variant spelling of cayoosh/cayuse

[Mike Cleven]

I know it's never been settled whether this word is proper Jargon or
not.  It's always been credited as a Jargon term in Lillooet country
accounts of the Jargon, although its most common spelling is as cayuse;
some histories of the province only mention it as the name of the famed
native variety of pony, the strain of which is still prominent in the
backcountry herds of the BC plateaux; they may mention it as an Indian
word without mentioning the Jargon, however.  I've never seen it in any
of the main published lexicons of the Jargon, though; I'm not sure about
Kamloops Wawa at the moment.  I know of its tribal and historic
associations in Washington - is it perhaps a word from one of the
languages of that region?  The Lillooet variant is place-specific,
because of the creek and canyon of that name and also the original name
of the town (pre-1859), although "cayoosh" is still the prononciation
used there and in the Chilcotin country for that strain of horseflesh,
rather than "cayuse", which elsewhere of course has also come to be
something of a casual-if-hokey term for "horse" in ordinary English
(specifically old Hollywood movie English).  There are definitely
different words in the Salishan languages of the Canyon and Cariboo, and
although "kiuatan" (by whatever variant) may have been in use in the
Jargon of that region for "horse" I think "cayoosh" would have been
breed-specific as a term anyway, as indeed the pattern remained in local
English; maybe in the native languages, too; certainly that's likely in
Ts'ilhoqotin (where the breed remains important) and much of the
Canyon.  It's also true that in Jargon-speaking times the majority of
horses in the area _were_ cayooshes (to coin a plural).  So it falls in
the category of leblo and laclem in describing a variety of horse,
rather than as a direct translation of horse - although the few
Canyon-country historians that there are give its meaning in the Jargon
as simply "horse".  I don't know the extent of its current usage in
regional English; it'd mostly be familiar to guide-outfitters and
ranchers over today's townspeople, except for those that own horses.

Geography:  "the Canyon" refers to the Fraser communities from Williams
Lake to Boston Bar or so, plus a bit of the Thompson Canyon country as
well.  It borders both Ts'ilhqotin and Secwepemc territories, and
includes the Upper Lillooet and Nlaka'pamux.

Anyway, the reason I spun the above was because I came across a spelling
of Cayoosh/Cayuse I hadn't seen before - from my own Lillooet country,
no less, which was a bit of a surprise.  It came in the address of the
Lillooet Nation on a given website, which included a list of its Member
Bands: Bridge River, Cayoose Creek (Kiy oose), Pavilion, Seton Lake.
Now, I should explain that the Cayoose spelling used here is the name
and the preference of the band, and differs from the geographic
gazetting of the actual adjacent creek as Cayoosh Creek; Cayoose
actually gives it more of an antique look, although Cayoosh is the older
spelling; I think this was because the band's name registry was done in
the 19th Century when either spelling was common in the region.

I've never seen "Kiy oose" before, though - it looks almost more
coastal, as in Nanoose and Clo-ose, or maybe even Plains.  Never seen
the term broken up as two words before, either; unless they can mean
something in St'at'imcets, which is unlikely, I think.  What really
strike me about it, though, is the sudden resemblance to this of some of
the variants that came up in the kiuatan/caballo discussion that was
going on in the list a few days ago.  Is there any possibility of some
kind of phonological "shift" from '-use' or '-oosh' to 'atan'?  I can't
remember the details of the many variants that came up in the
discussion; might there be a connection here?