Case file · Folklore / legend
'Stick Indians' of the Chinook Jargon
Across the 19th-century Northwest, Chinook Jargon speakers told of 'stick Indians': wild, half-seen people of the deep woods ('stick' meaning forest) who whistled, stole food and led travellers astray at night.
1863 CE · 47.04, -122.90 · status: legend
The account
The expression is old enough to appear in settler writing of the 1850s and 1860s, when George Gibbs was compiling his Chinook Jargon dictionary (1863), and many Coast Salish and Plateau peoples had their own names for such beings. Bigfoot writers later read these stories as early Sasquatch reports.
The sceptical view
The stories cover many different kinds of beings, some spiritual and some human (outcasts or enemy raiders); treating them all as one hidden ape is a modern reading.