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Chapter III Franz Boas: Early Field Work

“There is little on public record or floating in tradition regarding the youth of Boas,” reports A.L. Kroeber in the festschrift published by the American Anthropological Association in the year after Boas’s death in 1942.¹ There is no youthful dream which it was his life’s goal to fulfill. His enormous energy and output seem not to have been attached to a single dominating insight, but to have been austerely empirical. Any general statement could only be enunciated when data gave statistical proof. He resisted Hitler propaganda on the racial question with all the power of his mature authority; but the world does not associate the name of Boas with “racial equality,” as it does Darwin’s with “evolution,” Marx’s with “communism,” and Freud’s with “the unconscious.” Even by the end of his long working life, the proofs were not in. “He made no one great summating discovery,” says Kroeber (p. 24). Up to the end he was sifting the materials.

Boas was born in Minden, Westphalia, on 9 July 1858, to Meier Boas, a prosperous businessman, and his wife Sophie, a founder of the first Froebel Kindergarten in Minden and one of a circle of intellectuals “of the Mosaic confession” (as Boas once phrased it). Perhaps the most significant event in his life occurred in the fallow years after his doctorate, when he was waiting for some position. The event is of a personal nature. His aunt’s husband, Dr. Abraham Jacobi of New York City, invited Franz for a holiday in the Hartz mountains. Marie Krackowizer was of the party, one of two daughters accompanied by their mother, the widow of an Austrian doctor who had emigrated to the United States after the troubles of 1848. If Boas was to marry Marie, as he immediately knew he must, he had to have a career, and in the United States to boot. We can see Boas’s early ambition as half scientific thrust and half the securing of a lady’s hand in marriage. His letter-diaries make it quite clear where he would have preferred to be rather than on the S.S. Boskowitz up and down the Northwest Coast. Field work was not an enjoyable way of life, but merely a means of providing the raw materials for linguistic and statistical analysis, which could be conducted in the comfort of his own study at home. This not only explains the rather limited amount of time he spent in the field and the welcome he gave to informants who, when properly trained, could mail to New York quite usable information, but also illuminates Boas’s general moral stance: his life in New York, his editing, his teaching, and his marriage, this was so successful and satisfying that other ways of life, it seems, could only be looked down upon. Crime, casual sexuality, roisterous play, religious anxiety or enthusiasm, pastimes, or any form of unemployment, these were things he did not know much about, didn’t want to know much about. Perhaps one reason why the principle of equality was never powerfully enough enunciated is that he could not really believe that another mode of life might be as good as the one he was fortunate enough to possess.

Franz Boas with Marie Krackowizer during his visit to New York in 1884. Photo kindly made available by Ronald P. Rohner. See his The Ethnology of Franz Boas (1969), “Illustrations.” Reproduced courtesy of Franziska Boas, who supplied the correct date for the photo in a personal communication, 1 June 1980.

Indianische Sagen

It is rather dismaying to the general reader that the first major publication of myths and legends of the Northwest Coast was printed in German in 1895 and has remained untranslated.2 Indianische Sagen von derNord-Pacifische Kiiste Amerikas is a collection of the stories published during 1888-1895 in the two German periodicals hospitable to Boas’s reports, the gatherings from his first four trips to British Columbia, 1886, 1888, 1889, and 1890. The itineraries for these field trips have been conveniently tabulated and summarized in Ronald P. Rohner’s “Franz Boas: Ethnographer on the Northwest Coast” ed. June Helm Pioneers of American Anthropology (1966) pp. 151-247. What is also dismaying is how hurriedly these stories were collected. Outside of his base in Victoria, Boas never spent more than two weeks at any one place, often only a day or two. He worked under severe financial restrictions and faced many obstacles, the chief of which, initially, was his own inexperience. He had been a year with Eskimos in Baffinland (1883-84), and his observations there went far beyond his formal function of geographer, as The Central Eskimo (1888) attests. But the only Indians he had seen before 1886 were the Bella Coola “exhibited” at the Berlin Museum the previous year. Boas had taken the opportunity to do “field” research with this group, and had published on their language and culture.³ As it happened, a couple of these very Bella Coola contacts were in Victoria when he arrived on 18 September 1886, and facilitated his movements among the resident and visiting Indians. Speed was essential; he had budgeted for only three months to do a general reconnaissance of all the coastal tribes. “I am as well known here in Victoria as a mongrel dog,” he wrote of this period. “I look up all kinds of people without modesty or hesitation.”⁴ We can share his sense of depravity at trying to obtain clean texts in the congested Indian slums, and it is refreshing to read that, after sixteen days of hustling, he has embarked on a boat going north. He spends 6-17 October 1886 in Nawitti at the furthest tip of Vancouver Island. After 18-23 October at Alert Bay, he is back in Victoria for 26 October to 2 November; then off again to Cowichan (4-10 November); Comox (12 November to 2 December); Nanaimo (4-9 December); and ends up with just two days in Vancouver. It is, all in all, a great success. He has vocabularies enough to complete a linguistic map of the B.C. coast; he has packed off enough museum specimens to pay for the trip; and his manuscript of myths and legends “has reached page 326” (Rohner, p. 73). The other three trips which furnished the stories of Indianische Sagen were at a similar pace. The British Association for the Advancement of Science instructed him, through Horatio Hale, not to attempt a thorough study of any one tribe but to compile a general synopsis, i.e. to continue the kind of rushing around he had proved he could do. He was also asked to measure heads and collect skeletal remains, two disagreeable tasks which sapped his energies. It is a wonder that texts of permanent value could be obtained with so much scurrying. Perhaps Boas thought that few had, and left the collection untranslated, except for the following items which he placed in American journals:

