1827-1828: Edward Ermatinger’s York Factory Express journal, and lack of Chinook Jargon beyond Fort Vancouver

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My specialized book report on “Edward Ermatinger’s York Factory Express Journal: Being a Record of Journeys Made Between Fort Vancouver and Hudson Bay in the Years 1827-1828″ (published by the Royal Society of Canada in 1912, pages 67-132+map):

No Chinook Jargon; plenty of Métis/Canadian French.

Ermatinger’s abbreviation for “York Factory”,
reminiscent of Chinook Writing abbreviations decades later

This journal narrates fur-trade employee Ermatinger’s participation in the annual Express, which was the return of a given year’s furs from the Pacific Northwest to be sent to Hudson Bay Company headquarters in London, England.

Ermatinger was well-educated, knowing standard French, Italian, and Latin. (Page 68.)

From the first day of the Express, Ermatinger is orienting himself using the North American French names of locations, such as the Chûtes, and the next day the Prairie du Thé. All of these, he writes in standard French.

I feel pretty sure that page 72’s discussion of an “Indian Slave” on the lower Columbia is, contrary to the footnotes by Ermatinger’s descendant C.O. Ermatinger, about an enslaved Indigenous man, not a Slave(y) Athabaskan from the far north of Canada…

Here I should note that Ermatinger’s French spellings sometimes differ from standard ones, perhaps implying that he heard Canadian French as being very different from the standard, and perhaps reflecting a lack of access to any dictionary while occupied with the hard work of overland travel. An example of that is his Lac la Nane for ‘Nun Lake’, standardly Lac la Nonne.

Ermatinger uses, as I say, quite a lot of North American French words, such as battures on page 79 for ‘sandy/gravelly river “bottoms” ‘ — places where “the stream spreads out in numerous channels” as the footnote says. His journal is a gold mine of such terminology.

By about page 79, the Express crew are already outside any zone we might imagine to be connected with Chinook Jargon, and no mention has been made of that language. We can take this along with our existing evidence that CJ hadn’t gone into use beyond Fort Vancouver by 1827. It was still a local language of the far lower Columbia River then, 33 years after its earliest possible date of existence.

On page 83 is a nice instance of the word Bastonois, here used as a man’s name. This is Bostonnais, the French-Canadian word for ‘Americans’ that likely influenced Chinuk Wawa’s use of bástən to mean the same thing.

Page 103 has a footnote defining cassettes, a word that became Chinook Jargon’s term for any ‘box’, as “pine boxes 28 in. long, 16 in. wide, and 15 in. deep. They were very strongly constructed and proof against accident except fire.”

At the end of the publication, there’s a very useful map of “Routes Followed by Edward Ermatinger in 1827 and 1828”. Here’s the Pacific Northwest section:

íkta mayka chaku-kə́mtəks?
Ikta maika chako-kumtuks? 
What have you learned?
And, can you express it in Chinuk Wawa?

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