1883, Anacortes, WA: A number of northern canoes ‘n’ phrases
Local color!
Haida war canoe model, 1930s (image credit: Artemis Gallery)
“Northern canoes”, that is, Native folks from the north coast of British Columbia and/or Alaska, made an appearance at this little Washington coast town, and the Chinuk Wawa haggling began…
You’ll see that the editor didn’t need to add English translations. And his spellings were his own, indicating that he was writing stuff as he actually heard it spoken — he wasn’t copying from any book.
A number of northern canoes landed
on the beach in front of the ENTERPRISE
office Tuesday afternoon. The Indian
men had numbers of tenas canoes to sell,
and the squaws very pretty baskets of va-
rious kinds. A lively scene of barter en-
sued for half an hour or more between
the [Settler] ladies and children of Anacortes and
the Indian traders, in which the latter
had decidedly the advantage. The In-
dians understood very little English, and
the ladies scarcely any Chinook, neverthe-
less the conversation was very animated
and lively. Some disjointed sentences
floated through the ENTERPRISE windows,
such as “sitcum dollar,” “klum quarter,”
“chicamam,” “halo chicamum,” “kloo-
che,” “halo klooche,” “old skinflint !”
“hyas cultus klootchman,” etc.
— from the Anacortes (WA Territory) Northwest Enterprise of August 25, 1883, page 3, column 1
Helpful comments:
- The tenas (‘little’) canoes were probably carved models, a popular tourist curio.
- “sitcum dollar” = ‘half a dollar; 50 cents’, a super-common Jargon phrase.
- “klum quarter” = ‘three quarters; 75 cents’, also a common northern-dialect Jargon expression at the time.
- “chicamam” = ‘money’.
- “halo chicamum” = ‘no money; poor’.
- “klooche” = ‘good’.
- “halo klooche” = ‘bad; not good’. Typical of northern-dialect Jargon, using halo instead of wake to negate a predicate.
- “hyas cultus klootchman” = ‘very worthless woman’.
