1856, OR: Wake Quash is rejected
I don’t know the full background on this one, but the person with the pen name “Wake Quash” must have been so named for their boldness.
Readers understood. The name isn’t translated on the newspaper page.
“Wake Quash” = wík k’wásh = ‘not afraid’ in the Southern Dialect of Chinook Jargon.
The spellings used for CJ here were probably invented on the spot, as there were exceedingly few published dictionaries of the language in existence yet.
The object of contempt (image credit: Oregon Encyclopedia)
The “ass-a-hell Bush-eye” referred to is a competing printer, Asahel Bush (1824-1913).
Now, from quite an early frontier-era Oregon Territory newspaper, this:
“Wake Quash” is rejected. We cannot
let down the character of our paper by pub-
lishing such unmeaning, harsh words as
“ass-a-hell,” “Busheye,” &c., &c. The
name properly written conveys an idea of
so much that is corrupt, that the bare men-
tion of it makes a virtuous man crawl all
over. You can sink him no lower in pub-
lie estimation by piling on such epithets,
while you could sink our paper by getting
us to publish them.
— “To Correspondents”, in the Oregon City (Oregon Territory) Oregon Argus of April 26, 1856, page 2, column 5
