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Chapter II Before Boas

In the summer of 1896 Charles Hill-Tout, an immigrant schoolteacher newly arrived in Vancouver, took a boat across Burrard Inlet to the Squamish Mission village in what is now North Vancouver. Bishop Durieu had prepared the way, and the chief men of the tribe soon brought the visitor to the old, blind “historian,” Mulks. “I first sought to learn his age,” says Hill-Tout, “but this he could only approximately give by informing me that his mother was a girl on the verge of womanhood when Vancouver sailed up Howe Sound at the close of the last century. He would, therefore, be about 100 years old.”¹ What Hill-Tout then witnessed is, as far as I know, unique in the annals of myth collecting on the Northwest Coast of America: this Squamish “Homer” proceeded to orate the epic of the origin of his people as though in a formal ceremonial occasion.

Before the old man could begin his recital, some preparations were deemed necessary by the other elderly men of the tribe. These consisted in making a bundle of short sticks, each about six inches long. These played the part of tallies, each stick representing to the reciter a particular paragraph or chapter in his story. They apologized for making these, and were at pains to explain to me that these were to them what books were to the white man. These sticks were now placed at intervals along a table round which we sat, and after some animated discussion between the interpreter, who acted as master of ceremonies, and the other old men as to the relative order and names of the tallies, we were ready to begin. The first tally was placed in the old man’s hands and he began his recital in a loud, high-pitched key, as if he were addressing a large audience in the open air. He went on without pause for about ten minutes, and then the interpreter took up the story. The story was either beyond the interpreter’s power to render into English, or there was much in it he did not like to relate to a white man, for I did not unfortunately get a fifth of what the old man had uttered from him, and it was only by dint of questioning and cross-questioning that I was enabled to get anything like a connected narrative from him at all. The old man recited his story chapter by chapter, that is, tally by tally, and the interpreter followed in like order (pp. 19-20).

In his paper communicated to the Royal Society of Canada in 1897, Hill-Tout presents as much of this Squamish Flood story as he was able to record. In spite of the difficulties, it is more detailed than the large majority of such origin stories. Most important to our mythographic concerns are a couple of notes that Hill-Tout adds about the actual performance. Mulks is telling how “the Great Spirit” punished the tribe with an especially crippling kind of snowstorm: “In this part of his recital the old man was exceedingly interesting and graphic in his description, the very tones of his voice lending themselves to his story, and I gathered, long before the interpreter took up the story, that he had told of something that was very small and had penetrated everywhere” (p. 21). Starvation and cold caused the death of hundreds, and here “the old man’s voice was hushed to a plaintive wail, and the faces of his audience were an eloquent index of the tragic interest of this story of their ancestors' misfortunes” (p. 21). When so much of what we have of Native myth is little more than a minimal report of how the story used to be told, it is refreshing to have the sense of a “performance”: Mulks is truly “on stage.”² Hill-Tout’s inexperience worked in his favour here. If he had been better trained he would have taken Mulks aside and got the original Squamish down by slow dictation; instead, we get a picture of something that might have happened before any white man came on the scene.

Charles Hill-Tout, the frontispiece photograph to his volume, Man and his Ancestors in the Light of Organic Evolution (Vancouver 1925).

Franz Boas was working on the Coast by 1886, quite a few years before Hill-Tout’s arrival. But chronology does not count. Hill-Tout is “Before Boas” in the naivete with which he began his work. His background was rural England, a Church of England upbringing. He might have become a clergyman but for some “intellectual difficulties” of a Darwinian sort. He arrived in Toronto in 1884 with a letter of introduction to Dr. (later Sir) Daniel Wilson, and must have seemed just the kind of “young Dominion man” Wilson had prophesied would “arise to bear a part in letters and science not less worthy than those who figure on England’s golden roll.”³ Wilson spoke to him of “the vanishing race” and the opportunities for anthropological research in the West. When a sequence of circumstances brought Hill-Tout to settle in Vancouver in 1891 he was ready and eager to do his bit. His residence in the area gave him the advantage of being able to renew by continued visits the friendships he made with local Indians.

