Pohickery is a transitional transliteration of the native American word Pawcohiccora, from which we’ve derived the English word hickory. See the excerpt below from Bill Bryson’s history of the English language in the United States, Made in America:
English-speaking colonists who reached the New World encountered a host of animals, plants, peoples and places for which they had no words. The easiest solution was to incorporate native vocabulary into their own tongue, and in doing so they created the English language that is uniquely American.
The early American colonists began borrowing words from the locals almost from the moment of the first contact. Moose and papoose were taken into English as early as 1603. Raccoon is first recorded in 1608, caribou and opossum in 1610, moccasin and tomahawk in 1612, hickory in 1618, powwow in 1624, wigwam in 1628. Altogether, the native languages provided some 150 terms to the early colonist. Another 150 came later, often after being filtered through intermediate sources. Hammock, maize, and barbecue reached us via Spanish from the Caribbean.
Occasionally Native American terms could be adapted fairly simply. The Algonquian seganku became without too much difficulty skunk. The wuchak settled into English almost inevitably as the woodchuck. Despite the tongue twister, no woodchuck ever chucked wood. Wampumpeag became wampum. The use of neck in the northern colonies was clearly influenced by the Algonquian naiack, meaning a point or corner, from which comes the expression that neck of the woods. Similarly the preponderance of capes in New England geography is at least partly due to the existence of an Algonquian word, kepan, meaning a closed-up passage.
Most native terms, however, were not so amenable to simple transliteration. Many had to be brusquely and repeatedly pummeled into shape before any English speaker could feel comfortable with them. John Smith, Virginia Colony leader and influenrial writer, made his first attempt at transcribing the Algonquian word for a tribal leader as cawkawwassoughes. Realizing that this was not remotely satisfactory, he modified it to a still somewhat hopeful coucorouse. It took a later generation to simplify it further to the form we know today: caucus (and of course it now means not a leader but a coming together of leaders in conversation). Raccoon was no less challenging. Smith tried raugroughcum and rahaugcum in the same volume, then later made it rarowcun, and subsequent chroniclers attempted many other forms—aracoune and rockoon, among them—before finally finding phonetic comfort with rackoone. Misickquatash evolved into sacatash and eventually succotash. Askutasquash beceome isquontersquash and finally squash. Pawcohiccora became pohickery became hickory.
Often, as might be expected, the colonists misunderstood the local terms and misapplied them. To the natives, pawcohiccora signified not the tree but the food made from its nuts. Pakan or paccan was an Algonquian word for any hardshelled nut. The colonists made it pecan (after toying with such variants as pekaun and pecaun) and with uncharacteristic specificity reserved it for the nut of the one tree from the hickory family that we now call the pecan tree.
Occasionally the colonists gave up. For a time they referred to an edible cactus by its local name, metaquesunauk, but eventually abandoned the fight and called it a prickly pear. Success depended largely on the phonetic accessibility (to the English ear) of the language of the nearest contact tribe. Those who encountered the Ojibwa found their dialect so deeply impenetrable that they couldn’t even agree on the tribe’s name. Some said Ojibwa, others Chippewa. The language employed consonant clusters of such a confounding density—mtik, pskikye, kchimkwa, to give a few examples—as to convince the new colonists to leave their tongue in peace.
Despite the difficulty with pronunciation, the first colonists were fascinated by the native tongues, partly no doubt because they seemed exotic, but also because they had a beauty that was irresistible. Founding father William Penn wrote of the Lenape, who populated Delaware: “I know nor a language spoken in Europe, that hath words of more sweetness or greatness, in accent or emphasis, than theirs.” You have only to listen to a handful of original place names—Mississippi, Susquehanna, Conestoga, Rappahannock—to see that the natives found a poetry in the American landscape that has all too often eluded those who displaced them.