Already looking back (to 1840) in 1877 Oregon
An unsigned but no doubt genuine memory of quite early Settler days naturally makes use of plenty Chinuk Wawa!
The Jargon is, by definition, the early-creolized variety associated with Fort Vancouver.
Both that Fort and its master are both mentioned by their Chinook Jargon names in the following…
Robert Shortess was in this meeting at Champoeg (image credit: Wikipedia)
Early Times in Oregon.
What a time we had in the early days of Oregon Territory? Mills, there were few; and as a consequence, flour was not to be had in many sections of the Willamette valley at all. Dr. [John] McLaughlin had a fine mill at Oregon City, or as we often called it, the “Falls,” or more often, “Tum Water.” Jo. Gale had a “rattle trap” in Tualatin Plains. There was a small mill at Chemeketa, now Salem, known as the “Boston” Mission Mills, in contradistinction to the “Puisuke” — French — Mission Mills, in French Prairie. There was also a small mill, on a branch flowing from a small lake near the Willamette river, below Chemawa or the old Methodist Mission, above Matheny’s ferry. This old mill was, as we used to called it, “hias cultus;” but anything that would “crush wheat” was a mill. To think of this old mill, then, and of Kinney’s Mills at Salem, now, makes me think of Shakespeare’s comparison,
“Look at that picture,
And then at this!”A large majority of the emigrants had no flour. They lived on boiled wheat, boiled peas, boiled potatoes, and an occasional meal of beef, sometimes deer, once in a while, a “bar.” [bear] Their cabins were small, of fir logs, and puncheon floors, or very often God’s own naked footstool; and, on the “naked dirt” floors we spread down our 4½ point blankets, Hudson’s Bay blankets, which we had bought of Ermatinger, at the Falls, or, not unfrequently, we bought them at Cachutehut, or “Old Man Dr.‘s” — Dr. McLaughling [SIC], at Fort Vancouver. We sold our wheat universally, to the Company, foa [for] one dollar per bushel, while the Company had an existence.
HOW WE MANAGED SOME THINGS.
Wo had a few cows, American, but mostly Spanish. These last we had to tie, head and feet they kicked like ‘ell! and would hook, fight, and even bite, still, we milked ’em. We had to throw a Iasso over their horns and haul ’em up to a post, tie and milk ’em. This was fun for the boys, and merry lasses then. The milk was rich, as the cows had all the bunch grass they could eat. We had a few American horses, but most of the horses we used, were white eyed, sore-nosed, Cayuses. Some of they [SIC] were good horses, and some not — they would kick, bite, fight, and jump stiff legged! It was fun to ride one of these, especially for a dyspeptic. Sometimes it was necessary to look out for a soft place to fall, just as you straddled one. The fashion, learned from the Spaniards and Indians, was a “lope.” Some Cayuses would lope 40 or 50 miles in a day; and a few might lope all day under the shade of a big oak. After riding all day, one could eat boiled wheat and milk with an appetite like a sawmill. We had butter, pretty good, too; and flour and potatoes, and lots of other garden truck, for nearly all of us brought garden seeds “the plains across.” Feather beds were rare; a rough bedstead, with some straw on it, a 4½ point blanket on that, and another over us, made a magnificent sleeping apartment.
When we went courting — for people, even in those early days, did such things — we rode a white-eyed, sore-nosed, “cultus cuitan,” with rawhide saddle, bridle and lasso. The bit of the bridle was generally a Spanish bit, that would kill the Old Scratch, if put into his mouth; wooden stirrups, a horsehair sinch [cinch]; and over all these, rider and all, was a blanket with a hole in it, through which the head of the rider protruded. The suit, if you call it such, was a Hudson Bay pair of pants big enough for “ole man Dr.,” or sometimes buckskin; Hudson Bay shoes or moccasins, with rawhide bottoms; a Hudson Bay check shirt, and a hat that a Philadelphia lawyer couldn’t describe, made up the suit that we went wooing in; and, wo[o]ed and won, for we had then the finest girls in creation! They looked at a young man’s heart, not his “rig.”
THE SMITH FAMILY.
There were, in those days’ some great men, with great names, as: Blubber-Mouth, Two-Story, Noisy, Bed-Shirt, Skin-Flint, Bottle-Nosed, Three Fingered, God-Almighty — well know[n] in the Tualatin Plains — Blossom-End, Rot-Gut, Duck-Legged — Smith. These great men, each great in his own department, have written their names in Oregon’s history.
WE WERE HONEST THEN.
In those days man’s word for so many bushels of wheat, was good. We were hospitable, whole-souled; there was no aristocracy among us; we “were all alike — a brotherhood — I mean, the most of us. We attributed this friendly feeling to the fact that lawyers, preachers, and doctors were few, and these few “laid low and kept dark,” mostly. — [The Willamette] Farmer.
— from the Olympia (Washington Territory) Washington Standard of January 13, 1877, page 1, column 5
It seems pretty likely to me that this article had the same author as my blog’s 1877 “Oregon As It Was: By an Old Pioneer (Big Métis-Grand Ronde Connection)“.
Perhaps these are the words of very early (1840) pioneer Robert Shortess (1797-1878).
