Boas, Morice, and Swanton. This would seem to be as much reputation as one could ask for.
It is difficult, however, to find any recent testimonial to Hill-Tout’s overall value as an anthropologist. Perhaps this is because for the last twenty years of his life his contributions were entirely local, an aspect of his place in Vancouver society. As President of the Vancouver Art, Historical and Scientific Association, and as the writer of scores of newspaper articles, he interpreted the advance of science to those of his fellow-citizens who would listen. When he died at eighty-five on 30 June 1944, it was in a city where, as one obituary put it, “he was esteemed as one of the most notable and public spirited of its residents.”12 The work which earned him that tribute is laid out in the Bio-bibliography section of this volume below; one is not tempted to reprint it. Whatever it meant to his contemporaries, it means little to us who have our own interpreters. Some flavour of that period, however, is included in the two letters to Major Matthews, the City Archivist, where Hill-Tout is given the role of ancient, and asked to reminisce about the early days when, like a transformer-figure himself, he had a hand in creating landmarks in his city, Stanley Park, the Great Fraser Midden, Kitsilano. That last is possibly the only authentic pre-white place-name within the city limits; Hill-Tout made that link for us with the past.
It was G. M. Dawson, Director of the Canadian Geological Survey, who coined the phrase “the local contribution.”13 The respect was mutual, and Hill-Tout once spoke to a newspaper reporter about Dawson: “He was a singularly simple and modest man, cordial, very kindly and always ready to help younger and less experienced men.up the ladder which he had climbed so successfully.”14 They must have met in 1891 during what turned out to be Dawson’s last visit to British Columbia. They corresponded, and Dawson sponsored Hill-Tout’s first paper, “Later Prehistoric Man,” before the Royal Society of Canada at the 15 May 1895 meeting, and saw it through the press (see volume III of the present edition). The following year he nominated Hill-Tout for the new Ethnological Survey of Canada committee. He may have had reason to regret Hill-Tout’s local fervor when Hill-Tout preferred to sell his interesting artifacts to the Provincial rather than the National Museum (see letters to the Provincial Secretary below). But he had previously had help from Hill-Tout in that regard,15 and would not, in any case, hold grudges. He seems to have been the kind of disinterested 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
