Hartland, Edward Clodd, and William Alexander Cloustain, “whose collective efforts wrote a brilliant chapter in the history of modern thought.”23 Twenty years later, when that same Folklore Society accepted for publication his “Cannes” paper in the year following his repudiation by the Jesup Expedition, it would represent the kind of recognition he really desired. Here was a body of scholars who could be counted on to relish the daring comparison of a Sumerian god with a Salish culture-hero. E. Sidney Hartland, one of the above “six,” was the U.K. representative on the Ethnological Survey of Canada; his correspondence with Hill-Tout is extremely cordial, and they finally shared a platform together at the Winnipeg meeting of the British Association in 1909. These transatlantic ties were Hill-Tout’s mainstay at his British Columbian outpost. These were his kind of men. “Their unbounded enthusiasm,” writes Richard Dorson in The British Folklorists (p. 204), “the almost boyish abandon with which they devoted the hours saved from the daily round to the speculative reconstruction of human history in its widest aspects, was tempered by a stern resolve to be neither sentimental nor slipshod.” Like Hill-Tout, they were not supported by universities: “Each wrote his books as an avocation, and yet their drive and enthusiasm enabled them to outproduce most academic scholars.” In Hill-Tout’s case, as we have seen, his early field work took place when his duties as a college principal would allow. After about 1898 he was trying to wrest a living from his homestead, and thoroughly deserves the epithet “pioneer anthropologist.”24 Perhaps enough has been said to indicate the auspicious conjunction of the ethnologist and his informant, two men of widely varying backgrounds, but each a man of substance and resource: Mischelle, the man of position and knowledge in his tribe, of undoubted talent as a story-teller, and Hill-Tout, the keen beginner in a field of scientific study where to be dislocated and struggling oneself is not a drawback in finding fellow-feeling with one’s subject.
Ralph Maud
Cultus Lake, B.C.
December, 1978
1 As far back as 17 June 1905, E. Sidney Hartland was expressing the hope that “your health is quite restored, so as to enable you to make another journey” (Hartland correspondence in the Special Collections Library of the University of British Columbia). Presumably Hill-Tout went to the Okanagan in 1905 and/or 1906. In the letter printed in volume IV of the present edition, Hartland is still, on 27 January 1907, awaiting the report of that work. In May 1907 he writes that Hill-Tout’s application for funding has been withdrawn “as your letter precluded all hope of your undertaking any field-work this year.” The Okanagan report was written up for the Winnipeg meeting of the British Association in 1909. By the time he put it in final form for publication in 1911, Hill-Tout was aware that no field work had been done for some years and was not likely to be.
2 See Melville Jacobs “Folklore” in the Anthropological Association’s memorial volume The Anthropology of Franz Boas (1959) p. 126; and p. 127: “The austere visitor probably mingled politely with the natives, but with some discomfort and always with a feeling of pressure to get the scientific task accomplished.” Boas’ attitude is clear in his diaries and letters from the field, as presented in Ronald P. Rohner’s The Ethnology of Franz Boas (1969).
3 James Teit The Thompson Indians of British Columbia (1900) p. 297. Teit’s work, contemporaneous with Hill-Tout’s, provides confirmation and amplification at points too numerous to mention, except where especially pertinent.
4 James Teit Myth ology of the Thompson Indians (1912) pp. 411-412.
5 James Teit The Thompson Indians (1900) p. 269.
6 When Hill-Tout refers to “the presen Lytton chief” in the 1899 report below (see footnote 4 to the section “Social Organisation"), this must be Cixpentlem’s grandson. An hereditary chieftainship seems to be existing alongside an elective one. I am indebted to Reuben Ware for advice on this question.
7 James Teit The Thompson Indians (1900) p. 296.
8 Harlan Smith also appreciated Mischelle’s expertise, soliciting his opinions on various artifacts; see Archaeology of the Thompson River Region (1900), where he refers to him as “an intelligent old Indian of Lytton” (p. 440). This is the only comment on Mischelle noted outside of Hill-Tout; but the Jesup Expedition indexes do not generally list informants, so that they are traced only with difficulty.
9 I am indebted to George Brandak for drawing my attention to the Vagabonds Club papers in the Special Collections Library of the University of British Columbia, where these two letters may be found. For a discussion of biographical sources, see the Bio-bibliography included in volume IV of the present edition. The most accessible life is Alfred Buckley’s in British Columbia from Earliest Times Vol. 4 (1914) pp. 1194-98. Judith Banks Comparative Biographies of Two British Columbia Anthropologists: Charles Hill-Tout and James A. Teit (M.A. thesis, University of British Columbia 1970) is useful.
10 Special Collections Library of the University of British Columbia. This extensive and detailed biographical summary seems to have been written at the time of Hill-Tout’s death, but it contains much information that only he personally could have supplied.
11 Daniel Wilson “Inaugural Address” Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada 1 (1882) Section II, p. 11. And on pp. 4-5: “It is sad, surely, to realize the fact that the glimpse we thus catch of those artistic Haidas of the Queen Charlotte Islands, with all their peculiar aptitude in carving and constructive skill, is that of a vanishing race. Yet it cannot be said of the Haida, that he ‘dies and gives no sign.’ On the contrary his ingenious arts embody far-reaching glimpses of a remote past, the full significance of which has yet to be determined.”
12 Of this period from 1889 to 1891 in England, Charles B. Hill-tout (the eldest son) remarked in a conversation with Judith Banks: “Like every other Englishman — couldn’t stand the damn country; took two breaths and then came back to Canada and never saw England again. Every Englishman has to go back once and that’s all they want" - M.A. theses (1970) p. 16. This possibly expresses the speaker’s view rather than his father’s. A more positive propulsion might have come from the celebrated linguist Max Mu’ller, whom Hill-Tout is said to have met at Oxford in earlier days and who was still lecturing as strongly as ever. He had just taken the Presidential Chair of Section H (Anthropology) of the British Association on the eve of Boas’ work under its auspicies. Hill-Tout kept in touch; witness a letter of 8 June 1899 from Muller, in the Special Collections Library of the University of British Columbia.
13 McGill College of British Columbia came into existence in 1905. Harry T.Logan makes no mention of Buckland College or its founder in Tuum Est: A History of the University of British Columbia (1958).
14 University of British Columbia typescript. James E. Hill-Tout (the youngest son) remembers 1896 as the year the family of six young children was moved “from the comparative comforts of Vancouver to an unfinished log cabin on a forested hill a few miles west of what later became the village of Abbotsford” — The Abbotsford Hill-Touts (1976) p. 2. I am indebted to Grant Keddie for initially drawing my attention to this pamphlet, which is obtainable from the Abbotsford Museum. Speaking from personal experience of the farm operation, James E. Hill-Tout says, “My father’s contributions to the endless chores were, to be frank, minimal” (p. 21).
15 This letter of 2 November 1895 is included in volume IV of the present edition. Also included there is a letter of 4 March 1901 to Charles Newcombe in which Hill-Tout states: “each year I am now devoting more than six months to the work.”
16 Report to the British Association (1900) on the Squamish, included in volume II of the present edition. It is unfortunate that it was not the custom at that time to write full obituaries of native informants.
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