Slave Wives of Nehalem

By Garry Gitzen

Indian Stories from Nehalem Valley, Oregon. Originally published in 1933.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 12, 2011
• ISBN: 9781257583942

Book preview

NUMBER __________________

A NEHALEM EXPERIENCE

A RECORD IN EARLY PRINTED BOOKS

PUBLISHED IN FACSIMILE

SLAVE WIVES OF NEHALEM

Claire - Warner - Churchill

PORTLAND, OREGON 1933

FORT NEHALEM PUBLISHING

WHEELER, OREGON

The publishers acknowledge their gratitude to the M. Wayne Jensen Collection, Wheeler, Oregon for their permission to reproduce the Library’s copy.

This document conforms to all United States copyright © laws and has been deemed in Public Domain.

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Claire Warner Churchill, Supervisor, WPA Oregon Writer’s Project

Image courtesy of the Oregon State Library

Published 2009 by

Fort Nehalem Publishing

P.O. Box 575, Wheeler, Oregon 97147

Printed in the U.S.A.

Fort Nehalem Publishing is proud to reissue this initially 1933 limited production book as a facsimile in its original format. Until now, it has been an under-recognized historical document of Pacific Northwest Native American culture. It’s the publisher’s belief that Claire Warner Churchill’s Slave Wives of Nehalem was one of the first books published in 1933, either amateur or professional, dealing with the Salish speaking natives of Western Oregon’s Nehalem/Tillamook. Churchill’s work, until now, has been almost completely overlooked by those who are interested in the native stories passed down from mouth-to-mouth, year-to-year from ancestor to ancestor. Churchill’s name should be included, if not near the top, with other Pacific Northwest ethnologists: Leo J. Frachtenberg, May Mandelbaum, Elizabeth and Melville Jacobs, Philip Drucker, and Homer G. Barnett who’s combined field work totaled five months.* Churchill lived in Wheeler, Oregon, at the center of the Nehalem/Tillamook culture group for more than twenty years.

Churchill’s Indian consultants were Mr. Ed & Mrs. Nancy (Nishslush) Gervais. He was a grandson to Chief Coboway of the Chinook, who Lewis & Clark met, and Nancy Gervais was the last known full-blooded Nehalem.

Churchill selected the title for unknown reasons, but this book has nothing to do with wives as slaves, but does contains stories from the native group whose early ancestors likely met Francis Drake during the summer of 1579 when Drake’s ship was repaired in Nehalem Bay. At another time, the Nehalem group became the accidental merchants of a circa 1700 Spanish galleon’s cargo which wrecked on the Nehalem shores depositing tons beeswax.

With pleasure; Slave Wives of Nehalem.

Garry David Gitzen, Publisher

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* The Nehalem Tillamook, An Ethnography, edited by William R. Seaburg, Oregon State University Press 2003

SLAVE WIVES OF NEHALEM

BY

CLAIRE WARNER CHURCHILL

1933

METROPOLITAN PRESS, PUBLISHERS

PORTLAND, OREGON

COPYRIGHTED 1933, BY THE METROPOLITAN PRESS

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

INTRODUCTION

THIS VOLUME of stories is the outgrowth of a hobby—the study of the ethnology of the north Oregon Coast Indians. Before the overland explorers reached the Pacific the Indians were already greatly reduced in numbers, both from the native scourge of tuberculosis and from other maladies introduced by the first coastwise traders. In 1806, it was estimated that there were 320 Indians at the mouth of the Columbia and at least 1000 of the Tillamooks, By 1871 there were estimated to be but 28 Nehalems, 56 Clatsops, 83 Tillamooks, and 55 Nestuccas yet living in their native homes.

At present it is difficult to find a single representative of the pure stock. The traditions are neglected; the languages forgotten; and the memory of the race lives only dim outline in the minds of the mixed descendants,

It is my aim to reconstruct the life of these north Oregon Coast Indians from material furnished by reliable sources and to show them not as odd or curious, but as human beings subject to the familiar emotions which dominate us.

