Early days in Salish linguistics: you had your “Salt Water” Selish, your “Horse” Selish (Nisqually), your “Kwillehiut” Selish (the unrelated Quileutes!), your Yakama Snohomish Selish (the unrelated Sahaptians!), and such.
Lee & Frost’s “Clatsop” brief vocabulary list in “Ten Years in Oregon” (1844) is indeed Chinookan, but it’s Lower Chinookan as spoken with the White missionaries.
Perfetly typical for a bustling big city after frontier times, this Seattle newspaper needed to explain Chinuk Wawa words to its readers.
A prolific genre was enriched by a talented painter.
Here’s a rare type of song in Chinuk Wawa…
Irishman Michael Cowley was a very early pioneer in the area of Spokane in far eastern Washington.
I’ve snipped several fascinating sections of a Fraser River gold rusher’s personal narrative.
Another connection between the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and Chinuk Wawa.
One of the words for an ‘elder’ in the Umatilla Sahaptin-language dictionary surprised me.
The infamous bawdy Pacific Northwest folk song…
