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Introduction

The two ethnological reports in this volume, on the Sechelt and on the tribes around Victoria, have the same aim and pattern as those in the previous volumes of The Salish People, and do not require special introduction. Additional material is gathered here to provide insight into Charles Hill-Tout’s character and reputation; so that an assessment should now be attempted.

Marius Barbeau tells the story of a noted English anthropologist arriving in New York in the first years of this century and asking the American colleague who met him at the pier: “Where’s Hill-Tout?” This query, says Barbeau, “was often repeated with a smile among New York anthropologists as characteristic of the British point of view as to the progress of American anthropology.”¹ Really, of course, American anthropology was in the hands of Franz Boas; and we have already seen (in the Introduction to volume I of the present edition) how temperamental and other differences excluded Hill-Tout from Boas’ projects and the influential hard-cover publications which attended them. The exchange of letters presented below retells the story in its own succinct way: Hill-Tout’s effusive approach; Boas’ businesslike courtesy; Hill-Tout’s damaging over-speculative reply; then silence. In contrast, Hill-Tout’s best correspondent was Andrew Lang of Balliol College, who made time for his pen-friend in the midst of “morning leaders, weekly and monthly reviews and columns, and incessant addresses, prefaces, and essays.”² The tender solicitations of fellow folklorist E. Sidney Hartland (in a letter below) is further evidence of how far away Hill-Tout’s sympathetic audience resided. “Where’s Hill-Tout?” calls forth a rather forlorn reply.

Much of what Hill-Tout did in his life is tragi-comical if seen from an alien position. He persisted as “Professor” in the intellectual wilderness of early Vancouver; and also later, to the possible annoyance of the University of British Columbia, which overlooked the opportunity to grant him an honorary degree. ³ He bought a tract of forest and logged it without knowing the first thing about how to do it. ⁴ He tried to get a commission in the Foresters’ Regiment to fight in France in the 1914–18 war, though he was fifty-eight years of age.⁵ When other presidencies faded, he became President of the Happier Old Age Club of Vancouver in his eighties. These gestures, among many others,⁶ put him at risk: the dignified scholar lecturing at a wobbling podium. Voraciously self-tutored, neglecting his livelihood to talk to Native people in a dying language, button-holing the scholarly world with his pet theories, always with great expectations of patronage: he puts himself in a position to be laughed at. Having acknowledged this, one can also say that he actually pulls it off quite well most of the time. His inner dignity is real enough, not something dependent upon the opinions of others. It sees him through.

I have therefore to take exception to a previous study, an M.A. thesis by Judith Banks, entitled Comparative Biographies of Two British Columbia Anthropologists: Charles Hill-Tout and James A. Teit (University of British Columbia, 1970), which discusses Hill-Tout’s supposed crippling alienation and its psychological causes. The author was told by Hill-Tout’s eldest son that his father had been orphaned at about seven years of age, and on the basis of this erroneous information she proposed that his life and work suffered from “separation anxiety” and other debilities that orphans are said to have. ⁷ Unfortunately she was working without the correspondence and other biographical resources to correct the faulty memory of her interviewee. As the essay “Some Psychical Phenomena Bearing Upon the Question of Spirit Control” shows (below), if we are to pity Hill-Tout, it cannot be because he was an orphan child, since it is clear that he lost his father only after he had reached the age of sixteen, and his mother at some substantial time after that.

Judith Banks is correct, of course, that Hill-Tout as a theorizer on the subjects of evolution, migrations of peoples and languages, will be ignored. His letter to Colonel Powell, Director of the Bureau of Ethnology in Washington, D.C., is a case in point. It is included here in lieu of Hill-Tout’s forty-four page article on the “Oceanic Origin of the Kwakiutl-Nootka and Salish Stocks of British Columbia and Fundamental Unity of Same'” (1898). No matter that Edward Sapir’s Mosan theory, proposing a similar kind of “fundamental unity,” later became widely accepted for a time, and may again; no matter that a future Thor Heyerdahl may prove that the Northwest coast peoples came from where Hill-Tout said they did. The overriding fact is that Hill-Tout went about the matter in a clumsy way, pontificating on shakey ground. J. N. B. Hewitt, after thorough critical examination of the proposal, reported to Powell that Hill-Tout was on entirely the wrong track, relying “solely and primarily on vague resemblances of form to decide the question of the relationship of any two or more terms – a method of procedure at variance with well-recognized rules of comparative grammar.”⁸ The “Notes on the Cosmogony and History of the Squamish” (in volume II of the present edition) shows him making similar deductions from superficial resemblances between Dene and Chinese words. In this area, Hill-Tout must be discounted. But we are willing to let that overly-speculative side of Hill-Tout go, because of the value of his empirical field work, where pet theories intrude occasionally, but not damagingly.

