from Chinook jargon
This word originated in United States (Alaska), Canada (Yukon)
Welcome to Alaska, cheechako!
If that's the greeting you get up north, don't be insulted. In Alaska and the Canadian Yukon, cheechako means nothing more sinister than "newcomer" or "tenderfoot," a stage you will outgrow if you stay around. The harsh climate and terrain of Alaska do make greater demands on newcomers than the Lower 49, and perhaps that is why there is a special northern word for them.
The word was imported from Chinook Jargon into the English of that region during the Yukon gold rush that began in 1896 and is chronicled in the stories of Jack London and the poems of Robert Service. In White Fang (1906), London takes time at the beginning of a chapter to explain:
Service's third book of Yukon poems, published in 1909, is called Ballads of a Cheechako.
Chinook Jargon was a trade language spoken in the Pacific Northwest by perhaps as many as 100,000 Indians and the white traders and settlers who dealt with them. It was based on the language of the Chinook Indians of the lower Columbia River, but its vocabulary had many additions from English. Today there are just a few speakers of Chinook Jargon left. The Chinook language itself is extinct.
In Chinook Jargon, cheechako means "new come," the two parts of the word deriving from Lower Chinook and Nootka, respectively. English has gained half a dozen other words from Chinook Jargon, including camas (plant with edible bulb, 1805), eulachon (fish, 1807), salal (shrub, 1825), and chum (salmon, 1902). The motto of Washington State is the Chinook Jargon al-ki, meaning "by and by." But the name Chinook, used for a wind and a kind of salmon as well as the tribe, is not from Chinook Jargon but from the Chehalis Indian language.
