Chinook Archives - Lewis & Clark Research Database

Pressing Past Grand River Without Hunting

Tue, 05 May 2026 14:23:52 +0000

took our leave of him and proceeded on. In a short time,
passed the mouth of the river Grand, and soon after over-
took the hunters, who had not killed any thing. We con-
tinued our voyage all day without waiting to hunt; gathering
some papaws on the shores, and in the evening encamped on
an island.
The 19th was a fine day, and at day light we continued our
voyage; passed the mouth of Mine river; saw several turkeys
288 GASS’S JOURNAL
on the shores, but did not delay a moment to hunt; being so
anxious to reach St. Louis, where, without any important
occurrence, we arrived on the 23rd and were received with
great kindness and marks of friendship by the inhabitants,
after an absence of two years, four months and ten days.
FINIS.
INDEX
A
Adams, Point, 191
Aird, Mr., 233
Aleis Indians, 212; dress of squaws, 212
Allum, 21
Angelica, 137
Antelope (Cabre), 28, 32, 33, 36, 50,
76, 107, 108, 115, 121, 256-258,
266, 281.
Aricaris Indians, see Rickaree Indians
Arrow creek, 6
Arrows, Prairie of, see Prairie of arrows
Ash, 5, 8, 166, 206, 211
Ash creek, 4
Assiniboin Indians, 65, 75
B
Badger, description of, 17; mentioned,
46, 66
Bald-pated prairie, 284
Barbarole Indians, see Jonkta Indians
Baskets, willow, 133
Beans, raised by Indians, 47, 48
Bear, 8, 9, 76, 87, 95, 99, 104, 105,
210, 231, 234, 241-243, 249, 259,
268, 270
Bear, Black, 209.
Bear, Brown, description of, 82; men-
tioned, 83, 84, 86, 93, 104, 106,
247, 269, 271
Bear, Grizly, 232
Bear, White, adventure with a, 260;
description of, 80; mentioned, 52
Bear creek, 5
Bear island, 259
Bear meat, Indian method of cooking,
232
Beaver, 15, 17, 30-33, 75-79, 83, 118,
121, 124, 132, 203, 222, 223, 268,
269, 274
19
Big-bellied Indians, see Grosventres In-
dians
Big Devil river, 6
Big Goodwoman’s creek, 6
Big Muddy creek, 5
Big Rock creek, 6
Big-White (Indian chief), with his fa-
mily, goes to Washington with explor-
ing party, 276
Bighorns, see Mountain sheep
Birch, 166, 222
Blackbird, king of Mahas, 19
Black-bird creek, 7
Blackbirds, 104
Blue-water creek, 10
Blustry point, 177
Boat of iron, description of, 103
Boiling spring, 262
Bonum creek, 3
Bore-tree, 142
Brants, 167, 170, 175, 177, 178, 180
Brarow, see Badger
Breastworks, 26, 27
Buckeye, 8
Buffaloe, 22, 23, 29-33, 34) 51, 52,
57, 59-62, 65, 66, 76-79, 81, 83, 89,
91, 92) 97) 102-104, 107-109, 258,
259, 266, 268, 270-272, 274, 281,
282; night adventure with a, 92
Buffaloe prairie, 22
Burnt bluffs, 272
Butterfly creek, 14
Buzzard, 178
Cc
Cabre, see Antelope
Calamex (or Callemax), Indians, their
characteristics, customs, and dress,
204; mentioned, 192
Cannon-ball river, 51
290
Canoe camp, 111, 177
Canoe deposit, see Deposit, Canoe
Canoe, Indian, see Indian canoes
Canzan river, see Kanzas river
Cape Disappointment, see Disappoint-
ment, Cape
Cape Swell, see Swell, Cape
Catarack river, 215
Catfish, 20, 22, 24, 286
Cathlama Indians, their characteristics,
customs, and dress, 204
Cathlama village, 205
Cedar, 28, 83, 113, 116, 146, 210
Cedar bluffs, 21, 22
Cedar fort, description of, 35
Cedar island, 35
Cerwercerna river, 45
Charlotte rivers, the two, 7
Cherries, 14, 117, 129, 135, 140, 211,
230
Chien Indians, 58, 278
Chien river, 43, 280
Chilook Indians, 206; dress of women,
207
Chiltz Indians, their characteristics, cus-
toms, and dress, 204
Chinkook river, 177
Chinook Indians, their characteristics,
customs, and dress, 178, 204; their
hats, 198; mentioned, 188, 192, 198,
200-203, 206
Chinook Indian squaw saves life of one
of exploring party, 192
Chischeet river, 52
Chononish Indians, their method of
cooking bear meat, 232; some char-
acteristics, 255; mentioned, 226-230,
232-234, 240-242, 244, 248, 249,
252
Christmas, celebration of, 62, 63, 187
Clarke, Captain William: Takes com-
mand of expedition and proceeds up
Missouri river, 1; goes hunting, re-
turning next day with game, g; trav-
els by land, 13; holds council with
Indians, 17; goes hunting, 18, 19;
Index
Clarke, Captain William (Coztinued)
goes fishing, 20; goes hunting and
kills two elk and a fawn, 21, 22;
names Buffaloe prairie, 22; goes with
Captain Lewis to examine hill where
little people are said to live, 22, 23;
holds council with Sioux Indians, 24;
goes to view knob of a hill, 29; visits
prairie dog village, 29; goes hunting
and kills an antelope, 31, 32, 34, 353
threatened by Sioux Indians, 37;
holds council with Sioux Indians, 38;
goes to see Indians dance, 39; goes
hunting, 45; holds council with Rick-
aree Indians, 47, 48; visits Indians
and returns with corn and _ buffaloe
robes, 55; goes buffaloe hunting, 59;
goes hunting, 60, 61; gives brandy
to men for Christmas celebration, 63;
gives whiskey to men for New Year’s
celebration, 64; goes hunting, 68;
kills a hare, 75; kills an antelope, 76;
travels by land, 76; kills tliree black-
tailed deer and a buffaloe calf, 78;
measures Missouri and Yellowstone
rivers at mouth of Yellowstone, 795
measures Missouri and Muscle-shell
rivers at their confluence, 86; his ex-
pedition up south fork of Missouri
river, 94, 95; surveys road for a port-
age, 101, 102; measures portage and
Falls of Missouri river, 105; has nar-
row escape ina hail storm, 106; goes
in search of timber to build boats,
108, 109; goes ahead of party, 1123
leaves note informing party which
branch he had taken, 117; illness and
recovery, 117; starts for Columbia
river, 126; goes to Cape Disappoint-
ment to view the Ocean, 177; returns
from Cape Disappointment, 178; vis-
its the Ocean, 184, 185; gives men
tobacco and handkerchiefs for Christ-
mas, 187; visits salt-makers’ camp,
192; goes to examine tributary of the
Columbia, 209; goes hunting, 214;
Index
Clarke, Captain William (Continued)
purchases horses from Indians, 21 5—
217; journeys on foot so that men
with sore feet may ride, 220; kills
two pheasants, 222; doctors the sick
Indians, 226, 229, 2373; ascends
Clarke’s river, 254; ascends Gallatin
river in order to cross over to Yellow-
stone river, 262; account of his ex-
ploring trip, 274; holds council with
Rickaree Indians, 278; mentioned,
56, 57, 60, 69, 73, 88, 102, 113,
114, 11g, 121, 128, 130, 132-135,
146-149, 186, 197, 215, 235, 245,
2.53, 261, 271-274, 285
Clarke’s river, 139, 140, 159, 176, 252
Clarke’s view, 191
Clatsop, Fort, 190, 205
Clatsop Indians, their characteristics,
customs, and dress, 204; mentioned,
179, 180, 193, 194
Clear-water river, 112
Clover, 126, 257
Clover, red, description of, 220
Columbia plains, 211, 216, 219
Columbia river, exploration of, 125, 127,
158, 175, 177) 183, 205-219, 2525
falls of, 162, 163, 177, 218; mouth
of, 1745; narrows of, 163, 177, 216—
218; rapids of, 164, 167, 177, 212,
213
Columbia river Indians, see Indians of
the Columbia river
Columbia valley, 210
Commas, description of, 242;
tioned, 252
Commas flat, 242, 244, 248, 249
Commas root, description of, 148; men-
tioned, 222, 230
Copperas, 21
Coquallaisquet river, 256
Corn, raised by Indians, 47, 48
Cotton-wood, description of, 57; men-
tioned, 5, 8, 18,23, 28, 29, 56,81, 90,
92, 93, 100, 103, 112, 117, 166, 168,
170, 222, 223, 230, 256, 259, 266
men-
2g1
Council Bluffs, 17, 284
Cowas root, 230
Crab-tree bark, used as substitute for
tobacco, 201
Cranberries, 163
Crane, 139, 169, 175
Crow, 155, 161
Crusate’s river, 214
Currant bushes, 104
Currants, 112, 113, 117, 119, 129
Cutteau (Knife) river, 73
D
Dead, Indian custom of burying their,
204
De Chirn river, see Chien river
Deer, 4-6, 8-10, 12-18, 22, 24, 28-31,
33> 35» 46, 50-52, 57, 59, 61, 65,
66, 68, 75, 77, 78, 81, 83, 91, 96,
99, 101, 102, 108, 113-117, 119—
121, 123-126, 130, 134, 135, 137,
138-141, 151, 164-166, 168, 169,
175,177, 178, 180, 188, 193, 194,
201-203, 207-209, 213-216, 223,
2275 233, 235) 237-244, 247-249,
251-259, 269-272, 274, 276, 277;
279-281, 285, 286
Deer, Black-tailed or Mule, description
of, 33; mentioned, 34, 78, 269, 281
Deer creek, 4
Deer island, 206, 207
Deer-lick creek, 7
Depie creek, 9
Deposit, Canoe, 274
Deposits, 97, 98, 259, 260
Disappointment, Cape, 177
Divide between Missouri and Columbia
Trivers, 127, 257
Dog river, see Chien river
Dogwood, 211
Dogs, as diet, 163
Dogs, Indian, see Indian dogs
Du Bois (or Du Beau) creek, 9
Du Bois river, see Wood river
292
Ducks, 136, 147, 155, 156, 162, 166,
168, 169, 171, 175, 180, 182, 207,
211, 216, 233, 249
E
Eagle, 155
Elk, 13, 16, 17, 19, 22, 23, 26, 28, 30,
31, 36 51, 57, 65, 67, 68, 76-78,
91, 92, 96, 99, 101, 102, 104, 105,
113, 118, 139, 182, 185, 188, 190,
191, 193-199, 201-203, 205, 209,
210, 251, 2595 269, 270, 272-274,
2775 279, 281, 283, 284, 286
Elk island, 13, 36
Elm, 24
Elm creek, 34
Experiment, The, 108
Exploring party, start, 1; encamp for
the winter on the Missouri, 56-73;
find game scarce and are forced to
subsist on their horses and portable
soup, 142-147, 229, 238; dine at
head-waters of Missouri, 126, 127;
begin voyage down Lewis river, 152;
begin voyage down Columbia river,
160; reach the end of their voyage,
1753 prepare to encamp for the win-
ter on Pacific coast, 186-188; move
into winter huts and celebrate Christ-
mas, 187; leave Fort Clatsop and begin
return trip, 205; separate to pursue
different routes, 252; reunited, 274;
reach St. Louis, 288; number of elk
and deer killed by, Dec., 1805, to
March, 1806, 203
F
Fawns, 17, 22, 30
Fir, 144, 194, 195, 211, 255
Fire-prairie creek, 9
Fish, 20, 135, 155, 1733 petrified, 30;
see also specific names
Fish camp, 176
Fish creek, 51
Index
Flathead Indians, their lodges, 155;
their method of making bread, 147,
148; some characteristics, 204; men-
tioned, 137, 138, 140, 150, 151,
153, 155
Flathead river, see Clarke’s river
Flattening of the head, Indian custom
of, 165
Flax, 96, 101, 126, 133, 256
Fleas, 215
Flies, 190; horse, 249
Flounder, 177
Flowers, 206
Floyd, Sergeant, death and burial of, 21
Floyd’s river, 21
Fort Clatsop, see Clatsop, Fort
Fourth of July, celebration of, 11, 107
G
Gallatin’s river, 121, 262, 274
Garter snakes, 207
Gaskenade river, 4, 5
Gass, Sergeant, builds canoes, 70; finds
petrified log, 77; helps Captain Lewis
build his iron boat, 103; goes in
search of material for canoes and kills
two elks, 104; visits Falls of Mis-
souri river, 106, 1073 joins Captain
Clarke’s party in search of timber,
1093 goes with Captain Lewis to look
for Snake Indians, 118; ill, 149; re-
covers from illness, 151; has narrow
escape by canoe sinking, 153; has