The “Psychical Phenomena” essay, as a rare autobiographical statement, is informative on Hill-Tout’s special qualifications for fieldresearch. This essay bridges Westminster and New Westminster; for, without the receptive audience in London, i.e. the Society for Psychical Research, whose President was Oliver Lodge and would, in 1911, be Andrew Lang, we might never have learned of the seances conducted in Vancouver, which led our dignified professor to become something of a shaman, travelling beyond the bounds of normal perception and control. The scientist in him wins out in the end, but meanwhile, as an awed participant. Hill-Tout makes an emotional pilgrimage to his dead father in a seance situation. He describes himself at one point grovelling on the floor deranged, at another point nursing a friend in his arms like a mother. A mature man of obvious modesty is here revealing moments of sensitivity, moments when he was not himself. Again, he risks appearing comical, and again the real dignity of the man and his prose wins us over; and moves us, because of what these experiences mean in terms of his future as an ethnologist. In effect, by deliberately inducing extraordinary spirit happenings in a seance he was training for his “vision.” He found out what it was to be possessed, and also knew the bliss of gaining a guardian being. In field work later his informants would surely pick up some sense of his “medicine.” Captain Paul of the Lillooet did, and gave Hill-Tout “one of his ancestral mystery names.” Because of his own journeys into a spirit world, he could talk about these things to Captain Paul and others without hypocrisy. ⁹

Cartoon in The Vancouver Province, 1934.

One wishes that all Hill-Tout’s work might have been on this level of primary experience, but he was human enough to fill in with secondary material. “Haida Stories and Beliefs” is a notable example of reportage second-hand. He acknowledges indebtedness to the Rev. Mr. Harrison; apparently he was simply using Harrison’s notes. The embarrassment is that Harrison himself published most of these same stories in his book Ancient Warriors of the North Pacific (1925), and had even printed some of them before Hill-Tout.¹⁰ The piece as it stands is worth preserving in that Harrison nowhere published all the material it contains, notably the Haida songs.

In the Bella Coola review included below there is a similar case, where Hill-Tout presents a legend from an unnamed non-Bella Coola source, possibly a white man. Both these lapses occurred in a time when so little had been put on record that it must have seemed useful to get into print whatever came most immediately to hand, while the serious sustained field work was being prepared, more slowly, for publication.

The review of Boas’ Mythology of the Bella Coola raises the question of Hill-Tout’s professional standing in a further way. A scholar is judged not only by his original work but also by his critical intelligence. Book-reviewing is a self-regulating process by which a profession tries to keep healthy. Hill-Tout apparently did not relish controversy on this level; his review is lethargic, and it is his only one. He resigned his watch-dog role as soon as he began it. Lack of library facilities might have had something to do with it; or, again, his like-minded audience was too far away. It is not that he was lazy; he did keep up — quoting Spencer and Gillen, for instance, as soon as their Australian work was published in 1899. By 1923, when he was called to give the Presidential Address before Section II of the Royal Society of Canada, he was keeping up very well indeed. His topic, “Recent Discoveries and New Trends in Anthropology,” was entirely devoted to the previous two years: field discoveries in Rhodesia, Nebraska, and Patagonia; L. B. Berman’s 1921 book on endocrinology; a recent lecture by Sir Arthur Keith at Johns Hopkins University; and news of something at the University of Alberta “flashed around the world” while his address was being penned. This is “reviewing” of a kind, the continual sifting of materials in order to achieve a cosmology. But one’s true metal shows, not from a Presidential platform, but in the nitty-gritty of book-reviewing. Hill-Tout certainly had independent views and expressed them clearly, but he generally avoided an arena where they would be seriously contested.

Again, these criticisms do not really disturb the ground on which Hill-Tout’s true reputation will rest, the field reports which make up the bulk of The Salish People volumes. John R. Swanton, an amiable and judicious man, probably hit it right in a letter he sent to Hill-Tout on 4 January 1905, by which time five of the field reports were out. “You must keep me informed of the progress of your labors,” he writes, “especially when the time approaches for you to come over to this side.” The Bureau of Ethnology is worried about two neglected areas, Oregon and Washington, and there is a hint of future support there. “After the labors of yourself and Prof. Boas among the Salish, Kwakiutl and Tsimshian, those of Morice among the interior Atha-pascan tribes and of myself among the Haidas and Tlingit we have most of the northwest pretty well covered beyond latitude 49°.”¹¹ Thus, Hill-Tout’s work is appreciated and his services requested; he is named as a field worker alongside Boas, Morice, and Swanton. This would seem to be as much reputation as one could ask for.

