The Salish People: Volume IV. Charles Hill-Tout

patron that anyone would be honoured to be associated with. Even his premature death in 1901 meant that Hill-Tout was advanced, being appointed to the secretaryship of the Committee in his place. Dawson’s death was tragic in its long-term consequences. Had he lived he might have brought about a Canadian anthropology independent of the United States, utilizing Hill-Tout’s talents among others. With Edward Sapir’s appointment in 1910 as head of the Anthropological Division of the National Museum of Canada, the Boas school took over. “This,” as Marius Barbeau explains, “virtually eliminated Canadian pioneers, historians, local archaeologists and,” he adds, “dilettantes.”¹⁶

      Was Charles Hill-Tout a dilettante? Without his field reports to point to, one might be inclined to think so of a man whose career was capped by articles to the Illustrated London News. He brought Darwin to the West Coast of Canada, and like Hamlet made a great deal of a skull. But now that his eight full field reports are collected and republished, it behooves us to pay better attention to him. With immense scientific curiosity and great personal initiative he entered upon a crucial programme of research and recovery. He had abundant goodwill towards the Native people, which resulted in reports both ample and humane. Without overdramatizing it, he gives a sense of his own place in a moment of history. The Indian villages were precarious entities; the past was a yearned-for ideal; his visits to the tribes were enspiriting events. His loyalties were to what he saw and heard. We can contradict much of the theorizing he did, but he had a good eye, a good ear, and a good heart. This is where he cannot be contradicted.

      I have saved until last the “Origins of Totemism” essay, not because of any anthropological importance — though Hill-Tout up to 1914 had made a name for himself in this area more than any other¹⁷ — but rather because it was my first introduction to Hill-Tout some years ago, when I chanced to find a xerox copy of this particular article, bound and catalogued as a pamphlet, in the Simon Fraser Library stacks. Many times since then I have thought that whoever went to that trouble would probably appreciate having an inexpensive reprint available.

      Ralph Maud

       Cultus Lake, B.C.

       December, 1978

      1 Marius Barbeau “Charles Hill-Tout (1859–1944)” (1945) p. 89. Parts of this obituary, including the date of birth, are erroneous; but Barbeau’s sense of the politics of anthropology in Canada is valuable. See also D. Cole “The Origins of Canadian Anthropology: 1850–1910” (1973).

      2 Richard M. Dorson The British Folklorists (1968) p. 206. See, for instance, Andrew Lang’s contribution on Totemism in the Eleventh Edition of the Ency-clopaedia Britannica Vol. 27 (1911) p. 89: “For totemism in British Columbia the writings of Mr. Hill-Tout may be consulted.” The Lang correspondence is in the Special Collections Library of the University of British Columbia.

      3 Among the Hill-Tout papers in the Special Collections Library of the University of British Columbia donated by Lionel Haweis, there is a note that Hill-Tout’s name was proposed to the University Senate in 1935 for an LLD (Hon.), but that the suggestion was not acted upon.

      4 See footnote 24 to the Introduction to volume I of the present edition.

      5 Members of the Vagabonds Club of Vancouver engraved a scrolled farewell to Hill-Tout “on going to serve your country under arms” (dated 27 September 1916 in the Vancouver Centennial Museum). This turned out to be the only practical joke that he managed to pull off in a club that had been tolerant of his seriousness. The 1917 roll-call listed him as “an erudite vagabond whose only fault is Over-respectability; fortunately this is more apparent than real” (University of British Columbia Library).

      6 One might add that he wrote poetry. Vancouver Centennial Museum has his typescript volume of poems, dated from 1895 to 1915, entitled Echoes of Days That Have Flown.

      7 “The likelihood of emotional shallowness in such children and the adults they become is well documented” (p. 180 of Banks thesis). The interview with Charles B. Hill-Tout is quoted on p. 10 and referred to on p. 179: “We know that Hill-Tout was born to farming people and that he and a brother and sister were orphaned when he was about seven years of age.” A ts. biography in the Special Collections Library of the University of British Columbia, which seems very reliable on many things, says that “at the age of 16 he went to school at Weston-super-Mare. Following this he lived with his parents in Somersetshire.”

      8 Bureau of Ethnology internal staff memorandum from J. N. B. Hewitt to Major J. W. Powell, 6 April 1896: “With great care I have examined the evidence submitted by Mr. Hill-Tout in support of his startling statements, and wherever the meagre materials I have have enabled me to test the trustworthiness of Mr. Hill-Tout’s comparisons I find them invariably unsatisfactory and unsound”(p. 3).

      9 For Captain Paul, see the report on the Lillooet (1905) in volume II of the present edition. See also under the heading “Dances” in the report on the Kwantlen (1902) for references to the Society for Psychical Research in relation to shamanism (in volume III of the present edition).

      10 In “Religion and Family Among the Haidas” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (1892). It would seem that Hill-Tout needed something for his first report to the British Association before his own field notes were in order. Harrison must have given him the material on one of his visits to Vancouver, without mentioning previous publication. Harrison mentions Hill-Tout in Ancient Warriors of the North Pacific (1925) p. 38.

      11 Letter in Special Collections Library of the University of British Columbia. Teit’s name is noticeably missing, but Swanton probably considered him an employee of Boas. A well-balanced survey of Hill-Tout’s and Teit’s work by Swanton appears under the heading “Salish” in ed. James Hastings Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics Vol. XI (1928).

      12 Noel Robinson “Obituary” Man 45 (September-October 1945) p. 120. The University of British Columbia Library typescript quotes an address by Hill-Tout before “a public body in Vancouver": “I am a Vancouverite myself. I contribute to your revenues both directly and indirectly. I have seen this city, of which we are all so justly proud, grow from a village to her present leading position. My faith in her future has never wavered. I believe she is destined to play a great and important part in the future of this Province and the Dominion.”

      13 The words of our epigraph are from the introductory remarks to the report of the Committee for an Ethnological Survey of Canada Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science 70th meeting (1900) p. 470. The text is unsigned, but was presumably written by the secretary of the Committee, Dr. George M. Dawson.

      14 Noel Robinson quoting Hill-Tout in “Most Famous Canadian Geologist Was Very Human” Vancouver Province (5 August 1939). See also John J. Van West “George Mercer Dawson: An Early Canadian Anthropologist” (1976).

      15 A letter in the University of British Columbia Library Vagabonds Club manuscripts from Dawson to Hill-Tout, 13 June 1899, thanks him for specimens from Lytton and an “interesting” skull, and encloses $50 for more.

      16 In the obituary previously cited Barbeau adds (p. 91): “Left out of the federal field, Hill-Tout, like others, must have felt a bit slighted and at times provoked. This no doubt accounts for the loss of his active participation in the research and writing of later years, outside of purely local matters.” Although Hill-Tout ended his field excursions in 1906 (possibly because of ill-health), he participated internationally, in anthropological meetings and periodicals, until a reasonable retirement age of sixty-five, and only then lowered his sights to the local scene.

      17 According to a letter of 1 March 1913 (in University of British Columbia Special Collections Library), Professor Goldenweiser, Boas’ colleague at Columbia University, invited Hill-Tout to contribute to an international symposium on Totemism sponsored by the German journal Anthropos, and he is listed in distinguished company in Anthropos 11 (1914) p. 287. The outbreak of war prevented him from fulfilling his agreement to contribute; one suspects a patriotic gesture here.

Bio-bibliography of Charles Hill-Tout

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