(1) “On Certain Songs and Dances of the Kwakiutl of British Columbia” Journal of American Folklore 1 (1888) 49-64, which describes the potlatch Boas attended at Nawitti in 1886 and thus provides useful context (the materials appear in Indian-ische Sagen not so accommodated);

(2) “Notes on the Snanaimuq” American Anthropologist 2 (October 1899) 321-328 contains two tales from the Nanaimo section of Indianische Sagen, presented within the context of a description of tribal customs;

(3) “Salishan Texts” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 34 (January 1895) 31-48—Bella Coola texts with interlinear translation (the Indianische Sagen versions are longer, more sprawling, and may possibly be the same stories obtained through the medium of Chinook jargon);

(4) “Myths and Legends of the Catloltq [Comox] of Vancouver Island” American Antiquarian 10 (1888) 201-211, 366-373.

These are the selections from his earliest field work in myth that Boas offered his English-speaking public. Are they good stories? The question seems almost impertinent. Boas certainly would not claim that they were. Of the Bella Coola sampling, for instance, he states: “the texts are fragmentary and indifferent versions of myths” ("Salishan Texts" p. 31). In his letters home he makes it clear that he is really interested in the language: “The stories themselves are not worth much” (Rohner p. 50). When he says of the Comox stories, “in some ways the myths of the Comox are very interesting, and I am glad I have found so many of them” (Rohner p. 67), it is their pivotal position in the spread of motifs north to south along the coast which makes them interesting to him. The stories themselves are not especially interesting. And after a week at the Nawitti potlatch, Boas can write: “At present I am quite confused by the amount of nonsense to which I must listen” (Rohner p.38). The tidbits that appear in “On Certain Songs and Dances of the Kwakiutl” are quite appetizing, but future readers of Indianische Sagen should be warned that they will not be spared page after page of what Boas himself was very puzzled by.

Boas in 1894

The 1894 season was surely Boas’s best. It was his sixth, and he was lucky, and he had the skills to take advantage of his luck. As far as the British Association for the Advancement of Science was concerned, he was filling in gaps: the Nass River Tsimshian and the Tsetsaut. The ethnology is in his 1895 Report to the British Association; the myths and legends were published separately: “Traditions of the Tsetsaut” Journal of American Folklore 9 (1896) 257-268, and 10 (1897) 35-48; and Tsimshian Texts (Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 27, 1902). As far as his other sponsor was concerned, the U.S. National Museum wanted an article from him. He gave them much more, the magnificent Social Organization and Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl, published as pp. 311-738 of the Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution for the Year Ending June 30, 1895 (Washington, D.C. 1897).

These results were achieved by Boas’s willingness now to stick it out in a place until he gets a “break.” When the S.S. Boskowitz arrived in Kinkolith on 10 October 1894, the Tsetsaut he was looking for were all away hunting. Boas sent for the old man of the tribe, with the promise that he would be well paid if he returned. Meanwhile, he busied himself with Tsimshian language and stories, and measuring the physique of the Indians who were available. He waited from 11 October to 24 October, when: “this afternoon, very unexpectedly, the old Tsetsaut appeared. You can imagine how happy I am. Now I can satisfactorily pursue the main work I had in mind for this place” (Rohner p. 163).

