The Multnomahs

When interviewing William Clark and George Shannon to prepare his condensation of the expedition journals, Nicholas Biddle wrote in his notes that “The Multnomah nation is placed on the Wappatoe Island opposite the mouth of the Multh. river and the inlet which forms the island. . . .  the neighbors speak of the Multnomah nations as great &c.”^[2]The Nicholas Biddle Notes, c. April 1810 in Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition with Related Documents: 1783-1854, 2nd ed., ed. Donald Jackson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 542. They were also named, after their primary crop, the Wapato or Wappatoo Indians.

The Multnomahs spoke the Clackamas dialect and did have several villages on Sauvie Island as described by Lewis and Clark. Other villages identified by Lewis and Clark including Nahpooitle—often called Cathlapotle—in present-day Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge, Shoto on Vancouver Lake, and Ničáq^wli located at Portland International Airport.^[3]Michael Silverstein, Handbook of North American Indians: Northwest Coast Vol. 7, ed. Wayne Suttles, (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1990), 534.

In one of the rare depictions of Multnomah people, artist Hermon Atkins MacNeil created the “Coming of the White Man” likely at the request of Portland Mayor David P. Thompson. The work was installed in Portland’s City Park—now Washington Park—prior to the 1905 Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition. Several bronzes of various smaller sizes were also made, one of which is shown in the figure on the right. It is said that the two men are looking toward the Columbia River at the arrival of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. In the bronze, the artist removed the second figure—said to be a medicine man—and added a feather headdress, bow, and quiver of arrows resulting in the figure looking more like a defiant Plains Indian than Lower Chinook.^[4]Thayer Tolles and Thomas Brent Smith, et al. The American West in Bronze, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 44–45.

In researching his work, MacNeil appears to have consulted anthropologist Frederick W. Hodge. Of the Multnomah, Hodge wrote:

Nē’maLnōmax, ‘down river’. A Chinookan tribe or division formerly living on the upper end of Sauvies id., Multnomah co., Oreg. In 1806 they were estimated at 800, but by 1835, according to Parker, they were extinct as a tribe. The term is also used in a broader sense to include all the tribes living on or near lower Willamette r., Oreg.^[5]Frederick Webb Hodge, Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico, Vol. 1 (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology, 1912), 956.

As Multnomah populations declined from diseases, they absorbed into other tribes. In 1907, their population was given as ten people.^[6]Robert H. Ruby, John A. Brown, and Cary C. Collins, A Guide to the Indian Tribes of the Pacific Northwest (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010), 202.