Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/24

 1890 and 1891, while working in Oregon and Washington, he says he "learned that the dialects of the lower Chinook were on the verge of disappearing, and that only a few individuals survived who remembered the languages of the once powerful tribes of the Clatsop and Chinook." The remnants of the tribe he found at Clatsop, near Seaside, for various reasons gave him nothing. He was finally told that a few of their relatives lived on Shoalwater Bay. He went there and found two individuals who spoke Chinook—the real Chinook, not the jargon—Charles Cultee and Catherine. He got nothing at all from Catherine but vast riches from Charles. This Indian, of course, spoke the Chinook jargon as well as his own Chinook tongue. Dr. Boas spoke the jargon. And through the medium of this trade language the anthropologist extracted from this one Indian, material for the 278 pages of his famous Chinook Texts, which includes the alpha bet, eighteen myths, thirteen beliefs, customs and tales, and two historical tales.

It is astonishing alike how an ordinary Indian should have held so much tribal literature in his remembrance and how an anthropologist could have developed a technique for getting it from him. While the old Indians have become scarcer, there has been an improvement of method among scholars for x-raying their memories. In a way similar to that of Dr. Boas, Dr. Melville Jacobs, associate professor of anthropology in the University of Washington, has found two or three old Coos Bay Indians from whom, during the past few summers, he has obtained much material, particularly material relating to dreams.