My first day with the Tsetsaut was a great disappointment. The man talks so terribly fast that I cannot get any proper material out of him. He may learn to speak more slowly if I insist on it, but I doubt it. I have to try my best, however. I worked the whole afternoon to learn the old habitat of the tribe and its relationship to the neighboring tribes. I am clear about it now, although it is. a very slow process with him. He also gave me two legends and some linguistic material—vocabulary only (Rohner p. 164).

Well, Boas did persist; so that on 1 November he can say with some satisfaction: “It seems that I have learned everything my friend the Tsetsaut knows” (Rohner p. 168). Boas deserves a lot of points for his persistence, and it seems ungracious to take any of those points away from him. But why is his account of this informant, Levi, so uninteresting in his 1895 Report to the British Association, and why do Levi’s stories in the Journal of American Folklore seem dull? We can be sure it wasn’t Levi’s fault. Rohner again gives us the spice. The letters have all the flavour which Boas denied his published reportage. Levi may have been “quite exasperating,” but he wasn’t boring:

I ask him through my interpreter, “How do you say in Tsetsaut: ‘If you don’t come, the bear will run away’?” I could not get him to translate this. He would only say, “The Nass could be asked a thing like this; we Tsetsaut are always there when a bear is to be killed. That’s why we can’t say a thing like this” (Rohner p. 166).

This is the kind of thing Boas unfortunately considered unpublishable.

I also asked him, “What is the name of the cave of the porcupine?” His answer was only, “A white man could not find it anyway and therefore I don’t have to tell you" (Rohner p. 166).

A man who can parry like that is not likely to tell stories as plain as the gruel of the Journal of American Folklore pieces attributed to him. Something has been lost in transmission.

Chief Mountain

Perhaps the best stories in Tsimshian Texts (1902), though lacking the interlinear translation that the others have, are those told by Chief Mountain, who, in the British Association Report (1895), is given a welcome modicum of biography:

When he himself was a youth the supernatural beings were pursuing him all the time. One day a beautiful girl appeared to him and he fainted. She taught him her song which enabled him to make the olachen come in spring … She wanted to have intercourse with him. One night she took him through a fire, and since that time he was able to handle fire with impunity … At one time the Gyitqadeq disbelieved his power over fire. He asked them to build a large fire. He threw an iron hoop into it, moistened his hands, and covered his face, hair, and hands with eagle-down. Then he stepped barefooted over the glowing embers, took the redhot hoop, and carried it through the fire without burning his hands or his feet. He added that a few years ago he repeated this experiment, but as he failed and burnt his hands and feet he gave up his supernatural helper and became a Christian (pp. 580-581).

How refreshing that Boas does not turn this account into a disquisition on what shamans in general do. Mountain’s personal authority must have been too great for him to be turned into a class of behaviour patterns.

It was in 1927, thirty-three years after Boas, that Marius Barbeau went to see Mountain:

His white hair reached down his shoulders, and he seemed blind, unable to sit up; after a while he could raise himself on an elbow. He was quite deaf. For a chief of his high standing, whose main crest was the Double-headed Eagle, like that of the Tzar’s imperial emblem, there was certainly no mark here of power and prestige, and little promise that he might prove of much use in my research … Once he was launched on to his narrative, we went smoothly ahead for a good part of the afternoon, he muttering a phrase or two, the interpreter conveying the meaning to me in English, and I recording in shorthand the story as it moved along without a hitch. But the old man slowly grew excited at the recital of the unforgotten trials of his ancestors; he raised himself on his elbows and his hands, shouting at times and singing. I feared that he might collapse, and die, perhaps. We adjourned until the next day, and found him expecting us. The revival of his tradition had brought cheer to him and perhaps a new span of life.⁵

Barbeau thus prepares us very nicely for “Origin of the Salmon-Eater Clan,” given on pp. 16-21 of Totem Poles (Ottawa 1950) Vol. I, and for Mountain’s explanation of his totem pole, the tallest in existence at that time. Barbeau gives us further insight into Mountain’s character when he describes what Mountain replied to an offer to purchase his pole: “Give me the tombstone of Governor Douglas; I will give you the totem of my grand-uncles” (p. 33). Mountain died the following year, and when Barbeau came again, he bought the pole from his heirs, and it now stands in the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. He also picked up something else—a story about Mountain in his youth, deeply wounded in his pride because his wife had left him for the favours of a Hudson’s Bay official, Captain McNeill in Victoria:

