For Educators: Teaching Units & Lesson Plans:

Trade & Property

Lesson Plan 4: Trade with the Chinook

OBJECTIVES

Students will:

• describe elements of a successful trade using Lewis and Clark and the Chinook as an example
• explain the concept of a trade network

MATERIALS

BACKGROUND

Excerpt taken from Lewis and Clark: Across the Divide, by Carolyn Gilman, Chapter 7

Long before Lewis and Clark, American Indians were linked by a web of trade.

The Pacific Northwest was a place of particularly sharp variations in environment. Within a few hundred miles lived tribes who specialized in exploiting the products of desert, grassland, mountain, rain forest, and coastal ecologies. By trading, they could all live more prosperously. Even within ecological zones like the plateau, tribes reduced their labor by specializing in certain products and by trading for those they did not produce themselves.

On the eastern edge of the Chinookan trade network, the Nez Perce and the Salish were long-range, mobile traders who crossed the mountains to gather the products of the plains: buffalo skins and horns, obsidian, pipestone, and the finished shirts, parfleches, and headdresses of skilled Plains Indian leather- and feather-workers. The Shoshone, who traded with distant tribes from both the Great Basin and the Great Plains at a rendezvous in present-day western Wyoming, funneled goods from as far as Santa Fe into the Pacific Northwest through their sometime enemies the Nez Perce. From the Rocky Mountains, the Salish and the Nez Perce brought products like sheep skins and horns, goat wool, and deer and elk hides.

Plateau tribes produced goods of the grassland, the most important being horses, which they sold both to each other and to the Plains Indian tribes. The Nez Perce, Cayuse, Wallawalla, Palouse, and Yakima were all horse breeders. From their meadows also came heaping bags of camas, dried berries, tule mats, bear grass, wild hemp, and finished baskets, bags, and hats. The Klickitat produced trademark baskets of cedar root and bear grass from the Cascade Mountains, and they linked the tribes of Puget Sound to the plateau.

On the western side of the Chinookan trade network lay the coastal tribes. To the north, the Nootka on Vancouver Island produced some of the classic articles of Northwest Coast Indian culture: high-prowed canoes, basketry hats, woven robes, dentalia, and cedar bark for mats and bags. The Makah at the mouth of Puget Sound were great whalers who went to sea in their oceangoing canoes and produced whalebone, blubber, and oil. The Salishan tribes on the coast of present-day Washington hunted sea otter and wove blankets. At the mouth of the Columbia, the Chinook and Clatsop harvested candlefish, sturgeon, shellfish, and wappato for sale and hunted elk for heavy leather armor called clamons, which they sold north to the Haida. The Tillamook returned from their excursions to the area that is now California with abalone shell and slaves.

All of these products were funneled through the Columbia River, where the Chinookan tribes maintained absolute control. The lower Chinookans were distributors, transporting goods in their massive canoes (bought from the Nootka and the Makah) measuring up to fifty feet long and holding ten thousand pounds of cargo. The upper Chinookans were merchants, presiding over annual trade fairs. Everything came together at The Dalles. The name of the main village there, NixluÇidix, was translated by its inhabitants as "trading place."

The Wishram and the Wasco, "turbulent lords of the falls," made it all possible by stockpiling enormous stores of dried salmon for sale. Passing through in late 1805, after the trading was all over, Clark estimated the stacks of salmon he saw at 10,000 pounds, but he must have forgotten a zero, because even by his own figures (107 stacks of 12 baskets, each weighing 90-100 pounds), he was seeing 115,000 to 128,000 pounds. Lewis estimated that The Dalles Indians produced 30,000 pounds of fish annually for market. The reality was more like 320,000— and this figure does not count the fish produced for their own use.

Often, the raw materials traded at The Dalles were transformed into finished goods by tribes far from their origins—and then were traded again. Goat wool was harvested by tribes in the Rocky and Cascade Mountains but was woven into blankets by the coastal Salish and Nootka. Carved bowls and spoons diagnostic of Wishram and Wasco art were made from Rocky Mountain sheep horn brought to them by the Nez Perce and the Spokane. Styles and ideas were traded as well. Some of the Clatsop weapons illustrated by Lewis and Clark bear a striking resemblance to Athabascan and Tlingit ones.