It is difficult, however, to find any recent testimonial to Hill-Tout’s overall value as an anthropologist. Perhaps this is because for the last twenty years of his life his contributions were entirely local, an aspect of his place in Vancouver society. As President of the Vancouver Art, Historical and Scientific Association, and as the writer of scores of newspaper articles, he interpreted the advance of science to those of his fellow-citizens who would listen. When he died at eighty-five on 30 June 1944, it was in a city where, as one obituary put it, “he was esteemed as one of the most notable and public spirited of its residents.”¹² The work which earned him that tribute is laid out in the Bio-bibliography section of this volume below; one is not tempted to reprint it. Whatever it meant to his contemporaries, it means little to us who have our own interpreters. Some flavour of that period, however, is included in the two letters to Major Matthews, the City Archivist, where Hill-Tout is given the role of ancient, and asked to reminisce about the early days when, like a transformer-figure himself, he had a hand in creating landmarks in his city, Stanley Park, the Great Fraser Midden, Kitsilano. That last is possibly the only authentic pre-white place-name within the city limits; Hill-Tout made that link for us with the past.

It was G. M. Dawson, Director of the Canadian Geological Survey, who coined the phrase “the local contribution.”¹³ The respect was mutual, and Hill-Tout once spoke to a newspaper reporter about Dawson: “He was a singularly simple and modest man, cordial, very kindly and always ready to help younger and less experienced men.up the ladder which he had climbed so successfully.”¹⁴ They must have met in 1891 during what turned out to be Dawson’s last visit to British Columbia. They corresponded, and Dawson sponsored Hill-Tout’s first paper, “Later Prehistoric Man,” before the Royal Society of Canada at the 15 May 1895 meeting, and saw it through the press (see volume III of the present edition). The following year he nominated Hill-Tout for the new Ethnological Survey of Canada committee. He may have had reason to regret Hill-Tout’s local fervor when Hill-Tout preferred to sell his interesting artifacts to the Provincial rather than the National Museum (see letters to the Provincial Secretary below). But he had previously had help from Hill-Tout in that regard,¹⁵ and would not, in any case, hold grudges. He seems to have been the kind of disinterested patron that anyone would be honoured to be associated with. Even his premature death in 1901 meant that Hill-Tout was advanced, being appointed to the secretaryship of the Committee in his place. Dawson’s death was tragic in its long-term consequences. Had he lived he might have brought about a Canadian anthropology independent of the United States, utilizing Hill-Tout’s talents among others. With Edward Sapir’s appointment in 1910 as head of the Anthropological Division of the National Museum of Canada, the Boas school took over. “This,” as Marius Barbeau explains, “virtually eliminated Canadian pioneers, historians, local archaeologists and,” he adds, “dilettantes.”¹⁶

Was Charles Hill-Tout a dilettante? Without his field reports to point to, one might be inclined to think so of a man whose career was capped by articles to the Illustrated London News. He brought Darwin to the West Coast of Canada, and like Hamlet made a great deal of a skull. But now that his eight full field reports are collected and republished, it behooves us to pay better attention to him. With immense scientific curiosity and great personal initiative he entered upon a crucial programme of research and recovery. He had abundant goodwill towards the Native people, which resulted in reports both ample and humane. Without overdramatizing it, he gives a sense of his own place in a moment of history. The Indian villages were precarious entities; the past was a yearned-for ideal; his visits to the tribes were enspiriting events. His loyalties were to what he saw and heard. We can contradict much of the theorizing he did, but he had a good eye, a good ear, and a good heart. This is where he cannot be contradicted.

I have saved until last the “Origins of Totemism” essay, not because of any anthropological importance — though Hill-Tout up to 1914 had made a name for himself in this area more than any other¹⁷ — but rather because it was my first introduction to Hill-Tout some years ago, when I chanced to find a xerox copy of this particular article, bound and catalogued as a pamphlet, in the Simon Fraser Library stacks. Many times since then I have thought that whoever went to that trouble would probably appreciate having an inexpensive reprint available.

Ralph Maud

Cultus Lake, B.C.

December, 1978

1 Marius Barbeau “Charles Hill-Tout (1859–1944)” (1945) p. 89. Parts of this obituary, including the date of birth, are erroneous; but Barbeau’s sense of the politics of anthropology in Canada is valuable. See also D. Cole “The Origins of Canadian Anthropology: 1850–1910” (1973).

2 Richard M. Dorson The British Folklorists (1968) p. 206. See, for instance, Andrew Lang’s contribution on Totemism in the Eleventh Edition of the Ency-clopaedia Britannica Vol. 27 (1911) p. 89: “For totemism in British Columbia the writings of Mr. Hill-Tout may be consulted.” The Lang correspondence is in the Special Collections Library of the University of British Columbia.