To wipe off his shame in good style among his people, Mountain waited for his opportunity in a big tribal feast in his village of Gitiks. There he held up in his hand ten beautiful marten skins, and sang to an old tune a new challenge which he had just composed to cast ridicule on the fair deserter. He sang with sarcasm: “ . . . Wait and see what a chief can do! Wait, O sweetheart, that you may learn how, after my humiliation because of you, I have again raised my head! Wait, O flighty one, before you send me word of how you have failed in your foolish escapade and pine once more for my love! Time is now ripe, O woman who would rather belong to the bleached Victoria tribe (of white people) for you to send me a bottle of Old Tom. For my part I dispatch to you this small handful of mere beaver skins.”

Actually there was more than a “small handful,” and the skins were even more valuable than beaver. They were picked marten such as an indignant and wealthy chief could sacrifice to heap ridicule upon a woman unworthy of him. She would surely, after her desertion, be unable to reciprocate in kind.

But she was able. The following year, through her brother, she met the challenge with a carved canoe.

Now once more she had heaped humiliation upon him, and the tribe was not sure that he had the wit and the means to retaliate.

He had. After all his wealth in pelts, copper shields, blankets and trade goods was gathered, he invited the neighbouring tribes and made it known that he was about to cast off his unfaithful wife in a way which would brand her forever as worthless. While he lavished presents upon his guests at a feast, particularly upon those who had laughed at him, he sang a song composed for the occasion—a taunting song: “Hush! stop your idle chatter! Why do you mind my affairs?” … And the people had to repeat the refrain in chorus, after he had sung ⁶

Mountain’s ex-wife won in the end, for she erected the most fabulous of totem poles to the memory of her brother, confirming her status and freeing herself of Mountain’s power (Barbeau got the pole in 1929!).

The point is that chiefs live their lives in public, and as storytellers they are also people about whom stories are told. Mountain was undoubtedly a high chief, and at the time Boas came on the scene was ruling his domains augustly. But we now have information on two failures in his life: his retirement as shaman, and his losing against his wife in a notorious “fight with property.” We need not refrain, any more than his contemporaries would, from applying what we know. Here is Chief Mountain telling Boas about the origin of his own clan. The motif of the club which can turn whole towns into forest may be world-wide, but this is how Chief Mountain’s version ends:

The brothers travelled all over the world, and made war on all the tribes, and destroyed them by means of their club. The chief in heaven became angry because they abused his gift, and wished that they might forget the club on one of their expeditions. So it happened that they forgot the club when they went out to attack the town Gulgeu. Therefore the place has been called ever since that time Hwil-dakstsax, or Where-the-club-was-forgotten. Then they went to Demlaxam on Skeena river, where they settled, as they were unable to continue fighting on account of the loss of the supernatural club. Their descendants became the Gisqahast.

If Boas had been present at a communal telling of this origin story, and had known what the audience knew about the storyteller, and had been on the lookout for nuances in tone, and had sought a means to communicate them, we would have had quite a different text before us, I believe. With heroic figures, the public and the private are the same thing; the tribal loss of a supernatural club is the symbolic equivalent of the storyteller’s own.

The 1894 Fort Rupert Potlatch

In the introductory pages of The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians (1897) Boas uses some of the material he obtained from Mountain, this time suppressing personal references, even his name. It is tedious to keep repeating how Boas’s need to appear scientific deprives us of the individual quality of the event. This 1897 volume is very close to being the personal document we want of him; a whole section gives a play by play account of “The Winter Ceremonial at Fort Rupert” (pp. 544-606)—“the ceremonial as it actually took place and so far as I witnessed it in the winter of 1895-96.”⁷ But Boas is so successful in his scientific aim that he manages to tell us what he saw there as though he were the proverbial “camera,” not a human observer. If we want to know how he felt, we have to turn again to the family letters (Rohner pp. 176-189). It would not have done any harm, even in a scholarly work, to indicate just how lucky he was to arrive, without precise expectation, at Fort Rupert in the middle of the winter dance season, and to see in the canoe that came to pick him up none other than George Hunt, whom he had met in 1888 in Victoria and who had been in Chicago for the World’s Fair Exhibition in 1893. It would not have done any harm to take us behind the scenes a little. As the narrative stands in the Social Organization