He had an interest in spiritualism, as did John Swanton; but I do not know that Swanton gained an insight into the visionary experience in quite the direct manner that Hill-Tout did. In a report to the Society for Psychical Research in London in 1895, Hill-Tout tells of the seances being conducted in Vancouver and his own shaman-like experience at one of them. Like a spirit-dance song, the hymn “Nearer, my God, to Thee” induced in him “strange sensations”:

I stood up and began to sway to and fro, and soon lost all sense of my surroundings. I seemed to be far away in space. The feelings of distance and remoteness from all other beings were very marked, and a sense of coldness and loneliness oppressed me terribly. I seemed to be moving, or rather to be drawn downward, and presently felt that I had reached this earth again; but all was strange and fearful and lonely, and I seemed to be disappointed that I could not attain the object of this long and lonely journey. I felt I was looking for someone, but did not seem to have a clear notion of whom it was, and as the hopelessness of my search and the fruitlessness of my long journey forced itself upon me, I cried out in my wretchedness and misery. I felt I could neither find what I wanted nor get back from whence I had come. My grief was very terrible, and I should have fallen to the ground but that the other sitters had gathered round me. . . . ⁴

The Native gaining of a guardian spirit is not dissimilar, in essence. Hill-Tout’s Indian friends must have had some sense of this:

It was not till Captain Paul [of the Lillooet tribe] and I had spent several weeks in each other’s company and I had won his confidence and esteem and he had bestowed upon me one of his ancestral mystery names, thereby relating me to himself, that he gave me. . . esoteric information concerning the abnormal sight powers he claimed to have formerly possessed. I do not, for my own part, doubt his possession of them for a moment.⁵

Such a profound relationship between Indian and white is rarely so convincingly documented. It makes for good story collecting.

Hill-Tout’s most productive friendship was with Chief Mischelle of Lytton, one of the most talented and informed people that a beginning field worker could ever hope to meet.

Having acted as interpreter for many years to the missionaries, and also in the law courts, Mischelle was quite fluent in English. “My method of recording was as follows,” writes Hill-Tout by way of preface to a single masterpiece, which takes up over twenty pages of small type. “I made copious notes at the time, and expanded them immediately after. When written out, I read them to him and corrected them where necessary according to his instructions.”⁶ This methodology may not seem very promising; but the result is the most readable body of Native literature in the canon. “Mischelle was a good raconteur, and took the liveliest pleasure in relating to me his store of lore.” Hill-Tout won a prize of $25 from the Folklore Society of Montreal for the story in question; it is certainly, as “performance,” worth the price of admission.

When he gains some proficiency in the Salish languages, Hill-Tout provides interlinear texts, so that we can test his free translations against them. He consistently heightens the diction to make a story warmer and more heartfelt. He likes to add adjectives. For instance, in the Squamish story of the origin of the “Wildmen,” a chiefs daughter is made pregnant by a slave; then, according to the interlinear literal translation:

when he-finds-out the father, then he-takes-into the

canoe the daughter-his and the slave.

Chief Mischelle of Lytton. Photograph annotated: “Michel, Head Chief of Nekla-kap-amuks, May 1879.”

Hill-Tout’s free translation reads: “And, on learning who it was who had caused this disgrace to fall upon him, he took both the guilty slave and his hapless daughter away in his canoe.”⁷ If this sounds like Victorian melodrama, it is because Hill-Tout is trying to meet fully the melodrama of the original: Indian daughters are sometimes never told to darken doorsteps again. He knows that the hearers of this story were moved by it, and he wants us to be likewise moved. This is the perennial problem. Hill-Tout’s way of meeting it is to supply the emotive adjectives which the storyteller would imply in his manner:

. . . although nothing is more wearisome than consecutive reading of collections of Indian texts, there is nothing wearisome in listening to the recital of these by the Indian himself. Most Indians possess natural dramatic powers, and their ready, graceful and appropriate gestures, and their command of those tones of the voice that appeal to the emotions, make it distinctly pleasurable to listen to their stories of long ago or their recitals of the traditions of their people. So that if the English equivalents of my native texts in this or in former reports seem fuller than the baldness of their expressions justifies, it must be understood that this is because the bare text alone does not render the full meaning and context of the living recital or do justice to the subject treated of. I have seen women shed tears, and men’s faces grow pale and tense over the recital, by some of the elders of the tribe, of the traditions of the people, the text of which would make one marvel that such bald dry statements could call forth so much emotion.⁸

Hill-Tout is quite clear on Native showmanship, and his own.

