In the Nakusp (BC) Ledge, September 12, 1895, a leisurely installment of “Odd Talks with Old-Timers” hears out an unnamed Cariboo pioneer, possibly the newspaper’s editor. This old codger of a first-person narrator recalls… Continue reading
(Notice how I’m indulging in exclamations this week?!)
H.L. Mencken‘s famous 1945 book on “The American Language” (Supplement 1) gets into the subject of Chinook Jargon’s influence on our English, on pages 310-311. I hear a wisely skeptical voice in his… Continue reading
Just to bring alive for you one of the uses we talk about the Jargon having–a “token of pioneer identity”, a “badge of Northwesternness”–I give you the following correspondence, nine letters that were… Continue reading
Blazing the Way: Or, true stories, songs and sketches of Puget Sound and other pioneers. By Emily Inez Denny. Seattle: Rainier Printing Company, Inc. 1909. I enjoyed noticing on page 33 of this… Continue reading
The Tilikums of Elttaes were “a bunch of boosters“. Do you know more about them? Add it in a comment. Their early 20th-century organization was headed by a Hyas Tyee or Tyee Kopa Konaway. It… Continue reading
I mentioned that you find the coolest, un-indexed Chinook Jargon words scattered through all sorts of other materials. Those words can tell you a lot of surprising stories about how CJ was being… Continue reading
This blog post is fondly dedicated to the memory of M. Dale Kinkade. Hull, Lindley M. 1929. A history of central Washington: Including the famous Wenatchee, Entiat, Chelan and the Columbia Valleys/ With… Continue reading
Four Years in British Columbia and Vancouver Island: An Account of Their Forests, Rivers, Coasts, Gold Fields and Resources for Colonisation By Richard C. Mayne. London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1862. More or less a… Continue reading
Probably one of the most visible pop-culture uses of the Chinook Jargon word “Potlatch” was this #99 hit by the Native American band Redbone: (Their drummer was from Neah Bay.) It wasn’t as… Continue reading
