Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/404



In its present acceptation, a Chinook is the equatorial trade wind that blows during the winter months from the southwest, and, laden with moisture, strikes the Pacific Coast from the northern boundary of California to the Alaskan archipelago. It is now the local name for the soft, balmy, south wind. But it is a misnomer. In early days in Oregon, and even as late as the early seventies, our summer wind from the northwest was called a Chinook, so named because it blew into the Willamette Valley from the coast region inhabited by the Chinook Indians north of the entrance of the Columbia. Among the pioneers and their descendants, a Chinook wind was a "clearing-up" wind. Now it signifies precisely the opposite—i. e., a wind from the south, followed by rain.

Within the past twenty-five years the word has been grafted into the speech and the written language of vast territory east of the Cascade Mountains and circulates freely throughout Wyoming. It has been carried into western Nebraska. In recent years it has crept into Boston newspapers, with local application. Any soft, balmy wind that springs up in winter, is called a Chinook.

Thus we see, in an age of high civilization and universal knowledge, the vicissitudes of written words. Within thirty years Chinook has been turned "end for end".