1884: “You don’t know the chances” in Victoria, BC…if you can talk some Chinuk Wawa
I wonder if this enthusiast about Victoria, British Columbia got his info about Chinook Jargon dictionaries from a speaker of CJ? 😁😁…
Take his words “The Chinook dialect has been printed” with a grain of salt to start with — it obviously references the proliferation of Chinuk Wawa dictionary pamphlets on the West Coast.
Image credit: Boston Business Printing
The attribution of those dictionaries to “somebody in Boston” is hilarious! No such Jargon stuff was published in Massachusetts. But of course, in Jargon, we call Americans bástən (‘Bostons’). And the dictionaries we’re talking about all came from the USA’s West Coast. At least until some enterprising Victoria merchants pirated them to make a buck!
(T.N. Hibben, I’m looking at you.)
“Those fellows” in the following are “natives”, mentioned in the previous sentence. I quite appreciate this guy’s accurate observation that the Indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest coast “are not poor”!
The
Chinook dialect has been printed, you
know, by somebody in Boston, and it is
easy to hire those fellows to work. A
dollar a day is big in their eyes. They
are not poor. You couldn’t bestow a
charity among 10,000 of them. And
they do like work, and the pay for it.
— from the Fort Benton (Montana Territory) River Press of November 12, 1884, page 2, column 2
