Does Métis/Canadian French “moucher” bust another Chinook Jargon myth?
My French-speaking friends are already laughing. It feels like extra work sometimes, to a scholar, but we really have to re-check other researcher’s claims.
Some folks have suspected that the well-known Klondike Gold Rush-era, and later Alaskan, sled-dog command mush! has its etymology in Chinook Jargon.
Did I mention that French moucher means ‘to blow the nose’,
and is related to Central Chinuk Wawa lemushwe ‘handkerchief’?
(Image source: Youtube)
But in my career of research, I’ve found extremely little indication that CJ played a significant role in the Klondike, or in the Yukon Territory, or in interior Alaska.
Granted, surely some who came from the USA to that gold rush replicated what had happened in the 1850s Fraser River rush, where many assumed they would be able to speak Chinook Jargon with the Indigenous people —
But those people had not previously heard that language.
Let’s examine the mush! claim by peeking into one of my favorite reference works.
In John Francis McDermott’s brief but splendid “A Glossary of Mississippi Valley French” (St Louis, MO, Washington University, 1941), on page 105, we have this entry:
moucher, v. intr. To travel by sled dogs.
Originally mouche (“go fast”) was a term of command to sled dogs; by extension it came to mean to travel by sled dogs. Consult Nute, Voyageur, 96.
Huh! Is this the source of the famous sled-dog command, “mush!”?
McDermott’s reference is Grace Lee Nute, The Voyageur, 1931…
So, let’s look at page 96 of her excellent book (which is worth your reading all of it!):
Customs developed in this kind of travel just as in canoeing, and the voyageur built up his own vocabulary. Thus, to “mouche” meant for a dog to increase his speed.
Seems simple. Mouche = “mush!” Yeah? That’s a neat new word discovery for us.
But I have to point out — nowhere in Nute’s book does the infinitive French verb *moucher occur. McDermott has fiddled with the data, making a possibly unsupported inference.
So this mouche may very well be an interjection, or something else, instead. Is it metaphorical, from the noun (une) mouche ‘(a) fly’ (the insect)?
I don’t know. Let’s duly note that Nute doesn’t cite her source for mouche. So she’s also open to some skepticism here.
Well then, the eye drifts to the bottom of the page and continues on into the next one; Nute also tells us: “To stop was “wo“”…
…or “who“; to turn right “Yé” or “y’ui“; to turn left “chaw” or “cha“; and to start was “marche.”
This marche command (also given to horses as far as we understand things) is what we’ve always supposed to be the source of both Chinook Jargon’s másh ‘to leave; to throw away’ etc. and the Yukon sled-dog term mush.
At this point I’m grateful for all of the new information, but thinking the Yukon mush! may well have come from the predominantly English-speaking 1890s gold rushers hearing both mouche & marche from their more experienced Métis/Canadian colleagues, and conflating them into a single form.
It isn’t hard for me to imagine Anglophones presuming mouche to be a French-accented pronunciation of “mush”, and marche does resemble “mush” phonetically.
Similarly, I understand that there were rather few Métis/Canadians in the Yukon, especially as compared with the Indigenous population. So it seems possible to me that mouche & marche could have been mushed up 😁 together by Native people, many of whom worked with and for the goldrushers.
In any case I stand by my conclusion that mush! didn’t come from Chinuk Wawa.
It’s a relative of it, though.
Bonus fact:
Those voyageur commands for ‘stop’, ‘left’, and ‘right’ sure look related to English whoa!, gee!, and haw!