attack ofague, 154; helps build quar-
ters for commanding officers, 186;
goes to salt works, 190-192; goes
hunting with companion and spends
a night out-doors in the rain, 1973 is
ill, 263; with companion, starts by
land to mouth of Maria’s river, 266
Geese, 75-77, 130, 139, 155, 156, 162,
166-169, 171, 175, 202, 207, 209
Geesem, an interpreter, 276
Glade creek, 252
Gnats, 247
Index
Goat creek, 28
Goat-pen creek, 76
Goats, 28, 32, 33, 35, 44, 50-52, 62,
76, 121-124, 266
Gooseberries, 100, 109, 117
Gooseberry bushes, 243
Grand Bend, see Missouri river, Great
Bend of
Grand Point, 76
Grand river, 7, 287
Grapes, 13, 31
Grapevines, 5
Grindstone creek, 5
Grosventres (or Grossventer) Indians,
55> 7% 73) 74) 117, 267, 275, 276
– Grouse, 159, 2333 see also Prairie hen
Gulls, 161, 162, 169, 172
i
Haley’s (Hailey’s or Hayley’s) Bay, 177,
Ig1, 200, 207
Hares, 32, 65, 75, 159
Hawks, 155, 177
Haws, 129, 141
Hazlenut, 166
Heath hens, see Grouse
Herrings, 198
Hickory, 5
Hidden creek, 45
Hood, Mount, 168
Hot Spring, 141, 251, 252
Hudson’s Bay Company, 61
Hungry creek, 245-247, 250
Hysop or hyssop, 77, 133
I
Ibex, see Mountain sheep
Independence creek, 11
Indian baskets, 133
Indian bread, 130, 134
Indian canoes, 208
Indian customs: burial of the dead, 204;
method of making fire, 133; mode
of worship, 81; use of cedar bark for
293
Indian customs (Continued)
food and clothing, 210; see also names
of nations and tribes
Indian dog poles, 35, 36
Indian dogs, 41
Indian saddles, 235, 236
Indian spears, 131
Indian war-mallet, 233
Indians, see names of nations and tribes
Indians hold council to decide about
accompanying exploring party to
Washington, 275
Indians of the Columbia river, burial
customs, 160, 161, 204; dress, 131,
170, 176; form of salutation, 127;
lodges, 162, 164; mentioned, 127—
131, 133, 158-167, 169-179, 186;
see also Chiltz, Chinook, Clatsop, and
Flathead Indians
Indians residing between Falls of the
Columbia river and the coast, rascally
and thieving, 227
Indians residing between Rocky moun-
tains and Falls of Columbia, honest
and well disposed, 227
Tron ore, 14
Isquetcoqualla river, 254, 255
J
Jaune river, see Yellowstone river
Jefferson river, 121, 122, 126, 127,
262, 274
Jitk, 9
Jonkta Indians, 44
K
Kanowa Indians, 286
Kanzas river, 10, 286
Kanzon river, see Kanzas river
Kilhouanakkle river, 200
Kimooeenem river, 154, 159, 162, 177
Knife river, see Cutteau river
Kooskooske river, 154, 159, 176, 224,
226, 232
294
L
Labenile creek, 9
Landselle’s fort, 280
Lewis, Captain Meriwether: Joins ex-
pedition, 3; kills a deer, 6; holds
council with Indians, 17; kills a peli-
can, 19; goes fishing, 20; goes with
Captain Clarke to explore a prairie,
22, 233 holds council with Sioux In-
dians, 24; views knob of a hill and
visits prairie-dog village, 29; passes
trading house built in 1796, 30; kills
a strange bird, 33; goes hunting and
returns with game, 3 3-35; holds coun-
cil with Sioux Indians, 38; persuades
Indians to return women prisoners
taken in battle with Mahas, 39; goes
to see Indians dance, 39; gives pres-
ents to Indians and persuades them to
allow exploring party to depart in
peace, 40; visits Rickaree Indians,
holds council with them, and presents
them with American flag, 46-48;
gives presents to Rickaree Indians,
50; holds council with Grossventer,
Mandan, Sioux, and Watasoon In-
dians, 55; visits Mandan village, 56;
goes buffaloe hunting, 59; gives
whiskey to men for New Year’s cele-
bration, 64; calls for volunteers to
pursue Indian robbers, 69; sets out
by land for Yellowstone river, 78;
rejoins exploring party, 79; kills a
white bear and an elk, 80; his expe-
dition up north fork of Missouri river,
94, 96; sets out for mountains, 98;
visits Falls of the Missouri, 100;
helps men to make an iron boat,
103; bleeds sick man with pen-knife,
104; goes to look at spring, 105;
goes to mountain to take observation,
111; goes ahead of party and en-
camps over night alone in the wilder-
ness, 118; goes ahead with party to
look for Snake Indians, 118; journeys
as far as Columbia river and returns
Index
Lewis, Captain Meriwether (Continued)
with Snake Indians, 125; buys horses
for party, 133; ill, 1495 goes hunting
by moonlight, 168; takes specimen
of Indian language, 177; gives medal
to Chinook Indian, 178; trades blue
beads to Indians for sea otter skins,
1793 goes in search of winter camp-
ing place, 181; returns and reports
place for camp, 183; gives men to-
bacco and handkerchiefs for Christ-
mas, 187; buys canoes of Indians,
214; strikes Indian for stealing, 2173
journeys on foot so that men with sore
feet may ride, 220; doctors sick
among Indians, 226, 229, 2373 de-
scends Clarke’s river, 254-2673; as-
cends Maria’s river, 261; and party
have encounter with Grossventress’
Indians, 267; has skeleton of bighorns
prepared to take to Washington, 268,
269; wounded accidentally by one of
the party, 273, 274; recovering from
wound, 277; mentioned, 1, 60, 71,
86, 99, 108, 109, 112, 117, 119—
I2I, 124, 128, 132, 133, 140-142,
146, 150, 160, 163, 173-175; 184,
197, 213; 215, 235; 253; 260, 270,
271, 285
Lewis river, 152-159, 177; 224, 240
Little-bow creek, 23
Little Goodwoman creek, 6
Little Missouri river, 74, 75, 79, 275
Little Osage river, 3
Little Sioux river, 18
Loos Indians, see Loup Indians
Loup Indians, 14, 285
Lucelle, Mr., 35
M
Mackenzie, Mr., 36, 41
M’Clanen, Captain, 287
M’Clelland, Mr., 285
Madison river, 121
Magpie, 243
Maha creek, 12, 20
Index
Maha Indians, 19, 20, 23, 39, 285
Maha village, 20, 254, 283
Mandan, Fort, 58, 63, 65, 79
Mandan Indians, their method of hunt-
ing buffaloe, 59; superstitions regard-
ing buffaloe, 66, 67; burial customs,
54; characteristics, 71, 72; method
of wintering horses, 64, 65; men-
tioned, 47, 48, 52, 53, 55-73, 275
Mandan villages, 53, 54
Maple, 168, 170; soft, 211.
Marapa river, 46
Maria’s river, 96, 97, 99, 260, 261,
266-268
Marrow creek, 6
Medicine river, 101, 103, 104, 257-259
Milk river, 83, 270
Mine creek, 6
Mine river, 287
Mississippi river, 1
Missouri Indians, 17
Missouri river, ascent of, 1-55, 73-1273
description of country through which
it flows, 89~91; descent of, 257-288;
distance from mouth to Pacific Ocean,
176,177; Falls of the, 99, 100, 105—
107, 254; Great Bend of, 34, 35, 53,
280; north branch, 118-122; rapids
of, 100, 112; source of, 127, 257;
south branch, 120-122; three forks
of, 117, 121, 122; two forks of, 93,
94,96, 97; west branch of, 120-122
Moha creek, see Maha creek
Mombran’s tavern, 4
Mountain holly, 135
Mountain sheep, 80, 87-89, 93, 112,
240, 268, 269
Mud creek, 5
Mulberries, 8
Muscle-shell (or Muscle shoal) river,
86, 269
Musquitoes, 18, 19, 32, 104, 109, 115,
202, 243, 244, 247, 249, 253, 254,
256, 258-262, 272, 275) 2775 2795
282-284, 286
Myrrh, 137
295
N
Nadowa, 12
Namahia creek, 13
Nettles, 206
Netul river, 200
New Year’s day, celebration of, 64
Night creek, 34
North West Company, 61
North West Company traders, 54, 58,
61, 62, 66, 277
oO
Oak, 5, 24, 164, 166, 206
Onion creek, 75
Onions, wild, 114
Osage Indians, 5
Osage river, 5
Oto Indians, see Otto Indians
Otter, 52, 124, 203, 223, 274
Otter, sea, 164, 166, 172
Otter creek, 4
Otto Indians, 14, 16-18, 284
P
Pacific Ocean, exploring party arrive at,
174, 175; distance from mouth of
Missouri river to, 176, 177
Paint creek, 28
Pania river, 28
Panther, 149
Papaws, 287
Pelicans, 19, 51, 161, 283
Perch fish, 20
Petrified wood, 77
Pettit-ark creek, see Little~Bow creek
Pheasants, 131, 136, 137, 142, 147,
149, 222, 227, 248
Philosophy river, 122
Pigeons, wild, 10g
Pike fish, 20
Pine, 83-85, 113, 114, 116, 121, 126,
128, 131, 135, 136, 140, 142, 144,
146, 148, 152, 164, 166, 168, 170,
178, 184, 228, 242
296
Platt creek, 10
Platte river, 14, 15, 90, 284, 286, 287
Pleasant camp, 281
Plumb creek, 27
Plumbs, 281
Poncas Indians, 28
Pond creek, 11
Pond river, 49
Ponis (Panis or Poenese) Indians, 7, 14,
286, 287
Porcupine, 31, 32
Porcupine creek, 81
Porpoises, 172
Portage river, 263-265
Portages, Missouri river, 102, 105, 261—
264; Columbia river, 162, 164, 167,
213, 214, 216
Prairie dog, 29
Prairie hen, 131; see also Grouse
Prairie of Arrows, 6
Prarow, see Badger
President of the U. S., specimens sent
to, 71
Prickley pear, 95
Pumice stone, 13, 74, 77, 178
Q
Quail, 211
Quicksand river, 177, 208
R
Rabbit berries, 22, 52
Racoon, 203
Rainy, Mount, 169
Rapid-water river, 28
Ravens, 161, 202
Rat, wood, 11
Rattle-snake, description of, 116; men-
tioned, 216
Rickaree (Aricaris, Rickree, or Rees)
Indians, characteristics, 48; lodges,
45-475 superstitions, 278; mentioned,
42, 46-50, 54, 70, 73
Rickaree Indian villages, 48, 277, 278
Index
River de Bois, see Wood river
Rock camp, 215
Rocky mountains, 65, 80, 111-117,
119, 124-132, 137, 139, 140, 142—
147) 176, 231, 250
Rogue’s-harbour creek, 177
Roots, edible, 222, 238; see also names
of roots, and Shrub, edible
Rose river, 94, 266
Round-knob creek, 16
Rush creek, 4
Rushes, 5
S
Sacque river, 23, 24
Sage brush, 221
Saine creek, 6
St. Charles, 2, 3
St. Johns, 3
St. Louis, 1, 3, 71, 288
Salmon, 128, 129, 132, 136, 151, 157,
158, 161, 163, 172, 177, 182, 186,
188, 213, 240, 247
Salmon-trout, 247, 249
Salt spring, 30
Salt works, 188, 190-193, 195-198
Sandy river, 209, 210
Service berries, 117,
256
Service-berry bushes, 141, 142, 149,
243
Service-berry valley, 125
Shallow Bay, 171, 177, 181
Shapaleel (Indian bread), 215, 218, 219,
221, 222, 226
Sharbons creek, 75
Sheep, Mountain, see Mountain sheep
Sheep, unknown variety, 150
Sheep-sorrel, 202
Shoshone Indians, see Snake Indians
Shoshone river, see Snake river
Shotto, Mr., 283
Shrub, edible, 211
Sioux crossing-place, 34
UG EGS U5
Index
Sioux Indians, councils held with, 24,
55; dances, 25; declare war against
exploring party, 70; lodges, 24; mu-
sical instruments, 25; mentioned
7) 20, 23, 24, 36, 45, 52, $7, 2845
see also Teeton Indians, Yonktin
Indians
Sioux river, 21
Slate run, 46
Slaughter river, 268
Smoke creek, 36
Snake creek, 8
Snake Indians, 74, 125, 126, t40, 240
Snake river, 162, 176, 177, 218
Snakes, 11; see also Garter snakes, Rat-
tle-snake
Snow creek, 99
Soldiers creek, 18
Spear mint, 104
Springs, see Boiling spring, Hot spring,
Salt spring, Sulphur spring
Squashes (raised by Indians), 47
Squirrel, description of, 108, 216, 243;
mentioned, 136, 164, 165, 177, 191
Stony creek, 142
Strawberries, 100
Strawberry creek, roo
Strawberry island, 212
Strawberry vines, 141, 242
Sturgeon, 200, 202, 206
Sugar tree, 8
Sulphur, 74
Sulphur spring, 101

