voluntarily gave to the new trustee for the women of the family, and he pulled up stakes again and, with his family, returned to Canada, this time to Vancouver and its superb environment, to which he had taken a great liking as a result of his previous visit.”
1891–1896
Hill-Tout assumed the teaching post at St. James Boys’ School. Upon its amalgamation with Whetham College, he became a housemaster and English teacher in the college buildings at Granville and Georgia.8 He is reported as present at a meeting of the Art Association of Vancouver in February 1892 “for the purpose of changing the scope of the organization to include history and literature.”9
“Bishop Sillitoe had been anxious to start a Diocesan College in his diocese of New Westminster, which included Vancouver, and invited Professor Hill-Tout to organise this and become its principal. The offer was accepted and he resigned his post at Whetham College and opened Trinity College in a large building which, he thinks, today stands next the YMCA, just north of it. He conducted this for two years and then, as the Bishop and he could not see eye to eye upon some (to him) important points, Professor Hill-Tout resigned and opened a college of his own, which for eight or ten years was known as Buckland College on Burrard Street.”10
From 1892 Hill-Tout was listed as a member of the Society for Psychical Research (London) and participated in seances in Vancouver, which he reported on to the Society, his paper “Some Psychical Phenomena” being “taken as read” at the meeting of 1 March 1895 and published in the Proceedings (item #2 below).11
From his arrival in Vancouver, Hill-Tout on his own initiative surveyed archaeological sites along the Fraser River, chiefly Marpole (Eburne), Port Hammond, and Hatzic. “Professor Hill-Tout’s attention was drawn to the making of a road at Eburne, where, as one of his students who passed that way told him, skeletons and curious stone objects were being turned up by the workmen daily. Again he recalled the advice of Sir Daniel Wilson about being on the look-out for anything of interest in an archaeological way. At the first opportunity he went out to see what was happening at Eburne and discovered that the road was being put through the virgin forest. This forest had grown out of an ancient and abundant Indian midden heap. At once he became intensely interested. Every day skeletons and ancient stone and bone artifacts were being excavated. He interested a surveyor friend and got him to survey the extent of the midden and it was found that it covered over four acres and a half of the land and averaged a depth of about five feet and a maximum depth of 18 feet.”12 Hill-Tout participated in the opening of the Hatzic cairns in the summer of 1894, and reported on the finds in a lecture entitled “An Unique Skull” before the Art, Historical and Scientific Association of Vancouver (which had its first public meeting on 15 May 1894). He wrote the first survey of B.C. archaeology in a paper communicated to the Royal Society of Canada by Dr. G. M. Dawson at the meeting of 15 May 1895 and published in the Transactions (item #3 below). This paper indicates that he had already made at least one trip to Lytton.
Public lectures listed for 1895, organized by the Art, Historical and Scientific Society, include two by Hill-Tout: “Indian Folklore” and “The Mind.”
1896–1909
“‘But throughout all this scholastic period I still retained my love of the land,’ the Professor recalled, ‘and I had bought a quarter section of land near Abbotsford, upon which two of my sons still farm.13 You see I come of a land-loving stock. Upon this land we built a log house, beautifully situated in the midst of virgin forest, and the family spent the summers there. Many of these trees were 11 feet through at the butt. Later I bought out another settler, who had already built a fine farmhouse on the land, and moved my family from Vancouver to the farm. My other children were born there. We built my barn on the first place from shakes and boards which we made from the cedars on the place. I split the shakes and boards for that bam myself. In those days it was not possible to get milled lumber, so they had to be split with a wooden hammer, and the boys carried them to the spot where the barn was to be built.’
“For three more years Professor Hill-Tout carried on educational work in Vancouver while the family lived near Abbotsford, and then, in 1899, he went to live there entirely and gave up scholastic work and took up the study of ethnology in all his leisure time.”
His earliest ethnological field-trip specifically reported on was to the Squamish Mission reserve in North Vancouver in the summer of 1896; the paper was communicated to the the Royal Society by Dr. G. M. Dawson on 23 June 1897 and published in the Transactions (item #4 below).
The British Association for the Advancement of Science decided at its Liverpool Meeting of 1896 to create a Committee for an Ethnological Survey of Canada, in anticipation of the Toronto Meeting of the following year. Dr. G. M. Dawson was Chairman, and Hill-Tout was nominated to the Committee. He prepared a paper for the 1897 meeting, “Historical and Philological Notes on the Indians of British Columbia,” which was unfortunately lost and could only be announced by title.14 He had also sent the “Benign-face” legend, obtained from Chief Mischelle of Lytton.15 This was passed on to the London Folklore Society and was subsequently published in Folk-Lore (item #8 below).
Hill-Tout met Franz Boas in Vancouver in June 1897, and worked with Harlan I. Smith in Lytton for a few weeks.16 For the Ethnological Survey of Canada Committee Report the following year (1898, around June-July), he could report the following: “I send in some notes on the folklore of this district [item #6 below] which I have sought to record whenever possible on the lines suggested by the English Committee, and trust they will be found useful. I enclose a set of (3) photographs in duplicate of a rock painting found on a cliff about twenty miles from Vancouver. The Indians of the neighbourhood know nothing of it or of its meaning. I venture no opinion upon it myself.17 In my next report I hope to have more to communicate. I have in hand the following:— 1. Report on the Archaeology of Lytton and its neighbourhood. 2. Folklore stories from same area. 3. Vocabulary and Grammar notes on the Ntlakapamuq [Thompson]. 4. Vocabulary and Grammar notes on the Squamish and Matsqui, Yale and other divisions of the Salish. 5. Ancient tribal divisions and place-names. 6. An account of a great confederacy of tribes in the Salish region of Chilliwack.
“I regard the collection of vocabularies and grammar notes from every dialect and sub-dialect as imperatively necessary for linguistic comparison. The lack of these has caused me the loss of much valuable time and retarded my own labours in this … l … . . In this connection it gives me pleasure to inform the Committee that several of the leading anthropologists of Australasia have accepted the evidence of Oceanic affinities of the Kwakiutl-Nootka and Salish stocks as set forth by me in a paper presented at the recent meeting of the Royal Society of Canada [see item #5 below]. Dr. Carroll, the editor of the Australasian Anthropological Journal, in particular regards the evidence as practically conclusive.
“The photographic and anthropometric work of the Survey I hope to begin next month, the camera and instruments for which have just come to hand.
“In concluding this report I desire to call the attention of the Committee to the fact that much important archaeological work is awaiting development here for lack of funds to carry it on; the necessity for energetically prosecuting which, without further delay if it is to be done at all, I cannot impress too strongly upon all who are interested in this work of the Survey. Every month sees valuable records defaced and obliterated, either by relic hunters or by the progress of civilisation, and the day is not far distant when all trace of the past life and conditions of the aborigines such as are contained in the middens and mounds will be entirely swept away.”18
During 1898 Hill-Tout gave a talk to the Art, Historical and Scientific Society of Vancouver on “Our Forerunners in British Columbia” (paper of the same title published much later, item #33 below). He was elected First Vice-President of the Society.
For
