Читать книгу The Salish People: Volume I - Charles Hill-Tout - Страница 7

Introduction

Charles Hill-Tout’s earliest report, on the Thompson (1899), and his last, on the Okanagan (1911), are linked together geographically and culturally to the extent that one description “might have been written, with a few minor and unimportant points of difference” for the other. Hill-Tout knew that the Okanagan report was to be his last, and he made it attractively retrospective and valedictory.¹ It speaks for itself. This Introduction will consider the earlier report and present the two men who together made it the remarkable document it is: Hill-Tout, the self-educated and dedicated ethnologist, newly arrived from England, and Chief Mischelle of Lytton, one of the most talented and informed people that a beginning field-worker could ever hope to meet.

It was not the practice in the early days of anthropology to dwell on the personality of one’s informants. This was no doubt partly to protect privacy, but also in large part due to the temperament of the one man who set the tone and pattern in the Northwest, Franz Boas. Boas was not constitutionally inclined to make friends with his informants nor spend more time with them than the serious business of science demanded; and he elevated this trait into a theory: an informant is a spokesman for the tribal past, and one cannot inject prying questions or pleasantries without contaminating the medium.² Hill-Tout did not have Boas’ austerity, but he was too much of a novice to stray far from the Boas mode. Thus he gives us no sustained picture of Mischelle, just glimpses along the way.

James Teit, though he lived not far from Lytton, seems never to have contacted Mischelle. He does, however, make it possible to approach Mischelle indirectly, through a notion of what chieftainship meant to the Thompson and a description of his illustrious predecessor, Chief Cixpentlem, a man of mythic stature. Cixpentlem is supposed to have introduced potlatches to the area, and been so wealthy that he “was able to give one every two or three years on a very large scale.”³ His magnanimity extended to a most remarkable act of diplomacy: with the declared intention of making perpetual peace with the Lillooet, he travelled round neighbouring Shuswap and Okanagan territory as well as his own, buying up Lillooet slaves, and then set out for Lake Lillooet with them. He was met by armed men, and in an act of great personal courage he “went out alone to them, and soon persuaded them to lay down their arms and to receive the party.”⁴ He stayed there several days, and gave presents to all who had had relatives killed by the Thompson. “He told them that he had come there to put an end to war between his own tribe and them, and as surety of this he had brought to them all their people who had been slaves in his tribe. These he had bought up at much expense, and now he gave them their freedom and returned them to their country and friends. The Lillooet chiefs made a fire, and they and the Thompsons sat around it and smoked before the people.” Teit dates this event 1850, eight years before the treaty with Governor Douglas, which Cixpentlem also negotiated.⁵ Cixpentlem becomes a measure for our estimation of Mischelle; for, when he died after a long life in 1888, there was a grandson in the tribe who might well have succeeded him,⁶ but Mischelle was elected, a remarkable achievement for someone whose father was from down-river at Yale.

“Nowadays,” Teit writes in 1897, “chiefs are elected by a vote of the people, no doubt influenced by the priest or the Indian agent, and remain as such so long as they acquit themselves honorably, or the people are pleased with them.” They supervise the ecclesiastical and political affairs of the reserves, settle in council all petty disputes, and are spokesmen for tribal grievances.⁷ In other words, Mischelle was chief because of his usefulness. He was the Cixpentlem of a later age, a cohesive personality, generous with his time and attentive to the difficult truce with the white man, maintaining his balance and sense of humour throughout. And while being a translator in the law courts and for the missionaries, he was also an interpreter of his own people’s history — as Hill-Tout was lucky enough to discover.⁸

Of Hill-Tout’s family background we know little more than that he was born of Somerset farming stock in 1858, and there was strong Church of England influence. The daughters of the vicar of Kirby Grindalyth in Yorkshire write to say they are looking forward to his Easter visit: two sweet, vacuous letters, saved from Hill-Tout’s boyhood, indicate the milieu which would have been his had he not emigrated.⁹ As a theology student he preached in Cardiff, and later married Edith Mary Stothert, who had been a member of the congregation. He completed courses at a seminary in Lincoln. His path was cut out for him; the missionary field was waiting, or a rural living, the gift of a relative. However, he was mingling with a rather advanced set of religious thinkers, the Puseyites of the Cowley Monastery just outside Oxford; and he became caught up in the raging debate of the time, the pros and cons of Darwin’s theory of evolution. When he came out on the “wrong” side, emigration to Canada must have seemed a good solution to the social consequences of his “intellectual difficulties.”

