The Salish People: Volume I. Charles Hill-Tout

      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