The Salish People: Volume IV. Charles Hill-Tout
Myth of the Man Who Changed his Face
Story of Cwot, the Sister of Raven
The Kauitsen [Cowichan] or Island Halkomelem 155;
Place-names Cowichan Traditions of a Great Flood and Earthquake
Story of Tsoqelem 158; Cowichan
Account of a Great Fight Between the Salish Tribes and their Hereditary Enemies the Kwakiutl
List of Works Cited in Volume IV
Illustrations
Cartoon of Professor Charles Hill-Tout
From article “Delves Deep in History” by Noel Robinson in Vancouver Province, 23 June 1934.
Vancouver Centennial Museum photograph, “photographer probably C. Hill-Tout, from glass plate. Interior Salish.”
Cairn Near Harrison Mills, 1932
Photograph of Charles Hill-Tout. Courtesy of Clarence Wood and the Kilby Museum, Harrison Mills.
With Rev. Dr. Raley in the Old Vancouver Museum
Photograph courtesy of Anne Yandle and the Special Collections Library of the University of British Columbia.
Reproduced from Paul S. Wingert, Prehistoric Stone Sculpture of the Pacific Northwest (Portland Art Museum 1952), Plate 41.
Vancouver Archives photograph.
Stanley Park Road construction, 1888
Vancouver Archives photograph.
Cartography by Audio-Visual Centre of
Simon Fraser University.
Photograph taken during Bishop Durieu’s time, 1880's.
Courtesy Vancouver Archives.
Cartography by Audio-Visual Centre of Simon Fraser University.
Courtesy of the B.C. Provincial Museum, Victoria, B.C.: “probably taken during transfer of Old Songhees Reserve, Victoria, 1911.”
Photographed in 1938 before being removed to the Museum. Courtesy of the B.C. Provincial Museum, Victoria, B.C.
Introduction
The two ethnological reports in this volume, on the Sechelt and on the tribes around Victoria, have the same aim and pattern as those in the previous volumes of The Salish People, and do not require special introduction. Additional material is gathered here to provide insight into Charles Hill-Tout’s character and reputation; so that an assessment should now be attempted.
Marius Barbeau tells the story of a noted English anthropologist arriving in New York in the first years of this century and asking the American colleague who met him at the pier: “Where’s Hill-Tout?” This query, says Barbeau, “was often repeated with a smile among New York anthropologists as characteristic of the British point of view as to the progress of American anthropology.”1 Really, of course, American anthropology was in the hands of Franz Boas; and we have already seen (in the Introduction to volume I of the present edition) how temperamental and other differences excluded Hill-Tout from Boas’ projects and the influential hard-cover publications which attended them. The exchange of letters presented below retells the story in its own succinct way: Hill-Tout’s effusive approach; Boas’ businesslike courtesy; Hill-Tout’s damaging over-speculative reply; then silence. In contrast, Hill-Tout’s best correspondent was Andrew Lang of Balliol College, who made time for his pen-friend in the midst of “morning leaders, weekly and monthly reviews and columns, and incessant addresses, prefaces, and essays.”2 The tender solicitations of fellow folklorist E. Sidney Hartland (in a letter below) is further evidence of how far away Hill-Tout’s sympathetic audience resided. “Where’s Hill-Tout?” calls forth a rather forlorn reply.
Much of what Hill-Tout did in his life is tragi-comical if seen from an alien position. He persisted as “Professor” in the intellectual wilderness of early Vancouver; and also later, to the possible annoyance of the University of British Columbia, which overlooked the opportunity to grant him an honorary degree. 3 He bought a tract of forest and logged it without knowing the first thing about how to do it. 4 He tried to get a commission in the Foresters’ Regiment to fight in France in the 1914–18 war, though he was fifty-eight years of age.5 When other presidencies faded, he became President of the Happier Old Age Club of Vancouver in his eighties. These gestures, among many others,6 put him at risk: the dignified scholar lecturing at a wobbling podium. Voraciously self-tutored, neglecting his livelihood to talk to Native people in a dying language, button-holing the scholarly world with his pet theories, always with great expectations of patronage: he puts himself in a position to be laughed at. Having acknowledged this, one can also say that he actually pulls it off quite well most of the time. His inner dignity is real enough, not something dependent upon the opinions of others. It sees him through.
I have therefore to take exception to a previous study, an M.A. thesis by Judith Banks, entitled Comparative Biographies of Two British Columbia Anthropologists: Charles Hill-Tout and James A. Teit (University of British Columbia, 1970), which discusses Hill-Tout’s supposed crippling alienation and its psychological causes. The author was told by Hill-Tout’s eldest son that his father had been orphaned at about seven years of age, and on the basis of this erroneous information she proposed that his life and work suffered from “separation anxiety” and other debilities that orphans are said to have. 7 Unfortunately she was working without the correspondence and other biographical resources to correct the faulty memory of her interviewee. As the essay “Some Psychical Phenomena Bearing Upon the Question of Spirit Control” shows (below), if we are to pity Hill-Tout, it cannot be because he was an orphan child, since it is clear that he lost his father only after he had reached the age of sixteen, and his mother at some substantial time after that.
Judith Banks is correct, of course, that Hill-Tout as a theorizer on the subjects of evolution, migrations of peoples and languages, will be ignored. His letter to Colonel Powell, Director of the Bureau of Ethnology in Washington, D.C., is