According to an unsigned but obviously well-informed typescript biography,¹⁰ Hill-Tout came to Toronto with a letter of introduction to Dr. (later Sir) Daniel Wilson of University College. He was intending to farm, but Wilson said: “We want someone to take over Dr. Tassie’s private school, which is run by the Low Church party.” Hill-Tout found the offer irresistible until, after three years, he got the chance to buy a hundred acre farm near Port Credit on Lake Ontario. Before very long a summer resort wanted the land, and he eventually relinquished it at many times the purchase price.

One reason for selling out was that, by this time, he had four or five children, for whom he wanted an English education. Also, his own intellectual development had to find its flow: would it be in Canada or England? At the 2 April 1887 meeting of the Canadian Institute of Toronto he had delivered a precocious paper on “The Study of Language,” a polemical piece, valuable as evidence of the author’s ambitions. Four years before, at the founding of the Royal Society of Canada, Daniel Wilson prophesied that “in the future of our young Dominion men will arise to bear a part in letters and science not less worthy than those who figure on England’s golden roll.”¹¹ England’s golden roll still tempted Hill-Tout; but Wilson had called the Haida “a vanishing race,” and had spoken privately to him about the untouched field for anthropological research in the West. Hill-Tout was inspired to journey to Vancouver, while sending his family on ahead to England. “Upon arrival in Vancouver,” the typescript biography informs us, “he met an old college friend, the Rev. Finnes Clinton, rector of the pioneer Anglican Church of St. James, who was just on the point of starting a boys’ school and asked the new arrival if he would take charge. Just then a cablegram arrived from Mrs. Hill-Tout stating that one of their children had died. The offer was declined and Professor Hill-Tout returned to England, and the family settled down at a very lovely spot, St. Brevils, expecting to remain there for some years.” A financial reversal beyond his control caused Hill-Tout to pull up stakes once again and return, with his family, “this time to Vancouver and its superb environment.”¹²

Meanwhile, Dr. Whetham had also started a college, and when it was found that Vancouver, then a population of about three thousand, could not keep two schools flourishing, St. James’ School fused into Whetham College, and Hill-Tout became housemaster there. Then Bishop Sillitoe invited Hill-Tout to organise a Diocesan College, and he became Principal of Trinity College for two years. Disagreements with the bishop prompted him to leave and open his own Buckland College, which operated at the corner of Burrard and Robson for nine or ten years.¹³ “But throughout all this scholastic period,” Hill-Tout is quoted as saying, “I still retained my love of the land, and I had bought a quarter section of land near Abbotsford, upon which two of my sons still farm. You see, I come of a land-loving stock. Upon this land we built a log house, beautifully situated in the midst of virgin forest, and the family spent summers there. Many of these trees were eleven feet through at the butt. Later I bought out another settler, who had already built a fine farmhouse on the land, and moved my family from Vancouver to the farm.”

“We built a log house, beautifully situated in the midst of virgin forest.”

The date of this move is given as 1899,¹⁴ but it is clear from his publications that he had thoroughly explored the Lower Mainland from the moment of his arrival in 1891. He began living among the Indians for considerable periods “in order to gain their confidence and goodwill.” He recalls one occasion when “a young chief of the Chehalis Indians and his wife, who had been recently married, gave up their bedroom to me and also their bedding while they slept upon the floor of the kitchen for two weeks.” In a letter to Boas of 1895 he wrote that he was “exceedingly enthusiastic,” and “would like nothing better than to devote the next ten years of my life to the work in this district.”¹⁵ It was in midst of this missionary fervour that Hill-Tout met Chief Mischelle in Lytton, discovered him to be an exceptional talker, and took down all his stories and lore without curtailing them.

