The Salish People: Volume III. Charles Hill-Tout

probably be found in other parts of the Province. In order to describe these mounds the better I shall divide them into two groups — the Mainland group and the Vancouver Island group. Those on the island were first discovered some twenty years ago; and the late Mr. James Richardson, of the Dominion Geological Survey, and Mr. James Deans, of Victoria, B.C., opened up some of them; but the result of the investigation was never published, I think.¹⁰ I shall defer a description of these for a later occasion, my knowledge of them at the present time being too limited for me to speak with any exactitude about them, and confine my remarks to the Mainland group, which seems the more interesting of the two and which received its first systematic examination at the writer’s hands, and upon which he feels he may with more propriety speak.

      While the Vancouver Island group seems to extend more or less along the coast throughout the Cowitchin area, from beyond Sooke on the southwest to Com ox on the east, that on the mainland is confined at present to a narrow strip on the banks of the Fraser extending from the village of Hatzic to Port Hammond.¹¹ Those opened and examined by myself are found in a cluster on a ranch at Hatzic, on the right bank of the river. These sepulchres, with their ancient mode of burial, belong to a comparatively distant past. The Indians now dwelling in the neighbourhood appear to know nothing of them, disclaim all knowldge of the people who built them, and are quite unconcerned at their being opened or disturbed. This indifference in the face of the zealous vigilance they exercise over their own old burial grounds or depositories of the dead is the more striking. The difficulty of procuring osteological data from any of the burial grounds of the modern tribes is well known to any who have attempted to do so, and this unusual indifference displayed towards these mounds by the Indians of the district would seem to suggest that they belong to some antecedent and forgotten tribes. Indeed, an aged Indian of the place informed the writer that his people called them “ghost heaps,” that they were there when they first came into those parts, that no one knew who made them, and that no Indian would appoach them on any account. Indian traditions, one knows, are not very reliable data, but in this instance they support the evidence of the mounds themselves and may have a basis of truth in them. Whether they antedate the present tribes or not they were undoubtedly built when a mode of burial prevailed very different from that practised by their ancestors when the whites first came in contact with them; and the osteological data they have yielded reveal a habit of cranial deformation of a kind very unlike that known to have been practised in this region.

      These tumuli are interesting, too, apart from the question of their antiquity, as they seem to present to us either a development from simple conceptions and ideas concerning the dead to more advanced and complex ones, or else they mark in a most interesting manner the different degrees of honour their builders were wont to pay to their dead. For they show a markedly graduated transition from simple interment of a body beneath a pile of clay to the construction of comparatively elaborate tombs, composed of a great number of boulders arranged in precise and geometrical order and covered with layers of different kinds of sand and clay. But I shall best describe them if I take them in what seems to me from the evidence their natural order, which I find may be with propriety arranged in a fivefold series. The simplest and first of the series, and, as I am led to believe the oldest, was formed by placing the dead body on the ground somewhat below the level of its surface and then heaping over it the neighbouring soil; for there are hollows around these mounds showing that the soil of which they are formed was taken from the spot. In all these mounds throughout the whole series, whether simple or otherwise, it should be stated, one body only was ever interred. About this there is no doubt; and this fact of separate, individual interment is the more striking in the more elaborate tombs, which must have occupied many days, if not weeks, in their construction. Many of these simpler and less conspicuous mounds have doubtless been levelled by the ranchers of that neighbourhood without attracting attention, as the bones of the body in these are always found wholly decomposed, with the single exception at times of a bit of the lower jaw, and their matter has been so closely integrated with the soil that the fact that a body once lay there is only to be discovered by the presence of a darker shade or streak in it, though the enamel casings of the teeth themselves may generally, I think, be recovered if the mounds are opened carefully. Absolutely nothing but the teeth, or their remains, or, as stated before, tiny fragments of the lower jaw which crumble away in the hand, has been found in these clay mounds; not a vestige of tools, weapons or belongings of any kind. And I may here add that it is one of the singularities of these sepulchres that not a single relic of stone, not so much as a single flake of any kind, has been taken from the whole series, though I have used the greatest care in seeking for them. In this respect the interments in these mounds present a strong contrast to those of the sandhills round Lytton, in which arrow- and spear-heads, flakes and other stone relics are found in great numbers.¹² These clay or earth mounds are of varying dimensions, some of them evidently children’s graves, being only a few feet high and a yard or two in diameter; but like the more elaborate ones are always circular in form, and sometimes have a diameter of 20 to 25 feet.

      Next in the series is a class of mounds formed in part like the last but differing from them in having a pile of boulders heaped up over and around the spot where the body originally lay. The plan of interment in this second class of mounds seems to have been to place the body in the centre of the spot chosen for the grave — whether sitting or prostrate I have not been able to decide, but am inclined to think it was probably doubled up in some way — and then to surround and heap over it a large pile of boulders, and over these again to heap up earth to a height of from 6 to 9 feet. The third class differs from these only in having a stratum of charcoal, extending over the whole area of the mounds between the boulders and the outer covering of clay, evidently the remains of a large fire. Whether these fires were kindled for sacrificial or for some simpler ceremonial purpose it is impossible from the evidence now to say. The slaughter and cremation of slaves on the death of their owner or chief is not wholly unknown among the tribes of British Columbia; but whether we see an instance of this practice among these old mound-builders, or whether the fires were lighted in the belief that they comforted the shades of the departed on their journey to the nether world, we may never know.¹³

      The next order of the series differed again from the last in having a large quantity of coarse dark sand in their central parts. It would seem that in constructing these particular graves, after piling up the boulders over the body, the builders had covered them with a deep layer of quicksand — which in that district underlies the clay top-soil — and over this again had strewn a layer of this coarse dark sand. Where they procured this latter sand from I am not able to say. There is none like it in the neighbourhood at present. It is much coarser and darker in colour than that now found in the Fraser near by. But wherever they brought it from they were not sparing in its use. The rancher on whose farm these tumuli are found took out from one side of one of these between twenty and thirty sacks-ful for building purposes; and when I opened it up later there was still a great quantity left in it.

      This mound is one of the most interesting of the series inasmuch as it accidentally presents us with some independent, positive evidence of their antiquity. On one side of its crown the stump of a large cedar tree is seen projecting, the whole in the last stages of decay. To anyone who knows anything of the enduring nature of the cedar of British Columbia the evidence which this stump offers will be very convincing. A cedar tree will lie on the ground for a thousand years it is estimated by lumbermen and others, and yet its wood will be firm and good and fit to make up into doors and window-sashes. There is now, not two hundred yards from this mound, a living fir tree growing astraddle over a prostrate cedar log, the age of which, from its dimensions, cannot be much less than five centuries, and yet the wood of the cedar under it is as solid and firm as if it had been cut down yesterday. It is almost impossible to say how long the cedar of this region will endure; and if a claim of one thousand or twelve hundred years be made for the growth and complete decay of this tree, whose roots have crumbled and mouldered away among the bones hidden beneath them for many a long year, most British Columbians will think that a very moderate claim indeed; and it is very probable that a much longer period than that has elapsed since the mound was constructed.

      This mound is also interesting from the fact that it is the only one that has yielded any osteological data of importance. Whether from the large quantity of sand in it, which may have acted as a drain, or from the fact that this large tree stood over