and required much visiting among in-laws. If potlatching was originally economic, as Wayne Suttles persuasively suggests, “a means of converting a temporary surplus of perishable food into nonperishable wealth,”9 the aspect which comes down to the present time is the social; which Suttles also amply demonstrates, and which Cultus Lake on the 3rd of June of this year also amply demonstrated, up to twenty long canoes competing in some of the races, and the drumming of the international slahal games going on in the background.
Of the Mainland Halkomelem, Hill-Tout chose to study the Kwantlen and tribes further up the river rather than the Musqueam. Perhaps no congenial informant could be found close to the burgeoning city in the 1890’s.10 What he did do in regard to the Musqueam, however, was to examine their prehistory in “the Great Fraser Midden,” a site at the foot of Granville Street near the present Fraser Arms Hotel in Marpole. How far back, archaeologically, does the Musqueam settlement go, and, if there were previous occupants, who were they?
The road to connect Vancouver with Sea Island (the present International Airport) had already opened up part of the midden in 1889, two years before Hill-Tout’s arrival. He got into it right away; in 1930, he spoke of being directed to the midden “some thirty-eight years ago, when a road was being cut through it.”11 He surveyed the area with Mr. F. Monkton, “a mining engineer well-known in Vancouver early days and one of the founders of the Art, Historical and Scientific Association.”12 By 1895 Hill-Tout was able to write an extensive report to the Royal Society of Canada under the title “Later Prehistoric Man in British Columbia” (included below), which, in the words of Harlan I. Smith, constituted “the first resume of British Columbia archaeology.”13
The problem is that Hill-Tout found two types of skulls, one similar to the modern Salish inhabitants of the area and the other very different, “too decidedly dolichocephalic to be classified among any of the typical groups of this region.” But he does not say exactly where and how these two types were found in the midden. Harlan Smith also seems to have been careless about stratification when he dug the midden in 1898. He reported more of the two types of skulls, without assessing their age relative to each other.14 After his dig at North Saanich, he could report some skulls “of a narrow type, resembling those found at Eburne [Marpole], and they were rather deep in the heap, and never found among the upper or more recent layers . . . suggesting at least that the people having skulls of the narrow type were the older to the whole region.”15 However, this conclusion, which supports Hill-Tout’s feeling that a very different race of men occupied this coast two thousand years ago, is rather offset by Smith’s finding in other Fraser Delta shell-heaps “two distinct types of men . . . apparently co-existent, as the bones are found in the same layers.”16 In 1930 the Vancouver Museum staff tried again on the untouched parts of the Marpole midden. They unearthed sixty-five skulls; the narrow skulls were reported to be in the lower layers, the broad-headed in the upper;17 but this report has not received attention, e.g., Donald H. Mitchell in his monograph said Hill-Tout’s hypothesis had not been supported by later excavations, “except possibly at North Saanich.”18 The word “possibly” here is hardly fair, since Smith definitely corroborated Hill-Tout at that point. And when we look at the cairn burials, the second part of Hill-Tout’s “Later Prehistoric Man” article, we note another tantalizing connection with North Saanich. Smith’s cairns there are remarkably similar to Hill-Tout’s at Hatzic on the Fraser; both contained the same sort of copper ornaments.19 Cairn burial is, on the face of it, not Salish at all, but recent archaeological opinion has not made any response to this supposition and its implications. The prevailing view seems to be that there existed a continuity of culture in the Fraser area from at least 1000 B.C., and that nothing proves the inhabitants were radically different before that date.20 However, archaeology in British Columbia is still at the stage where surprises can be expected.
In turning to Hill-Tout’s ethnological descriptions of the Mainland Halkomelem, we find that, until Wilson Duff’s work in 1949–50, they constituted practically our only information on these tribes. Boas spent a week with Chief George of the Chehalis, who was living in New Westminster at the time, and out of that rather limited experience wrote his 1894 report on “The Indian Tribes of the Lower Fraser River.”21 For his 1902 report Hill-Tout used seven named informants from three different Halkomelem tribes, and for the 1904 report five named informants from two additional tribes. He talked to them in their own villages, and quite probably on several occasions. He has stated that his study of the local languages “extended more or less over the whole period of my residence in these parts.” By mid-1898 he could report to the British Association that he had “in hand” field notes on the Squamish, Matsqui, Yale, and Chilliwack tribes. Having moved his family to a homestead in Abbotsford by 1897, he was only about twenty miles from Chilliwack and even closer to the Kwantlen at Fort Langley; he never had to work, like Boas, at long distances from home.
As far as the stories in this volume are concerned, it would be invidious to compare Boas’ Captain George Chehalis as a story-teller with Hill-Tout’s Chehalis informants, Francois and Mary Anne; so much depends on the listener and the occasion. Boas was not satisfied with what he was getting; the tales as we read them seem rather inhibited.22 Hill-Tout, on the other hand, was proud enough to say that his texts “are as perfect as they can well be written.” When he read them to different members of the Chehalis band, “all expressed themselves as satisfied with their correctness.” When he comes to the Scowlitz stories, however, he is slightly apologetic. The four tales lacklustre, but he asks us not to misplace our scorn: “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.” And in the same passage, below, he goes on to describe the Indian’s “natural dramatic powers.” It is obvious that Hill-Tout relished his field work for more than the scientific results.
If Hill-Tout found the Chilliwack tribe disappointing in that they “seem to possess but few folk-tales, or else they have forgotten them,” the fault must lie largely with Hill-Tout himself. He would certainly be surprised at how much has come to light in the last two decades. For instance, on tapes made by Oliver Wells in the 1960’s, Dan Milo tells stories that Hill-Tout heard at the beginning of the century, plus additional stories, some of them in Halkomelem as well as in English.23 Hill-Tout expressed chagrin at missing “a noted old shaman” of the Kwantlen: “With him passed the opportunity of acquiring first hand information on many of their old customs, practices, and beliefs, thus affording another illustration of the need there is to push our inquiries and observations without loss of time.” Yet, just across the river at Port Hammond, if Hill-Tout had only known, a man called Pierre, a hearty, robust man in mid-life, could have told him a great deal on the subject, having been a medicine-man from his earliest youth. He was there in 1936 to tell Diamond Jenness his very compelling life story. His religious beliefs constitute a cosmology of substance, published in 1955 as The Faith of a Coast Salish. The photograph on the cover of that publication shows him as Hill-Tout could have seen him in the 1890’s. Likewise with the Chilliwack area, where Hill-Tout drew a relative blank, an M.A. student from the University of Washington, Norman Lerman, could still in Sardis in 1950 collect an amazing number of stories, which have recently been made available as Legends of the River People (1976).24 Wilson Duffs The Upper Stalo Indians (1952) is a model of ethnographic reporting in its accuracy, scope, and richness of detail. While giving respectful attention to Hill-Tout, Duff was able, coming into the Chilliwack area fifty years after, to discover significantly more about tribal history and customs.
The trouble was that Hill-Tout had limited himself, for whatever reasons, to informants from only one family, that of Captain John of Soowahlie, the most notable Chilliwack man of his time, but not necessarily the best informant. By the time Hill-Tout came upon him he had been an aislesman in Rev. Crosby’s church, and at times a substitute preacher, for over thirty years, and was perhaps not too eager to discuss the pagan doings of the olden days.25 In any case, we are grateful to Bob Joe, Mrs. August Jim, and Mr. and Mrs. Edmond Lorenzetto, who were Wilson Duff’s informants,