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Chinook Traders Bring Cedar Bark Rain Hats

Tue, 05 May 2026 14:23:13 +0000

of the Chinook Indians came to the fort with hats to trade.
They are made of the cedar bark and silk grass, look hand-
some and keep out the rain. But little rain fell to day, and
in the evening we turned out the natives as usual, and they all
went home.

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Clark's Party Reaches Beached Whale on the Coast

Tue, 05 May 2026 13:47:53 +0000

Clarke with 14 men came to the salt-makers camp, in their
way to the place where the large fish had been driven on
shore, some distance beyond this camp. The Indians about
our fort had procured a considerable quantity of the meat,
which we found very good. The 8th was a fine day and I
remained at camp. The 9th was also fair and pleasant; and
about noon Captain Clarke and his party returned here; the
distance being about 17 miles. They found the skeleton of a
whale which measured 105 feet in length and the head 12.
The natives had taken all the meat off its bones, by scalding
and other means, for the purpose of trade. The Indians, who
live up there are of another nation, and call themselves the
Callemax nation. They are a ferocious nation: one of them
was going to kill one of our men, for his blanket; but was
prevented by a squaw of the Chinook nation, who lives among
them, and who raised an alarm. There is a small river comes
into the sea at that place. Captain Clarke and his party re-
mained at the camp all night, during which some rain fell.

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Departure from Fort Clatsop After Winter Stay

Mon, 04 May 2026 16:45:59 +0000

rained hard the greater part of last night, this morning proved so
rainy and uncertain that our officers were undetermined for some
time whether they had best Set out & risque the [wind] which
appeared to be riseing or not. John Colter returned having killed
an Elk about 3 miles towards point adams.1 the rain Seased and it
became fair, about meridian at which time we loaded our canoes &
at 1 P.M. left Fort Clatsop on our homeward bound journey, at
this place we had wintered and remained from the 7th of Decr 1805
to this day, and have lived as well as we had any right to expect,
and we can say that we were never one day without 3 meals of Some
kind a day, either poor Elk meat or roots, notwithstanding the
reputed fall of rain which has fallen almost continualy since we
passed the long narrows on the [blank in Ms.] of Novr last, indeed
we have had only [blank in Ms.] days fair weather Since that
time. Soon after we had set out from fort Clatsop we were met
by a party of the chinooks, the old baud and hir Six Girls,2 they
had a canoe, a Sea otter Skin dryed fish & hats for Sale, we pur-
chased a Sea otter and proceeded on thro Meriwethers Bay.
their was a stiff breeze from the S. W. which raised considerable
swells around Merewethers Point, which was as much as our canoes
could ride above point william we came too at the Camp of G.
Drewyer & the 2 Fields they had killed 2 Elk which was about
1± mile distant, here we Encamped3 for the night, having made
16 miles.

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Delashelwilt and Women Arrive at Fort Clatsop

Mon, 04 May 2026 16:45:58 +0000

Snow, we fixed our canoes and git in readiness for a Start expect-
1 “we were visited this afternoon by Dclashshelwilt a Chinnook Chief his
wife and six women of his nation which the old baud his wife had brought for
market, this was the same party that had communicated the venerial to so
many of our party in November last, and of which they have finally recovered.
1 therefore gave the men a particular charge with rispect to them which they
promised me to observe.” Lewis.
1806] SERGEANT ORD WAY’S JOURNAL 329
ing G. Drewyer to return from the Cathlemaks. Showery all day.
in the evening Drewyer returnd with a canoe which he had bought
for Cap* Lewises Uniform coat and a small peace of tobacco.1 we
should have started this day had we been ready. &C.

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Enormous Turkey Buzzard Shot Near Haley's Bay

Mon, 04 May 2026 16:45:41 +0000

more of the party set out in order to go down and see the passiffic
1 Baker Bay. The camp for the next ten days was near the southeast, or
landward end of the bay, near Chinook Point. On or near this site today is
Fort Columbia, one of the country’s important modern seacoast fortifications.
312 WISCONSIN HISTORICAL COLLECTIONS
ocean, we proceeded on round Hailys bay1 crossed two Rivers
in sd bay. one of the party killed a verry large turkey buzzard2
which had white under its wings, and was nine feet from the points
of the wings, and 3 feet 10 Inches in length, and everey way pro-
portined. we proceeded on round high clifts of rocks where we had
much trouble to pass, towards evening we arived at the Cape dis-
apointment on the Sea Shore, went over a bald hill where we had a
handsom view of the ocean, we went on a Short distance on the
coast and Camped for the night.

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Treaty with the Chehalis et al., 1864

admin — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 13:47:28 +0000

Land cession by the Chehalis, Chinook, Klatsop, Klikitat. Region: Washington 1. Covering 9 counties across WA.

Present-Day Tribes

Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation
Confederated Tribes of the Chehalis Reservation, Washington
Quinault Indian Nation, Washington
Shoalwater Bay Tribe of the Shoalwater Bay Indian Reservation, Washington

Citations

DOI OFA – Chinook, 57; DOI OFA – Chinook, 57; DOI OFA – Chinook, 57 -58; Tiller 731; Tiller 762

1 Hodge 241; Waldman 63

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The Chinook People and the Lewis and Clark Expedition

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 01:27:41 +0000

Boyd examines the complex interactions between the Lewis and Clark Expedition and the Chinook peoples of the lower Columbia River during the winter of 1805-1806. The article documents the Chinook’s position as the premier traders of the Pacific Northwest, controlling commerce at the mouth of the Columbia and maintaining trade relationships with European and American maritime vessels for decades before the expedition’s arrival. Boyd analyzes the cultural misunderstandings that characterized the expedition’s Chinook encounters, including the captains’ frequent complaints about theft and hard bargaining, which Boyd reinterprets as the Chinook operating within their own well-established commercial protocols. The article also addresses the devastating demographic impact of European diseases on Chinook communities, documenting pre-contact population estimates and the catastrophic epidemics of the 1830s that reduced the Chinook to a fraction of their former numbers.

