1853-54, Puget Sound: Lt. William P. Trowbridge diary
William Petit Trowbridge (1828-1892), my fellow Columbia University Lion, did some coastal surveying work in the Pacific Northwest during the frontier era.
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“Blue men” and Gaelic?
I’ve previously written that Pacific Islanders and African-Americans were seen as “blue men” by Indigenous Pacific Northwesterners…
1871: A Negro boot-black (& a missing pidgin)
There’s at least one pidgin missing from the flock of languages in this astonished mention of a Portland Black man.
How did it come to happen that ‘happen’ came from ‘come’?
Do you know how to say ‘happen’ in Chinuk Wawa?
1848: Allen, “Ten Years in Oregon: Travels and Adventures of Dr. E. White and Lady”
Here’s a wonderful book to read. Quite the palate cleanser, after slogging through Herbert Beaver’s letters, but that’s another story.
1888: California CPE doggerel: Ah Sing on Ah Ben
Much as African-American English was, Chinese Pidgin English was used a great deal in 19th-century US popular culture, always for comic effect, and usually by someone costumed as a Chinese person.
Robert K. Beecham, the Canadian “Chinook poet” of Everett
Robert K. Beecham (1838-1920), born in New Brunswick, served in a Wisconsin division in the US Civil War, moved to Everett, Washington in 1894 — which is a telling detail.
Pioneer Nig Saul
At points offensive, but well worth quoting in full, is this nationally circulated rare biographical remembrance of a very early African-American settler and Jargon speaker on the Lower Columbia.
B.C. Black History, Indigenous race relations, plus Bostons & Chinese
Mifflin Wistar Gibbs (1823-1915) was a remarkable person.
Black and blue, Kanaka too! An Indigenous metaphor
For years I labored under the distorted impression that Hawaiians employed by the Hudsons Bay Company in the Pacific Northwest had been known as “blue boys”…