1872: Some Sitka people talk Chinook already
Just 5 years into the US colonization of Alaska Territory, Chinook Jargon was already an important presence among Lingít (Tlingits) in the southeastern “pandhandle”.
I’ve previously found that some Lingit were talking this language by the 1867 handover from Russian control — but hardly earlier.
Nobody thinks lots of Alaska Native people were talking Jargon at that time. But it goes to show you that Victoria, BC (founded 1843), was already the coastal commercial magnet that drew tribal visitors and workers from far to the north. There certainly weren’t American/Canadian/British missionaries, for instance, in “Southeast” yet, which would’ve been an impetus for introducing Chinuk Wawa.
Jakob Svorkdal wrote to send me some newspaper clippings documenting PNW Coast Chinuk Wawa use:
“The first is from “The Cruise of the Rose”, September 19, 1872, which among painting an interesting picture of the small “Greek” Orthodox communities along the Alaskan coast, also establishes that the indigenous people living around Sitka in this period had amongst them those who could “Talk Chinook.” “
This is an excerpt from a longer article in the British Colonist newspaper of Victoria, BC:
There are about one thousand Indians making their home adjoining the town of Sitka, and I do not think there are more than 250 adult males among the number. Sitka, however, Is visited by all the tribes for 200 or 300 miles around; and at times there may be 500 fighting men present. So far as I have seen they have conducted themselves very well. All the Indians north of Stickcen [Stickeen River] speak one language [Tlingit] == a few can talk Chinook, a few the Russian. We are anchored immediately opposite the Indian rancherie. We can count 62 large houses, some of which are very substantial and well built. One of the physicians of the Fort, who is an Irish gentleman, and who, with myself, had the curiosity to go through the rancherie, told me they were much better providedfor, and more comfortable, and appeared happier than the poor of his native country.
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My GGG-Grandfather worked for the HBC. In 1841-1842 he was based at Fort Vancouver, in 1842-1846 at Fort Stikine (after the death of John McLaughlin Jr.), and then 1846-1848 at Cowlitz Farm. I would have expected, with no support for this assertion, that the knowledge of Chinook Jargon would have been common at Fort Stikine.
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Hi Greg, thank you so much for sharing your valuable family history here! I agree that knowledge of the young creole language Chinuk Wawa must’ve been common at Fort Stikine (modern Wrangell, Alaska area). This is because many or most of the personnel must’ve come from the Fort Vancouver (modern Washington state) area, where the CW language community was centered. They and any of their wives and kids who came along would’ve been speaking some Jargon.
But, just as with tribes a mere day’s travel from the Fort Vancouver CW zone at the same point in time, SE Alaska tribes wouldn’t have used the Jargon yet, having relatively little stimulus to do so with the newly arrived HBC people, who only remained 4 years. We have to recall that Fort Victoria, which went on to become the magnet town of the whole coast, and thus history’s biggest center of Chinook Jargon usage, wasn’t founded until 1843.
I’d be highly interested in combing through any Fort Wrangell journals in search of the occasional Jargon word that might appear there, but I expect there’ll be very little of that. I would predict that the HBC’ers of Fort Wrangell were forced to rely on local interpreters who spoke both Russian and Tlingit.
qʰata mayka təmtəm?
Dave Robertson
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Thanks for writing this up! Hiyu mahsi! I know very little about the Tlingit language and I wonder what influence it might have had on BC Jargon
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Exceedingly little 🙂 What comes to my mind are the handful of unique modern North Coast-isms that we can find shared among languages such as Tlingit, Tsimshian, and Haida — for example ‘steamboat in the woods’ meaning ‘railroad train’ might have originated in North Coast use of Chinook Jargon.
I’ve never noticed words from those North Coast Indigenous languages coming into widely recognized CJ use, though. I can only think of the apparently Haida interjections that were conventionally used in the Victoria CJ songs collected & published by Franz Boas. (Search my website.) Even those don’t clearly carry any clearly understood meanings, outside of the Haida-speaking tribes.
Dave Robertson
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