1868, Tongass Island, AK: An early “siwash style”
This has to be one of the first printed occurrences of “siwash” as a word for ‘camping out’.
Unlike a LOT OF other Chinook Jargon loans into Pacific NW English, this one doesn’t involve a change of syntactic category.
Lingít people at Fort Tongass, 1868, photographed by the legendary Eadweard Muybridge (image credit: Wikipedia)
By that I mean, the English speakers didn’t turn the CJ noun “siwash” (sáwásh ‘Indigenous person’) into anything besides a noun, in this instance.
An illustration of that frequent change of categories would be “potlatch” (pá(t)lach ‘to give’), which went from being a Chinuk Wawa verb to a Settler-colonizer English noun for a Native giveaway, and even for a ‘party’.
So today’s example is out of the ordinary — and maybe that’s because it was such a new loan at the time, and hadn’t had time to mutate.
A bit later on, folks did mutate this same word “siwash”, creating the regional English verb “siwashing (it)”, to also mean ‘camping out’.
This clipping is from a US soldier’s letter datelined Tongass Island in the newly acquired Alaska Territory, building the short-lived US Army Fort Tongass adjacent to a Lingít (a.k.a. Tlingit) village.
He was homesick for Washington Territory’s relative comfort:
For the present, we have not so
much as a board floor allowed us. The
atmosphere is so excessively damp, in
the absence of fire in our tents, that it
permeates clothes, blankets, every-
thing. You ought to see us, in true
siwash style, huddling in groups
around our camp-fires. It is absolutely
impossible, in our present state, to read
or write. My fingers are now so cold
that I can scarcely write intelligibly.
— from “From Alaska Territory”, in the Olympia (Washington Territory) Pacific Tribune of January 25, 1868, page 2, column 2
This phrase wasn’t necessarily of very specific meaning. Later occurrences of “siwash style” don’t necessarily refer to sleeping outdoors. They include:
- an 1894 Chehalis, WA young man raising a profane tussle “in first-class siwash style“;
- a Chehalis clambake “served in true siwash style” in 1901;
- and a salmon “cooked in the good old Siwash style” in the San Juan Islands in 1909.
