The best link of Spokane with CJ that I've yet found

[Mike Cleven]

At 11:42 PM 2/5/99 -0800, David Robertson wrote:
>Klahowyam,
>
>Now, I don't know the author of this book yet, nor the date and publisher.
>But as the local library was closing, I xeroxed a few pages of "The Yukon
>overland:  Poor man's route to the gold fields."  (Jack London would've
>agreed, and added "Fool's route!")
>
>There are plenty of advertisements in the book for Spokane, Washington
>businesses, billing the city as the launching point for the Klondyke.  I
>believe the book was printed in Cincinnati by Editor Publishing in 1898
>and the author was Frederic R. Marvin, if this is the same edition
>referred to in the holdings list of the U. of Victoria CJ Project.
>
>The book devotes about 30 pages to a discussion and vocabulary of the
>Chinook Jargon.  Chapter X begins:  "An essential accomplishment in
>traveling through the Northwest is a knowledge of the language of the
>Indians....[T]here is a common medium of communication understood from the
>Siskiyus to Klondyke, and so far as know, to the North Pole.  This is a
>jargon called Chinook."  (Five pages of filler babble follow.)

The inland routes were indeed among the most disastrous (second only to the
Malaspina-Tanana route).  I hadn't heard of the Spokane route, but Edmonton
also touted itself as the "gateway to the Klondike" and still has a
Klondike Days festival every year; even though I think almost no one who
left Edmonton overland ever made it to Dawson City.  The one group I _do_
know that made it actually voyaged down to the Mackenzie Delta, then back
up the Red River of the North from there and got to Dawson from the north
(two or three years late); theirs is one of the most nightmarish of all
Klondike tales.  The Klondike Cattle Drive route northwards from the
Skeena-Bulkley region of BC was shorter still than either the Edmonton
route or your Spokane find, but equally disastrous......



>The vocabulary is not terribly remarkable, but as with the run of the CJ
>mill, each word list has its subtly interesting peculiarities.  Here are
>some:
>
>"brother"	--	Kar-po		/(Note {ar} representing
>"buy (to)"	--	Mar-kook	\ a long, stressed /a/ sound.)

"ar" => "ah"  ..... maybe the editors were Bostonian.... ;-)