Their meeting came none too soon. In 1898 Mischelle became paralysed in his lower limbs. Hill-Tout’s 1899 report states that Mischelle “was looking forward to the time when he would be so far recovered as to be able to take a sweat-bath"; but the following year we find his obituary: “My principal informant among the Thompson, Chief Mischelle, from whom I secured so much valuable information a year or so ago, has passed away, and can render us no further aid.”¹⁶ The oddity of this collaboration between an Oxford scholar¹⁷ and a Lytton chief is symbolized in the title of their first published product, “Sqaktktquaclt, or the Benign-faced, the Cannes of the Ntlakapamuq, British Columbia.” Since Cannes is the god who came out of the sea to give the Sumerians their technology, the comparison with the Salish transformer-hero is certainly apt; but in offering this juxtaposition Hill-tout was taking a risk. Oxford might appreciate its far-fetched quality, as might Mischelle; but Franz Boas, on the other hand, probably would not. Something about Hill-Tout annoyed Boas, his tone, his intellectual demeanour, his presumption. Their first meeting, on 3 June 1897, turned out to be their last. Writing home from Vancouver on that date, Boas said: “Mr. Hill-Tout here gave me five skulls this morning; one of them very valuable.”¹⁸ Nothing more is said, in spite of the fact that Hill-Tout had been given certain expectations. “It is very likely that I shall be on the coast about the month of May,” Boas had written him in 1895, “and should be very glad if I could assist you in your interesting work. I may be able to obtain funds for this purpose” (letter included in volume IV of the present edition). Though a year behind schedule, Boas had now arrived, and with Jesup funding; but he was not inclined to add a supernumerary to the expedition. Hill-Tout helped Harlan Smith at Lytton for two or three weeks, undoubtedly as a volunteer. “The Expedition is under great obligation to Mr. Hill-Tout for the deep interest that he manifested in its work, and for the kindly assistance rendered by him":¹⁹ gracious though this statement from the first Jesup report is, it places Hill-Tout outside the expedition proper; and his assistance beyond Lytton was apparently not requested.

“There are but few students,” Boas was soon to write in another context, “who possess that cold enthusiasm for truth that enables them to be always clearly conscious of the sharp line between attractive theory and the observation that has been secured by hard and earnest work.”²⁰ Hill-Tout had already been unable to resist “vague conjecture” (his own phrase) in his letters to Boas, and if at that 3 June 1897 meeting he had offered Boas his new speculative paper, he must certainly have ruined his chances.²¹

Rather than postulate a dramatic clash between these two men, we might consider the mundane fact that the British Association for the Advancement of Science was at that moment in the process of switching committees. The committee which had financed Boas’ five field trips between 1888 and 1894, and was co-sponsoring the present one, was being replaced by a new committee for an Ethnological Survey of Canada, with local Canadian representatives, including Hill-Tout himself. This bureaucratic separation could have provided some excuse, if such were needed, for the two men to go their separate ways.

In any case, without the Jesup connection, Hill-Tout accomplished an amazing amount in the 1897 season, and could report to the Ethnological Survey Committee by mid-1898 that, besides the two reports he was then submitting, one on the Haida (volume IV of the present edition) and one on some rock-drawings (not published), he also had “in hand":

1. Report on the Archaeology of Lytton and its neighbourhood.

2. Folklore stories from the same area [Mischelle’s].

3. Vocabulary and Grammar notes on the Thompson.

4. Vocabulary and Grammar notes on the Squamish and Matsqui, Yale, and other divisions of the Salish.

5. Ancient tribal divisions and place-names.

6. An account of a great confederacy of tribes in the Salish region of Chilliwack.²²

He was not wasting any time. And he knew the audience that he really wanted to reach.

At the time the Folklore Society was founded in London in 1878, Hill-Tout was an alert twenty-year-old, and there must have been some hero-worship of the “six giants of the science of mythology,” Andrew Lang, George Laurence Gomme, Alfred Nutt, Edwin Sidney Hartland, Edward Clodd, and William Alexander Cloustain, “whose collective efforts wrote a brilliant chapter in the history of modern thought.”²³ Twenty years later, when that same Folklore Society accepted for publication his “Cannes” paper in the year following his repudiation by the Jesup Expedition, it would represent the kind of recognition he really desired. Here was a body of scholars who could be counted on to relish the daring comparison of a Sumerian god with a Salish culture-hero. E. Sidney Hartland, one of the above “six,” was the U.K. representative on the Ethnological Survey of Canada; his correspondence with Hill-Tout is extremely cordial, and they finally shared a platform together at the Winnipeg meeting of the British Association in 1909. These transatlantic ties were Hill-Tout’s mainstay at his British Columbian outpost. These were his kind of men. “Their unbounded enthusiasm,” writes Richard Dorson in The British Folklorists (p. 204), “the almost boyish abandon with which they devoted the hours saved from the daily round to the speculative reconstruction of human history in its widest aspects, was tempered by a stern resolve to be neither sentimental nor slipshod.” Like Hill-Tout, they were not supported by universities: “Each wrote his books as an avocation, and yet their drive and enthusiasm enabled them to outproduce most academic scholars.” In Hill-Tout’s case, as we have seen, his early field work took place when his duties as a college principal would allow. After about 1898 he was trying to wrest a living from his homestead, and thoroughly deserves the epithet “pioneer anthropologist.”²⁴ Perhaps enough has been said to indicate the auspicious conjunction of the ethnologist and his informant, two men of widely varying backgrounds, but each a man of substance and resource: Mischelle, the man of position and knowledge in his tribe, of undoubted talent as a story-teller, and Hill-Tout, the keen beginner in a field of scientific study where to be dislocated and struggling oneself is not a drawback in finding fellow-feeling with one’s subject.

