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[128.104.46.196] Project MUSE (2024-04-09 03:55 GMT) UW-Madison Libraries
THE FRANZ BOAS PAPERS, VOLUME 2
T H E F RA NZ BOA S PA PERS DO CUM E NTARY E D I T I ON
The Franz Boas Papers, VOLUME 2

Franz Boas, James Teit, and Early Twentieth-Century

Salish Ethnography, 1894–1922

Franz Boas

Edited by Andrea Laforet, Angie Bain, John Haugen,

Sarah Moritz, and Andie Diane Palmer

REGNA DARNELL, GENERAL EDITOR

Co-published by the University of Nebraska Press

and the American Philosophical Society
© 2024 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America
The University of Nebraska Press is part of a land-grant institution
with campuses and programs on the past, present, and future
homelands of the Pawnee, Ponca, Otoe-Missouria, Omaha, Dakota,
Lakota, Kaw, Cheyenne, and Arapaho Peoples, as well as those of the
relocated Ho-Chunk, Sac and Fox, and Iowa Peoples.

♾
Publication of this volume is assisted by the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The Franz Boas papers / Regna Darnell, general editor.
volumes cm.—(Franz Boas papers documentary edition)
Contents: volume 1. Franz Boas as public intellectual: theory,
ethnography, activism / edited by Regna Darnell, Michelle Hamilton,
Robert L. A. Hancock, and Joshua Smith
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8032-6984-2 (cloth: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8032-7199-9 (pdf) 1. Boas, Franz, 1858–1942—Influence.
2. Boas, Franz, 1858–1942—Correspondence. 3. Ethnology. I. Darnell,
Regna, editor of compilation.
GN21.B56F75 2015
301.092—dc23 2015011301

All volumes in the series can be found by searching under the first
volume’s information.

Set in Charis by Scribe Inc.

Frontispiece: Franz Boas portrait by Carl Gunther, 1912, courtesy Franz

Boas Papers (Mss.B.b61), series 2, U5.1.25, c.1. James Teit portrait
courtesy Canadian Museum of History, 18463, CD95-821-004/.
Contents

List of Illustrations vii

General Editor’s Preface ix

REGNA DARNELL

Acknowledgments xi

Editorial Method xiii

Introduction by 1
ANDREA LAFORET

1894–1895 61

1896 108

1897 119

1898 140

1899 167

1900 209

1901 233

1902 244

1903 253

1904 270

1905 290

1906 300

1907 323

1908 351
1909 390

1910 435

1911 480

1912 509

1913 552

1914 627

1915 664

1916 725

1917 757

1918 810

1919 863

1920 924

1921 935

1922 963

Postscript 968

Bibliography 977
Index 997
Illustrations

FIGURES
Frontispiece. Franz Boas and James Teit ii
1. Stone blades 196
2. Lodge at the entrance to the spirit land (side view) 200
3. Lodge at the entrance to the spirit land (end view) 200
4. Tattoo marks Tcuiêska 212
5. Arrow, snake, and sweat house tattoo marks 213
6. Sketches of moccasin designs 213
7. Lillooet butterfly pattern (upper) 248
8. Lillooet butterfly pattern (lower) 248
9. Nlaka’pamux woven mat 338
10. Basketry design motifs 389
11. Postcard showing “Chilkat Chiefs in Dancing Costume” 398
12. “Ashcroft Indians,” photograph by George N. Bailey 434
13. Woven Salish blanket by the McKay sisters (no. 2) 653
14. Woven Salish blanket by the McKay sisters (no. 4) 653
15. Teit’s diagram of a nose in profile 742
16. Teit’s drawing of a hand 836
17. (a) Skeena River twined baskets and
(b) Newcombe’s note to Teit 869
18. Upper Nlaka’pamux baskets 874
19. Sketch of basketry tray made at Lytton 909

