1913, northwest Alaska doggerel: “Songs of the Neukluk”
Found in a privately published book, “Songs of the Neukluk“, by Ewen MacLennan and Charles Wilbert Snow, which I bet was funded by someone’s gold finds.
I won’t reproduce all 4 pages of the poem “Mariar Jane” (pages 12-15), because this technically comes from outside of Chinook Jargon country.
Being set in Council, Alaska, in the Nome area, this stuff is well beyond Eyak country, which I’ve declared the furthest northwest reach of Chinuk Wawa.
But if you click to go read the whole thing, you’ll recognize a ton of Jargon words being used, Robert Service- or Jack London-style, for frontiersy effect:
MARIAR JANE
I hadn’t seen Old Scroggins since along in ninety eight,
I just come down from Hunker, on the day he pulled his freight
Out of Dawson, down the Yukon, in an old Lake Bennett boat
With his dogs and other plunder, about all his craft would tote.
The main ante in the jack-pot was a dimmyjohn of hootch,
And the second in the ratin’ wuz his faithful pockmarked klootch,
His “long-haired tillicum“, Mariar Jane, from down the Yukon Flats;
They wuz a pretty average couple, though they had their family spats.
The Siwash matron never talks of “goin” home to Ma’,
And I reckon that her family ties, down on the Tanana
Cut no figger with Mariar, but she shore wuz glad to go;
P’r’aps the upper river salmon did’nt taste like them below.
Scroggins, too, wuz glad to “klatawa“, and he tole me mighty plain…
(Etc.)