Ralph Maud

Cultus Lake, B.C.

December, 1978

1 As far back as 17 June 1905, E. Sidney Hartland was expressing the hope that “your health is quite restored, so as to enable you to make another journey” (Hartland correspondence in the Special Collections Library of the University of British Columbia). Presumably Hill-Tout went to the Okanagan in 1905 and/or 1906. In the letter printed in volume IV of the present edition, Hartland is still, on 27 January 1907, awaiting the report of that work. In May 1907 he writes that Hill-Tout’s application for funding has been withdrawn “as your letter precluded all hope of your undertaking any field-work this year.” The Okanagan report was written up for the Winnipeg meeting of the British Association in 1909. By the time he put it in final form for publication in 1911, Hill-Tout was aware that no field work had been done for some years and was not likely to be.

2 See Melville Jacobs “Folklore” in the Anthropological Association’s memorial volume The Anthropology of Franz Boas (1959) p. 126; and p. 127: “The austere visitor probably mingled politely with the natives, but with some discomfort and always with a feeling of pressure to get the scientific task accomplished.” Boas’ attitude is clear in his diaries and letters from the field, as presented in Ronald P. Rohner’s The Ethnology of Franz Boas (1969).

3 James Teit The Thompson Indians of British Columbia (1900) p. 297. Teit’s work, contemporaneous with Hill-Tout’s, provides confirmation and amplification at points too numerous to mention, except where especially pertinent.

4 James Teit Myth ology of the Thompson Indians (1912) pp. 411-412.

5 James Teit The Thompson Indians (1900) p. 269.

6 When Hill-Tout refers to “the presen Lytton chief” in the 1899 report below (see footnote 4 to the section “Social Organisation"), this must be Cixpentlem’s grandson. An hereditary chieftainship seems to be existing alongside an elective one. I am indebted to Reuben Ware for advice on this question.

7 James Teit The Thompson Indians (1900) p. 296.

8 Harlan Smith also appreciated Mischelle’s expertise, soliciting his opinions on various artifacts; see Archaeology of the Thompson River Region (1900), where he refers to him as “an intelligent old Indian of Lytton” (p. 440). This is the only comment on Mischelle noted outside of Hill-Tout; but the Jesup Expedition indexes do not generally list informants, so that they are traced only with difficulty.

9 I am indebted to George Brandak for drawing my attention to the Vagabonds Club papers in the Special Collections Library of the University of British Columbia, where these two letters may be found. For a discussion of biographical sources, see the Bio-bibliography included in volume IV of the present edition. The most accessible life is Alfred Buckley’s in British Columbia from Earliest Times Vol. 4 (1914) pp. 1194-98. Judith Banks Comparative Biographies of Two British Columbia Anthropologists: Charles Hill-Tout and James A. Teit (M.A. thesis, University of British Columbia 1970) is useful.

10 Special Collections Library of the University of British Columbia. This extensive and detailed biographical summary seems to have been written at the time of Hill-Tout’s death, but it contains much information that only he personally could have supplied.

11 Daniel Wilson “Inaugural Address” Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada 1 (1882) Section II, p. 11. And on pp. 4-5: “It is sad, surely, to realize the fact that the glimpse we thus catch of those artistic Haidas of the Queen Charlotte Islands, with all their peculiar aptitude in carving and constructive skill, is that of a vanishing race. Yet it cannot be said of the Haida, that he ‘dies and gives no sign.’ On the contrary his ingenious arts embody far-reaching glimpses of a remote past, the full significance of which has yet to be determined.”

12 Of this period from 1889 to 1891 in England, Charles B. Hill-tout (the eldest son) remarked in a conversation with Judith Banks: “Like every other Englishman — couldn’t stand the damn country; took two breaths and then came back to Canada and never saw England again. Every Englishman has to go back once and that’s all they want" - M.A. theses (1970) p. 16. This possibly expresses the speaker’s view rather than his father’s. A more positive propulsion might have come from the celebrated linguist Max Mu’ller, whom Hill-Tout is said to have met at Oxford in earlier days and who was still lecturing as strongly as ever. He had just taken the Presidential Chair of Section H (Anthropology) of the British Association on the eve of Boas’ work under its auspicies. Hill-Tout kept in touch; witness a letter of 8 June 1899 from Muller, in the Special Collections Library of the University of British Columbia.

