Washington State University - Chinook Yearbook (Pullman, WA)

Page 12 text:

Chinook: The Indian Chinook is the best known and most widely used Indian word on the Pacific Coast of America. It origin¬ ated as the name of a tribe at the mouth of the Columbia River. Cap¬ tain Robert Gray, in discovering and naming the river on May 11, 1792, and Lieutenant W. R. Broughton, of the Vancouver expedition, who explored the river for a hundred miles in the same year, 1792, were probably the first white men to encounter the Chinooks. The Lewis and Clark ex¬ pedition spent the winter of 1805 to 1806 among those people and gave us the best early account of them. As knowledge of the Chinooks in¬ creased, it was found that their power and influence extended over many neighboring villages and tribes whose peoples spoke dialects of the same primitive language. Major J. W. Pow¬ ell, director of the bureau of American Ethnology, prepared a map of the ‘‘Linguistic Families of American Indians North of Mexico,” which appeared in the Annual Report for 1885-1886 and again (re¬ vised) in Bulletin 30, Handbook of American Indians. That map shows the Chinookan Linguistic Stock extending along the shores of the Columbia River from The Dalles to its mouth and thence along the coast to Willapa Bay on the north and Tillamook Head on the south. The principal chief of the original tribe and federation was Comcomly, who be¬ came famous at the time of the Astorians, following 1811. Early fishermen applied the name Chinook to the wonderful salmon (Oncor- hynchus chouicha) found in the Columbia River. The name was also applied to certain warm winds which melt the winter snows with remarkable rapidity. One of the most effective inter-racial trade languages produced in America is called the Chinook Jargon. It contains from 500 to 1000 words, about 200 being taken from the original Chinook language. In 1829, about four-fifths of the peoples of the Chinookan tribes lost their lives in an epidemic of fever. There are now but a few remnants of the tribes and those are living on the Yakima Reservation in Washington and on the Warm Springs and Grande Ronde Reservations in Oregon. We are indebted to Professor Edmond S. Meany, Head of the Department of History at the University of Washington . for the above article. Professor Meany is. without doubt, the greatest authority on Northwest history and he has kindly submitted this summary. Eight