1858, Fraser River gold rush: “Chenook” beats a college degree
I’m very fond of the contemporary reports telling of the moment when Chinuk Wawa suddenly propagated into the British Columbia interior.
(Image credit: Wikipedia)
Most of the newspapers in existence on the West Coast in 1858 were published in California, due to the 1849 gold rush there.
Which sets the stage for the inevitable demise of many of those California boomtowns. Have you ever even heard of Rocklin?
That’s where we find some timely advice to the northward-bound gold bug…
Topic of the Day.
“Gold, Gold, Gold,” — like the cry of “fire,” every one exclaims where?” “Up on Frazer [sic] river,” is now the answer, and to that that distant spot, where mountain torrents most do congregate, every person not possessed of a large amount of the world’s goods, seems to be turning his footsteps. None count the cost, for there is a general belief that there is gold enough to pay the score. So in steamers and in schooners, in ships and sloops, away they go; an army with rockers ready to take any risk for money.
Frazer river has banished almost every other topic. Kansas is eclipsed — Black Republicanism sunk into African darkness, and Know-Nothingism is bound for the new mines. Wherever our footsteps tend there we find exciting groups, impracticable gold-rockers and Munchausen narratives of mining millionaires who are lords of claims of untold wealth — barring the high water. — How long this confusion is to prevail, none can tell — perhaps the very next steamer from the North may allay the fever. At present the hubbub is a draw-back to many kinds of business, and a serious detriment to contractors and builders. In the interior, the effect is still more disastrous. Quartz mills and ditches are losing their laborers, and traders their debtors. The columns of the interior press are filled with accounts of the exodus, and steamers and stages arrive daily with crowds of goldseekers en route for the place where Chenook canoes are better paying stock than ocean steamers, and a knowledge of the “jargon” a more desirable accomplishment than the lore of universities. S.F. Globe.
— from the Rocklin (CA) Placer Herald of June 19, 1858, page 4, column 2
Okok naika tumtum. There are two options it seems. One is that Chinook Jargon was known and used in the BC interior before the Spring of 1858 and that is why the first miners wrote back telling people to bring a Chinook dictionary and that knowledge of it was more useful than a university degree. The other is that the white miners introduced Chinook Jargon to the native people in the Spring of 1858 who quickly learned it which led to it being indispensable in those first months. It is hard to imagine a mechanism of how Chinook Jargon could be introduced and learned so quickly. What percent of California miners would know Chinook, what opportunity would they have to teach it. It seems more plausible that Chinook Jargon was already widely known…
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I think the idea that there was CJ present especially along the fraser, but that it was only known by relatively few makes the most sense. likely those few who knew cj were the ones who traveled to the coast / fort langley. Even later on in the 1890s you hear that not everyone knew CJ (especially women it seemed in the Kamloops area, no?).
This would explain the presence of the older “tq’iX” pronounciation present on the lower fraser. Also it makes sense since there would have been little use for CJ outside of those more coastal contexts since there were so few settlers and those few that were in the interior would have spoken French/French of the mountains.
So, even though few knew it, speaking to those few interpreters would still have been very valuable and likely many others would have learned cj rapidly with the influx of miners so they too could act as interpreters / benefit from trade etc.
I wonder too if the rush enticed Indigenous people from the states to come as well? Possibly as miners/porters/interpreters/for transport. Maybe that contributed some more CJ speakers into the mix.
Like you say Sam, I have a hard time believing many Californians knew CJ prior to arriving in BC.
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I’m still waiting for the evidence that Chinuk Wawa was known inland from Fort Langley before 1858 🙂 Aside from a handful of sporadic visitors to that Métis establishment.
I doubt knowledge of Jargon among “Californians” was universal, but then again, the 1849 gold rush country was in the Sacramento Valley, where the HBC already had a presence and we find traces of CW pretty far back.
I do think plenty of cheechakos in BC used published Jargon dictionaries, which helps account for the demonstrable loss of grammatical and structural complexity in BC Jargon.
Indigenous folks coming up from the US side of the border is not a strong trend I’ve noticed in the BC gold rushes. But some obviously traveled freely back and forth, having relatives in BC as well as taking some work opportunities in the new wage economy.
Eh?
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Re: Alex’s comment that not everyone knew Jargon in BC even in the 1890s, when it had been present for over a generation, this is very much the sort of distribution we expect for a pidgin language. It’s a second language to essentially all speakers, and it’s not a communitywide language.
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I mean I think the rub is finding out what Le Jeune means by “lower fraser” and therefore finding out where Chinook was present at an early date (as evidenced by “tq’iX”) and finding out what you count as “the interior”.
I’m only suggesting that it would have been present along the fraser itself, maybe up into the canyon a bit, but not as far as Kamloops or anything like that. Hope and Yale, for example, are gold rush territory and close enough to Fort Langley and relatively easy to reach by boat, so quite possibly could be considered “lower fraser” and an early Chinook-speaking area.
In any case, the ‘lower fraser’ was the launching point for these miners and it’s not a question as to whether Chinook was being spoken there, it is a known fact. So with that in mind it would have been useful to learn Chinook. Maybe it wasn’t by the time you got to Lytton, but when you were equipping yourself, hiring transport/a guide, at, for example, Fort Langley, it would have been. So I think these suggestions to learn Chinook at the time were perfectly reasonable, even if it wasn’t going to allow you to speak with everyone you would come across.
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Yale had also been an HBC post since 1848, so might be worth looking into who was staffing that post and tracing the flow of people between there and Ft Langley. Maybe they have connections to Ft. Vancouver as well? If Chinook was at Yale, then maybe knowledge of it could have gone well up the canyon.
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Hope too, would be one to look at since it lasted longer.
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All good strands to research. I expect individuals at fur-trade posts all over New Caledonia knew some Chinook Jargon — but that doesn’t count 🙂 A language is a social phenomenon, needing a community in which to be used. It looks like we agree that the CJ community in BC centred on Fort Langley, and thinned out fast as one went upriver. I’m ready to buy breakfast at Tim’s for whoever first demonstrates that there were individual Jargon speakers at Hope and Yale, pre-goldrush. That’s virtually guaranteed, just as we know there were early CJ-speakers scattered around Puget Sound by virtue of being enterprising individuals who traded at Langley.
But I’ll buy you dinner at Sabri’s in Victoria if you can show that there was anything like a CJ-speaking community that far upriver!
Dave R.
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Here’s my chance to remind folks of Richard Mayne’s 1862 book, an eyewitness document of the Fraser River gold rush, clearly reporting that above Yale you had to know Métis French.
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