As a member of the Ethnological Survey of Canada Committee, Hill-Tout issued full ethnological reports to the British Association for the Advancement of Science on the Thompson (1899), the Squamish (1900), the Mainland Halkomelem (1902), continuing with similar scholarly reports in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute on the Sechelt (1904), the Chehalis and Scowlitz (1904), the Lillooet (1905), the South-Eastern Tribes of Vancouver Island (1907), and the Okanagan (1911). This work involved the collection and publication of grammars and vocabularies for eight quite different Salish languages, material which linguists today find useful. All this was accomplished in spare time during his years as a teacher in Vancouver and then, from 1899, when he moved out to the farm he had purchased in Abbotsford, in time wrested from business and family. It was a life-long grievance that he never received employment or proper recognition from academic Anthropology. It goes back to the rebuff from Boas, the exact nature of which we do not know. Hill-Tout and Boas met in Vancouver on 3 June 1897. Hill-Tout gave Boas five skulls, “one of them very valuable.”⁹ And that’s all we know. Hill-Tout had certain expectations. He had written Boas a long letter on 3 October 1895, and Boas had replied: “It is very likely I shall be on the coast about the month of May and should be very glad if I could assist you in your interesting work. I may be able to obtain funds for this purpose.”¹⁰ Hill-Tout had rejoined: “I am exceedingly enthusiastic over the whole question and would like nothing better than to devote the next ten years of my life to the work in this district.” Boas had now finally arrived on the coast; the Jesup Expedition was well financed; but Hill-Tout was not taken on. Something about Hill-Tout annoyed Boas, his tone, his intellectual demeanour, his presumption.¹¹ The result was that Hill-Tout was never published in the nice hard-cover volumes of the Jesup Expedition, nor in the Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletins, nor in the publications of the American Folklore Society, nor in any of the influential series of Anthropological volumes emanating from Columbia University. Hill-Tout’s field reports never got a Library of Congress catalogue number, and thus were condemned to oblivion, or at least an eighty-year delay.

George M. Dawson could have made a great deal of difference, and his premature death in 1901 is lamentable. He was the son of the Principal of McGill, and a brilliant geologist. As a member of the staff of the Geological Survey of Canada, he overcame his physical disability, the result of polio at the age of eleven, and made many arduous explorations of the Northwest, and also did three substantial ethnographic reports in the midst of his cartography: on the Haida (1880), the Kwakiutl (1887), and the Shuswap (1891). Dawson included Mythology sections in each of these reports.¹² They are interesting as being very much “Before Boas”; but he is essentially reporting on the stories rather than presenting them. What we lost with Dawson’s death is not so much a great story collector as a great enabler. He enabled Boas to get started on his very first season in the field, as their exchange of highly practical letters reveals.¹³ He was on the Committee of the British Association for the Advancement of Science that hired Boas for his second field trip (1888) and five subsequent trips. He was the Chairman of the Association’s new Committee for the Ethnographic Survey of Canada in 1897, nominating Hill-Tout for membership. Here was a man big enough to sponsor a multiplicity of attitudes and modes in anthropological research. If he had lived, the Anthropological Division which was established in 1910 within the Geological Survey would surely have been a more catholic and at the same time a more Canadian entity. As it was, Boas was consulted, and a staunch Boas man, Edward Sapir, appointed as head of the new Division. The “Canadian pioneers” were, in the words of Marius Barbeau, “virtually eliminated.”¹⁴

There was one Canadian pioneer who, it is safe to say, got all the recognition he deserved. At the World’s Fair in Chicago, 1893, “a massive Scotchman, as rugged as his native climate, 65 years of age, with iron gray hair and beard,” lorded it over the miniature Haida village he had set up there and gave daily “readings from the totem poles,” telling and retelling “the quaint old stories connected with them.”¹⁵ The crowds of “admiring listeners” kept asking him for a book, so he went home and put together Tales from the Totems of the Hidery (1899).

James Deans of Victoria, presumably around 1893.

Home was Victoria, B.C., called Fort Victoria when James Deans arrived there in January 1853 off the Puget Sound Agricultural Company’s barge, “Norman Morrison.” Thus, Deans had begun his field work more than thirty years “before Boas”—as a farmer in the midst of the Indians, and then, with the aid of Chinook, as an amateur ethnologist among the many tribes represented at the Fort. “I was surprised to find that each nation had a wonderful mythology … My next step was to collect all I could find and write it down, in order to preserve it from oblivion” (p. 6). During 1869-70 he was on the Queen Charlotte Islands, building a tramway for the shipping of coal. He was there again in 1879, and began spending a few weeks every fall among the Haidas. In the summer of 1883, starting from Skidegate, he visited most of the villages by canoe. Between 1887 and 1899 he published seven stories in the Journal of American Folklore, and many small pieces in the American Antiquarian, all of which found their place in Tales from the Totems of the Hidery, though sometimes with interesting variants. For, even when the informant is named in one instance (“Mr. George Cunningham, of Port Essington”), and even though Deans states flatly that he has given it “as near to the original as I can remember” (p.37), the prior publication in the Journal of American Folklore 4 (1891) 32-33 differs so much as to suggest that neither comes very near the original. For example, at one point the love-struck hero is ordered by the cruel maiden to cut his hair short like a slave’s:

Hearing this last request he hesitated, well knowing the consequences; however, after a while he went and had it cut, and presented himself, in order to claim his reward. When she saw him she said: “You fool! to cut your hair for a woman, and become like a slave. . . . ”

In the book ten years later, this passage becomes:

No doubt, when Sun Cloud heard this last request, he had a hard struggle within himself, a struggle between true love and dishonor. Reaching home, true love prevailed. He went to a friend’s house and had a close cut. Afterwards hoping all would be well he went over to her house, in order to claim his reward. As soon as she saw what he had done for her love, she said, “You fool, do you think I would wed a slave?”

