OR, BC: Reinhart’s “The Golden Frontier…1851-1869”

My thanks go to Gaye Schafer for sharing this book of her ancestor’s frontier-era memories of Oregon, and other Pacific NW areas.

Today I’m discussing “The Golden Frontier: The recollections of Herman Francis Reinhart, 1851-1869” (Austin, TX: University of Texas, 1962).

Reinhart was an immigrant from Germany; the way he spelled and phrased things in his massive diaries reflects that, as you’ll be seeing. 

On pages 23-24, in 1851, in the area of modern Merrill, Oregon (central Oregon, right on the California border), the overland emigrant party including Reinhart encounter Chinuk Wawa speakers, but they’re not Klamath-Modoc tribal locals:

We saw that there were at least 60 or 75 of them, all well mounted and well armed with Rifles and Revolvers, coming full tilt on the run…they commenced to call “Klahiram! Close Klahiram!” and Capt. [Cornelius Joel] Hill[s] understood the Chinook Indian language for “How do do! Good How do do!” and recognized them as friendly Kijus and Klickatat Indians. When they got up to us they jumped off their horses and shook hands with us and said they were General [Joel] Palmer‘s scouts and Body Guards and hunters…that they were hunting and that Genl. Palmer was at Yreka, California, about 60 miles off by trail…the friendly Indians escorted us a few miles acrost the Stone Crossing or Naturell Bridge of Lost River, then bid us “Highip close Klyhiram,” which means “a very Good By.” 

The editors of the book suggest in a footnote that Reinhart’s German-looking “Kijus” = an upper Rogue River tribe, “Kuitsh”, but they’re wrong; “Kuitsh” is in fact a spelling of “Coos”, as in the people of Coos Bay down on the coast. Instead, I imagine Reinhart is repeating what the more experienced Oregon hands around him, such as Captain Hills, were saying about “Cayuse” people. As a cheechako (newcomer), however, Reinhart seems to have confused the much-spoken-of Cayuse, who had recently (1847) been in a war against White settlement, with someone more friendly to the US government!

For that matter, it’s not clear to me that Joel Palmer actually was, or would ever have been, in the Yreka, California area in 1851. Reinhart wrote all of this down years after the fact. Who knows how exact his memory was. But he accurately quotes Chinuk Wawa, and in his own oddball spellings, which suggests eyewitness knowledge.

An additional point — in 1851, Yreka wasn’t necessarily known yet by that name. Similarly, page 25’s mention of heading toward “the Siskiyou Mountain” can be suspected as renaming at a later date, because the earliest that we find “Siskiyou” as a place name is a little later, when the county of that name was formed in California. In other words, Reinhart is helping his readers by giving things names that became well-known after he had been in the region. 

A venerable Pacific NW institution is referenced on page 27, Mexican packers. These were the folks you paid to carry your stuff on mule- and horseback over the long distances between sites of economic activity such as mines, ranches, and so on. The De[sj]ar[lai]s Brothers, encountered in Minersville, CA, “had all Mexicans to work for them.” Mexican packers ranged well north into British Columbia within a few years, and a few words of their Spanish remained as borrowings into Northern-dialect Chinook Jargon and some Indigenous languages. 

The first overt mention of Chinook Jargon by Reinhart is on page 56, where in 1852 in the Umpqua Valley area of southwest Oregon, 

The settlers of Oregon and all the Pacific States had many of them learned this jargon or Chinook talk or tongue and all the young folks tried to speak it as a secret way of sly speaking because so few could speak it, and us boys in the Oregon mines used to speak it and it caused a great deal of fun, for if you did not sound certain letters right it would give it a vulgar meaning in English, and many would do so a-purpose. I became quite proficient at it and we talked it to all the Indians around us who had learned it. (Captain Hill[s] spoke it to the Modocs at the Pitt River Valley when we crosed the plains a year before.)