13 McGill College of British Columbia came into existence in 1905. Harry T.Logan makes no mention of Buckland College or its founder in Tuum Est: A History of the University of British Columbia (1958).

14 University of British Columbia typescript. James E. Hill-Tout (the youngest son) remembers 1896 as the year the family of six young children was moved “from the comparative comforts of Vancouver to an unfinished log cabin on a forested hill a few miles west of what later became the village of Abbotsford” — The Abbotsford Hill-Touts (1976) p. 2. I am indebted to Grant Keddie for initially drawing my attention to this pamphlet, which is obtainable from the Abbotsford Museum. Speaking from personal experience of the farm operation, James E. Hill-Tout says, “My father’s contributions to the endless chores were, to be frank, minimal” (p. 21).

15 This letter of 2 November 1895 is included in volume IV of the present edition. Also included there is a letter of 4 March 1901 to Charles Newcombe in which Hill-Tout states: “each year I am now devoting more than six months to the work.”

16 Report to the British Association (1900) on the Squamish, included in volume II of the present edition. It is unfortunate that it was not the custom at that time to write full obituaries of native informants.

17 Though there is no evidence that he was ever a matriculated student at Oxford University, Hill-Tout was certainly nurtured in its ambience.

18 Letter to Mrs. Boas 3 June 1897, in Rohner The Ethnography of Franz Boas (1969) p. 201. Boas went on to Spences Bridge the same afternoon, where “Teit had prepared everything for us very well” (p. 202). Rohner’s compilation of the Boas letters and diaries contains no other mention of Hill-Tout. He is referred to occasionally in the Teit-Boas correspondence in the American Philosophical Society manuscript collection. There is no indication of a further meeting between Boas and Hill-Tout.

19 Franz Boas “Operations of the Expedition in 1897” Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History 2 (16 June 1898) p. 8. Harlan Smith in Archaeology of Lytton (1899) writes: “In the field, assistance was rendered by Mr. Charles Hill-Tout of Vancouver, who for many years has been much interested in the antiquities of British Columbia” (p. 130).

20 Franz Boas “Rudolf Virchow’s Anthropological Work" Science 16 (1902) p. 443.

21 “Notes on the Cosmogony and History of the Squamish” (included in volume II of the present edition) claims that “of the Dene tongue it is no exaggeration to say that 50 percent of its radicals are pure archaic Chinese.” Criticizing a linguistic theory of Ratzel’s, Boas had already made the point that “we desire to find uncontestable evidence of transmission, not alone the possibility or plausibility of transmission; and for this purpose our safeguards must be insisted on” - quoted by Robert H. Lowie History of Ethnological Theory (1937) p. 149.

22 Ethnological Survey of Canada report to the British Association (1898) pp. 698-699.

23 Richard M. Dorson The British Folklorists (1969) p. 202.

24 The University of British Columbia typescript is worth quoting in full on this adventure:

“In the neighbourhood of Abbotsford and on his own lands, there were large growths of fine tie timber, and it was suggested to him that he should utilise this timber and get a contract for ties from the CPR. At this time he was ignorant of what a tie was, but he was told that he could hire tie-cutters and get contracts. He got a contract for 50,000 ties and hired woodsmen to cut them. Unfortunately among the twelve men who came to him only two were actually tie-cutters. The others were lumber-jacks who had been used to handling big timber and not ties, which was a specialty. He set them to work and for two days let them alone. On the third day he went into the woods to see how they were getting along and found they had not been carrying out the conditions of the contract, which called for a tie eight feet long, seven inches wide and seven inches thick. Some were so heavy that it took two men to handle one. He was paying them $4 a day to spoil his timber. So they had to take a contract for so much a tie. Then the ten lumberjacks said ‘Give us our time.’ So he paid them off at $4 a day and they went away. The two real tie-cutters were kept and they advised him to advertise for tiecutters, which he did and got a dozen really good men. He fulfilled the contract for 50,000 ties and got a second contract. When this was completed it was suggested to him by the CPR agent that he should put in a mill and cut the bigger timber which the CPR would require. This he did and ran the lumber mill for about ten years.”