Skookum

Rain came sideways off Shoalwater Bay on the seventh of November, 1859, and in a room above the tideflats a man leaned over James Swan’s notebook and drew a monster on the first page. It was one of the skookums, he explained: one of the ones who make the lightning by running out their tongues. Swan wrote the note down in the cramped hand of someone working with cold fingers, and moved on to the next day.

The drawing is gone. The word stayed, and it has been busy ever since.

Skookum entered Chinook Jargon, the trade language that ran the length of the Northwest coast, from Lower Chehalis, a Salishan language of the Washington shore. In Lower Chehalis, skwəkwə́m meant ghost, spirit, monster. Inside the Jargon it drifted first toward fearsome and then toward powerful, until a trader could use the same two syllables for a demon, for tidal rapids, and for a canoe that would not swamp. The nineteenth-century vocabularies kept both halves of the meaning on the same line without apology. One glosses it as strong; strength; a ghost; an evil spirit or demon. A list from 1890 puts it even more flatly: skookum, or skookoom, strong; a demon, ghost.

Swan had come out from Boston to Shoalwater Bay in 1852 and stayed long enough to speak the Jargon well enough to interpret at treaty negotiations. In the book he published in 1857 he set down what the word covered on the ground. Skookums were bad spirits, and they were not confined to a single body. A crow could be one. So could an eagle, an owl, a blue jay, and various beasts and reptiles besides. They could get inside a person and make him seriously ill.

A jay drops onto a rack of drying salmon, sidesteps the smoke, and is nothing but a jay until somebody in the house who knows what to watch for stops talking. Nothing about the bird has to change. That is the whole mechanism.

Ask what a skookum looked like and the record declines to settle, which is itself the most dependable thing about them. No one drew the same one twice. The lightning skookum in Swan’s notebook had a tongue it could run out like a whip; the skookums of the high country were giants, and in the Chinuk Wawa still spoken at Grand Ronde in Oregon that monstrous sense is even said differently, with the stress dropped onto the second syllable, skoo-KOOM, as though the word needed to be told apart from its tamer twin. Everything else about their appearance depends on what they happened to be wearing that day. A being with no body of its own has no portrait.

Their home ground was the outside. Across the languages of the Northwest coast, the inland forest and the mountains behind it were the wild, unsafe direction, away from the water and the villages and the smoke, and the skookums belong to that geography as much as to any story. Two days after the lightning drawing, Swan noted that a man had worked skookum tamanawas, which is to say used a powerful spirit power, and there the two halves of the coastal supernatural sit side by side: the hostile thing out in the trees, and the guardian power a person acquired to stand against it. Illness was the field where the two met. A skookum inside a body was a problem for someone whose own spirit power was stronger.

What happened to the word afterward is its own small tragedy of translation. Settlers, miners and loggers took skookum for its strength sense and left the demon behind. A jail became a skookum house, a strong house. Turbulent tidal water became skookumchuck, and the name stuck to rapids and rivers and towns from British Columbia down through Washington and into Idaho. Keish, one of the men whose find opened the Klondike, went into the record as Skookum Jim. By 1913 Mary McAboy was manufacturing souvenir dolls under the name Skookum, patented the following year and sold at trading posts to tourists who had no idea they were buying a monster. A carpenter in Vancouver today, knocking a stud into place, will look at it and say that it is skookum, meaning it will hold.

The old sense has not stopped surfacing, though it now surfaces in strange company. On the twenty-second of September, 2000, a group of Bigfoot researchers working at Skookum Meadows in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest baited a muddy wallow with fruit and came back the next morning to a large body impression in the mud. The cast they lifted from it runs about three and a half by five feet and weighs somewhere near four hundred pounds. It was examined by Jeff Meldrum, an anatomist at Idaho State University, who could not match it to a known Northwest animal. Hair recovered from the impression was identified as elk. The tracks around the wallow were elk, deer, bear and coyote.

So the word has ended up in three places at once: in the mouths of tradespeople as a compliment, on a shelf in a cryptozoology collection, and in the dictionaries, where it still means a ghost, a demon, a thing that can put its tongue out and set the sky alight.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a skookum?

A skookum is a malevolent supernatural being of the Pacific Northwest, and the word covers a whole class of them rather than naming one individual. Nineteenth-century sources describe skookums as bad spirits or demons that could take the form of birds, beasts and reptiles, and the term was also used for mountain giants. The name comes from Chinook Jargon, the trade language of the Northwest coast.

What does the word skookum mean?

Skookum means strong or powerful in Chinook Jargon, and it also means a ghost, demon or evil spirit. It was borrowed from the Lower Chehalis word skwəkwə́m, “ghost, spirit, monster”, and the sense apparently shifted from fearsome to powerful inside the Jargon. Both meanings appear side by side in nineteenth-century Chinook Jargon vocabularies.

What did skookums do to people?

Skookums were believed to enter people and cause serious illness. James Swan, writing in 1857 after several years at Shoalwater Bay in Washington Territory, recorded that they were bad spirits which could be represented by crows, eagles, owls, blue jays and various beasts and reptiles, and that they could inhabit a person and make him sick. Countering one was a matter of spirit power rather than force.

Is a skookum the same thing as Bigfoot?

Not originally, but the word has been used that way. In one of its senses a skookum is a mountain giant comparable to the Sasquatch, and modern Bigfoot writing has adopted the term freely. The older and better attested meaning is broader: an evil spirit or demon that need not be large, hairy or even humanoid.

What is the Skookum cast?

The Skookum cast is a large plaster impression taken from a mud wallow at Skookum Meadows in Washington’s Gifford Pinchot National Forest on 22 September 2000, after Bigfoot researchers baited the site with fruit overnight. It measures roughly three and a half by five feet and weighs about four hundred pounds. Hair found in the impression was identified as elk, and elk, deer, bear and coyote tracks were recorded nearby.

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