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Sam Robinson on Chinook history, culture, and federal recognition

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:36:08 +0000

well good afternoon and welcome to the tent of mini voices and core of Discovery 2 uh core Discovery 2 is a national traveling a multi agency Federal exhibit about the Lewis and Clark expedition it has a a partnership among many different federal agencies see many of them listed on the stage here the national parks service is the lead agency and those of us you see in uniform that are traveling with as exhibit work for the National Park Service what we do here in the ten many voices is we bring in a wide variety of presenters to share with us some different aspects of that Lewis and Clark expedition 200 years ago but also to look at the history and culture of all those various American Indian nations that we’re living here for thousand thousands of years before the arrival of Ls and Clark any the other Europeans or european Americans and we have with us a representative of one of those American Indian nations we have Sam Robinson he is chinuk he’s a chinuk council member and he is a longtime resident of Clark County he’s also involved in the Planning and Building of a let’s say for me one more time cotal plank house cotal plank house and he is going to talk and share with us some of the history and culture of the chinuk people so let’s give him a warm welcome here to the tanam voices behind my name’s Sam Robinson my father was Scott Robinson his mother was Dora Clark her mother was Annie Hawks her her father was John Hawk and his father was Tom Hawk huwel who who was a signer of the 1851 Treaty I like to I like to say this because uh um you know in Indian culture we really take a lot of pride of tracing back our history because for a long time in in Indian Country we were forced to forget a lot of our history so I like to talk about that who who were the who were the chinuk people you know the chinuk people they existed on this Columbia River out here and uh um oh these are some of my snapshots I thought I’d entertain you guys with anyway the chinuk people that existed along the Columbia River all the way from the Dows to the mouth of the Columbia River down the tilok up into the wiipop there was there was about 11 11 different tribes along the way and some of them you probably heard of you know up in the Northern Area you know the Wasco the click attack the molomo the wamit and the Cascades and a lot of those tribes were seated through treaties to uh uh to the warm up to the Warm Springs and and in the aamon and down into Grand Ron I myself today as a council member for the CH Nation I represent the uh the five Lower River tribes the clat the cath lamut the wiipop W kayak and the lower chinuk people we have about 2500 members there today the chinuk people they’re they were pretty dominant to the Columbia River they they lived in plank houses because of the uh uh they didn’t have to travel the river provided for them it provided smelt it provided sturgeon and steel head it provided Transportation so we hung along the river and we made our domain in the river it was uh one of the uh quotes that I like to use is Dr Steven Beckham from Louis and Clark College was our ethnic historian and he he uh did an interview for an article in the Seattle PI it made me proud when he said that uh the chinuk people were the the oceans of America you know because we knew how to uh manage that River just like the Pharaohs did their River and we have many many of uh Chiefs that along the river that that controlled it you know the Chiefs such as casino and and tomcin you know pre contact you know with the chinuk people you know we uh we were powerful back then because we did a lot of trade off the river to Indian tribes that were uh up in the desert area would come down and get fish oil that we had prepared and uh um and traded we traded for elk and and so forth and down to cotal Village down there it was thought that uh um Dr Ken Ames from Portland State thought that uh from their findings that the chinuk people were probably manufacturing armor made out of el tiddes and there was trading that as far as Northern California so there’s a vast trade going on in you know with the chinuk people and then Captain gray in uh uh Captain gray came into the river and then the whole new world of trade opened up for us you know and all of a sudden we’re getting things like iron and copper and and of beads and things that uh people definitely would want outside of our area so we were controlling all that Commerce in and out of the river and the chinuk the chinuk nation or the chinuk chinookan people along the river became so popular that other tribes outside the area would actually want to uh uh want to uh marry their daughters into the tribe for the endowments because there was large endowments that were arranged amongst the CH people so they would actually flatten their daughter’s heads flatten them back so that they would look Chinook and and to make them more appealing to the Chiefs so they could trade him their daughters into the into the tribe so they could have that connection with all the power that was going up and down the river and then of course in by the time Le lwis and Clark came in we’ve already been doing a lot of trading you know so when Lewis and Clark came in and they said you know we looked at these guys and they didn’t look any different than anybody else you know the other people were coming up the river the only thing differ these people were going down the river then actually they looked a little pathetic you know and they didn’t really have anything we wanted you know they came down and they were they were pretty down on their last maybe 10% of trade items and so forth and and it was just uh he didn’t have anything we wanted you know so we just kind of let him go on by you know by the time went to by Ridgefield you know a cotal village there The Village had 14 plank houses um but maybe about 800 people living there and we were wearing BB overalls and British jackets and we had Firearms you know so we were pretty seasoned to the trade but we didn’t let them start you know they got they got hunkered down in that dismal Niche and they thought it was the end of the world you know for four or five days or were hunkered down there and they kept many attempts to get around that uh around the dismo niche you know and uh they thought it was the end of it and then all of a sudden a chief from the C Lam Chinooks comes paddling across the river he’s standing in his canoe and he’s coming to trade give him food and uh they they just they couldn’t believe it you know first thing they thought that the canoes were magical and I tell you from my experience I think those canoes do take care of us I’ve been out in that Columbia River in our canoes and I have a lot of faith in in in in those canoes there’s one of ours that’s sitting out there right now and it’s they’re beautiful we hope to have some larger ones here you soon but so you know we talked them in the movie moving over to for cl you know they made that famous decision down there at the station Camp whether to move back up here to Stevenson or move down there to where for clot up is and they chose for clup that might have been their mistake because they got they got a little moist down there but you know we we we made sure that they they stayed alive and we we we fed them well and and when when of course when they left they signed over the fort to the chin people you know so uh um Lewis and Clark you know back then you know we we help them out today they helped us out you know I mean it was probably about four or 5 years ago we didn’t realize if we’re going to even participate in this whole entire commemoration um Council we had a tough decision to make what are we going to do you know and my my thoughts were to the council I was new on the council so I was a new voice uh was that one thing that the Lewis and Clark can give back to us is enlightened people on the plight of the chin people let everybody know where the chin people stand today and where our battle’s been for the last 33 years and so forth so there was something to be had you know and still the decision hadn’t been made yet so one day we put a canoe out on the water and it was it was uh weather kind of like this maybe not quite as cold but windy not rainy but windy and choppy down to mouth Columbia River we heard there were some reenactors that going to make a trial run down the river and there Scott Mandrell and his people so we’re curious we’re curious about those people and um when we did uh we waited in they waited in the river had a couple fish we were going to gift our elders they never came and then we get word hey they’re already on the beach they overturned their canoe about 20 mi up the river and they gave up so we came and we gifted them a fish you know and it was it was kind of a uh they didn’t expect anybody nobody came along and gifted them anything so they weren’t prepared to give back because it’s always traditional to give both ways and uh gifted them the fish they had no way to prepare it so we had an elder there he’s about 82 years old George leran pulls out a little pocket knife and he fets that fish out and Cooks it right on the beach for them and that at that time he had this bond with Scott Mandrell you know and Scott gets back to St Louis and he starts writing out he wanted to know who this George leren was and want to know where he lived and so forth and so George uh they finally got a hold of George and they when they kicked off in St Louis they FLW George and his wife Millie who makes wonderful baskets uh back to uh St Louis and uh it came time it came time for Jefferson to hang the medal on on Lewis there and stopped portraying Lewis uh stopped him and said George loger get in the crowd and he gives gied that metal to George and so there’s that Bond today and then then they made a trip to Bay Center and they picked up a little canoe called Little Wolf that Georgia carved out for his grandchildren and uh um little wolf they took Little Wolf and Little Wolf followed them all the way down the trail until it got to the plank house and then they gifted it back to George and Millie then and then so little wolf made the entire journey and little Wolf’s over up on the porch today you know it’s a great little canoe George’s got three other canoes in the works but they’re almost as long as the stage right now 82 years old and he’s still cares you know so and he’s also got he’s running cattle out there in Bay Center too it’s it’s just a great you know it was a great bond that we made that day and then we decided to move forward with the Lewis and Clark event and um and it has it has it every every place we go you know every place we put our canoes in the water people are happy to see us and then we we we feel good you know and then when we tell people of of of the uh of the tribe you know in in our in our plight well let me explain to you what you’re seeing here but I was just going to put this up here for you guys to see as a backdrop I’ll explain to you this is one of our ceremonies that you know in the last 5 years we decided we need to start bringing back our culture this particular ceremony here is our first fish ceremony and when you when you bring that first Salon into the river there’s certain ways you need to prepare it and there’s certain ways you need to treat the fish you know you uh you bring the fish up and one of the elders kicks the fish to kill the fish and then the children there they’re Fe putting berries in the fish’s mouth and feeding the fish and you honor the fish and then you cook him and everybody eats the eats from that fish and then when you’re done eating that fish you put it back into the river you put the bones back into the river and that allows that fish to go back out to the into the ocean and let all the other salmon know what kind of respect that you’ve treated him with and they’ll come up the river too some strange things have occurred you know we we’ve taken those bones out into the river in our canoes and you put them back into the water and we generally go out there on an incoming Tri tide so the water’s always coming up the river so we don’t get sucked out into the ocean and we’ve gone out there and you lay down the bones they’re on some cedar bowels and they’re floating there in the water you’re just taking and lay it down well one year we just set it down and those bones just shot out like a rocket right back out to the ocean and the wildlife they’re always around us too you know the eagles they come and check us out and the sea lions and the salmon so I think you know uh nature itself understands that the you know people are out