1890: “The Pioneers of Polk” sing in Jargon
Sounds like a great time was had at the first Polk County Pioneer Association reunion in 1890, the year the frontier closed.
Polk County, Oregon, including Grand Ronde Indian Reservation, is within the dotted lines (Image credit: Google Maps)
The first evening of the get-together featured the clever idea of several “tableaux” (scenes) re-enacting frontier-era life, including a “ladies’ working bee”. A “bee” in 1800s America was a social gathering to get a lot work done, while having an enjoyable time as well.
It closed, as so often happened, with the sentimental gesture of singing in Chinuk Wawa.
The entire article that this comes from is very fun to read — click the link below — but I’m just reproducing this bit:
The fourth and last scene was two Indian men and three Indian women singing a Chinook jargon [song], which created considerable merriment, and concluded the exercises for the evening. Then we all went to our resting places.
— from “The Pioneers of Polk” in the Salem (OR) Evening Capital Journal of September 16, 1890, page 4, columns 2-3
Maybe I need to explain that the “Indians” onstage were probably White people, presumably elder Settlers. There’s some chance that folks from Grand Ronde Indian Reservation, which is in Polk County (as the map above shows), were invited, but these oldtimers’ parties were normally a White people’s club.
Chinook Jargon routinely drew reactions of strong nostalgia from Whites by 1890 in Oregon, where it had come to be less used between Natives and newcomers than it was in the past.
I’m always really curious, when these old reports mention someone singing in Chinook, what song or hymn it was. And was it something the singer or their family had made up, or learned from someone Native, or gotten from one of the few printed sources? Maybe some further research into local people’s diaries and so on will give us answers…
