A very good musquet! No! do not understand this kind of musquet!"
Thus early is it a historical fact that the Chinook jargon was already established on the Pacific coast. This jargon, a polyglot of traders' tongues, like the old Lingua Franca of the Mediterranean, is used by the coast Indians to this day from the Columbia River to Point Barrow on the Arctic. And for its birth we may thank the Boston traders.
Chinooks, Clatsops, Tillamooks faced that stormy beach and lived on winter stores of roots, berries, fish, and dried meat. Their beautiful elastic bows of white cedar were seldom adequate to kill the great elk, so when the rush bags under the beds were empty, they watched for fish thrown up by the waves.
"Sturgeon is very good," said a Clatsop in English, peering and prying along the hollows of the beach. But the great whale, Ecola, that was a godsend to the poor people. Upon it now they might live until the salmon came, flooding the country with plenty.
Old Chief Coboway of the Clatsops watched those shores for sixty years. He did not tell this story to Lewis and Clark, but he told it to his children, and so it belongs here.
"An old woman came crying to the Clatsop village: 'Something on the shore! Behold, it is no whale! Two spruce trees stand upright on it. Ropes are tied to those spruce trees. Behold bears came out of it!' Then all the people ran. Behold the bears had built a fire of driftwood on the shore. They were popping corn. They held copper kettles in their hands. They had lids. The bears pointed inland and asked for water. Then two people took the kettles and ran inland. They hid. Some climbed up into the thing. They went down into the ship. It was full of boxes. They found brass buttons in a string half a fathom long. They went out. They set fire. The ship burned. It burned like fat. Then the Clatsops gathered the iron, the copper, and the brass. Then were the Clatsops rich."
One of these men was Ko-na-pe. He and his co