3 Among the Hill-Tout papers in the Special Collections Library of the University of British Columbia donated by Lionel Haweis, there is a note that Hill-Tout’s name was proposed to the University Senate in 1935 for an LLD (Hon.), but that the suggestion was not acted upon.

4 See footnote 24 to the Introduction to volume I of the present edition.

5 Members of the Vagabonds Club of Vancouver engraved a scrolled farewell to Hill-Tout “on going to serve your country under arms” (dated 27 September 1916 in the Vancouver Centennial Museum). This turned out to be the only practical joke that he managed to pull off in a club that had been tolerant of his seriousness. The 1917 roll-call listed him as “an erudite vagabond whose only fault is Over-respectability; fortunately this is more apparent than real” (University of British Columbia Library).

6 One might add that he wrote poetry. Vancouver Centennial Museum has his typescript volume of poems, dated from 1895 to 1915, entitled Echoes of Days That Have Flown.

7 “The likelihood of emotional shallowness in such children and the adults they become is well documented” (p. 180 of Banks thesis). The interview with Charles B. Hill-Tout is quoted on p. 10 and referred to on p. 179: “We know that Hill-Tout was born to farming people and that he and a brother and sister were orphaned when he was about seven years of age.” A ts. biography in the Special Collections Library of the University of British Columbia, which seems very reliable on many things, says that “at the age of 16 he went to school at Weston-super-Mare. Following this he lived with his parents in Somersetshire.”

8 Bureau of Ethnology internal staff memorandum from J. N. B. Hewitt to Major J. W. Powell, 6 April 1896: “With great care I have examined the evidence submitted by Mr. Hill-Tout in support of his startling statements, and wherever the meagre materials I have have enabled me to test the trustworthiness of Mr. Hill-Tout’s comparisons I find them invariably unsatisfactory and unsound”(p. 3).

9 For Captain Paul, see the report on the Lillooet (1905) in volume II of the present edition. See also under the heading “Dances” in the report on the Kwantlen (1902) for references to the Society for Psychical Research in relation to shamanism (in volume III of the present edition).

10 In “Religion and Family Among the Haidas” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (1892). It would seem that Hill-Tout needed something for his first report to the British Association before his own field notes were in order. Harrison must have given him the material on one of his visits to Vancouver, without mentioning previous publication. Harrison mentions Hill-Tout in Ancient Warriors of the North Pacific (1925) p. 38.

11 Letter in Special Collections Library of the University of British Columbia. Teit’s name is noticeably missing, but Swanton probably considered him an employee of Boas. A well-balanced survey of Hill-Tout’s and Teit’s work by Swanton appears under the heading “Salish” in ed. James Hastings Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics Vol. XI (1928).

12 Noel Robinson “Obituary” Man 45 (September-October 1945) p. 120. The University of British Columbia Library typescript quotes an address by Hill-Tout before “a public body in Vancouver": “I am a Vancouverite myself. I contribute to your revenues both directly and indirectly. I have seen this city, of which we are all so justly proud, grow from a village to her present leading position. My faith in her future has never wavered. I believe she is destined to play a great and important part in the future of this Province and the Dominion.”

13 The words of our epigraph are from the introductory remarks to the report of the Committee for an Ethnological Survey of Canada Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science 70th meeting (1900) p. 470. The text is unsigned, but was presumably written by the secretary of the Committee, Dr. George M. Dawson.

14 Noel Robinson quoting Hill-Tout in “Most Famous Canadian Geologist Was Very Human” Vancouver Province (5 August 1939). See also John J. Van West “George Mercer Dawson: An Early Canadian Anthropologist” (1976).

15 A letter in the University of British Columbia Library Vagabonds Club manuscripts from Dawson to Hill-Tout, 13 June 1899, thanks him for specimens from Lytton and an “interesting” skull, and encloses $50 for more.

16 In the obituary previously cited Barbeau adds (p. 91): “Left out of the federal field, Hill-Tout, like others, must have felt a bit slighted and at times provoked. This no doubt accounts for the loss of his active participation in the research and writing of later years, outside of purely local matters.” Although Hill-Tout ended his field excursions in 1906 (possibly because of ill-health), he participated internationally, in anthropological meetings and periodicals, until a reasonable retirement age of sixty-five, and only then lowered his sights to the local scene.

17 According to a letter of 1 March 1913 (in University of British Columbia Special Collections Library), Professor Goldenweiser, Boas’ colleague at Columbia University, invited Hill-Tout to contribute to an international symposium on Totemism sponsored by the German journal Anthropos, and he is listed in distinguished company in Anthropos 11 (1914) p. 287. The outbreak of war prevented him from fulfilling his agreement to contribute; one suspects a patriotic gesture here.