that on still summer and autumn evenings, the sad song of the Pascagoulas can still be heard near the river.
Pascagoula gained notoriety on October 11, 1973 when two local fishermen, Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker, claimed to have been abducted by aliens from a Pascagoula pier. The media frenzy that followed touched off national interest in UFOs and extraterrestrials unparalleled since the Roswell incident. In 1983, Hickson wrote a book about his ordeal entitled UFO Contact In Pascagoula.
Pascagoula also gained national attention in the 1980s, when novelty singer/songwriter Ray Stevens featured the town in his hit, "Mississippi Squirrel Revival." Stevens admits, though, that the song could have been set in any Southern town but the name Pascagoula easily rhymed with the word, hallelujah, which is heard frequently in the song.
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