1859 Sept | Oct 2012_opt

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photo by Trina Eayds
Astoria, where canoes played a vital role in their daily lives and conveyed the
dead into the spirit life.
Chief Comcomly is noted in historical records for trading with late eighteenth
and early nineteenth century explorers, including Lewis and Clark.
An account in Native Peoples of the Northwest says that when he died in
1830 at 66, his family placed his body in a raised war canoe and later moved
it to a burial site in a nearby forest to keep it from grave robbers. A physician
of the Hudson’s Bay Co. soon found the body and decapitated it. The head
spent more than one hundred years in the Royal Naval Hospital Museum in
Gosport, England.
The chief ’s skull finally made its way back to Astoria, where the historical
society displayed it as a curiosity in the Flavel House Museum for more
than twenty years. In 1972, Chinook pleas for the return of the chief ’s skull
were finally honored, and the chief was buried in an Ilwaco, Washington
graveyard north of his old village. Visitors can see the black burial canoe,
now cast in concrete, that the city of Astoria built in 1961 as a memorial to
the late Chief Comcomly.
Preservation of the body is important in many religions, says folklorist Sherman.
“There’s a belief that the body will someday be resurrected, therefore no
cremation or desecration of the body is allowed.” In folklore, she says, ghosts
are often people who weren’t buried properly, died a horrific death or became
attached to certain places. Sometimes they’re the dead seeking vengeance or
are stuck on earth for bad behavior while alive.
1859 oregon's mAgAzine SEPT OCT 2012 1