1855, WA Territory: More Indian Murders — Prospects of a General War
North-central Washington Territory in 1855 was a dangerous place to be a miner.
The Palouses, Yakamas, and “Isledeperies” (Isle-de-Pierre, Rock Island in the middle Columbia River; the Sinkiuse a.k.a. Moses-Columbia Salish) were reported to be violently hostile to non-Indigenous people intruding on their lands.
By this time, a few folks from those tribes could speak Chinook Jargon.
The language had begun to expand from its lower Columbia homeland to become a means of communication between those Native peoples and the ever more numerous Settlers.
The news report that I’m referring to today speaks more than once of these tribes telling of threatened and actual killing of “Bostons”, i.e. White people.
When a Mr. Mattice of Olympia was robbed and killed by some Sinkiuses, a Spokan(e) tribe couple who had witnessed this hurried to tell some Settlers, but this was hard to accomplish:
The Spokan
Indian and his squaw could neither one speak
the Chenook sufficiently well to make them-
eelves understood. Judge [B.F.] Yantis and his par-
ty could none of them understand the Spokan
or the Isledeperies language, and could not
therefore make out what these Indians desired
to communicate to them, except that a Boston
had been killed by Indians.
— from the Portland (Oregon Territory) Oregonian of September 22, 1855, page 2, columns 1-2
This was a fraught time in Pacific Northwest history.
The Stevens Treaties had just been concluded, involving significant amounts of misunderstanding due to Chinook Jargon still not being widely known beyond the lower Columbia.
Thus, “Indian wars” broke out on the Coast and in the Interior, including the one I’ve just alluded to above.
These were not very good conditions for encouraging communication between cultures.
How often, and how well, do people learn a language because they’re angry enough to kill those they’d be talking with?
Bonus fact:
The Sinkiuse Salish, we’re told, used to inhabit the Umatilla Valley, Oregon, which faces the general area of the modern Tri-Cities, Washington across the Columbia River.
The name “Sinkiuse” is thought to reflect that fact — so I guess it may reflect the neighboring tribe name, the Cayuse.
That word became commonly used in Chinook Jargon for a ‘pony’.
And that word has been suggested as being Salish for ‘spotted face’ by Dr Sally Thomason. (Think of the locally originated breed, Appaloosa ponies.)
For me, it’s very compelling to find that we may know which specific Salish people lived on the Columbia River in longstanding contact with Oregon and Washington Sahaptins, Cayuses, Nez Perces, and Upper Chinookans.
The Nxa’amxcin (Moses-Columbia) Salish language of the Sinkiuses may thus be our best historical clue to understanding some of the word borrowing that went on among all those languages.
Some of those long-shared words eventually wound up in Chinook Jargon, perhaps including our words for ‘9’, ‘6’, and of course ‘pony’.
