which the Bastard metaphorically condemns in King John.
The conditions upon which the survival of sign language among
the Indians has depended is well shown by those attending its
discontinuance among certain tribes.
Many instances are known of the discontinuance of gesture speech with
no development in the native language of the gesturers, but from the
invention for intercommunication of one used in common. The Kalapuyas
of Southern Oregon until recently used a sign language, but have
gradually adopted for foreign intercourse the composite tongue,
commonly called the Tsinuk or Chinook jargon, which probably arose for
trade purposes on the Columbia River before the advent of Europeans,
founded on the Tsinuk, Tsihali, Nutka, &c., but now enriched by
English and French terms, and have nearly forgotten their old signs.
The prevalence of this mongrel speech, originating in the same causes
that produced the pigeon-English or _lingua-franca_ of the Orient,
explains the marked scantiness of sign language among the tribes of
the Northwest coast.
Where the Chinook jargon has not extended on the coast to the North,
the Russian language commences, used in the same manner, but it
has not reached so deeply into the interior of the continent as the
Chinook, which has been largely adopted within the region bounded by
the eastern line of Oregon and Washington, and has become known even
to the Pai-Utes of Nevada. The latter, however, while using it with
the Oregonian tribes to their west and north, still keep up sign
language for communication with the Banaks, who have not become so
familiar with the Chinook. The Alaskan tribes on the coast also used
signs not more than a generation ago, as is proved by the fact that
some of the older men can yet converse by this means with the natives
of the interior, whom they occasionally meet. Before the advent of
the Russians the coast tribes traded their dried fish and oil for the
skins and paints of the eastern tribes by visiting the latter, whom
they did not allow to come to the coast, and this trade was conducted
mainly in sign language. The Russians brought a better market, so
the travel to the interior ceased, and with it the necessity for the
signs, which therefore gradually died out, and are little known to
the present generation on the coast, though still continuing in the
interior, where the inhabitants are divided by dialects.
No explanation is needed for the disuse of a language of signs for
the special purpose now in question when the speech of surrounding
civilization is recognized as necessary or important to be acquired,
and gradually becomes known as the best common medium, even before it
is actually spoken by many individuals of the several tribes. When
it has become general, signs, as systematically employed before,
gradually fade away.