At least one of these is an embroidery upon the “original”—possibly both. Deans obviously had fun travelling the country he loved, picking up these yarns, and getting them published. We would be well advised, also, to treat them as fun.

What else is there “Before Boas”? Very little. One collection of legends is of special interest not only because of its early date. History and Folklore of the Cowichan Indians (Victoria 1901) is a charming book compiled by Martha Douglas Harris, the daughter of Governor James Douglas by his part-Cree wife.¹⁶ The stories are presented lightly and modestly.

As a little girl I used to listen to these legends with the greatest delight, and in order not to lose them, I have written down what I can remember of them. When written down they lose their charm which was in the telling. They need the quaint songs and the sweet voice that told them, the winter gloaming and the bright fire as the only light—then were these legends beautiful (p. 57).

This book contains a rare item, the transcription of a story in Chinook jargon, followed by a translation (pp. 43-49).¹⁷

G.M. Sproat was an early homesteader before he became a well-known government representative in Indian affairs. There is legend material in Sproat’s Scenes and Studies of Savage Life (London 1868),¹⁸ among the earliest recorded for this area. In a footnote to the mythology chapter (p. 177) Sproat mentions the Rev. A.C. Garrett of Victoria, and the “active and observant traveller,” Dr. Robert Brown, as both possessing “extensive information on this subject.” Brown’s known publications do not include mythology,¹⁹ and the Rev. Garrett did not apparently publish at all.

It would perhaps put things in perspective to mention that the classic Alaskan ethnology is Aurel Krause’s The Tlingit Indians, first published in Jena in 1885, translated by Erna Gunther in 1956, and available in a University of Washington paperback since 1970. Chapter 10 contains several wellauthenticated legends, including some from previous explorers, Veniaminof, Lisiansky, and Liitke. The latter’s Voyage autour du monde, 1826-1829, published in Paris in 1835, takes us back into the early nineteenth century.²⁰

1The Salish People: The Local Contribution of Charles Hill-Tout ed. Ralph Maud (Vancouver: Talonbooks 1978) Vol. II p. 19.

2 Dell Hymes defines true performance as “the taking of responsibility for being ‘on stage’”—see his “Folklore’s Nature and the Sun’s Myth” Journal of American Folklore 88 (1975) 352.

3 The Salish People Vol. I p. 13.

4 The Salish People Vol. IV p. 60.

5 The Salish People Vol. II p. 122.

6 The Salish People Vol. I p. 21.

7 The Salish People Vol. II p. 97. The interlinear translation may be found in the original Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science; for reference, see The Salish People Vol. II p. 27.

8 The Salish People Vol. Ill p. 156.

9 Franz Boas, letter to Mrs. Boas, 3 June 1897, in The Ethnology of Franz Boas ed. Ronald P. Rohner (1969) p. 201. See The Salish People Vol. I p. 15.

10 The exchange of letters between Boas and Hill-Tout is printed in The Salish People Vol. IV pp. 35-40.

11 Boas’s letter to R.W. Brock of 1910—see footnote 9 of Chapter VI (below)—refers to Hill-Tout as having “a most remarkable ability of exasperating everyone with whom he comes into contact.”

12 “On the Haida Indians of the Queen Charlotte Islands” Report of Progress, Geological Survey of Canada, 1878-79 (Ottawa 1880) pp. 103B-179B, “Traditions and Folklore” section pp. 149B-154B; “Notes and Observations on the Kwakiool People of the Northern Part of Vancouver Island and Adjacent Coasts, made during the Summer of 1885” Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada 5 (1887) Sect. II pp. 63-98, myths on pp. 81-87; “Notes on the Shuswap People of British Columbia” Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada 9 (1891) Sect. II pp. 3-44, “Mythology” pp. 28-35. A concise discussion of Dawson’s contribution to Pacific Coast ethnology is John J. Van West “George Mercer Dawson: An Early Canadian Anthropologist” AnthropologicalJournal of Canada 14 (1976) No.4 pp.8-12.

