1914: tyee kopa konaway: The Star-Smith Tilikum wedding
A 1914 publicity stunt by Seattle civic boosters was “the Star-Smith-Tilikum wedding”…
…, a giveaway of everything you’d need to establish a household, to a randomly picked lucky couple.
Why the odd name?
The Star = the flashy Seattle Star newspaper where I found this article.
Smith (Image credit: Findagrave)
Smith = Burns Lyman Smith (1880-1941), heir to an industrial fortune.
(Image credit: MOHAI)
Tilikum = the Tilikums of Elttaes, of course! They were an influential fraternal organization who we’ve crossed paths with before. They followed the pervasive fashion of the time in using Chinuk Wawa like an in-group code, as you see in the above image. Their leader was styled the tyee kopa konaway (‘chief of all’):
— from the Seattle (WA) Star of July 17, 1914, page 1, column 2
Just another indicator of how thoroughly ingrained Chinook Jargon was in Northwest civic life well past the frontier era.
