The Chinook continued to work as middlemen after non-Indians reached the area. Early European explorers reached the Oregon coast as early as the 1500s. In the late 1700s, the area came to be developed for trade, especially after 1792 when American Robert Gray and Englishman William Broughton explored the Columbia River. Thereafter, both British and American trading ships anchored near Chinook territory, seeking to exchange European trade goods for pelts. Lewis and Clark, traveling overland rather than by sea, reached Chinook country in 1805. In 1811, John Jacob Astor, the owner of the American Fur Company and the Pacific Fur Company, founded a trading post called Astoria near Chinook lands. Before long, a trade language that came to be called Chinook Jargon (or the Oregon Trade Language) had incorporated English and French words as well as Indian ones from the earlier Chinookian trade language and was utilized throughout the entire Northwest, from Alaska to California. An example of a word in Chinook Jargon is hootchenoo for homemade liquor, from which our slang word hootch is derived.
The traditional way of life of the Chinook began to change in the 1830s, when a Methodist minister named Jason Lee established a mission among Chinookian-speaking tribes of the Willamette Valley. Lee encouraged white development of the rich farmland, and by the 1840s, settlers were arriving in great numbers. By 1859, Oregon had achieved statehood; Washington followed in
1889.
Many of the Chinook settled among the Chehalis, a Salishan-speaking tribe, for whom a reservation had been established near present-day Oakville, Washington, in 1864. Others settled among other area peoples, such as the Quinault, also Salishan-speaking. The Chinook have since strived to maintain tribal government and identity as well as to establish land and fishing rights. In 2002, the Chinook were denied special federal status by the Federal Acknowledgment Program.
World History
