What was the range of Chinook Jargon?

At 10:40 PM 7/23/98 -0300, Randy McDonald wrote:
>Hi,
>
>I'm Randy McDonald, a suscriber to this list. I was wondering whether
>anyone had some information on the geographical dispersion of Chinook
>Jargon -- was it concentrated in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia,
>or was it in roughly-equal use throughout the Pacific Northwest?

Pretty much equal in a certain zone - the lower Columbia basin, Puget
Sound-Georgia Strait-Vancouver Island-south/central Interior, although
there were variations in the Jargon's longevity here, especially from one
side of the line to the other.  The Jargon was known and in use from
northern California to Alaska and the Yukon and as far east as the
Rockies-Flathead, but less so than in the core zone just described.  I'm
not sure whether it lasted longer as a "common tongue" on the US side or
the British/Canadian side; there was much more non-native influx into the
American Northwest at an earlier date than there was in BC, but on the
other hand most of the Jargon publications and continuing activity and
awareness of the Jargon seems to be on the US side.

Major Matthews, the Vancouver city archivist who collected the oral
histories of Vancouverites, maintains that the older Vancouver families
(non-native), even the more high-fallutin' ones, often spoke the Jargon =
at
home until the 1920s, although the majority of post-railway (post-1885)
newcomers to the province were not as aware of it as those who had come
there prior to that.  Outside of Vancouver, however, the Jargon remained =
in
steady use, especially because bureaucrats and merchants in the outlying
areas had natives, resource workers and frontiersmen (all groups fluent =
in
the Jargon to some degree) to deal with as customers and social contacts,
and so it survived in the hinterland a lot longer than it did in the =
city,
where the newcomers viewed it with disdain (one reason why the old-time
families spoke it at home).  Earlier on, it was a given that residents of
Gastown or any of the other small communities of the colony/province, or =
of
either of the capitals (Victoria or New West) would speak Jargon to each
other, even though they might both have the same native tongue (Gastown =
and
other lumber and mining camps were notoriously polyglot).  Still today, =
you
are more likely to hear someone from the bush towns use words like
"skookum" or "saltchuck" than an urbanite would, although "high =
muckamuck"
seems to have become part of the general Vancouver parlance - even among
recent newcomers.
>
>On a similar note, was use of Chinook Jargon limited to certain
>ethnocultural groups, like the Salishan peoples and their neighbors?
>Was/Is Chinook Jargon commonly used by non-Natives?

Non-native persons with knowledge (or even awareness) of the Jargon are =
now
very rare; fifty years ago this was not the case, and 70 years ago the
chances that someone in one of the smalltown might have a decent =
knowledge
of the Jargon was probably pretty high (especially in the fishery,
prospecting, guide-outfitting, or other native-connected branches of the
economy).  100 years ago, the Jargon was everybody's language (except for
urbanites recently arrived) and didn't have a specific affiliation,
although natives would more likely speak it on a daily basis than
non-natives would.  As for the natives, at least in the areas of my
upbringing, supposedly the elders of a generation ago more likely knew =
the
Jargon than their own tribal language, and it served as a common tongue
among natives for a lot longer than it remained among non-natives =
(children
from different tribes were often thrown together in the residential =
school
system, although they'd just as likely have been beaten for speaking the
Jargon as they would have for speaking Nuu-chah-nulth or Stl'atl'imx or
Halqemeylem).

The only surviving _group_ that we are aware of who continue to use =
Jargon
are indeed natives, i.e. the Grande Ronde community in Washington, and
there are only a few scattered speakers of it remaining in other regions.

Myself, as a non-native, I view the Jargon as part of the collective
communal history/identity of the region - a "Cascadian tongue", if you =
will
(yuck!) - that all of us share as part of the common heritage of the
region.  The survival of certain elements of the Jargon into regional
English remains an identifying hallmark of someone "from here", no matter
which side of the border you're on or what your ethnicity is.........

Mike Cleven

[Is this the same Randy McDonald who posts in soc.history.what-if??]