13 Excerpts included in Jacob W. Gruber “Horatio Hale and the Development of American Anthropology” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 111 (February 1967) 5-37, specifically pp.21-22.

14 Marius Barbeau “Charles Hill-Tout (1859-1944)” Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada 39 (1945) Sect. II pp. 89-92, an astute evaluation of early Canadian anthropology. See also Douglas Cole “The Origins of Canadian Anthropology, 1850-1910” Journal of Canadian Studies 8 (February 1973) 33-45.1 am indebted to Douglas Cole for directing my attention to a letter from Hill-Tout to Sapir of 26 February 1912 in the National Museums of Canada (Canadian Ethnological Service), which sums up the feelings of those who were passed over:

Bucklands

Abbotsford, B.C.

Feby 26 1912

Dr. Edward Sapir

Dom Geo Survey

Ottawa

Dear Sir,

I beg to acknowledge and thank you for the copies of your papers which you were kind enough to send me. Permit me to say that I heard of your appointment as ethnologist-in-charge at Ottawa with great interest and pleasure, and I look forward to see the dreams some of us have indulged in during the last twenty years accomplished by your self and colleagues. I see only one thing to regret and that is that your survey of the anthropological problems in your paper in “Science” and the tone there adopted by you may alienate the sympathies of some of the earlier students and associations devoted to the study of the aborigines of the Dominion. You seem to have overlooked the work and efforts, or rather you seem to fail to appreciate the work and efforts of those who have endeavoured to keep alive an interest in anthropological study. I will instance one person’s work only, Father Morice’s. His methods may not be ideal but there is no question of his knowledge of what he writes. I question if there is another student in America with a more perfect and critical knowledge of a native tongue than F. Morice has of Carrier and cognate tongues. Yet your mention of him and his work is only a “patronizing” one in a footnote. I cannot think you are aware of the amount of pioneer work which has been done in this country, and Canadians are very touchy. I could wish you had laid a little more stress upon the value of these efforts as far as they go. You don’t want to alienate any one with anthropological interest. There is so little of it shown in this country, and when you remember it took some of us over 20 years to educate the authorities at Ottawa, even with Dr. G.M. Dawson and his distinguished father Sir William’s assistance, to appreciate the value and importance of anthropological studies, you will see it is indiscrete to start your work by rousing feelings of antagonism to yourself.

You will pardon my freedom in speaking but I have your work at heart and would be sorry to see any obstacles placed in your way. The next time you have an opportunity try and smooth down these ruffled feelings your paper has aroused.

Yours truly,

C. Hill-Tout

Sapir apparently did not reply to this letter. When President Wesbrook of the University of British Columbia asked Sapir’s advice on Hill-Tout as a candidate for the Headship of the Department of Anthropology, Sapir wrote: “To be perfectly frank, I do not think Mr. Hill-Tout would altogether answer the needs of a university”(letter of 29 June 1916, in Museums of Canada, Ethnology Division).

15 “Archaeological Exhibits at the Fair: James Deans and his Company of Indians” American Antiquarian 15 (1893) 185; see James Deans, Introduction to Tales from the Totems of the Hidery, Vol. II of the Archives of the International Folk-Lore Association (Chicago 1899) p. 5.

16 See Derek Pethick James Douglas: Servant of Two Empires (Vancouver: Mitchell Press 1969) pp. 266-273, though there is no mention of Martha’s collection of myths.

17 Melville Jacobs Texts in Chinook Jargon (University of Washington Publications in Anthropology, Vol. 7 No. 1, November 1936) pp. 1-27 includes some stories in Chinook jargon from Thomas Paul of Saanich, collected in Victoria in May 1930.

18 Extracts from this early book were included in Tom McFeat’s paperback compilation, Indians of the North Pacific Coast (Toronto:McClelland and Stewart 1966); but these did not include Sproat’s mythology chapter.

19 Wayne Suttles in a personal communication corrects me on this point. One of Brown’s publications which I have been unable to locate contains a “star-husband” tale.

20 The Norwegian brothers Adrian and Fillip Jacobsen lived on the West Coast for a number of years, especially at Bella Coola, and wrote a few reports for German periodicals in the period 1890-1895. These have been collected and translated by the B.C. Indian Language Project, and await publication. What we have seen in English have been the few myths included by Boas in his Mythology of the Bella Coola Indians (1898). Notable among the material supplied by early explorers and travelers is “Report on the Indian Tribes inhabiting the country in the vicinity of the 49th Parallel of North Latitude” published by Capt. E.E. Wilson of the Boundary Survey in Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London 4 (1866) 275-322, which includes one vigorously told Coyote story.