CHINOOKAN LANGUAGES. 



B7 



GiU (J. K.) — Continued. 



Gill title above), Mr. Gill writes me, iiuclerdato 

 of October 6, 1892, as follows : 



"As to my argument that the Jargon was of 

 an earlier date than 1820, 1 have to say that I 

 went rapidly last evening through my copy of 

 Jewitt's "Captive of Nootka" (1861), and 

 found scattered through the following words, 

 which I am sure have a relation more than 

 accidental to the present Chinook. 



"Jewitt uses the word 2)ou' for the firing of a 

 gun. He speaks of an edible root called qna- 

 noose and another, yaina. the latter doubtless 

 a form of kanias and the former probably of 

 kome, both of which roots are still eaten by 

 many of our primitive Indians. Ti/ee is identical 

 with the present word for the deity or any- 

 thing great. Pelth-pelth is evidently pil-pil; 

 peshak (bad) is also identical. Three other word.s 

 used b> Jewitt, kutsak, quahootze, and ahwelth, 

 are all rather familiar to me in sound, and if I 

 had time to hunt them up I believe I could 

 connect two of them with Chinook readily. 



"Now, I do not claim that the Chinook Jar- 

 gon originated at the mouth of the Columbia 

 River, where the Chinook Indians lived, but 

 that it was an intertribal language of quite 

 ancient date, and used at first by the coast 

 tribes, whose intercourse was much more fre- 

 quent than those of the interior. It spread by 

 the Columbia River and through waterways, at 

 last reaching the Rocky Mountains, and cov- 

 ered the coast from San Francisco Bay to the 

 Arctic. As the trading was done largelj' at 

 Nootka Sound a century ago, that language 

 would naturally be largely represented in such 

 a jargon, but the fact that the oldest white 

 people who have made any records of this 

 Oregon region have used tyee as a name for God, 

 chuck for water, A;Zosft« for good, etc., and that 

 the same things are found in the Nootka and 

 other northern tongues, other than the original 

 Jargon, seems to me only to prove my position. 

 Jewitt encountered these words as long ago aa 

 1803, which certainly gives me reason for my 

 theory that the Chinook is of an earlier date 

 than opponents concede. The whole of Jewitt's 

 narrative is so palpably that of a simple, old- 

 time sailor spinning his yarn, which bears 

 internal evidence of its truth, and which agrees 

 with established facts and circumstances on 

 this northwest coa.st, that it leaves us no doubt 

 as to the existence ot most of the things he 

 speaks of, though he was not a man of suffi- 

 cient observatiiui and experience to make the 

 best use of his opportunities. When he wrote 

 yaina for kamans it may have been days or 

 months from the time of hearing it, and wrote 

 his remembrance, perhaps, of a word whichraay 

 have been pronounced diflereutly when he 

 actually heard it. Authors who have edited 

 Jewitt's work have taken some liberties with his 

 text, and improved, according to their notions, 

 upon it. Like that Scotch pastor who, hearing 

 Shakespeare's 'Sermons in stones, books in the 

 running brooks,' and being convinced that the 



Gill (J. K.) — Continued. 



printer had done the poet injustice, said: 'Ay, 

 ho meant sermons in books, stones in the run- 

 ning brooks, ' so many a simple story is made 

 to .serve the purpose of pedagogism and quite 

 loses its intended character. 



"The Nootka Indians in 1803, when Jewitt 

 was among them, were in the habit of using the 

 words which I have quoted above among them- 

 selves. There were no whites in the country 

 excepting Jewitt and his companions, and the 

 inference is that the Indians used only the lan- 

 guage which was familiar to them, and not in 

 any sense to accommodate their expression to 

 Jewitt's comprehension. In speaking with 

 strangers of other tribes, however, they would 

 probably do what Americans who converse 

 with Germans sometimes do, that is, interpolate 

 German words (if they know any) in their 

 English conversation, with the idea that they 

 exhibit their own knowledge, or that they set 

 their auditor at ease. As Jewitt was of a dif- 

 ferent race, the use of the words above may 

 have been impressed upon him rather than the 

 words which may have been in uae for the 

 same things in the native tongue of the Nootkas. 

 But if the words are Nootka, as you insist, and 

 I am willing to admit they may be, there is no 

 doubt about their having been transplanted to 

 the mouth of the Columbia and having spread 

 into the interior of the Pacific Slope — a trans- 

 planting which may have been from either 

 source, as you can readily see. Andas the earliest 

 whites on the Columbia heard the same words 

 in use by Indians who spoke languages which 

 were Greek to the Indians on Puget Sound and 

 Vancouver Island, the fact is all the more cer- 

 tainly established tliat many words were com- 

 mon among a number of tribes who had their 

 own native words also for the same things. As 

 Jewitt gives but a dozen or less Indian words 

 altogether in the edition of his book which I 

 have, and at least six of them are congeners of 

 the Chinook, I am inclined to think that if he 

 had used sixty words of the people among whom 

 he lived, he might have shown us the same 

 proportion of Chinook words, and it is but fair 

 to consider that he would not have chosen only 

 words which were of this common Jargon." 



Mr. Gill's comments were forwarded by me 

 to Mr. Horatio Hale, the author of the ' ' Manual 

 of the Oregon trade language or Chinook Jar- 

 gon" referred to by Mr. Gill, who comments as 

 follows : 



"In preparing my account of the Chinook 

 Jargon for the enterprising London publishers, 

 Messrs. Whittaker & Co., I had not the advan- 

 tage of being able to refer to Mr. Gill's dic- 

 tionary, which I have never seen. From his 

 account of it, I have no doubt that it would 

 have been of material service in my task. His 

 care in marking the accented syllables is a 

 scholarly precaution which compilers of such 

 vocabularies are too apt to neglect. 



" My materials were derived mainly from 

 my own collections, made in Oregon in 1841, 



