1903: Oregon Indigenous baseball doggerel
This vintage baseball item fits in our “Chinook Jargon-related doggerel” file; look for the Wawa component!
How come?
Sam Morris was a young Indigenous (Nez Perce) baseball star from Oregon, along with a Grand Ronde guy named Joseph Teabo:
(From this source:
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Baseball/oJuwTnbkmUMC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22sam+morris%22+baseball&pg=PA384&printsec=frontcover)
So that’s the Native, and Chinook Jargon, connection here.
This is the locally published poem celebrating Sam Morris’s athletic skills, albeit in a way that’s conventionally racist for 1903:
Every Indian in his tepee
Felt uncomfortably creepy,
For the prophet of the tribe was on the
stump;
Who, on pondering his matter,
Thus began his wordy clatter,
And he emphasized the starting with a
thump.
“I can see the paleface coming from every
point around,
And he’s crowding out the Indian to the
happy hunting ground;
We shall lose our broad possessions and be
penned in a reserve,
And they’ll try to civilize us, a fate we
don’t deserve.
When some small dispute arises we won’t
settle it by fight,
But in tedious litigation to the lawyers’
great delight;
We who’ve roamed the wide states over
shall be wards of Uncle Sam,
And his agents men who know that wool is
useless to a lamb.
Thus our sons shall live as subjects till a
day in Nin[e]teen-three,
When a youth shall rise to save us and the
whites his glory see;
He shall take them in their stronghold and
shall bring them into camp,
While the crowd shall shake the bleachers
as their wild applause they stamp.
His name will be Sam Morris, I hear it in
their shout”-
Here the prophet sank exhausted, for his
pipe had flickered out.
And the redskins were contented with this
ending to the story,
For the scion of their chieftain’s house re-
gained the race’s glory;
But had the wily prophet just prepared an-
other pill
The vision he’d have visioned would have
made him very ill;
He’d have seen the brave young tyee, with
an eye described as ory.
A-heading for the skookum house, despite
his bunch of glory,
And the prophet would have profited by
noting this thing down:
“You may paint your faces all you please,
but never paint the town.
“The Pitcher That Went Too Often” Morning Oregonian of September 18, 1903, page 6, column 7
(https://oregonnews.uoregon.edu/lccn/sn83025138/1903-09-18/ed-1/seq-6/#words=Often+Pitcher+Too+Went)
