Chumtalia

Quick Facts

Significance:

Chinook headman

Date of Death:

1830

By Jack Nisbet

At the beginning of September 1825, naturalist David Douglas was busily pressing plants and drying seeds in his cedar bark hut on the grounds of Fort Vancouver when he learned that an upper Chinook headman named Chumtalia was visiting the post. Chumtalia's home village lay upstream of the Columbia at the rapids called the Cascades of the Columbia - the site of today's Bonneville Dam. The previous spring Douglas had observed many interesting plants at the Cascades and was anxious to return and collect their ripe seeds. After hiring Chumtalia as a guide and a Canadian voyageur to paddle, he journeyed upriver two days, then pitched camp near Chumtalia's lodge. "I found my Indian friend during my stay very attentive and I received no harm or insult. He accompanied me on some of my journeys," Douglas noted in his journal.

When Douglas expressed a desire to climb Table Mountain on the north side of the river the next morning, Chumtalia excused himself on account of feeling ill (which Douglas believed to be feigned) an appointed his younger brother as a substitute. After an exhausting three-day trek, Douglas recuperated back at the village, fishing and shooting at seals while resting his sore feet. Chumtalia then willingly ferried Douglas to the south shore and led him to a rugged drainage below snowcapped Mount Hood. Along the way they gathered seeds of several penstemons and passed beautiful stands of beargrass. At the climax of the day's ascent, they reached a stand of magnificent firs, which were still known as pines at that time. Certain that the species, which he named Pinus nobilis, was new to science, Douglas wanted cones to send to England, but found them impossible to obtain - the trees were too huge to climb, and the cones to high in the tree tops to shoot down. He made a note in his journal to acquire the cones "by some means or another." He did eventually succeed in obtaining seeds of the tree we now know as Abies procera, or noble fir.

When Douglas revisited the Cascades of the Columbia in August of 1826, Chumtalia welcomed him with a meal of fresh salmon and huckleberries laid out on a tule mat. The headman then insisted that the naturalist exchange his battered craft for a larger one from the village, and the next day Douglas arrived at Fort Vancouver in style. 

In July of 1830, Douglas again traveled to the Cascades in the hopes that Chumtalia would guide him back to the grove of noble firs to gather cones. The journey was postponed because the headman was hosting a feast in honor of his daughter's coming of age, but less than a month later, Chumtalia arrived at Fort Vancouver in his large canoe to pick up the naturalist and his gear. This time, Douglas was able to obtain his much-desired fir cones, as well as a tribal name for the noble fir. "Brought to Fort Vancouver by the Indians, under the name of Tuch-tuck, from the Great Falls of the Columbia."

Soon afterwards, however, some distressing news reached the post:

Poor Chumtalia is since dead. He was blown up by his powder horn which was on his person, and falling on his side, his knife entered above the fifth rib so that he died.

References

Douglas, David. Journal Kept by David Douglas During His Travels in North America. London: William Wesley and Son, 1914.

Hooker, William Jackson. Flora Boreali-americana. 3 vols. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1829-1840.

_____. "A Brief Memoir of the Life of Mr. David Douglas, with Extracts from his Letters." Companion to the Botanical Magazine 2 (1836).