there again and they really uh they they they like that we like that too this particular here is the opening of uh William Clark park it was a it was a great day and well how would you keep put it in anyway so so anyway so we we we decided to come out and we decided to go ahead and participate with certain LS and Clark events there were some of them that we couldn’t because of the politics of it but uh um but uh in real reality I I was um my cousin and I we we put it up to vote that we would come in the court too and and tell the story and the council voted to allow us to do that you know and today you know um today one of our biggest battles for the tribe is to uh is to uh battle for federal recognition um um in 1963 1967 we uh we were going to go for some uh some aid for a few of our elders that needed some some Medical Aid and the federal government came up and told us you know U what you what are you talking about you’re not a ferally recognized tribe anymore we’re like what are you what are you talking about well there was a head of the diaa that decided he would go ahead and swipe over 100 tribes off the list of recognized tribes and us being a landless tribe was it was a pretty easy pick you know for them even though it took an Act to Congress to uh take us away and that never occurred but meanwhile they were they were gracious enough to uh create a process for you to go through to become recognized again and so we we went through that process for 26 years and uh only only to be turned down and then right at the end of a uh right at the end of the Bush Administration Kevin gr saw it in himself to uh take take a look at those the recommendations that were being placed upon his desk because he didn’t believe that the research was done properly and he had actually hired an attorney to go through all the paperwork and they looked through all the paperwork and he called our Council back there and he said I want your Council to come back to DC I want you to be back here in 24 hours and I want you not to tell anybody that you’re coming so it was a great day you know uh they went back there and had a big ceremony and people came in down from the house and the Senate and everything to witness the signing of the the chinuk recognition and then we uh my granddaughter and then we went to a uh a 90-day appeal process and uh with that on the 89th day of the 90-day appeal process on our federal recognition the corol tribe decided that they would go ahead and appeal appeal us and uphold our recognition and um so we we appealed it we won the appeal and then the qus stated nine questions to Gail Norton on whether the process was even a good process to begin with and upheld it again for another year and a half well Gary Johnson our chairman happened to be back in Washington DC about 3 days before Neil uh mcb’s decision to uh whether to carry on with a recognition or not and he was there to kick off the Lewis and Clark and there was only three chair three chairmans from three tribes back there so we thought that this was this was a great sign for us that out of all these tribes that were along the trail that car was back there with George and Laura Bush having lunch only only 3 days before the decision came at the end of uh at the end of the uh week about 4:30 Gary’s getting on the plane to come back and uh he gets a call from the the Bia and the B told they told him as they were close the doors that they turned us down so today this this lady right here she raised my my uh my uncle down on Goose Point Goose Point is a small village in Bay Center it was over over the over the uh Bluff it was down in some swamp land and uh the reason there was a village in goo Goose Point there is because we we refused to sign a few of the treaties some of our treaties were ratified therefore they they forced us off the rivers to hide from the from the military and when we went down onto the when we went down onto the uh uh into the wiip we had to hide in lands that nobody else wanted anyway but the good story about this one is that Philip might He he’ll be speaking here in a couple weeks he he was raised by chicha his grandmother there and he didn’t even speak English until he was 5 years old and went in the kindergarten but he still remembers you know ch and and living down on Goose Point and have a happy life you know it was a good life for him it was you know and he learned how to respect the land and he definitely uh she kept him working hard you know chopping firewood and and everything going there that’s my great great great grandmother Catherine George she was a wealthy person she’s wearing a lot of detali in there she’s got a nice fourpoint huts and B blanket on that’s that’s my grandmother I was unfortunate I never was able to meet her but anyway so um you know we we we battle ahead but you know as a tribe for recognition but we we also we’re proud we’re not waiting we’re not waiting for things you know I mean the triy we’re trying to bring back our culture things such as Lewis and Clark such as the plank house you know uh really helped us bring back a lot uh the thing about the plank hous is you know all of a sudden now you’re starting to learn how to uh uh use cedar again you know making Cedar houses you know making Cedar headbands you know gas GA in and so forth you know because the chunuk people that they were they were heavy on the Gathering they made they they used uh Spruce root from the spruce trees to weed baskets and that that Spruce Roots would swell up and and make you water type baskets so that you could cook in you know cedar cedar was the Tree of Life Cedar provided you with clothing in the inner bark you could weave clothing you could make canoes um you could uh make plank houses you could also uh uh they used it for diapers for their babies you know so I mean um there there was a a lot given from the earth there the plank house is a beautiful project I don’t know if many of you have been out there it’s over in Ridgefield at the Wildlife Refuge but a lot of a lot of heart and soul went into went into that building to build this this the replica I well I don’t even like to call it a replica anymore I just call it the most modern chip PL house today cuz there was so much life in a plank house you know I mean the family’s been gather in there during the winter and each house each house was actually a um you had a head of a household in there and there could be 60 to 100 people living in that house and he was responsible for the Health and Welfare of all those people in that house so he would live on the wealthy end of the house you know and uh he uh he was took care of everybody from his immediate family down right on down to the slaves you know that have been taken in from other tribes and it was warm it was cozy there was a lot going on there a lot of Storytelling there a lot of basket you being made maybe could be Nets that were being made from netts or uh a lot of stones and so forth to be pecked to make fishing wngs but we lived on the river therefore water water was everything you know we had no need to move off from the river and today we still would like to be stay on the river but a lot of our ceremonies like I said a lot of our ceremonies are first fish ceremonies we’re bring like naming ceremonies we got three canoes that we’ve named just recently uh we hope to get more canoes on the water uh we’re we’re putting together a canoeing Society with grand Ron because there’s a lot of chimin people in the grand Ron from this Middle River area and they’re recent they’re right now they’ve got a 35ft canoe in the works and and we hope to uh build a 36t CU we want to have a bigger one and um we we just recently paddled the paddle to ilwa you know it was our first time to being in the paddle and we paddled uh uh 9 days a little over 110 miles up through up through the sound and next year um we plan on paddling our second year we’re going to paddle to maau and uh we uh the shortest route seems to be up the coast but I don’t know if feno allow us to land on their Beach or not so we’ll probably end up going up through the sound but uh it’s great you know it’s a great to be able to stop in every one of those Villages and you’re accepted onto their shorelines and they they feed you and and there’s a lot of drumming and dancing and just it’s it’s just a great and then you pick up the next morning it might be 4:00 in the morning you start paddling again and you’re tired by the time you reach the shores but they take care of you again and you do this day after day until you reach your final destination and then they usually have about a three or four day party going on there today we exist down in Chinook down in the coast we we’ve existed in a uh I believe is about a 1926 School building uh we able to they’ve been able to provide us with a space down there for the last 33 years one of the hard things is right now is I know the school the school uh District down there wants to get rid of that building um they they don’t want to turn it over to a large developer U they’re hoping that the tribe can somehow come up with some monies to buy it but we don’t have the money so we’re hoping that we can work out some kind of a long-term lease with them it’s not much we just had a commemoration event down there a couple weeks ago uh four days we’ve had a lot of free salmon dinners and and we did some drumming and ceremonials and talked about our culture and our past and history and it it was it was a great time had a lot of friendly faces come down we had a lot of people from up here a lot of people that I see up here every day came down to visit us and and uh just to just for people to come down and say hey w wow this is how you exist you guys deserve a little bit better than this and we said well this is just we’re we’re glad to have this right now we move forward you know I’ve had people come up to me and say well chin you’re chin you got a casino I said no that’s not us we don’t have a casino in fact we voted in 1999 not to go into gaming you know had we had we voted going into gaming we may be fly recognized today but we we we didn’t want to sell our souls to to become fly recognized we thought there was a better way to do that um but then then people are just just ODed by the fact that the you know the chin tribe is not a fairly recognized tribe because most of them say hey I’ve read about you in school you know and sure you’re still there you you’re in the journals you got to be around you know the Louis and Clark journals you know I said yeah you know but but we’re not we’re not we’re working our way back I said it may take a a federal lawsuit or it may take a bill from Congress you know so I always promote the fact that if you see your Congressional people your Senators to you know lobby lobby for that chinuk recognition and I think with this Lewis and Clark this whole Lewis and Clark scenario it’s really uh brought a light to the to that fact and more people are putting a little more pressure on the politicians it seem like politicians a little more apt to talk to us nowadays so I we really appreciate any of that that you can do for us we did a reenactment with a lady Washington out in Baker Bay and it was it was a beautiful day and they they they FL flew our F flag for us all the way up from uh Oregon all the way up into Baker Bay any day in the out on the canoe is a great day and any day drumming is a great day also we’re going to be doing a reenactment this Saturday too um prob about 12:00 out here by uh by Hong and Larry we’re going to do a reenactment with one of the long boats from Lady washingon do a trade reenactment weather providing of course weather probably won’t bother us too much we don’t mind the rain you not too bad that there is at uh chinuk Point down there by Fort Columbia um there’s a Cove down in there where people used to sit down inside the cove and wait to watch the ships come up into into the mouth of the Columbia River so they could go out and trade trade was trade you know I mean we could like it refer to the trade and how we controlled the trade once once the first ship came through and we realized that they wanted they wanted those Furs we started stuffing those plank houses full with Furs you know and we start trading with the other tribes and really bringing them in there and in the plank houses there was there would be trenches or storage facilities dug underneath the bunks or Hind to the floor so um when Lou and Clark Ste into the plank houses for the first time down there at capotal they didn’t see a whole lot going on as far as storage but there was a lot of stuff stored on the floor that they didn’t see and uh so we would fill those plank houses full and trade out and build that Empire one of the one of the sad stories is that uh in about the 1850s