OPENING

Ask students, "Do you think Lewis and Clark were more often successful or unsuccessful in their trade attempts with the Indian tribes they encountered along the expedition?" Ask students to consider this question and the information they have learned so far in the unit. Take an informal vote by asking students to raise their hands. Students should support their answers with evidence.

PROCEDURE

1. Tell the students they will have the opportunity to make a trade in a simulation on the Web.
2. Introduce "Help Lewis and Clark Buy a Canoe." (Because the wording is sophisticated, you may choose to guide the students through this activity as a class.) This activity is based on real events that Lewis and Clark recorded in their journals. The interactive asks students to put themselves in the shoes of Lewis and Clark in three different "trade" scenarios. Students choose between two answers for each scenario and then find out if the Clatsop Indians would have sold them a canoe based on their answers.

Background

Lewis was harsh about coastal Indian trading habits. He wrote,

"They are great higlers in trade and if they conceive you anxious to purchase will be a whole day bargaining for a handfull of roots ;ƒ they invariably refuse the price first offered themƒ.I therefore believe this trait in their character proceeds from an avaricious all grasping disposition." What he didn't understand was that trade occupied a different role in Indian society than it did in his own. To him, trade was an impersonal exchange of goods, something he did to meet material needs. To Indians, trade was a relationship. The goods expressed the participants' feelings, their character, and their roles in the community. Different rules applied to trade with friends and trade with non-friends. Friendly trade was based on generosity. But in trade with non-friends, the relationship was competitive and adversarial, and the object was to win. It was a kind of game. Lewis and Clark were considered non-friends. The Clatsop wanted to sound out a trading partner, learn his character, and build friendship or kinship. The captains were too impatient for such time-consuming interaction. Goodwill and a good reputation were not the sorts of capital their commerce hinged on.

3. Reflect back on the Lesson 1 barter experience. Guide the students in comparing their barter experience to Lewis and Clark's experience. Lewis and Clark had to overcome a language barrier. Were there any barriers during our barter encounter? (Different values, different needs and wants?) Did your relationship with the other person influence whether or not you would trade?
4. Ask students, "Why do you think Lewis and Clark were often unsuccessful in trading with the Chinook Indians?" (The biggest reason is that they did not establish trusting relationships with the Chinook. Other reasons include a misunderstanding of value system, failure to recognize wealth in different forms, and a language barrier— they had to go through language interpreters). Also, ships full of goods of interest to the Chinook arrived off the coast on a regular basis. (Lewis and Clark did not have much of what the Chinook valued.)

Optional Additional Computer Interactive - Procedures 5-8

5. Introduce Web activity "Trade Network" interactive. (This interactive will be suitable for students to complete individually or with a partner.) This interactive allows students to examine five products traded in the vast northwest Indian trade network. They first match the products to the correct animal that was the source for the raw materials. With a successful match, they can see where the raw material originated and where the final product was made. The distance between the two sources makes the point that this was a vast network.
6. Pass out blank maps of the northwestern United States. As students explore the trade interactive, they will map the origin points of the animals used to make one of the following products: whale-bone club, sheep-horn bowl, goat-wool blanket, abalone-shell earrings, or buffalo-leather parfleche.
7. Give students enough time to explore the trade network and complete their product maps of the North Pacific coast. Students should use the map scale to estimate distances between origins of raw materials and final products.
8. Discuss: Did anything surprise you about the trade network? (The vast distances over which materials were traded.)

CLOSING

Review these concepts through discussion: Lewis and Clark observed the trade activity without fully understanding it. Many times they were unsuccessful in their attempts to trade. Long before the arrival of Euro-Americans, there was a trade network established by the Indians in North America. This trade network linked the Indian tribes. Through this trade network they were able to trade goods and services, as well as fashions and manufacturing techniques.

SUGGESTED FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT

Ask students to individually respond to the following question in writing:

What is required in order for trade to be successful? Use examples from Lewis and Clark's encounter with the Chinook to support your answer. (A trusting relationship with the other party; an understanding of each Indian tribe's culture, including its specific values; each party must have goods or service that the other party needs or wants.) Use these responses to assess each individual's understanding of a successful trade.