I’m trying to figure out which words you can mispronounce in Chinuk Wawa to give an obscene English meaning…

In 1854, in the Mussel Creek area (between Gold Beach and Port Orford on the southern Oregon coast), page 80 tells us of some people who probably grew up speaking creolized Chinuk Wawa: 

My nearest neighbors north was nearly three miles at the foot of the Humboldt [Humbug] Mountains. They were, one Frenchman named Francis Richards [François Richard?], and his five partners were half-breed Indians. They spoke French, English, and Jargon or Chinook…The half-breeds’ names were Allix [Alexandre] and Frank [François] Purier [Poirier], John [Charles?] and Peter [Pierre] Grosluis [Groslouis], and Antoine Murain [Morin?]…Three of them…had made some twenty thousand dollars and went down to French Prairie in the Willamette Valley, Oregon, where their parents lived and where themselfs were raised.

Reinhart makes it sound as if he also learned to speak some Oregon Coast Athabaskan (Tolowa?); on page 84, he says the approximately 12-year-old son of a nearby Native family “learned me a great deal of the Indian language, so that in seven or eight months I could talk quite well enough to be understood by them.” This would make Reinhart a rare Settler indeed, but we already knew that non-Indigenous people grasped some basic facts about Tolowa, routinely removing the suffix -tene ‘people’ from tribes’ names and then often turning the remnant into something English- or Chinuk Wawa-sounding. An example of this is on page 85, where Reinhart tells us “He said he was a Mackinoo Indian, and lived high up on Rogue River, and the Mussel Creek Indians were their enemies and would kill him.” This “Mackinoo”, a footnote tells us accurately enough, “probably refers to the Mikono tunne who were members of the Tututni tribe.” Another example, already known to us from other sources, is on page 94 where Reinhart refers to a tribe as the “Yewkas”, cf. his earlier “Yuka” for the card game euchre, and the modern place-name spelling, Euchre Creek.  

On page 115, we find Reinhart heading to BC’s Fraser River for the gold rush that had broken out. He’s going overland, from The Dalles, Oregon up northward through Washington Territory. A complication arose that May at Fort Simcoe in the Yakama (Yakima) region of Washington:

One of the officers of the fort had a target gun and as the chief’s son was patting his back at them, took an elevated shot at him. He was 800 yards off, and when he fired, the chief fell, and the Indians carried him further back, out of reach of the Boston gun. Soldiers were called “Bostons” by the northern Indians all through British Columbia. 

That’s a little garbled, as well. The only Americans (which is the core meaning of Bostons) in BC at the time were miners, not soldiers. The word was also used generically for all Whites, by many speakers of Chinook Jargon. But on page 130, Reinhart himself specifies that “Bostons” means Americans.

Apparently also in 1858, on page 138 Reinhart stops off at Fort Hope, a Hudsons Bay Company post where

…several head men of their company had their squaws living with them. I saw plenty of children, quite white, red-haired, freckle-faced little Scotch fellows. Their mothers were squaws and could speak the Chinook, or Jargon language.

A nice point — there existed some kind of Métis community at Fort Hope, BC, that involved Jargon speakers.

This is a good moment for me to point out that HBC-associated people did already know Chinuk Wawa before the 1858 gold rush. They knew it from experience of the Fort Vancouver region, which stretched from French Prairie in Oregon up to Fort Langley in BC (built 1827), as well as of Fort Victoria in BC (built 1843), which had now become the fur-trade headquarters. The thing is, CW was not yet widely used outside of that region, until American miners suddenly showed up wanting to communicate with Indigenous people in a broader swath of BC.

Reaching Victoria in the same year, Reinhart finds that it’s already quite the intercultural crossroads. From pages 142-143: 

There were many Indians at Victoria, some belonged there, others from up north, where they were whiter and taller and goodlooking Indians. Most all of them could speak Chinook or Jargon, and all around their large huts, some built of lumber, there would be wooden figures carved to represent men, horses, dogs.

On page 144, Reinhart notices a ship arriving at Victoria from the Sandwich Islands (Hawai’i). “The ship had some Kanakas and Indians to lassoo the cattle on the dock”…That’s Pacific Islanders of course. 

And that’s about all for my spotlight on this tremendously fascinating book. Reinhart’s eye for detail makes this a heck of a rich read, and it’s been reprinted.