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Doug Durr on Clatsop and Chinookan Land Management

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:36:08 +0000

good afternoon ladies and gentlemen welcome to the ten voices in the qu Discovery 2 tell you guys a little bit about us if you haven’t joined us before we are a traveling exhibit we’ve been traveling the trail since January of 2003 when we started out at oneill at Thomas Jefferson’s home made our way Westward to the Pacific Ocean and next year we’ll be doing the return trip back to St Louis we’ll open up March 13th in St Helen’s Oregon um as well U we call this the T voices because we bring in people from all over the country to do programs for us to tell ly Clark Story as long with the Native American story as well the over 50 different tribes they met along the way today we have with us Doug durur who’s from the University of Washington and he’s going to be talking about the classup and the halum living on the land so please welcome Doug hello and thank you very much for showing up today uh as was said my name is dou dur and I’m a researcher with the University of Washington I work with tribes all over the West um trying to document things like traditional environmental knowledge and uh historical knowledge knowledge tied to particular places on the landscape and I do this through the University of Washington through other connections working directly with American Indian tribes around the western part of North America uh through the University of Washington through the University of Victoria where I’m at professor as well of the University uh Victoria uh School of Environmental Studies and the classic theum though from here of uh the people who lived here are particular interest um because this is home to me here this is where I’m from and uh the part of my family where we have a written record they wash a Shore here in the 1840s and develop connections with the tribes living here uh they wash a Shore and actually take up homesteads here in Seaside just as ston from the large Village that was out here and so we had these long connections going back and so those con connections continue today and uh we know though that these these people who are here clap flip primarily but also the nalum or Northern tum people who were up here some of the time sh know people from up North they were here for a very very long period of time they learned a lot about how to live in this place and there’s been a lot that we have learned we being people from the outside being my family being researchers had learned from these families uh about how to live here and how to live here well and so over the years the class of people the people who lived here in Seaside have been scattered in a number of different directions and today we have people who class of food went North some of them went up across the river and those people ultimately became hard of of what we now now know as the chinuk nation or the qual nation further north and we had people who got scattered to the South as settlers came through and started to move into the area we ended up going south and some of those people became part of what became the CET tribe the grand Ron tribe and the class of nalen people who are a mixture of people from different communities up in down the coast and so the class of people today have scattered the people who lived here the descendants of the people who lived here have scattered and yet they’re still around in fact I’d like to ask if there’s anybody here who’s a descendant of class of Chinook people anybody interesting first talk I’ve given in a while but we haven’t had a few of those folks here there are a lot of them around and even though we tend to think about these people having disappeared this is what you hear in all the textbooks the truth is they survived and they adapted they married into other tribes but they also married into the white families coming in from the outside and they became a seamless part of the community and today ironically when I do the numbers I see that the uh the number of people living today who are descended from the communities right here in the seaside is is larger than the number of people who is here who were here when Louis and Clark were here they have more living descendants today that doesn’t mean that the the class of people are all uh living exactly as they did 200 years ago but they haven’t disappeared theyve become part of a much more complex sort of social fabric like there and so I’ve had the the uh privilege of working with a lot of their their elders and working a lot with the written materials things that their grandparents and great grandparents told people who were passing through the area and so it’s on the basis of that information that I talk today uh about the history of this very immediate area here and this way of life that has in some ways been swept away even if the people themselves carry on today but I think it’s very important if you leave here to to know that at very least these people haven’t disappeared it isn’t an extinct people like you’re reading all the textbooks we really have descendants all over some living here in Seaside some still practicing certain parts of their cultural tradition but that being said I’m going to talk a lot about people as they lived in the past I’m not going to talk so so much about how modern day Classics drive around in SUVs and go to the grocery store and do things there though that’s what they do but instead talk a little bit about just how these people liveed here on the land we know that there were several large villages right here in the Seaside area right along the title Flats right along where the estuaries are and the people of this area fundamentally were people of that Estuary and in uary is a place where we have the fresh water come down and mix into the ocean and you get water that’s a little bit salt a little bit fresh all mixed together and you get all kinds of things happening there that’s where the salmon first come in and where you can catch the salmon that’s where the clams are all the different clams of plats of people here survived on are all found there in that Estuary a lot of other fish that you don’t hear as much about the flounder they had distinctive ways of catching flounder right out here you got out in the mechanic Estuary in the mouth there you can see all that those shallow areas and the flounder used to be thick there and the some people can still remember seeing their grandmothers go out and catch those fish by coming up and jumping on them you can actually get them because they’re nice flat fish and so you can catch them under your feet and you can hold them until you can reach down to the SN one and so there were all kinds of things like that to be found there the roots that grow in the tide flat almost everything that grows in the tide flat had some traditional use and unfortunately this time of the year there isn’t a lot of those things out out there there aren’t those things out there to see on the landscape I try to gather plants to show you and most of the plants I wanted to show you have turned around and washed away because it’s the wrong time of the year um and what this means too is that even though Lewis and Clark were here at this time of the year observing things very carefully they missed a lot because they were only here for a narrow period of time which is ordinarily a very wet rainy period of time I’ll have to take my word for that and so all the things they needed really were clustered around that Estuary we have this the SLO Edge grows on the SLO right on one those title Flats also called the basket sge people use this to make basketry and The Roots can be used for that but also these pieces can be stripped and woven together and turned into nice mats and that kind of thing so part of why I’m standing down here is so if anybody’s interested you can hand these things around so you can get a feel for them slle Edge that’s right or basket sge carrots of nuta for those who are taking notes it’s a uh a plant that grows all over we have a couple of types of SES that grow in side plats and the roots of these to this day there are some tribal Elders who still take care of these plants they go into there and they churn up the soil around where these plants grow they pull out only the roots they need and then they turn up the soil some more all around the perimeter what that does is it allows those roots to expand without a lot of friction without hitting rocks without hitting solid dirt and what that does is make nice long long roots and those roots are the best ones to use for making baskets and so there’s a lot of that kind of knowledge that still persists today the tops can also be madeit into various things too but uh there’s that management of the land really is tied to taking care of those roots making sure that those work a lot of food plants can be found there in the tide Flats as well one that I can’t show you here but which is all over is a plant that the Halen people at least we know I don’t know what it was called in classa but the Halen people called it Yeta and it’s a root that uh comes up has a flower kind of like a buttercup and you’ll see it out in the tie flass here if you know how to cook the roots and this is about the right time to gather it tastes just like a sweet potato and it was one of the primary starch foods that was going to offset all that sand and clams and everything else that people laid here very important plant and when you go out at the right time of the year and you look out over those tide Flats it’s like it’s like you’re in your SUV driving to the grocery store it’s everything you need out there you have all the plants to eat all the plants to make your baskets all the plants you need to do med medicinal work all those things out there on the tide flaps and there on the tide flaps too people traditionally fished around here and up and down this Coast we have some hint of what the how that worked there’s one Elder I’ve had the opportunity to work with Joe scoval who’s who was one of the last people raised in the community that was sometimes called squat town hobsonville down on Northern T Bay and uh some of his ancestors came from the village here in Seaside but by the time that the 20th century rolled around a lot of them were moving north and south and these people went South down to till Bay and that family has stories about how the hereditary Chiefs in that Community would take care of the fish as they would come up through those tide Flats they had strong beliefs that these fish were sensient beings like ourselves willing to make the decision to come up and and to give their life so that we might live here and so they didn’t want to disturb that they didn’t want to offend the fish by catching too many fish by using the fish wastefully and so the hereditary Chiefs would walk up and down the long Shoreline as people were fishing and they would regulate that they would tell people when they were going to set in the Nets they had they were going to they would tell people when they would stop fishing when they would pull those Nets out when they would stop fishing because they knew that they had reached a point where they could take care of their own needs for food they could take care of their needs for trade but they weren’t going to take much more than that because they knew that if they did that according to their Traditions the fish would choose not to come back not so much because you would overe exploit them which is how our modern day resource managers might try to explain that same thing but because the fish had felt violated by that that has overstepped our balance that out that gone outside of our relationship that we have with those fish and we know that probably over a very long period of time these people had the opportunity to witness cause and effect they saw the people a couple Villages down catch too many fish the fish don’t come back much after you keep pulling out too many fish year after year after year and those fish don’t come back and you learn that and that becomes part of your oral tradition part of your stories that you then pass on to your children and to your grandchildren to make sure that they’re okay to make sure that not only do you maintain that relationship but to make sure that your family survives that they have food to eat in Generations ahead so it’s important that that knowledge gets passed along Within These traditions and in fact doing the work I do up and down the coast has been amazing for me to encounter a few I worked with a few Elders who were raised very traditionally raised by families where they didn’t speak English raised by families that intentionally went out of their way to not teach the children things about the outside world and uh I I’ve sat there with Elders who who are just from a little ways up the coast speaking in broken English about how their great grandparents taught them that there were certain things to do with the fish one of the things I do in addition to working with tribes as I help with salmon habitat restoration work and we know that we can take very good care of those streams we can stop all the fishing we can make those the water quality just perfect get everything right and still sometimes the fish don’t come back now one of the reasons the fish don’t come back is because if the stream has lost all of its salmon there are no sandon carcasses in the water to feed the little bugs and if there are no little bugs there’s nothing to feed the fish it’s a very interesting thing salmon leave here they’re little tiny fish like this they swim out in the ocean they come back like this so they’re feeding on things out there in the water shrimp and little fish and all of that stuff that they accumulate in their bodies comes back up with them and it comes into these streams and they spawn and they die and their bodies are used to feed all the little things in the Stream we found that hundreds of different species depend on those carcasses for their survival and one of the species that depends on those carcasses for their survival are the young salmon themselves because they eat the bugs that eat their own their own family and so we have now gotten to the point of sem habitat restoration where we take carcasses from places like uh Seafood operations take those carcasses and put them in the water and the fish start to come back because there’s something that you’re getting the nutrients kickstarted within that system and so it’s fascinating me to work with tribal Elders who say to me and again great grandparents born in the mid 19th century who never heard anything about this modern science they will tell their grandchildren we’ve been told that we have to put the carcasses back in the water we do that because the fish need that so they can come back their physical body becomes part of the body of the Next Generation if we don’t do that the fish won’t be able to come back and if you don’t do that they’ll be offended and they will refuse to come back and that’s interesting because this is Cutting Edge science I’m talking about with this fish carage stuff and here we have confirmation of voice coming in from the 19th century to tell us how to do it right and for me that’s exciting because I can take that back to these resource specialist water day scientists and say look what the tribal Elders are telling us they’re telling us we have to do these certain things in relation to the fish and most people who come from a natural resource background think that we’re going to tell them well you have to chant certain words and spin in circles three times that’s not the kind of knowledge that’s coming down to me from these people it’s very practical knowledge it’s how do you keep your family living how do you survive how do you keep your children alive how do you keep your grandchildren alive so that’s the kind of knowledge that gets passed down through these oral Traditions it’s a form of scientific knowledge but it’s being passed down in a society where you don’t have writing so you teach children these things at the very early age and teach them how to navigate those things and to survive also down here around the uh well I’ll double back to that point a little bit I think that that’s an important point in terms of how to navigate and how to survive but I it should move up now from the title Flats move up a little bit higher the edge of the title flats that area between the ocean and the big forests back here and we know that the people right here in this area class of people T people Cho people all took care of the land in various ways and one of those ways was to burn the plants out from along the edge of that contact point between the forest and the tide flats and we know that the areas around the perimeters of the big Villages as you went further out those areas were full of good berry picking areas areas where people took care of those berry patches and made sure that those things grow well a lot of the berries that you find around here will do okay they will survive if they’re down under the forest canopy but they’re not going to thrive they’re not going to uh put on many berries they’re not going to really do uh put out enough berries you can actually feed your own family and so what we see here is that there’s a tradition of burning the edges of the forest going out and starting those fires and clearing back those edges a little bit and so we have stories from the elders passed down about all around the edges of what is now Seaside as you go around back along the edges of the hills sort of in that area between the the tidle flats and back in the trees all that area being excellent very picking at one time that was an excellent place to go buy a house I guess a lot of suburban yards there now bar picking areas are kind of few and far between but those areas were very very important and there’s still places around today where you can go and see evidence of that if you walk across the land here in Eola Park there’s some some little areas where you’ll still see berries growing and it seems strange cuz the forest should be covering it but it’s not Forest is back a little ways now the forest is moving