The Salish People: Volume IV. Charles Hill-Tout

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