The conventional code of these people abounds in tabus based upon observances so old that their origin has been lost in the cultural development of the race, and in its subsequent decadence since the settlement of Oregon.

The folkways used as a basis for these tales are those described either by the early explorers, by trained ethnologists, or reputable historians, and are actual as relates to background and customs, plot manipulation only being fictional,

I have selected the most dramatic situations—those dealing with birth, with marriage, with death, with mourning, with religion and pride of race, and have woven them into narratives meant to entertain and not to moralize.

Wheeler, Oregon,

February 1, 1938.

OCK-LI-PAT-LI

The Lily

OCK-LI-PAT-LI

The Lily

I

TY-YEL-A-HO, maker of gaming sticks, squatted on bended knees beside the unruffled Nehalem waters and in the pale evening light studied his own dusky reflection. He saw the long-stemmed pipe between his lips, saw the straight black hair which was carefully oiled with salmon oil so that it glistened above his smooth face, saw the beauty of his young, yet mature body, for he was strongly built and tall, and without the blemish of squat legs so often found in the canoe Indians. Gazing at himself it seemed to Ty-yel-a-ho that he was the very center and axis of the world which was inversely mirrored on the surface of the water. There around his body spread out the whole panorama of the surrounding hills, valleys and mountains.

Many times he had watched the reflections, and often he had marveled at the matching of a tree with its shadow in the water, but never until this particular evening had the pictures held any real significance for him.

It seemed that all the natural wonders about him were not only reflected in the water, but that they actually existed there. To his primitive mind, fish and seal, salmon and clam, flounder and crab in the deeps, all looked up at this mirrored picture and for them the reflection became reality. They need not look out, only up, and there on the surface was the world of man. If this were true, all these creatures were his fellow companions. They were persons to whom he might speak, and who might speak to him.

All the tales recounted to him by his father, all the legends of his tribe, all the sagas of his people, lived for these creatures, reflected as truly in the lives of the fishes as these images of the surrounding country were reflected in the water.

Ty-yel-a-ho, amazed at the vastness of this conception, explored it more fully. If the shape and color of this evening sky and landscape were real in the water, were not the cry of the loon, the mother mourning for her babe, the screams of the braves in the war dances—were not all these sounds of his personal life repeated in the depth of the water?

This being established, Ty-yel-a-ho found there was an unending application of the principle he had discovered. The beasts of the forest, the birds of the air, the tiniest insect, become an integral part of the whole grand scheme of nature. Man assumed an important place, and, although his savage ego proclaimed him the king of all living creatures, yet the lesser beings were his brothers. It was a happy thought. Ty-yel-a-ho began to have a dim perception of To-mahn-o-us, that power respected by all Coast Indians, that one-ness with nature which gave command over its creatures, whether they were beasts or men.

Ty-yel-a-ho pondered. Long minutes he sat motionless at the water’s edge gazing into the depths. Shadows lengthened. The sun dropped behind a bank of fog far out over the ocean, and only the tips of the distant mountains remained in light. Swol-la-la-chast¹, the home of Hah-ness², the Thunder Bird, was blue in the half light, its pointed crags faintly aglow with the last rays of the sun, Ne-ah-kah-nie³, home of the Fire Spirit, husband of Hah-ness, grew blacker in silhouette against the bank of fog which now smouldered with the flame colors of the setting sun.

All this Ty-yel-a-ho watched in the water, intently, until darkness blotted it out, and the waters revealed nothing. Rising, he looked about him, and suddenly Ty-yel-a-ho was afraid, for the world he had known was gone. Total blackness enveloped him. It was as though he, like Tal-a-pus⁴ of told, were enclosed in a stone lodge, compassed about and overhead, a prisoner, sealed in darkness.

Involuntarily, as the old legend flashed through his mind, he cried