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.
He would split the larger logs. In my memory, Grandpa used an ax and a Swedish bow saw to cut fuel for fish fries. He had a bright yellow McCullough chain saw, but I don’t recall him ever using it. After cutting the fuel, Grandpa would start the fire with newspaper, a little kindling, and dry stove wood from the wood shed and later throw on the fresh cut green vine maple. When the fire was going well, sweet and pungent smoke billowing, snow white ashes juxtaposed to black charcoal, flames barely visible in the bright sunlight, responsibility went to the cook, usually my uncle. Grandpa died when I was eight, taking with him, I believe, more secrets about vine maple than I can tell.
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