MAPS
1. Geographic scope of Teit’s research 3
2. Research sites in British Columbia 62
3. Research locales, 1908 and 1909 366
4. Research locales, 1910 453

vii
TABLES
1. Teit’s death records 1895 to 1899 of NLaka’pamux people 194
2. Teit’s birth records 1895 to 1899 of NLaka’pamux people 195
3. Inanimate, animate, and personal forms 358
4. Organization of Tahltan Manuscript 915

viii | Illustrations
General Editor’s Preface
REGNA DARNELL

The Franz Boas Papers series received $2.5 million (Can) as a Partnership
Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
(No. 895-2012-001) between 2012 and 2020. The first volume, based on a
planning conference in 2010, appeared in 2015. The mandate tied archival
research to community-based collaborative research in Indigenous communi-
ties and trained both community personnel and students (overlapping catego-
ries). Governance by an Indigenous Advisory Council prioritized digitizing the
Franz Boas Papers (FBP) at the American Philosophical Society (APS), a part-
ner in the project, rather than print publication. This was a massive undertak-
ing. Much of the material is now available online; APS developed a research
center for Native American and Indigenous Research that drew models from
the FBP but also developed its own trajectory. Spinoffs have mushroomed
with interim reports in the Critical Studies in the History of Anthropology
(CSHOA) and Histories of Anthropology Annual (HOAA) series and elsewhere.
COVID-19 induced delays to field work and field-based consultations. Cur-
rent environmental crises of floods and fires have also intervened. The pres-
ent volume lies at the core of the series mandate, and its importance as a
template for forthcoming volumes cannot be overstated.
The interdisciplinary scope of the FBP project allows a synthesis that will
stand across time as a model for archival scholarship and community collab-
oration. The open-ended nature of the process ensures its usefulness to the
primary intended audience in Indigenous communities because published
sources are rendered generic and gloss over the information of most use to
them. The commentaries and footnotes simultaneously address multiple audi-
ences ranging from the academy to the general reader. There is some urgency
to reassessing the role of Franz Boas both in anthropology and beyond.
The organization is a model of clarity. The introduction provides a road-
map of what is to come, and how to navigate it, and facilitates the high-
lighting of crossovers across time as successive actors and institutions replay
similar trajectories with different details. The trajectories stretch into the pres-
ent and beyond. The references are exhaustive and their relation to the text

ix
encourages readers to follow up. The whole manuscript must be considered
in addition to existing work on parts of the whole.
This synthesis has been possible because the editorial team is complex and
seamlessly integrated, with all members equally valued for their unique roles
within the larger organism. Andrea Laforet is an effective organizer and team
leader in addition to her career-long and ongoing experience as administra-
tor, fieldworker, and consultant to Indigenous communities; her long-term
personal relationships with each member of editorial team underlie this syn-
thesis and integrate the team. With an archivist’s eye, Angie Bain (Union
of British Columbia Indian Chiefs) has sourced and managed documentary
materials as a trained researcher and community member. In his own work
John Haugen, also a community member, merges traditional and scholarly
knowledge, and in his work for this volume he has used these to link aspects
of Teit’s work, particularly in photography and basketry, with the current
community knowledge base. Sarah Moritz is assistant professor of anthropol-
ogy at Thompson Rivers University (Department of Environment, Culture and
Sociology) and director of SEAL (Storytelling, Ethnography & Action Lab) and
is a long-term collaborative fieldworker in the British Columbia communi-
ties and translator of German materials on Boas. Andie Palmer is an interim
director, Kule Folklore Centre, and associate professor of anthropology at
the University of Alberta with ongoing empathy, concern for the ethics of
engagement, and long-term community engagement. Team members share an
ethos of research and practice the standards they profess at both individual
and team levels. Indigenous and non-Indigenous members contribute in rela-
tion to their interests and skill sets.
It has been my pleasure and privilege to sit with this group at many of their
meetings and to offer some insights through a network of overlapping crossties
through the Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA); berose International
Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology; and the American Anthropolog-
ical Association, especially the history of the anthropology group within the
General Anthropology Division and the Association of Senior Anthropologists.
The volume will have a major impact as Franz Boas continues to serve as
a lightning rod connecting generations and subject areas in an open-ended
and continuing process of transportable knowledge. It is quite simply a tour
de force with a dynamic greater than the sum of its parts.

