Frank Hall, today's guest columnist, is a project manager at Hewlett-Packard Co.  He has distant Native American ancestry, being 1/128th Cherokee.  As a hobby he pursues cultural anthropology, which he studied for a master's degree at the University of Texas.

         The Kalapuya did not call Marys Peak "Chintimini" as is commonly believed, nor did they name it after a heroic maiden.  These popular ideas were apparently introduced in 1900, as Ken Munford has recently shown, with the publishing of B.F. Irvine's poem "Chintimini" and John Horner's "Legend of Chintimini"

         I appreciate Ken's invitation to review for you some evidence recently uncovered in the University of Washington Archives.  This evidence has helped to clarify the actual name and its meaning.  Irvine was nearly correct about the name, but Horner was very wrong about the maiden.  Yet each likely had good reason to think he was correct.  And the French probably had something to do with it.

         First, we need to ask how the original name for something as prominent as Marys Peak could get lost.  The short and tragic answer is that most of the Kalapuya culture itself was lost.

        The Kalapuya, who primarily occupied the Willamette Valley, are thought to have once numbered more than 13,000, but they were rapidly reduced by Western disease to an estimated population of 300 by 1842.  Mixed in 1856 with survivors of several other tribes on the Grand Ronde and Siletz reservations west of Salem, the Kalapuya blended with the other tribes and soon lost their distinct language and cultural identity.  On the reservations, missionary churches and schools worked diligently to scrub their minds clean of the native ways.  When the pre-reservation generation died out around 1910, there was little knowledge left of the original Kalapuya culture, apart from a few notes and interviews recorded by
linguists and anthropologists.  By the 1930's only one or two elderly speakers of Kalapuya were known to be alive.  Today there are many Kalapuya descendents, but they have integrated so well with mainstream America that many do not identify themselves as Native Americans.  And if they do, they are most likely to identify themselves not as Kalapuya but as members of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde or of Siletz.

Fortunately, anthropologist Albert Gatschet collected in 1877 a spirit-song that contained a reference in Kalapuya to Marys Peak, quite possibly the only such reference recorded.  Gatschet's notebooks were archived in the Library of Congress, and Irvine and Horner probably never saw them.
 

         Next, we need to understand that Marys Peak was the greatest of Kalapuya  spirit quest sites.  On coming of age, each young tribe member went alone to a spirit site on a five-day fast to learn the identity of his or her guardian spirit.  The spirit, be it eagle, deer, thunder, or so on, would reveal itself in a dream and teach the child a spirit-song that he or she would use lifelong to rejuvenate contact with the protective spirit.  These spirit sites were called tamanwis or tamanawis sites in the Chinook jargon a pan-tribal language that the
Kalapuya and other area tribes used for trade.

         We are now ready to watch as the native name surfaces through time.  In 1984, Stephen Dow Beckam of Lewis and Clark College and two associates published "Native American Religious Practices and Uses in Western Oregon."   They published, for the first time, Gatschet's 1877 spirit-song referencing Marys Peak, but in English only:
 

Full of blood, full of blood,
Full of blood, full of blood,
Here from Timanwi.

        With the  help of the Benton County Historical Society staff, they acquired obscure documents about the Kalapuya, but none shed further light on the name of the peak, and the earthy Kalapuya legends bore no resemblance to Horner's sweet tale.  It appeared that "Chintimini" was quite wrong, and they theorized that Horner may have made up both name and myth as an example for his mythology class. Yet it seemed odd that Horner had apparently believed the myth was true.

       Intrigued by this mystery, in 1988 I gained permission to access the Melville Jacobs Collection in Seattle's University of Washington Archives.  This is where most of the Kalapuya linguistic and anthropological records are now stored.  I soon had two surprises.
 
         First, I had the great fortune to meet there a linguistics graduate student who had just completed a "slip file" catalog (still unpublished) of all the Kalapuya words in the Archive's texts.  He had learned to read the Kalapuya language, and was very likely the only person
alive who could do so.

         Second, when I located the transcription of Gatshet's spirit song that mentioned Mary's Peak, I found that the English translation written above the Kalapuya was exactly as Beckham had published it: Timanwi.  But when I showed this to my linguist friend, he quickly pointed out that the English translation was misleading.  In the Kalapuya words of the song, the
complete name given for the peak was "tca Timanwi."  The prefix "tca," he explained, means "place of" and is often part of Kalapuya place names.  (As later came to realize, this prefix is reflected in "Chemeketa," "Champoeg," and several other modern versions of Kalapuya place names.)

         My spine tingled as I realized that the actual Kalapuya name for Mary's Peak, pronounced "Cha TEEmanwi" (hard "Ch" as in Tchaikovsky), matches the word "Chintimini" so closely, including the exact placement of the accent, that the latter must simply be a softened, nasalized, French-like corruption of the Kalapuya name!  Irvine and Horner hadn't been lying; they'd just had flawed information, possibly from an old French-Canadian settler from French Prairie who had known or married a Kalapuya.

So the name means place of... what?  My spine tingled again when I realized that the "Timanwi" part of the name must be cognate with (derived from the source as) the Chinook word "tamanwis," and the Kalapuya name for Mary's Peak probably means exactly what it was to them, simply "place of spirit power" or "place where the spirits dwell."
 
 This little mystery is a case where everyone was right, except the Frenchman about the maiden.  My guess is that the tale will prove to be a French folktale dressed up in Kalapuya clothing.
 
 
 Other namesake historical links on this site:
 

• 1900 poem introduces 'Chinitimni' - by Kenneth Munford, July 13, 1992
• 'Chintimini' may be garbled version of Kalapuya name - by Frank Hall, July 27, 1992
• Peak, river's name sake?  One Mary gained fame by meeting early death - by Kenneth Munford, August, 17, 1992
• Lloyd wasn't original Mary - by Kenneth Munford, August 24, 1992
• Marys Peak namesake mystery solved - by Kenneth Munford, August 31, 1992