in slowly taking over those areas now because nobody’s taking care of that land but you can still find those places nion Mountain you go a little further south in oswal West State Park South of us here as you drive through that area if you’re heading south along the highway 101 you look back on the south side that Hill slope still doesn’t have many treats on it trees are moving in fast because nobody’s burning it anymore but that whole hill slope used to be burned and there are excellent places there still to go pick thimbleberries and things like that because people took care of those places for years and years and years and years knowing that those plants would come back up also in those areas where some some plants like Camas I wanted to show you one of those but you know there’s one of these plants that was said to be among the most important in the diets of all the people along the North Coast it’s a plant that’s very pretty it has a blue flower that comes up in the springtime and it’s so pretty in fact the gardeners buy it now have both catalogs right there with their tulips and they put those in their yard and those blue flowers come up and they they’re spectacular they come up for just a little while and they go to seed and drop back down and the bulb is edible and if you can bake that you know how to do that right it’s very sweet very tasty and a lot of the elders around turn of the previous Century reported the Anthropologist coming through that the cus was their most important one of their most important plants right up there with that YCO rout I was telling you about on the tide Flats had also this plant grew right along the edges sort of wet margins where people were burning to take care of it and why I have all this buildup to tell you about this great ch plan just because I can’t find you any to show you anymore because they were taking care of it and nobody’s out there anymore taking care of it nobody’s burning those places to keep the forest back and the places where it was growing have also been built over and today canas is an extremely rare plant on this part of the coast it’s it is rare enough that people say from The Nature Conservancy other organizations that take care of rare plants be kind of excited when they see it around here it’s a plant that’s been rapidly disappearing in and yet 100 years ago Elders were saying they remember remember it was a staple plant they knew all about how to dig it where you could go get it fields that used to be full of it early explorers coming through here describe these Meadows and blue flowers in the springtime that were spectacular and without people taking care of those places without burning back the forest vegetation along the edges and people coming in building over the tops of those places bringing in livestock early on pigs love camet that get in they boot up for those C bulbs they dig up the ground and they heat up big patches and in fact in some parts of the the Northwest settlers coming in and reoccupying those C patches actually started off Wars there are fairly significant battles that took place in eastern Oregon when tribes Chas plots that they taken care of for Generation after generation were being uh occupied by people coming in with livestock for the for the outsider they would see those things they’ say what a great Meadow it’s a nice natural spot I’ll set my set my animals Lo not realizing what kind of investment of Labor and personal energy and all those things that went into that particular piece of land that looks so nice it looks like a nice natural Meadow H the WAP the WAP that’s a good question the WAP doesn’t really grow down here on the coast it grows a few of them grow here on the coast but the big WAP grounds were further up the Columbia River the WAP is a fascinating plant and even though it’s not from this area I’ll go ahead and tell you a little bit about it because it’s so close that’s right and it was available in large quantities to trade from just up River the real Central core of WAP Gathering along this entire Coast is the Zone from about Portland to Long View what some people call wapo Valley historically that’s another plant that’s becoming increasingly rare although here and there on his is like savi’s Island outside of Portland you still see WAP growing in some of these natural little SES and WAP it’s actually um Chinese food you have uh little white things um waterest is it relative of that uh Sagittarius they’re both the same no but they’re both the same genus and so if you want an idea of what that’s like it’s kind of people call it the Indian potato around here sometimes but it’s the same it’s the same basic size little round bull blet that grows in Wetland areas uh up on the Columbia in fact it grows it likes a very specific kind of wetland area which is a real interesting thing it’s one of the things the science books I was talking about estuaries here were the salt water all mixes and textbooks never talk with you much about intertitle freshwater wedings but that’s that’s in fact what the wapo really likes cuz the Columbia River it hits that incoming tide and what happens is you get salt water in the mouth of the Columbia River but the further up you go you no longer get much salt water but what you get is the tide still affecting the river level so the river all the way up into Portland is going up and down and up and down with the tide even though there’s no salt water that gets that far up and so the WAP is sort of uniquely suited for that kind of environment where you have the water levels going up and down and up and down it’s actually a plant that can grow right in the water so you have to Buble it in the mud and then a long stem coming up in the leaves and a pretty little white flower up on the top and those were gathered by the chinookan people from just a little bit up River and Classics down here had families up there they had kinship ties to the people all the way up the river and trade ties and everything else and so they traded things down here that they had for wapo from just up the river they were they were slightly different people but they spoke more or less the same language and uh they had these kinds of connections and so people down here for example would have things they would gather whale oil was an important commodity and seal meat and seal oil things you can get down here along the Waterfront they also me very good canoes down here sometimes those are traded further up River and they would trade those for a variety of different things and WAP would be one of those things they could get also for that matter some of the people from down here here seem to have had uh kind of de facto plant Gathering rights up River because of those Family Ties and so they you actually hear stories clear into the late 19th century of people jumping in canoes from all the communities along the coast and going up the columia both to fish salmon at some of the falls all the way up to uh Bonville solo area but also Gathering wa as that came back down through and so it wasn’t a plant that really grow grew much here here but it was one that was close enough and they had access to so it was a very important part of the trading economy here and those car pick up on that um it’s also a very good plant to store so most of the plants that Louis and cl are talking about they’re not actually seeing people out Gathering much of this stuff because it’s the winter time it’s not the time to gather berries it’s not the time to gather most of these plants but they are seeing those plants coming through and those WAP are being traded all up and down the river all through the winter time taking care of people so okay right it can be propagated here yeah it does well in we setting so you can put it if you have a pond in your yard you can get some going a nice muddy base if if the water isn’t too stagnant you need a little bit of flushing and then I’ll go further back up into the mountains and come back down for a while and then we can open up for more more questions here these are good questions but taking things up further into the mountains some of the big mountains unfortunately we can’t see it here but if you were to just walk out anywhere Seaside look up you can see these big mountains all around here we have CLE mountain and we have Sugarloaf Mountain and we have onion Peak and we have Angora Peak these are all these this Ridge of mountains about 3,000 ft high at the tops going more or less from Northeast to Southwest terminating hitting the ocean where the a mountain is and the tops of those Peaks are high enough that everything’s a little bit different up there and we know that while I’m talking about the people of this part of the world spending a lot of time down along the tide flat spending a lot of time around these estuaries certain times of the year summer being a good time to do this people Tre further up into the mountains and up there you have plants that you just don’t find down here in fact there are some plants that are endemic to the tops of those Peaks right up here you don’t find them anywhere else on Earth because they’re completely isolated from other mountain ranges all around this area so they become completely isolated but people would go up there and gather plants for medicines they would gather a certain kind of grass be grass that’s especially tough and sharp very good for making real rigorous baskets real tough ones also people would use that for making designs on bask B because it takes D well so you can dye at a certain color and do all the ornate basket work and up on these ridges along the Coast Range here people also went up and um well gathered onions onion Peak is called onion Peak because of the fact that the whole side of that thing it’s all private Timberland on the way up there so it’s hard to go look at this but you stand at the base of some of these Baltic outc crops that go up 500 ft above your head and it’s real rough and each little pocket on the side of that rock has a little bit of dirt and each little bit of dirt has an onion going out the side of it it’s a pretty cool spot and people would go up there to gather large quantities of these onions which are can be eaten just like our own onions the top meat like green onions little bulb can be used like a wet and so that was being gathered up there but also there were hunting areas up there elk hunting areas and uh we even have stories about people going out and hunting the ridgetops kind of like you hear about the Buffalo further east people would actually flush those elk off the tops of the cliffs chase them places where they knew they would have to go around some Corner around another rock and then oh there’s a blind corner there that goes off the edge of the cliff and people knew where those things were and they would chase the elk over the edge some of those Cliffs are actually high enough it’s hard for me to imagine hard for me to imagine picking up the elk at the bottom but that was done and also up the tops of those mountains you have a lot of different places that were being visited for ritual purposes as well a lot of other important places like that a lot of stories tied to each one of those Peaks and so all of that was part of this continuous process of using the land year after year going in these Cycles going to these different places and taking care of different areas as people move around and so each part of these Journeys that people would take across the landscape cumulatively provided them with all the things they needed all the food they need all the medicine for the clothing they needed and so forth and so I may actually um cut things a little bit short here I do want to get into to questions and I also see the executor showing up but um I should say though as a closing though that this all this knowledge I’m talking about I guess it’s it’s interesting people talk with me about these kinds of tribal traditions and are they relevant today and I I they often seem to think that this is kind of antiquated stuff it’s something out of the distant past but like I’m suggesting there are a lot of things can be learned from this sort of knowledge we’re looking at uh ways of taking care of the fish we have stories about simple things that seem fairly basic to us and yet they tell you how to uh how to take care of your family I was mentioning the importance of of not overe exploiting the fish because of not not just the sort of big cosmological concern about the fish but because of the Practical necessity you need those fish to come back you need to maintain that kind of relationship with those fish in order to keep yourself fed we also have stories about uh for example tsunamis here there’s a story about um about a tsunami takes place down near Indian Beach or uh ecola Point down south towards can Eola Park that area about a tsunami coming in and there’s a the place called the baskets there a lot of lot of rocks that look like overturned baskets if you look out there from Nia point in Nia State Park and the stories describe people seeing all of the the water is sweeping out and we know now having seen what’s taking place with tsunami is happening around the world we know that the water sweeps out first when a tsunami is going to happen that’s the dip before the crest comes and so the water starts to drop and drop and drop and drop and you hear this story all over the world actually because there are different times in history where people see that happen and they don’t know what that means and they get really excited because you can go out in places you’ve never gone on to before and so there’s a story from who knows how far back I assume it describes a real event a real tsunami because it’s so accurate but they describe that water starting to fall going down and down and down and down and the people in the communities down in that area we know there are several Villages down near can Beach get excited about that and they tell their young women look their muscles all over the Rocks it’s a great time for Gathering because look at all those places can get to that you never were able to get to before and all the young women go out into the rocks and start Gathering and all of a sudden we see that wave come up and it sweeps up and we know this has happened many times before on this Coast because we find the sand we find the drift logs sometimes a mile or two Inland and that wave comes in and it takes them all and in the story then only a few people survive they go up up high and survive and when they come back down they stand on the beach and and they cry for the young people who have been lost they cry for all those people and if any of you know Canon Beach you know that one of the things that’s always in the tourist brochures is as you walk over the sand it makes this squeaking sound as you walk and people talked about that is the crying Sands of Canon Beach and in this story they explain that they say those are the crying Sands that’s the sound of those people crying for the people that were lost out there in that tsunami and when you tell stories like that to young people you don’t need to drill them on what to do in the event of a tsunami when you tell young people stories like that you don’t have to worry about them getting excited and running out to check out what’s going on down there because they have this powerful lesson and not only do they have this powerful lesson but every time they walk up the beach they’re thinking about that lesson they’re hearing that sound in that sand they’re being reminded of that story you’ve told them and that’s pretty powerful because it teaches people how what to do and how to survive and we know that because these tsunamis do happen every 3 500 years in this stretch of Coastline there are times when you actually have to worry about that when suddenly after maybe a whole generation hasn’t seen it that water starts to drop back and I tell you that now I tell you this story coming back from who knows how many generations of of class ofum of people you see that water dropping keep that in mind and get get to High Ground so that knowledge is passed down in that way the knowledge has passed down in other ways and one of the things when you go to boy scout camp they teach you around this part of the world you can always eat the blueberries find a blueberry out in the wood is almost always edible white berries you don’t usually want to mess with those and in fact in the oral traditions of the tribes right here they talk about the white berries as being the berries dead people dead people who died eat those white berries that’s their food so you don’t mess with that and then as your Todd in Boy Scout camp those red berries you kind of have to know your berries some red berries are good some red berries are very good some red berries are poisonous or at least when makeing very sick and here too the elders came up with a way of dealing with this he tells stories about Helo around here the wild woman kind of like zonaa North uh if you know that name like a Bigfoot character but a woman sharp teeth sticks mos in her hair extremely strong extremely strong and dangerous and liable to even eat children and there stories say those berries are hello berries all the berries that are red out in the forest she thinks are hers and so you never eat those berries in the forest if you’re out in the forest walking around you don’t just pop one of those in your mouth the only place where it’s safe to eat a red berry is if you take all your berries and go back home with the rest of your family inside your inside your long house that’s the safe place to eat those berries because otherwise she’s out there in the woods she’ll see you eat her berries and she’ll get upset and she’ll come after you but what does that do effectively that makes sure that every time that little kids are out in the woods Gathering red berries they don’t just start eating them randomly out in the woods they bring it all home where their parents are where their grandparents are to watch what they’re eating to make sure it’s okay so a lot of these stories too you go through and read stories in in collections of tribal tales and it’s like well that’s what’s this crazy stuff about some wild woman who likes