Circa 1862: Maybe if he’d known Chinook…
Have a hypnotic Halloween! (Image credit: Alamy)
Imagine my delight on finding another example of 1800s supernatural communication that involves Chinuk Wawa!
(See “A Seance with a Cayuse Chief via Grand Ronde Chinuk Wawa“.)
My delight is tempered, because this Australian performer was evidently too recently arrived to have learned the Jargon.
I think that affected his results in attempting to hypnotize a group of Native people in BC.
For an indication that the Wawa wasn’t his strong point, I notice that “six cloochmen and six bucks” is translated as “twelve unfortunate Indians”!
The twelve must not have understood “Professor” Bushell’s hypnotic suggestions…
At his farewell performance in Victoria, “six cloochmen and six bucks” (twelve unfortunate Indians) were brought up on stage to be hypnotized. Not one was affected by Professor Bushell’s electro-biology (which, we suggest, speaks for their native intelligence), but two members of the audience were drawn to the stage and turned into risible fools.
— from “Frontier Theatre: A History of Nineteenth-Century Theatrical Entertainment in the Canadian Far West and Alaska” by Chad Evans (Victoria, BC: Sono Nis, 1983)
