Author: Marv

To accurately imagine the sound of a drag saw, hike into the mountains as far from roads and habitation as you can get, then listen. Eliminate all sound of motor vehicles, airplanes, the hum of rubber tires on paved roads, the drone of factories, and the myriad sounds of human occupation.

Then imagine the steady chug, chug, chug of exploding petroleum in a heavy cast iron single cylinder engine and the shhh, shhh, shhh and ring of the saw slicing away through green wood. Add the clatter of a drive mechanism with a little slack.

Drag saws cross cut big timber. They were replaced sixty or seventy years ago by chainsaws. We had a drag saw on the farm that Grandpa left leaning on a five foot diameter Douglas fir log in the woods the year Dad bought a chainsaw. No one ever fired up the drag saw again. By the time I was old enough to notice it, the drag saw was covered with bright green algae and its wooden rails were beginning to rot. Today, the fir log has rotted down to a little rise on the floor of the woods and the saw is a scarcely recognizable lump of moss-covered iron.

A drag saw blade looked like an old fashioned two man cross cut saw, but heavy enough not to bend when it was pushed through the cut on the forward stroke. Imagine the man on one end of a cross cut saw replaced by a gasoline engine with an eccentric crank like one on the side of a steam locomotive to convert the rotary motion of the engine to the reciprocal motion of the saw blade and you have a drag saw. The single cylinder air-cooled cast iron engine was mounted on a wooden frame that leaned against uncut portion of the log. The saw pivoted downward as it sliced through the log.

Drag saws were impractical for anything but cutting stove wood from logs that only a tall man could see over. Setting up for a cut required stopping the engine, moving the saw, and restarting the engine. Noting the weight and awkward shape of the saw, the altogether cussedness of starting those ancient single cylinder gas engines, and the disappearance of giant trees to cut up for firewood, it does not surprise me in the least that Grandpa left his drag saw to rot the day the chain saw came along.

There are estimates, more likely wild guesses, that a 100,000 people spoke Chinook Jargon in the old days, which were sometime around the turn of the century. The charm of Chinook Jargon is in its illegitimacy. The inventors of Chinook Jargon were simply up to no good. The traders of Nootka Sound, the Straits of Juan de Fuca, the Gulf of Georgia, Puget Sound and the mouth of the Columbia were out for quick profits, not to confer the blessings of high culture. They wanted prime sea otter and seal skins they could convert to mountains of cash in China. When the Chinese market for skins petered out, they went for salmon, timber, coal, gold (never much of that), whatever was available and selling. They were more interested in cheap whiskey than grammar and not likely to waste their breath on anything more abstract than “hyas makook” (big sale, expensive) or “tenas makook” (little sale, cheap.)

Concrete and unadorned, Chinook Jargon did not garner much respect among the representatives of high culture. Christian missionaries did not make much progress with the native population and some of them blamed the jargon.

J. G. Swan was notable among early observers of the northwest because he became fluent in the Indian languages, like Makah and Clallam, as well as the jargon. Swan settled on Willapa Bay in the 1850’s and later moved to Port Townsend, wrote monographs on Pacific Northwest natives for the Smithsonian, and was schoolteacher to the Makahs on Neah Bay.

Swan said the missionaries failed because the Indians were never shown any advantage to taking on the white religion. The Indians, according to Swan, were fascinated by white ways. They were quick to adopt iron tools and fire arms. They listened to the white clergy’s stories with great interest and they took to singing hymns with the same alacrity that Europeans picked up jazz a century later. But believe that preposterous nonsense? Not on your life. Swan said several times that the Indian could be converted, but first he would have to be convinced and that would take a generation of education. Swan advocated a long game for the Indians: education without conversion. For all his sympathies for the Indians, Swan did not doubt the superiority of white religion and civilization. He expected conversion would automatically follow a generation of education.

But other missionaries were not so diligent in their language studies or patient with the natives. For example, Reverend John H. Frost arrived at the Columbia in June of 1840 from New York via Hawaii as part of the “Great Reinforcement” from the Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Frost met with more difficulties than he was prepared to face. The whites were selling rum and whiskey to the natives and the Chinooks were more interested in trading than religion. Frost gave it up, putting a good share of the blame on the inadequacies of Chinook Jargon. He said “Their language is so defective that thereby, it is impossible to acquaint them with the law.” With that pronouncement, Reverend Frost sailed from the Columbia in August of 1843.

Swan’s point is not difficult to understand. Frost may have been frustrated by the jargon, but it is easy to imagine that lack of empathy was more of a barrier than the language. What were the Indians to think of a tribe that sold lumpechuck and piahchuck, then threw them in irons for consuming it?

How do you speak Chinook like a native northwesterner? You must understand that it is the language of a disappearing underclass: manual laborers who don’t get inside enough, will never be well paid, and are working on permanent joint damage. Only use the jargon in the most everyday situations. Reach for a Chinook word when your message needs the smell of the tideflats, the ambiguous warmth of huddling around a warm up fire in a steady rain, or the howl of a Northeaster at dawn.

What? You never need these nuances? Then you will never need Chinook.