1857, WA: Earliest “Stick Indians”
The earliest “Stick Indians”? Report No. 135 from Bellingham Bay Agency, Washington Territory, in the 1858 Report_of_the_Secretary_of_the_Interior of the USA is from E.C. Fitzhugh, Special Indian Agent.
Lake Whatcom, WA (image credit: Wikipedia)
Fitzhugh, on page 617, makes the earliest reference I know to “Stick Indians”, who were known tribes rather than mythical beings:
In our immediate vicinity, directly interior, we have
part of two tribes called the Neuk-wers [dxʷʔaha] and Sia-man-mas [Samish?]; these we
call Stick Indians. They live on the lakes back — Whatcom and Sia-
man-na lakes-and their tributaries. They have very little inter-
course with the Salt-chuck Indians, and never had seen a white man
in 1852, when the first settlers came to this bay, and did not even
then come down for a year after.They dress in skins and blankets, made of dogs’ hair and feathers,
of their own manufacture. They have had no muskets until the last
three years. They cultivate small patches of potatoes, but subsist
principally on elk, deer, and fish and dried berries.
(The Lushootseed-speaking dxʷʔaha a.k.a. Nuwhaha people, signatories of the Stevens Treaties, were also referred to inaccurately as the Stick Samish, as if they were a forest division of the Straits Salish-speaking Xws7ámesh)/Samish.)
It’s not hard to see why stik-sawash (forest Native people) was the word for remoter inland tribes. The primary distinction anyone made in Chinook Jargon-speaking contexts was between saltsəqw-sawash (coast Native people who were usually the first in contact with Whites) and everyone else.
It’s equally easy to see how stik-sawash soon got conflated with existing Indigenous knowledge of dangerous beings who lived in the interior forested uplands.
