"A Warm Wind and a Bad Headache": _NYT_ 2/8/00

[Mike Cleven]

Jim Holton wrote:
>
> If you look up "Wind" in Gibbs, he gives a little blurb about the winds being
> most often referred to by the direction that they come from in Chinook
> Jargon.  I am wondering  if this normally changed as the speaker moved
> around.  For instance Gibbs says that, "at the mouth of the river [Columbia],
> a southerly is a Tilamooks wind...." while I could see a Puget Sounder calling
> this wind a "Chinook."  I now the term Chinook, for a southerly wind, was used
> during the Klondike gold-rush, and maybe from there ended up getting spread
> around the place via popular literature, returning people, etc.  Puget
> Sounders played an important role in the gold-rush.  Anyhow, just an idea....

Pretty sure the term Chinook was deeply entrenched long before 1898 (the
year of the Klondike Gold Rush), whether in the coastal lands or in
Alberta-Montana; in fact I'm pretty sure it was already known on the
Prairies early in the 19th Century; don't have a Canadian dictionary but
I'll check.  In fact....no, the Canadian Encyclopaedia doesn't have a
date; what it _does_ have, however, is a discussion of the Chinook Wind
that for one thing only mentions the Alberta=Plains version of the
meaning (not the coastal one), but also says that the word means "snow
eater"; the very next article discusses the Chinook Jargon and was
(thankfully) written by a different author!  Unless maybe there's a pun
in Piegan or Blackfoot that means "snow eater" and is similar to Chinook
;-)

Very few of the Klondike sourdoughs would be aware of the Alberta-Plains
meaning of the word, even though they'd all dutifully bought their
Chinook lexicons before setting out north to the Yukon (where the Jargon
was then virtually unknown).  I'd think that the context from the
Klondike is more than probably the Puget Sound-Georgia Strait one,
meaning a warm, wet wind that comes in from the south - and, um, just
won't -stop-.  Yuck.  The effect within the Yukon itself of such a
weather system would be something like a Chinook, though not as marked;
Bennett Lake and Whitehorse would get this, but not the Klondike proper
(Dawson City).  But the Alaskan usage also had time to migrate
northwards long in advance of the Gold Rush, given that the US bought
the place in 1867; at least some of the fishermen, loggers and others
who settled in the Panhandle were from the Northwest, which is probably
how this term came northwards, rather than as the result of coining by
the 1898 bunch.  The one pack of would-be zillionaires who _did_ come in
from the Prairies (Edmonton, which touted itself as the "Gateway to the
Klondike, despite being some 1200+ frozen miles or so away) arrived
pretty much after the Rush was done; some time in 1900, I think, having
spent 20 months or so on the trail.  Not as bad as the Red River of the
North party, though, who showed up at least in (IIRC) 1901.....

Mike
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