Dale Kinkade’s 1963 dissertation shows there was no Chinook Jargon in Upper Chehalis country in the ?late 1700s?
M. Dale “Dale” Kinkade gave his 1963 PhD dissertation a very Dale title, very hard-nosed and direct:
Scene of a life and death encounter: Mud Bay, WA (image credit: Youtube)
It’s “Phonology and Morphology of Upper Chehalis“.
From the free translation of “The First White Men at Mud Bay”, pages 142ff, with my emphasis added in the form of colorization:
Free translation: A long time ago there were people living at Mud Bay. All at once they saw a canoe coming toward them, and the people were paddling backwards, and kept coming until they landed where the people were. Strange people — very strange people. And through signs with their hands, the Indians — the Upper Chehalis — came to understand what they wanted. And they made signs asking for their consent to camp on their land. And the Indians, by giving them signs, said it would be all right. And so they went on the other side of a point.
…because, the newcomers are obviously dead people, and it’s wrong for dead & living people to mix, the locals then kill them. (I was fascinated to learn that we can kill the dead.)
I don’t know a date for this first encounter, but I estimate the late 1700s, perhaps in connection with the 1792 explorations of Puget Sound by George Vancouver’s bunch.
Mud Bay is on Puget Sound.
Today’s text is a perfect nugget of first-contact levels of understanding across cultures in the Pacific NW: it’s not only languages that weren’t shared, it was mutual cultural assumptions that were also missing.
The above oral-history recollection is 100% typical of what we also know from written sources.
It actually took a bit of time for Indigenous PNW people and the Drifters (non-Indigenous newcomers) to achieve any consistent verbal understanding of one another.
In other words, and I’m saying this for the 100th time, if we go by the available data such as elders’ testimony, there was no Chinook Jargon nor any other pidgin language in the PNW prior to 1794.
