Concomly to Lewis and Clark

[George Lang]

I can’t help but hop on the “clouch musket” hobby horse too.

In honour of next week’s Lu7lu, in which the role of Wakashan languages in
Jargon will be of special interest, let me note that this phrase is in what
I like to call the Nootka Lingo, the early “seed” of Jargon, the three
words apart from “musket” coming from Nootka and supposedly uttered
hundreds of miles away from the Nootka homeland.

Not that we shouldn’t be careful with the quote as we have it, since it not
a transcription in any strict sense of the word. Clark’s manuscript was
actually reviewed and edited in 1810, five years after the event in
question, by his consultant Nicholas Biddle. My own theory is that Biddle
or someone around him had previous acquaintance with written traditions of
something “Jargon-like,” probably one or another of the vocabularies of
Nootka which started with Cook, a likely candidate being the “Vocabulary of
Nootka Sound” draw up by the Gray's ship's surgeon Robert Ingraham in 1792
– Ingraham’s list has “cloush” and “commatax”. Which doesn’t mean Clark
didn’t hear something like “Lhush musket, wek kEmtEks musket”

Those interested in this thread can point at the site I have up on the
Nootka Lingo: www.arts.ualberta.ca/~chinook/nootka.

Biddle's involvement in the L&C Journals is discussed in Donald Jackon,
_Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition with Related Documents 1783-
1854_ (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962) p. 497, and in Henry
Zenk’s 1984 dissertation _Chinook Jargon and Native Cultural Persistence in
the Grand Ronde Indian Commmunity_, pp. 28-29

George