Colby, Merle. "A guide to Alaska: Last American frontier."

[David Robertson]

New York:  Macmillan, 1942.  [Federal Writers' Project / Works Progress
Administration, 1939.]

Please note that the 'everyday' or 'American' speech referred to below is
the common Alaskan variety of English.  I'm having little luck finding
citations in this book for the references used in creating the passage
below.  The most likely of those listed is "Annual Reports of the Bureau
of American Ethnology" but I doubt that can have been very useful to
Colby.  Some of the below simply repeats the cliche's of the popular
manuals of "Chinook" as well as their conventionalized spellings.  Did
Colby simply draw on personal knowledge in giving the vocabulary below?

*Page xxxix:  'VOCABULARY OF ALASKA TERMS.  The old trading jargon of
Chinook is dying a lingering death along the northwest coast of America,
not without having enriched the "American" language with a few permanent
contributions and a number of colorful localisms.  The jargon arose out of
the slaving activities of the powerful Chinook tribe of Columbia River,
who did a brisk business in slaves with the Nootkas, members of a wealthy
tribe which enjoyed a virtual monopoly of the shells from which the shell
money of the Pacific Northwest was manufactured.  The jargon was
originally an approximation of the Chinook language to the language of the
Nootkas, but later it adopted many words from English and French.  A
knowledge of this jargon was indispensable to white traders, who used it
extensively in Alaska from 1840 to 1890.  At its height the jargon was the
main method of communication for fully 100,000 people.

	'Although Chinook jargon had a vocabulary of over 500 words, this
trading language had no formal grammar, it varied from place to place, and
adopted and discarded words with the freedom of a gutter argot.  From the
English it borrowed such words as house, stick, and boat, and such
onomatopoetic expressions as piu piu (stink) and hee hee (laugh).  Many
English words would not carry over into Chinook because the Indians were
unable to pronounce certain letters -- thus fish became pish and carbine
calipeen.  Examples of borrowing from French are siwash (sauvage) and mush
(marche).  Because of lack of grammatical structure, new ideas were
expressed through compounds:  thus a place of amusement became hee hee
house, the United States Boston illahie (from Boston, American, and
illahie, ground or earth).

	'Some of the Chinook expressions still used in everyday
speech, together with other terms current in Alaska, are given below.
Orign of the words is indicated thus:  C. (Chinook), E. (Eskimauan), A.
(terms brought by Americans).

	'bulldozer n. (A.) a caterpillar tractor equipped for stripping
		operations
	cat n. (A.) caterpillar tractor
	chechakho n. (C.) "just arrived,", hence, tenderfoot
	chuck n. (C.) water, stream
	clean-up n. (A.) reckoning up the "take" at the end of the season,
		hence the "take"
	flour n. (A.) fine gold
	gurry n. (A.) the offal from a fish cannery
	hi yu n. (C.) plenty
	hootchenoo n. (C.) home-distilled spirits the origin of the slang
		term, "hootch"
	husky n. (A.) sled dog
	iglu n. (E.) sod house, any Eskimo dwelling
	iron chink n. (A.) an automatic device for splitting and cleaning
		fish in a cannery, replacing the former "China gang"
	kayak n. (E.) single-passenger skin boat
	malemute n. (E.) sled dog
	muckamuck n. (C.) food
	mukluk n. (E.) fur boot
	mush v. (C.) get on! command to a dog team.  Also to walk rather
		than to ride
	outside adv. (A.) anywhere except Alaska, usually the States
	parka n. (E.) (pronounced "parky") overgarment of skin, fur, or
		wool
	poke n. (A.) a moosehide bag for gold dust, hence one's "roll" or
		wealth
	siwash n. (C.) Indian (contemptuous)
	siwash v. (C.) to sleep out without shelter
	skookum adj. (C.) strong, worthy, as a "skookum hunter"
	skookum-house (C.) jail
	sourdough n. (A.) bread made without yeast, hence, old-timer
	tillicum n. (C.) friend
	tundra n. (A.) swampy, grassy plains of treeless regions
	umiak n. (E.) large skin boat
	umuk n. (E.) the "woman-knife" used for flensing skins'
		[NB:  I always heard "ulu" when I was growing up.-Dave]

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