x | General Editor’s Preface

Acknowledgments

Franz Boas, James Teit, and Early Twentieth-Century Salish Ethnography is a

work that has depended on the preservation of knowledge in archives. As the
Covid-19 pandemic gripped the world in 2020, archives were transformed in
a way never contemplated, as archivists throughout North America found
themselves working from home, their institutions closed to both visitors and
staff, and the collections of original documents out of reach. This volume
would have been impossible to produce without the knowledge, flexibility,
and kindness of Brian Carpenter and Paul Sutherland at the American Phil-
osophical Society Library; Laurel Kendall, Peter Whiteley, Kristen Mable,
and Barry Landua at the American Museum of Natural History; and Benoît
Thériault, Erin Wilson, Kelly Cameron, Shannon Mooney, and Nadja Roby
at the Canadian Museum of History. Jamie Lewis at the Field Museum, Gen-
evieve Weber at the British Columbia Archives, and Melanie Kjorlien at the
Glenbow Museum also provided timely assistance. In addition, in the course
of preparing the volume the co-editors drew on the resources of the Nicola
Valley Archives, Lillooet Tribal Council Archives, Nlaka’pamux Nation Tribal
Council Archives, Vancouver City Archives, Kommunalarchiv Minden (Min-
den Municipal Archives), and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
The co-editors wish to express their gratitude to the Union of British
Columbia Indian Chiefs for their kindness in hosting both in-person meet-
ings in Vancouver and teleconferences over several years. We are grateful, as
well, to Wendy Wickwire, Mandy Na’zinek Jimmie, and Steven M. Egesdal,
who shared information and expertise. In the early days Joshua Smith of the
Franz Boas Papers: Documentary Edition provided critical information as to
how our commentary on the letters might take shape. Eric Leinberger of the
Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, prepared the maps.
In understanding the context in which Teit conducted his initial field work
and the implications of his findings, the co-editors have drawn on knowledge
acquired from Nlaka’pamux, St’át’imc, and Secwepemc elders over many
years. These include Grand Chief Robert Pasco, the late Clara Clare, the
late Nathan Spinks, the late Annie York, and the late Louis Phillips, among
many Nlaka’pamux people; Secwepemc elder the late Dorothy Johnson and
St’át’imc elders Qwa7yán’ak Carl Alexander of Xwísten (Bridge River), the
̓
late Desmond Peters Sr. of Tsalálh (Seton Lake/Shalalth) and Ts’k’wáylacw

xi
̓ (Seton Lake/Shalalth);
(Pavilion), Aggie Patrick and Pete Alexander of Tsalálh
Art Adolph of Xaxlíp (Fountain); Gerald Michel of Xwísten; Tiiya7 (William
̓
Alexander of Tsalálh), ̓
Morris Prosser (Tsalálh), Qwalqwalten (Garry John
̓ ̓
of Tsalálh), Willie Terry Sr. (Tsalálh), hereditary Kukwpi7 Randy James,
Kukwpi7 Ida Mary Peter, former chief and councilor Larry Casper, Rodney
Louie, and many more St’át’imc individuals. Others who have provided sup-
port along the way include Serena Hunsbedt, Jeanie Charlie, Pauline Doug-
las, Elin Sigurdson, Darren Friesen, Deirdre Lott, Gregory Conchelos, and
Georgia Gale-Kidd.
Without the Western University transcribers, and particularly Mitchell
Horkoff, who typed the majority of Teit’s handwritten letters and found a
creative way to notate digitally the many Salishan terms Teit included in his
own orthography, the volume would have been difficult to prepare. In the
early years of the project, Sam Cronk supplied technical support and assis-
tance with decoding the mysteries of internet caches.
Early feedback from Matthew Bokovoy and Heather Stauffer paved the
way for the development of the manuscript within the required format. Mary
Conchelos provided early editorial support. Over the past several months
Nathan Dawthorne has worked tirelessly to format the constantly updated
manuscript and prepare the index.
The Franz Boas Papers: Documentary Edition, directed by Regna Darnell, has
been funded and supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council through SSHRC Partnership Grant No. 895-2012-1001. Throughout
the preparation of this volume we have benefited greatly from Regna Dar-
nell’s guidance, support, and matchless knowledge of Boas and his work.

