miles east of Des Chutes river outlet, and a majority of them has forgotten already their paternal idiom. Judging from the Cayuse words printed in the Transactions of Am. Ethn. Society II, p. 97, this language prefers consonantic to vocalic endings, and possesses the aspirates th and f. The occurrence of both sounds, especially of f, is not uncommon in Oregonian languages.
Kalapuya.—The original seats of this tribe were in the upper Willamette Valley. The laws of euphony are numerous in this language, whose utterance is soft and harmonious; thus it forms a remarkable contrast with all the surrounding languages, the sounds of which are uttered with considerable pectoral exertion. The personal pronoun is used also as a possessive; no special termination exists for the dual or plural of nouns. Yamkally, on head of Willamette river, has many words in common with Kalapuya, and is supposed to belong to the same stock.
Chinook.—The populous, Mongol-featured nation of the Chinooks once dwelt on both sides of the Lower Columbia; but after the destruction of four-fifths of their number in 1823 by a terrible fever-epidemy, a part of the survivors settled north, and now gradually disappear among the Chehalis. The pronounciation is very indistinct, the croakings in lower part of the throat frequent, the syntaxis is represented as being a model of intricacy. To confer with the Lower, the Upper Chinooks had to use interpreters, although the language of both is of the same lineage. The dialects and tribes were distributed as follows: Lower Chinook, from mouth of Columbia river up to Multnomah Island, Clatsop; Chinook proper; Wakiakum; Katlámat. Middle Chinook—Multnomah, Skilloot. Upper Chinook—Watlála or Watχlála, showing a dual and a plural form in the inflection of the noun; Klakamat, south-east of Portland, a tribe once dispossessed of its homes by the Moléles; the idiom of the Cascade Indians, and of the extinct Waccanessisi. Following the authority of George Gibbs, I mention also as an Upper Chinook dialect the Wasco or Cathlasco language. From their original homes east of the Dalles, the Wascoes were removed to the Warm Spring Agency.
Chinook jargon.—The location of the Chinooks in the central region of western border commerce, and on the outlet of the international roadway of Columbia river, rendered the acquisition of the Chinook, or Tsinúk language very desirable for the surrounding tribes. But the nature of this language made this a rather difficult task, and so a trade language gradually formed itself out of Chinook, Chehali, Selish, Nootka and other terms, which, on the advent of the whites, were largely in-
