Coquelle Thompson (ca. 1848–1946) was an accomplished storyteller who lived through the Rogue River Wars of 1855–56. His tribal community was evicted from its homeland and resettled with other Athabaskan groups on the Siletz Reservation, where he lived for ninety years. William R. Seaburg (1947–2022) was a professor of interdisciplinary arts and sciences at the University of Washington Bothell. Elizabeth D. Jacobs (1903–83) was a therapist and ethnographer who conducted fieldwork among the Native peoples of the Pacific Northwest in the 1930s. Ghosts Dance in an Empty House and Other Stories (Nebraska, 2026) was published in June.

Ghosts Dance in an Empty House and Other Stories comprises forty-five narratives dictated by Coquelle Thompson, an Upper Coquille Athabaskan Indian residing on the Siletz Indian Reservation in Oregon, during the fall of 1935. Elizabeth D. Jacobs transcribed the stories from Thompson and selected some for intended publication. In addition to those Jacobs chose, William R. Seaburg combed through Thompson’s field notebooks and chose a handful of additional stories, as well as several cognate texts Thompson told to Smithsonian Institution linguist John Peabody Harrington in 1942 and cognates from other Athabaskan and from non-Athabaskan groups in the region.

This companion volume to Pitch Woman and Other Stories: The Oral Traditions of Coquelle Thompson, Upper Coquille Athabaskan Indian, which collected Thompson’s myths and folktales, focuses on Thompson’s semi-historical tales, narratives of historical events, ethnographic texts, and personal and family stories.

Introduction

The Storyteller and His Verbal Art

Coquelle Thompson Sr., Upper Coquille Athabaskan Indian, is known as a culture broker and storyteller whose knowledge and experience were shared with researchers over the course of many decades, providing unique documentation of the lifeways of Native peoples of western Oregon.

Coquelle was born around 1849 in an Upper Coquille Athabaskan village in the Coquille River valley of southwestern Oregon. As a result of the 1855–56 Rogue River War, his people, along with many other southwestern Oregon coastal Indian peoples, were removed from their homelands and resettled a hundred miles north on land that was to become the Siletz Reservation. Many did not survive the emotional and physical hardships and illnesses of the early days of the reservation, but Coquelle was a survivor and lived there for the remainder of his nearly one hundred years (Seaburg 2007, 2–3).

Growing into manhood, Coquelle participated fully in life at Siletz. He either took part in or witnessed all the major events at Siletz from 1856 to 1946. He was an active and enthusiastic participant in an offshoot of the 1870 Ghost Dance, known at Siletz as the Warm House Dance. He was an accomplished singer and dancer of both Native and nativistic songs and dances. And he knew virtually everyone on the reservation as well as their kinship ties. He had a prodigious memory, as official heirship testimonies and anthropological field notes demonstrate. Although he never learned to read or write English, he spoke it fluently in addition to the local lingua franca, Chinuk Wawa, and his native Upper Coquille Athabaskan, a language that only a few still spoke at the time of his passing in 1946 (Seaburg 2007, 3–4).

Coquelle worked at various times as a farmer, a hunting and fishing guide, a Siletz Agency teamster, a tribal policeman and judge, and a mail carrier. He managed hundreds of acres of land he had accumulated, primarily through inheritance from the many people he was related to at Siletz. He was married three times and had eleven children, only two of whom survived beyond young adulthood. Coquelle is described by those who knew him as a loving father. His third wife, Agnes, was well known as an accomplished midwife and practical nurse at Siletz and frequently assisted the local medical doctor (Youst and Seaburg 2002, xvii–xviii).

During Coquelle’s long life, he was an active agent in the shaping of his and his children’s lives. He firmly supported modern education for his children, four of whom obtained their secondary education at the Chemawa Indian Boarding School. He lived to see his only surviving son graduate with a degree from Oregon State College in 1932. Later, he saw his youngest daughter join the Army Air Corps (WAC) and serve as a communications specialist at Third Bomber Group Headquarters in England during World War II (Youst and Seaburg 2002, xviii).

Coquelle had been with the first of the Indians of southern Oregon who entered their new one-million-acre Coast Reservation in 1856, and he lived to see that reservation reduced to a mere four sections of tribal timber and seventy-seven individual allotments held in trust. He did not quite live to see the termination of the reservation in 1954.

For a period of nearly sixty years, between 1884 and 1942, Coquelle served as a cultural and linguistic expert witness for six anthropologists: J. Owen Dorsey, Cora Du Bois, Philip Drucker, Elizabeth D. Jacobs, John P. Marr, and John P. Harrington. Coquelle is the source of most of what is known about the Upper Coquille Athabaskan language and culture. He was a perceptive, intelligent observer and had a phenomenal memory—for language, oral history, and genealogy (Seaburg 2007, 5).

Elizabeth Jacobs interviewed Coquelle over several months during the late fall of 1935 at the Siletz Reservation. During that period, she accumulated over eight hundred pages of notes including linguistic, ethnographic, and folkloristic data. Coquelle was a master raconteur, and both Elizabeth Jacobs and, later, J.P. Harrington recorded his tellings of hundreds of myths, tales, personal experience narratives, and historical event narratives (Seaburg 2007, 9–11).

Jacobs began her work with Coquelle eliciting lexical and grammatical material. After a few days she asked him to dictate a folktale in the Upper Coquille language, but about halfway through the story he finished telling it in English. He apparently did not have the patience for the slow process of phonetic text dictation (Elizabeth Jacobs, personal communication, 1975). From this point on, he recited in English, with occasional transcriptions of Native words and phrases (Seaburg 2007, 11). He was a master storyteller, and his willingness to answer questions, offer ethnographic details in what Jacobs called “digressions,” and reminisce about the past resulted in a unique and invaluable document of his life and times.