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Chief Concomoly Epitomized Brave Chinook Spirit
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By Nancy Lloyd
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The great chief of the Chinooks around 1800 was a man named Comcomly. Contemporaries remarked upon his high standing among his people, his amiability toward whites, and his having only one eye. Mention of him is first written in the log of Capt. Chas. Bishop of the English vessel Ruby. Bishop wintered his ship in Baker Bay during 1795-96 and traded with the natives as the opportunities arose. Comcomly "moved his house down to the Bay, to be near the ship." Bishop allowed him to sleep in his cabin aboard ship, a rare privilege and a measure of the captain's regard for the man.
In 1805, William Clark and Meriwether Lewis met Comcomly and another chief along the shore of Baker Bay. The explorers gave each man a medal and sought to trade the Indians out of the sea otter robe one of them was wearing. It was"more butifull than any fur I had ever Seen," wrote Clark. The Chinooks drove a hard bargain; it took Sacajawea's belt of blue trade beads to cinch the exchange. (Lewis and Clark made it up to her later with a square of blue cloth.) In 1811, Comcomly was instrumental in saving Pacific Fur Co. employees Duncan McDougall and David Stuart from drowning when, contrary to his suggestion, they rowed their dinghy out into the storm-riled waves of Baker Bay and capsized. He fished them out, brought them to shore, and dried them out by the fire. They thanked him with gifts. Comcomly became central to the Indian/white trading cycle. He controlled the native supply of furs, he knew the river and bar so well that the Hudson's Bay Company made him the river's first pilot. He ate regularly at Dr. McLoughlin's table. About 1825, the Bay Company post was moved upriver to a place called Fort Vancouver. That broke Comcomly's monopoly of trade and together with the devastation of the Cold Sick, left him bereft. At least one observer remembered seeing him prowling the canoe burial grounds to protect his entombed loved ones from the grave-robbing proclivities of the whites. The white newcomers were fascinated with the Chinookan custom of head-flattening. The rise of interest in medicine and science in the 18th century led some of Europe's leisured elite to collect items of strange interest into their own private cabinets de curiosities. Two-headed calves, malformed fetuses, odd rocks, exotic animals "living or otherwise" each was a potential for someone's collection. The European interest in Chinook skulls was unfortunately avid. In 1829 or 1830, Comcomly himself succumbed to the fever and was buried on a hillside in what is now Astoria. In 1833, the Hudson's Bay Company dispatched a young Scots physician, Meredith Gairdner, to Fort Vancouver to help Dr. McLoughlin combat the epidemic. Gairdner soon developed an illness of his own, tuberculosis, and was granted a leave of absence to the Sandwich Islands where he hoped to mend. But first ... Dr. Gairdner, perhaps with an eye to his own imminent death, wanted to do something unusual for the sake of science. He knew of Chief Comcomly by reputation, how able and intelligent the leader had been, and the doctor wondered about the shape of the skull that enclosed so fine a mind. He thought medical men in Britain might be just as interested. So off Dr. Gairdner went to that Astoria hillside and set to his gruesome task. He packed up his gory souvenir and set sail for Honolulu, where he repacked it and forwarded it to Dr. John Richardson, soon to be chief medical officer of the Royal Naval Hospital near Portsmouth, England. His cover letter included the comments that, "the accompanying head in a small box is that of Com-com-ly, the old chief of the Chinook nation ... You have heard of this character for he is mentioned in most of the narratives relating to the Columbia. By his ability? cunning? or what you please to call it, he raised himself & family to a power & influence which no Indian has since possessed ... When the phrenologists look at this frontal development what will they say to this?! If I return to the Columbia I will endeavor to procure you the whole skeleton." Dr. Gairdner died of tuberculosis in 1836. Comcomly's skull (or at least the one said to be his) was for years part of a display in a dusty glass case at the Haler Royal Naval Hospital Museum in Gosport, England. Copyright 2001 Chinook Observer; republication by permission only. |
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