The Chinook Book

If this book is taken as a Chinook standard of spelling there should be no further confusion in recording anything in Chinook and I hope for the sake of the jargon that this will be done. Contrary to common belief, the Chinook jargon is not a product of the Hudson Bay Company, but is a spontaneous growth that started first among the old fur traders of Nootka when the Spanish first made a fur port of Nootka, on the west coast of Vancouver Island, many years before the Hudson Bay Company existed. The jargon grew slowly until the Hudson Bay Company began to use it as a trade medium This com pany enlarged it and used it but it was the Astor fur people at Astoria who finally developed it into the present excellent terse medium of transferring intelligence. Herein I have recorded the words and meaning of the fully developed jargon with the idea of preserving it for all time for it is too good an infant language to be lost to the world.