Chinookan peoples

The Chinookan peoples speak related languages along the great Wimahl, the Columbia River, from its gorge near The Dalles down to the Pacific, and along the adjacent coast from Tillamook Head to Willapa Bay, a country they and their ancestors have held since deep antiquity. At the cascades and the dalles, immense salmon runs made riverside towns rich: cedar-plank houses, hereditary chiefs and slaves, flattened-head elite cradle-boarding, and the continent's greatest pre-contact trade fair, where dentalium shells, wapato, camas, obsidian and buffalo robes changed hands between coast, plateau and plains. The Lewis and Clark Expedition met the lower Chinook in 1805; within decades maritime fur traders and then malaria and smallpox emptied the river towns. Chinook Jargon, the trade pidgin built partly on their language, became the speech of the whole Northwest. Descendant communities persist in the Chinook Indian Nation, still seeking federal recognition, and among the Yakama and other confederated tribes.