to eat children and thinks the red berries are hers that’s that’s crazy but the more you look at this stuff the more you understand what actually out there on the ground the real hazards to children out there on the landscape that’s where this stuff is coming from and a lot of that stuff is pretty sophisticated it reflects the fact that people spent generation after generation figuring out how this stuff works and then how do you tell children something about that or how do you explain to your community about that in a way that’s going to stay with them that’s going to remind them that’s going to keep them safe for generations to come and looking after those those children and grandchildren and so I think that there is a lot that we can still learn from this oral tradition and not just the tribal people although for them it is an important part of their Heritage but I think that this oral tradition you know the class of people when Louis and Clark came here we know that they were very good at sharing they took good care of their guests they kept an eye on Louis and Clark they made sure they had food coming and going and and uh they did the same for a lot of families they did for my family they did it for all the different explorers coming through early on you know and I find today the elders who are still Tred tied into these Traditions are happy to see the rest of us paying attention to them because it’s we all live here now we all still we live in this place we share this landscape with the people who lived here for Generation after generation after generation in a way those mountains we see around us that walk in front of us those are the things we share with those past Generations as well as concern about our children concern about our grandchildren those fundamental human things and the point of view of these Elders is you now have to live on this land you now have to take care of this land too you have to take care of your children and grandchildren and so we can all gain things from this we can all be inheritors of this oral tradition reflecting generation after generation and experimentation having on the land having to deal with the consequences if you over harvest the fish if you eat the wrong Berry if you run out and the tsunami is coming in and now we are all inheritors of that and stories have been passed on to me verbally they came to my ears now they come out of my mouth to your ears they’re all part of your knowledge as well so you all have that tradition as part of your knowledge too and so the old tradition continues and just as I said the classic people aren’t extinct they have descendence all over so too their oral tradition is carry on but in ways they probably could never have imagined so anyway I open it up for questions I heard that did everybody else he was asking is there a time when youth are trained uh to tell stories and the truth is that storytelling is is a fundamental focal point of social life within the traditional way and that especially at this time of the year as we get into the winter and again it’s hard for me to help you envision this because we’re having W winter or we’re not having winter weather we’re having weather that’s kind of like our Springtime but ordinarily we have and we will probably in a couple of days in fact if you stick around we’ll have wind blowing wind often howling out of the South as these fronts come in off the ocean rain falling horizontally it’s a very good time to go indoors and tell stories and for this reason actually one of the sets of stories I didn’t even really get into today but it’s very important in terms of this kind of teaching I’m talking about is a whole series of stories among the tribes about south wind who is in fact their trickster character uh like coyote further east or Raven further north south wind is here all the time in the winter blowing making your house rattle making the smoke back up and bow into your home and so you can’t forget about south wind south wind is everywhere and south wind is the one in the stories who creates a lot of the land forms out there on the ground and teaches people about how to live and how not to live and he’ll steal somebody’s fish for example and then run down the beach ways and fall asleep because he so full he has to sort of sleep it off and he’ll wake up incased in rock and he’ll have to break his way out of that rock calling upon the the generosity of various people who just about had it with him and it’s a long negotiation process to get chipped out of that rock so there those rocks are at the mouth of t m Bay and every time somebody goes in and out of that bay they’re reminded of that story you don’t take somebody’s food like that without permission you don’t take things that people and if you do you’re going to spend a lot of time negotiating yourself out of a pit or out of a chunk of rock to come to the surface so that knowledge is all there on the landscape but the South Winds would be blowing all winter long while these stories are being told so a lot of this knowledge is being discussed being passed along around the fires in the winter time and in fact in this part of the world more so than in some other tribes I’ve worked with some tribes stories are told and then children learn those stories just by hearing them over and over again here there was so much of a premium placed on passing down the information very accurately that they would actually drill children sometimes in learning these stories line by line so that they would they would learn learn them wrot so that the next story teller would know those stories just perfectly and for that reason it’s really interesting because I can go back to old archival accounts somebody interviewing One Elder in 1900 another Elder in 1930 and you can almost get the exact same wording boom boom boom boom boom and it’s that kind of cultural knowledge we don’t do that so much in our society with stories we do that with songs we can say oh what fun it is to ride in a one horse open sleigh but we don’t teach children to sing well you know it’s really great to jump in a sleigh and ride down through the snow with a horse one his best kind of fun you get that kind of Rhythm to it and and those things stick in your head and so that’s the way that those things are being passed on to the children but it’s really from from infancy on they’re being exposed to these stories and then some stories being told out on the landscape when the landscape feature is there that story is tied to that landscape feature but an interesting thing one last thing I should mention about the south wind stories is that there there was a belief that you shouldn’t talk about south wind you shouldn’t retell the south wind cycle out of season because you’d be inviting Misfortune you in fact would cause it to go back to wintertime because that’s a wintertime story so you start telling South Wind Stories the wind may go south on and you’ll be uh having to puddle indoors again because that’s that’s the time so many questions here question how long does the uh did the waves stay out in a tsunami before they come in how did they have enough time to go out there and and Fiddle around shelves you we don’t have a geologist or do we have a geologist in the crowd it’s a few minutes few minutes not very long and it depends on the the size of the wave and the variety of things but it’s a few minutes I heard from an earlier presentation the importance of the cedar tree that’s right and I was wondering if there’s any Traditions you can share in terms of relationship with the either Force management Cedar well that’s that’s a good point I brought along some cedar I brought along several pieces of trees people thought I was going to give like a wreath making demonstration or something but all hand this these are two pieces of Cedar uh gather actually gathered right in the middle of an area that I know was in a halem cedar Gathering area at one time the cedar trees there there’s so much there I could do a whole separate talk to on the cedar trees because cedar trees were the source of the wood for the houses the canoes the bark can be peeled off and if you pound it just right and soften it up the fibers come loose and it’s almost like cotton you can weed things with it uh you can weave baskets and hats and all sorts of things The Greenery has medicinal uses and so almost everything uh that a person might hope for in terms of material culture in terms of those items you want to make for your living are found in a cedar tree and there were a lot of different relationships with those cedar trees that are worth mentioning I’ll just T touch on a couple here again just like fish the traditional world view is that these these cedar trees are they they give themselves willingly so that we may have those things and so people didn’t kill cedar tree unless they absolutely had to and so for example around here people would take planks off the sides of the trees without killing a whole tree or they take cedar bark off the side of the tree that’s actually possible you can come up to these cedar trees and up in British Columbia I’ll still find places where people still have done this recently enough you can find the scars on the side of the tree you can come up to the side of the tree put in some wedges hit them up and it has such a long straight Rin that starts to split off the tree a little bit and because these people had a lot a lot a lot of patience I guess you say the tree sways back and forth and over time that splits a little bit and then maybe come back the next day and boom notos wedges up a little bit more and that tream keeps doing that until finally pop they take off that whole plank cedar bark is the same way you’re going to make clothing out of it you only take what you need off of one side of the tree and over time that cedar bark closes up the tree heals that up it takes a long time that that can be done and if people were taking these things there actually certain things you apologies you make to this gear streak saying you know I’m sorry I’m doing this to you but I really need this for my family and we’ll do this respectfully and we’ll still takeing care of and take that stuff home I should also say that the the cedar trees for the canoes and other Woods where you really needed good strong wood people would often go way up into the interior it’s another use of the mountains I didn’t mention even though there were cedar trees down here people often went way in Inland because the cedar trees growing on the real Rocky higher elevation areas they had to struggle they grow slower because it’s colder rockier and what that means when it grows slower is that the Rings are tighter less growth each year less build up new wood and so from a if you’re a canoe Builder that’s a good thing because that means you have really tight grain wood very strong wood and so people would actually go way in the interior and chop these trees down I work with one Elder up north who still remembers doing this with his grandfather where they went clear up a mountain and they knocked over the tree and then it hangs up on the brush and they chop the brush and it takes about a day and then the tree slides halfway down the hill you go down the hill and they set have another base camp they clear the brush there out of the way Push It Rock it and pretty soon it slides the rest of the way down to the water front and then they can start working on cano takes two or three days to get that log down to the water and then they floated down the river down to the village where they work on so that wood was the premium stuff and there were stories that children would be taught again about these plants which I won’t even get into but there are stories about the cedar trees at different times and the spruce trees and all the other trees when they’re still speaking being asked actually by that same Wild Woman character you know uh she has gotten her face tattooed and she wants to ask them what what they think of it of course she’s pretty horrific looking anyway and now she’s got her face tattooed and she asks each of the trees in turn what do you think of my new tattoos and henlock tree which I don’t have here has the bad sense to tell her what he really thinks and she says in the future your wood is going to be totally useless when winds blow you fall right over nobody will make medicine out of you you’re not good for much of anything but cedar tree has t cedar tree knows what to say he says I think you look great this is always the right answer isn’t it he says I think you look great with that those tattoos and she says very good and you’re going to have strong wood in the time to come when people people are here this is before people arrive people will make canoes out of you they’ll make medicine out of your out of your Greenery they’ll make clothing out of your bar and you’ll be honored by all these people who will show you this kind of respect and so same thing happens with Spruce this tree is everywhere around here Spruce very Pokey I’ll hand these around Spruce also has a good sense to say fairly positive think Spruce is not given as many attributes as Cedar but Spruce it’s a great tree and a lot of the uses are medicinal pitch very important medicine uh spruce trees in some cases people go and put ceremonial regelia in the branches because it’s a powerful tree and you want those things out of the mundang world off the dirt off the ground and in some cases people even bury people up in trees up in the branches of these spruce trees with broad lateral branches sticking out and they laid those canoes or boxes right in the arms of that tree to take care of them so that’s very Poky by the way I warn you that a lot of the native names for this plant up and down the coast translate to the plant that really really really hurts when you grab onto it so as this goes around before War that’s why I’ve stripped the stems for you this will be our last question okay can you give us a glimpse of what it was like for families living in the long house seasonally how it would change yeah the the long houses around here they varied in size a lot there was the winter long house where the larger families gathered together and those were all made out of these big cedar planks they were often big open rooms some of the really big ones were as big as this the interior of this tent and you’d have extended families in them often two or three fires in a row down the middle some kind of large broad bench structure around the perimeter which served as sleeping platforms and often there were places to store things underneath that over the top of that and so forth and then there were rooms often partitioned off with small poles and uh woven Maps made out of various grasses even sometimes these guys and so you have whole extended families there in the winter time you it’s sort of a combined residential space and storage space because there’s so much it it’s not the time of year when you’re Gathering food it’s the time you’re living off the stored Provisions so there were boxes all over often big what they call bent wood boxes made out of sear planks that will be taken off the tree heat it up and then bent so that you take a single Plank and you bend it and you bend it until you get a box and then you put the top and bottom on and you get a nice wooden box and people will be living off out of the food or off the food in those boxes and those boxes would be decked out on those platforms and under those platforms and above those platforms around where people were gathered and so in the winter time people were living off of those telling the stories around the fires and holding winter ceremonials often when the biggest homes which happen to be the homes of the more powerful families um we’re hosting potash kind of events where they’re exchanging goods thank you and uh and also um sham shamanistic uh work where they’re going through and bringing in shamanist new healing work and that kind of thing in the winter and there as we get into the springtime people begin to mobilize they go to fishing places and plank Gathering areas and so there fewer people there at the at the larger houses but then you have temporary encampments smaller houses um there are temporary encampments like this that used to be all over the place and you can still see where some of them are as you walk over the landscape um and some of those were they look like shle simple shed structures often like the size of a garden shed sometimes where you have a family just sleeping for a couple of nights uh doing some fishing doing some plant Gathering maybe a simple shed slope like this rather than like this and um and they would move around between different locations where they had fishing stations and so forth and then people moving up into the interior as well sometimes in the hottest days of summer people sleeping out with kind of mat coverings again those woven mats being used over pole Frame Works way of the Interior fishing stations and so forth in the big Villages though at that time people would still be there um sometimes people would pop the boards off the roof so you got better areation and uh sometimes if people are going to go for a major fishing junket they might even pull some of the boards off and take them with them to go lean up to make the walls of the other structure they’re going to live in so they’d actually pick up those boards takes a lot of work to get one of those sear blanks off of a tree so you don’t just have you know a bunch of them here A bunch of them there a bunch of them here you sometimes have to take some with you to to go where you want to go and so in those different places you’d have smaller groups of family and then in the larger house you’d have a few people still hanging out usually elderly children those kinds of things Sing close to home and then as you get into the winter time then everybody begins to regroup and sometimes people who haven’t seen each other for quite a while for weeks or months would regroup and those extended families are back together in a larger village where they spend the year rest of the year say we’re out of time we should be questions for Mario stick

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