themselves to his story, and I gathered, long before the interpreter took up the story, that he had told of something that was very small and had penetrated everywhere” (p. 21). Starvation and cold caused the death of hundreds, and here “the old man’s voice was hushed to a plaintive wail, and the faces of his audience were an eloquent index of the tragic interest of this story of their ancestors' misfortunes” (p. 21). When so much of what we have of Native myth is little more than a minimal report of how the story used to be told, it is refreshing to have the sense of a “performance”: Mulks is truly “on stage.”2 Hill-Tout’s inexperience worked in his favour here. If he had been better trained he would have taken Mulks aside and got the original Squamish down by slow dictation; instead, we get a picture of something that might have happened before any white man came on the scene.
Charles Hill-Tout, the frontispiece photograph to his volume, Man and his Ancestors in the Light of Organic Evolution (Vancouver 1925).
Franz Boas was working on the Coast by 1886, quite a few years before Hill-Tout’s arrival. But chronology does not count. Hill-Tout is “Before Boas” in the naivete with which he began his work. His background was rural England, a Church of England upbringing. He might have become a clergyman but for some “intellectual difficulties” of a Darwinian sort. He arrived in Toronto in 1884 with a letter of introduction to Dr. (later Sir) Daniel Wilson, and must have seemed just the kind of “young Dominion man” Wilson had prophesied would “arise to bear a part in letters and science not less worthy than those who figure on England’s golden roll.”3 Wilson spoke to him of “the vanishing race” and the opportunities for anthropological research in the West. When a sequence of circumstances brought Hill-Tout to settle in Vancouver in 1891 he was ready and eager to do his bit. His residence in the area gave him the advantage of being able to renew by continued visits the friendships he made with local Indians.
He had an interest in spiritualism, as did John Swanton; but I do not know that Swanton gained an insight into the visionary experience in quite the direct manner that Hill-Tout did. In a report to the Society for Psychical Research in London in 1895, Hill-Tout tells of the seances being conducted in Vancouver and his own shaman-like experience at one of them. Like a spirit-dance song, the hymn “Nearer, my God, to Thee” induced in him “strange sensations”:
I stood up and began to sway to and fro, and soon lost all sense of my surroundings. I seemed to be far away in space. The feelings of distance and remoteness from all other beings were very marked, and a sense of coldness and loneliness oppressed me terribly. I seemed to be moving, or rather to be drawn downward, and presently felt that I had reached this earth again; but all was strange and fearful and lonely, and I seemed to be disappointed that I could not attain the object of this long and lonely journey. I felt I was looking for someone, but did not seem to have a clear notion of whom it was, and as the hopelessness of my search and the fruitlessness of my long journey forced itself upon me, I cried out in my wretchedness and misery. I felt I could neither find what I wanted nor get back from whence I had come. My grief was very terrible, and I should have fallen to the ground but that the other sitters had gathered round me. . . . 4
The Native gaining of a guardian spirit is not dissimilar, in essence. Hill-Tout’s Indian friends must have had some sense of this:
It was not till Captain Paul [of the Lillooet tribe] and I had spent several weeks in each other’s company and I had won his confidence and esteem and he had bestowed upon me one of his ancestral mystery names, thereby relating me to himself, that he gave me. . . esoteric information concerning the abnormal sight powers he claimed to have formerly possessed. I do not, for my own part, doubt his possession of them for a moment.5
Such a profound relationship between Indian and white is rarely so convincingly documented. It makes for good story collecting.
Hill-Tout’s most productive friendship was with Chief Mischelle of Lytton, one of the most talented and informed people that a beginning field worker could ever hope to meet.
Having acted as interpreter for many years to the missionaries, and also in the law courts, Mischelle was quite fluent in English. “My method of recording was as follows,” writes Hill-Tout by way of preface to a single masterpiece, which takes up over twenty pages of small type. “I made copious notes at the time, and expanded them immediately after. When written out, I read them to him and corrected them where necessary according to his instructions.”6 This methodology may not seem very promising; but the result is the most readable body of Native literature in the canon. “Mischelle was a good raconteur, and took the liveliest pleasure in relating to me his store of lore.” Hill-Tout won a prize of $25 from the Folklore Society of Montreal for the story in question; it is certainly, as “performance,” worth the price of admission.
When he gains some proficiency in the Salish languages, Hill-Tout provides interlinear texts, so that we can test his free translations against them. He consistently heightens the diction to make a story warmer and more heartfelt. He likes to add adjectives. For instance, in the Squamish story of the origin of the “Wildmen,” a chiefs daughter is made pregnant by a slave; then, according to the interlinear literal translation:
when he-finds-out the father, then he-takes-into the
canoe the daughter-his and the slave.
Chief Mischelle of Lytton. Photograph annotated: “Michel, Head Chief of Nekla-kap-amuks, May 1879.”
Hill-Tout’s free translation reads: “And, on learning who it was who had caused this disgrace to fall upon him, he took both the guilty slave and his hapless daughter away in his canoe.”7 If this sounds like Victorian melodrama, it is because Hill-Tout is trying to meet fully the melodrama of the original: Indian daughters are sometimes never told to darken doorsteps again. He knows that the hearers of this story were moved by it, and he wants us to be likewise moved. This is the perennial problem. Hill-Tout’s way of meeting it is to supply the emotive adjectives which the storyteller would imply in his manner:
. . . although nothing is more wearisome than consecutive reading of collections of Indian texts, there is nothing wearisome in listening to the recital of these by the Indian himself. Most Indians possess natural dramatic powers, and their ready, graceful and appropriate gestures, and their command of those tones of the voice that appeal to the emotions, make it distinctly pleasurable to listen to their stories of long ago or their recitals of the traditions of their people. So that if the English equivalents of my native texts in this or in former reports seem fuller than the baldness of their expressions justifies, it must be understood that this is because the bare text alone does not render the full meaning and context of the living recital or do justice to the subject treated of. I have seen women shed tears, and men’s faces grow pale and tense over the recital, by some of the elders of the tribe, of the traditions of the people, the text of which would make one marvel that such bald dry statements could call forth so much emotion.8
Hill-Tout is quite clear on Native showmanship, and his own.
As a member of the Ethnological Survey of Canada Committee, Hill-Tout issued full ethnological reports to the British Association for the Advancement of Science on the Thompson (1899), the Squamish (1900), the Mainland Halkomelem (1902), continuing with similar scholarly reports in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute on the Sechelt (1904), the Chehalis and Scowlitz (1904), the Lillooet (1905), the South-Eastern Tribes of Vancouver Island (1907), and the Okanagan (1911). This work involved the collection and publication of grammars and vocabularies for eight quite different Salish languages, material which linguists today find useful. All this was
