Historical Significance

The Chinookan peoples lived along the Lower Columbia River, where bountiful salmon runs allowed them to create large, trade-oriented villages. Captain Robert Gray, an American fur trader, captained the first ship to enter the Columbia River in 1792. But Spanish explorers had sailed along the North Pacific coast long before then.
The ship described in this Chinookan account may have been from an eighteenth-century Spanish expedition—though historians have discovered no documentation of this event in Spanish archives.
Chinookan Charles Cultee provided the oral testimony reproduced below to pioneering anthropologist Franz Boas in the early 1890s, long after the Clatsop and other Chinookan peoples around the Columbia River's mouth had been devastated by European disease and colonization. Boaz included the account in Chinookan Texts, published in 1894. Native American stories or histories were usually more concerned with conveying some sort of spiritual truth, with making sense of the world, than with relating concrete historical facts, so the content of a story or history could change over time, as a culture's circumstances and requirements shifted. It is therefore difficult to know when or if the event described below took place or what purpose the account served for the generations of Chinook who listed to it.