Cockqua

Quick Facts

Significance:

Chinook headman

By Jack Nisbet

As he traveled up and down the lower Columbia River during his sojourn at Fort Vancouver, the Scottish naturalist David Douglas often relied on local people to educate him on the flora and fauna of their homeland. He learned Chinook jargon (Chinuk Wawa), a lingua franca that allowed him to communicate with different bands throughout the lower Columbia. He sometimes reimbursed his "Indian acquaintances" in trade goods if they delivered certain desirable specimens to his lodge at Fort Vancouver.

While exploring the shores of Willapa Bay in the late summer of 1825, Douglas stopped at the village of a Chinook headman called Cockqua, whose people were harvesting the roots of the beach peavine (Lathyrus littoralis) and so-much-tan, seashore lupine (Lupinus littoralis). Always curious about the tribal uses of plants for food and textiles, Douglas studied baskets, hats, and pouches woven from cedar roots, sedges, cattail, and beargrass. After placing an order for four custom hats "like the Chiefs' hats from England," Douglas asked his host to keep an eye on evergreen huckleberries (Vaccinium ovatum) growing nearby and harvest their seeds when they ripened. 

A few weeks later, back at Fort Vancouver, Douglas noted in his journal: "Last night my Indian friend Cockqua arrived here from his tribe on the coast, and brought me three of the hats made on the English fashion, which I ordered when there in July... Faithful to his proposition he brought me a large paper of seeds of Vaccinium ovatum in a perfect state."

Douglas revisited Cockqua's village in early spring 1827 in search of sewellel or mountain beaver (Aplodontia rufa). The naturalist had noticed robes that the lower Chinooks sewed from the skins of this small rodent, but he had never seen the actual animal, and was hoping his friend could help capture one. Cockqua was occupied with a cousin's funeral, but promised to send some specimens to Fort Vancouver as soon as possible. A month later, still keen to obtain a sewellel, Douglas dispatched a reminder of that promise "to be read by my Chenook friend Cockqua."

Douglas did eventually obtain a complete mountain beaver specimen, as well as a cloak: "an Indian blanket or robe, formed by sewing the skins of the sewellel together. The robe contains twenty-seven skins, which have been selected when the fur was in prime order."

During Douglas's second visit to the Columbia in 1830, he made no mention of Cockqua. The headman may have been carried away by the relapsing fever epidemic that made its first appearance that year, decimating many settlements along the river and Pacific Coast.

References

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

Nisbet, Jack. David Douglas: A Naturalist at Work. Seattle: Sasquatch Books, 2012.

Richardson, John. Fauna Boreali-americana, or the Zoology of the Northern Parts of British America. 2 vols. London: John Murray, 1829.