28 FIFTY YEARS IN WESTERN CANADA

of the Chinook jargon,*? would get from her as much
information as he could, that is, as much as her rather
short patience would allow him to gather.

The bee gets its honey more easily. It is true
that Father Morice’s ‘flower’? was already not a
little faded. . . . Fortunately, he had a good
ear, being, as we have seen, something of a musician.
He is wont to declare that if he had not caught in his
first lesson those extremely delicate sounds commonly
called “‘clicks,’’ or vocal explosions, which he never
heard a white man properly render outside of phil-
ological circles, he would never have been able to learn
the language, for those phonetic peculiarities are of
paramount importance, and totally change the meaning
of the words. With his usual eagerness, he soon made
good progress in that study. Instead of allowing him-
self to get discouraged by the many mistakes he was
bound to make in the beginning, in a comparatively
short time he had gathered up quite a vocabulary,
noted down a number of phrases and sentences, and,
through the process of deduction, made for himself the
outlines of a grammar.

In proportion as he became acquainted with the
language, he would give his people more and more

5 For the benefit of readers outside of British Columbia, it may be
said that Chinook is a jargon made up of ill-pronounced words of the
original Chinook language, now extinct; of other terms which originated
in the Nootka dialect and other native idioms quite as much disfigured,
as well as of French and English words oftentimes hard to recognize.
This lingo imperceptibly came into existence through commerce between
fur traders and Indians, and most British Columbia missionaries content
themselves with its use to teach their charge, relying on the services of a
professional interpreter to properly explain what Chinook leaves to the
sagacity of the hearer to guess. Fathers Morice and Le Jeune were the
only Catholic missionaries on the mainland part of the province (together
with the late Father Brabant on Vancouver Island) to have mastered
sufficiently the native languages to be able to use them in the pulpit.