Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/96



" jargon called Chinook is the lingua-franca of the whites and Indians of the Northwest," wrote Theodore Winthrop in 1853. "It is a jargon of English, French, Spanish, Chinook, Kallapooga, Haida, and other tongues, civilized and savage. It is an attempt on a small scale to nullify Babel by combining a confusion of tongues into a confounding of tongues—a witches' caldron in which the vocable that bobs up may be some old familiar Saxon verb, having suffered Procrustean docking or elongation, and now doing substantive duty; or some strange monster, evidently nurtured within the range of tomahawks and calumets. There is some danger that the beauties of this dialect will be lost to literature. The Chinook jargon still expects its poet."

To a surprisingly extensive and varied degree it is not lost to literature. And, as several selections will show, it has had its poets.

Altogether in a literary way it is an impressive language. Perhaps no other composite and manufactured tongue has served such noble and poetic purposes of expression. The missionaries used it as the successful medium for the communion of the spirits of two different peoples. From wilderness camps, hymns and prayers went up to God in the blue heaven above in the Chinook jargon, which had a sufficient richness and