Not from ‘chrism’
The Central and Southern Chinuk Wawa word for a ‘yellow / dun / buckskin-colored’ horse is likʰrem.
That’s not from a French word for ‘chrism’.
Image credit: LA Catholics
‘Chrism’ is a priest-blessed mix of oil and balsam that’s used in Catholic ceremonies. (See above.)
In French, it’s le chrême.
The 2012 Grand Ronde Dictionary offers that word as a partial explanation for the French masculine gender that we detect from the Chinook Jargon form, where li- correlates with le.
That explanation is offered because we might have expected the Jargon word to come from la crème, ‘cream’ — the dairy product. A feminine noun.
However, nowadays we have Wiktionary to inform us that crème is actually an adjective, and an invariable one, in French. It’s got the same form in both the feminine and the masculine.
So, as with the other horse-color words in Chinuk Wawa, what we have here is a masculine use of an adjective as a noun: ‘the cream(-colored) one’ (cheval ‘horse’).
FYI.
Pingback: Jump Off Joe! How’d that name happen? | Chinook Jargon