Do we really believe there was a Jargon phrase “lám pi tsə́qw”?
At least as early as his 1884 edition, John K Gill of Portland included in his Chinook Jargon dictionary an entry <lum-pe-chuck> ‘grog’.
Also bullshit?
One doubts there were pre-mixed barrels labeled ‘grog’!
What a waste of valuable stowage space on a ship that would be.
Grog was mixed and served from separate tubs.
(image credit: The Daily Grind)
That’s lám pi tsə́qw, literally ‘alcohol and water’.
An accurate description of grog, and of ‘Indian rum’, the heavily watered-down rum that Euro-American traders routinely gave to Indigenous people of the Pacific NW coast in early decades of contact, (1) as an expected pre-trading gift, (2) to put Native people at a disadvantage by disorienting them, and (3) as an article of trade that was inexpensive to the shipborne merchants.
About this, see: James R Gibson. 1992. “Otter skins, Boston ships, and China goods: The maritime fur trade of the Northwest coast, 1785-1841”, pages 224-226.
Gibson has found that the same set of traders also watered down the much-south item, molasses, in comparable way, referring to this among themselves as ‘Indian molasses’.
Do we really think, however, that these New England sharpies (they were mostly from there, and largely lived up to that region’s reputation for commercial intensity) went around telling the Indigenous folks, “Oh, that’s just Indian rum / watered-down rum”, and so on? Or admitted that “this here is watered-down molasses”?
Nah. Your BS detector should be buzzing real loud here. The people who were told they were drinking diluted rum were non-Indigenous sailing crews, and they didn’t have to be spoken to in Jargon, just English.
I sure suspect JK Gill invented <lum-pe-chuck>. The actual word used was simply <lum> (lám). It was so universally known that we find this descendant of English “rum” borrowed into a number of PNWC tribal languages.
There’s nobody else in the Chinuk Wawa universe that documented a term for ‘grog’. And that is because there wasn’t one in reality.
𛰅𛱁𛰃𛱂 𛰙𛱁𛱆𛰅𛱁 𛰃𛱄𛰙𛰃𛱄𛰙? qʰáta mayka tə́mtəm?
kata maika tumtum? Qu’en penses-tu?
What do you think?
And can you say it in Chinuk Wawa?
Hey! Teach Yourself northern-dialect Chinook Jargon!
And join free Zoom sessions…currently Sundays @ 9AM!
Contact me for the Zoom link.
Another possibility is that Gill’s anglophone Jargon speaking consultant Rev W. C. Chattin was the source. Not sure what if any practical proficiency Gill himself (founder of J K Gill bookstore in Portland, now long gone but THE bookstore and stationary supply store in Portland when I was a kid) ever achieved. According to the intro of the 7th ed. of his dictionary (pp 3-4): “Our firm purchased the copyright of the Chinook Dictionary from S. J. McCormick, who published several editions in Portland previous to 1880. … At that time also, Rev. W. C. Chattin, who for twenty years had been a missionary among different tribes of the Northwest, gave us the advantage of his experience in the use of Chinook among our Indians.” I haven’t followed up Chattin’s story beyond finding some online mentions: among them an 1867 report by him to the Secretary of the Interior, identifying him as a teacher at Skokomish Indian School, W. T.
Excellent point, thank you Henry. Chattin has been a bit elusive from us, partly due to the many misspellings of his name in print as “Chaltin”, “Chatten”, and so on.