What was the Chinook Peoples history?

Answer 1

By the end of the Middle Archaic period, around 300 BC, the Chinook people had moved into the Northwest Coastal area and settled there. In the Late Archaic period, the Chinook lived along the Columbia and Willamette rivers near the Pacific coast (in modern Oregon and Washington). They were hunters and gatherers, and especially fishers, living mainly on salmon that they caught in the river during the spring salmon runs, and dried and smoked so they could keep it all winter. They also hunted elk and deer, using their new bows and arrows as well as their old spears and atlatls. They gathered and ate acorns, and a plant that grew in wetlands that was a root like a potato. The Chinook did not have inherited or elected leaders, but lived in small bands with only temporary leaders they called "big men". They traded actively along the Columbia and Willamette rivers and down the Snake River. Chinook people lived in villages on the high land above the rivers. Their houses were wooden longhouses built of cedar planks. Big houses might have as many as a hundred people living in them. Each family within the house had a separate room with walls of woven mats, and a fire inside the room. But there was also a big fire in the middle of the hall that everyone could gather together around. Chinook people looked different from their neighbors because they flattened the heads of their babies to make them look more beautiful. When a baby was little and the skull was still soft, the mother took a wooden board and tied it to her baby's head to flatten its forehead. Instead of moving into the Woodland period, the Chinook people stayed with the Late Archaic way of doing things until the arrival of the Europeans in the 1700's and 1800's.