“Le pea-coat”, a Canadianism?
Once in a while I reencounter this rarish Chinook Jargon word that has always caused my brain a mild itch that I’ll get to momentarily: lapikwo “frock; short-coat” (as given in Father St Onge’s… Continue reading
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Father St Onge writes from his deathbed, in Jargon
A strangely unsung figure in Chinook Jargon history writes from his deathbed, in Jargon, in 1898. Father Louis-Napoléon St Onge, OMI (b. 1812), had apprenticed as a young missionary with the now better-known… Continue reading
Rudolf Wickberg: Ett blandspråk i nordamerikanska vestern
This looks like quite good Chinook Jargon information (it might help answer a recent question about how Scandinavians pronounced their CJ), but I’ll need a friend to translate it from this Swedish: The… Continue reading
The Ice-Caves of Washington Territory
“The Ice-Caves of Washington Territory” was an uncredited travel piece in the illustrious Bret Harte‘s Overland Monthly, volume 3, number 5, November 1869, pages 421-427. (Earlier in the same issue is an interesting article… Continue reading
Three Mox places, or, I digress
In a comment to my post about Molalla-area pioneers, Sara Palmer raised a question about an Olympic Peninsula place name: We see “Mox Chehalis” here in the south Sound as a road and watercourse… Continue reading
Molalla-area pioneers
I have readers who will take exception to the title “Our Proud Past” of the book where I found the following nuggets of Chinook Jargon. (It’s subtitled “A Compiled History of the Families… Continue reading
Gi-a-wak (doggerel)
“Should you ask me, whence these stories?” — H.W. Longfellow There’s evidence in the following “Song of Hiawatha” clone that Chinook Jargon lies beneath. For instance: You have the overt “Shaped his lips… Continue reading
Cree loan words into BC Chinook Jargon
Yesterday, in my article about Walter Moberly’s cool 1885 book “The Rocks and Rivers of British Columbia”, I asked about a word that some apparently Columbia River Shuswap (Kinbasket Secwepemc) guys used, likely… Continue reading
Kinbasket’s “Columbia River Shuswaps”, a railroad surveyor, and the Jargon
“The Rocks and Rivers of British Columbia” by the engineer/surveyor Walter Moberly (London: H. Blacklock & Co., 1885.) This is the sort of old Northwest book that’s not quite crammed full of the stuff… Continue reading
Blackfeet story
Around the turn of the century, as they used to call 1900, a lot of Indigenous people were recorded as talking a mixture of pidgin English and Chinook Jargon. Here’s an Okanagan… Continue reading