xii | Acknowledgments
Editorial Method

The development of this volume brought together five co-editors, Andrea

Laforet, Angie Bain, John Haugen, Sarah Moritz, and Andie Diane Palmer,
all with prior knowledge of Teit’s publications, and all with direct knowl-
edge of Indigenous communities in Canada in which he worked. Angie Bain
also served on the Indigenous Advisory Council for the Franz Boas Papers:
Documentary Edition.
Some of the co-editors had met at breakfast meetings organized by Regna
Darnell during annual meetings of the American Anthropological Associa-
tion. All five first met as a working group for this volume in Vancouver in
June 2016 at a meeting hosted by the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs
(UBCIC). Subsequently the group met through teleconferences every few
months to discuss progress, issues, and the scope of commentary, and met
in person, again, at a meeting in Vancouver hosted by UBCIC in July 2019.
Many of the letters from the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH)
had been acquired by Andrea Laforet in the course of earlier research. In
2017 Regna Darnell, Angie Bain, Sarah Moritz, and Sam Cronk traveled to
the AMNH in New York and acquired additional material. In 2021 Kristen
Mable of the AMNH was extremely helpful in reviewing lists and providing
additional letters from 1904. The American Philosophical Society Library
provided digitized copies of the original letters between Boas and Teit in the
Franz Boas Papers. The AMNH letters were transcribed by Andrea Laforet
and Angie Bain; the APS letters were transcribed by staff hired by the Franz
Boas Papers Project, the transcripts drawn down by the co-editors from an
Omeka open-source internet file; and the CMH letters were transcribed by
Angie Bain. Letters in German between Boas and Herman Haeberlin and Boas
and Adolph Bastian were translated by Sarah Moritz. The group collaborated
on bringing source material together in an internet cache established with
the help of Sam Cronk.
The University of Nebraska Press editorial requirements, circulated to the
editors at the outset of the larger project, prescribed a format for finished
volumes. In order to ensure that the editorial group fully understood what
was expected, Andrea Laforet inaugurated the formal editorial process by
organizing the typed letters from the American Museum of Natural History
with a set of initial footnote commentaries in the format anticipated by UNP

xiii
and circulated it to the group. Through Regna Darnell, staff provided helpful
feedback. As the typescript APS letters became available they were added,
along with preliminary commentary. In 2019 it was decided that the story
of the Teit–Boas collaboration could not be complete without the addition of
letters between Teit and Sapir and the letters between Sapir and Boas relat-
ing to Teit’s work. As each draft has been completed it has been circulated
to the editorial group.
The letters from all three institutions came together in early 2020, just
as the Covid-19 pandemic began. Four of the co-editors were living in Canada;
one was living in Austria. The border between Canada and the United States
closed and did not reopen until late 2021. Both international and domestic
travel were severely restricted. Canada and Austria experienced economic
shutdowns, with social gatherings either forbidden or limited, restaurants
restricted to takeout, and shopping limited to necessities. Archives, muse-
ums, and university libraries closed, with staff required to work from home
and with access to non-digitized collections unavailable or severely limited.
The final draft of this volume came together with some, but not all, of these
conditions easing as the pandemic continued and new variants of the virus
appeared. The co-contributors are very grateful to the archivists in New
York, Philadelphia, Gatineau, and Victoria who provided needed assistance
with speed and assurance, even as they worked under straitened conditions.
In 2021 the editorial group confronted climate change in a sudden, direct,
and personal way. A heat dome over southern British Columbia in the last
days of June raised the daytime temperature of Lytton, home to many
Nlaka’pamux people, including John Haugen, to nearly 50 degrees C, far
above the highest recorded temperature. On June 30 a forest fire destroyed
the entire town and associated Lytton First Nation reserves, including John
Haugen’s home. For weeks during the summer, areas of the British Colum-
bia interior were devastated by the Lytton Creek fire and other forest fires.
In November 2021 a series of atmospheric rivers brought torrential rain to
southern British Columbia, flooding the town of Merritt and the Fraser Val-
ley and bringing ruinous damage to several highways connecting Vancou-
ver with the rest of Canada. Highways throughout Nlaka’pamux traditional
territory were broken beyond the possibility of quick repair, leaving Lytton,
Merritt, and other communities isolated, and destroying the highway through
the Nicola Valley, home to Angie Bain’s family.

The Letters
In preparing this volume the goal has been to present the content and tone of
the letters accurately, without attempting to mimic facsimile reproductions.

xiv | Editorial Method

Teit’s original letters to Boas, particularly, contain many indications that Boas
saw the letters as a kind of living archives. In fact, he retained the letters
even as he discarded or returned to Teit draft manuscripts following their
publication. Many passages in Teit’s letters are outlined in pencil or colored
pencil. That Boas may have adopted this as an editorial device to highlight
information that was to be included in the developing manuscripts is sug-
gested by notations placed in the margin beside the outlined passages, pro-
viding one- or two-word labels for the topic (e.g., basketry designs).
Toward the end of the preparation of Teit’s posthumous publications, Boas
also engaged a student to go through Teit’s letters in search of material that
had not yet been published (see Postscript, at the end of vol. 2, book 2). In
addition to bracketing and labeling portions of some letters, the student also
separated parts of others, so that these letters are no longer whole. In some
cases fragments or copied fragments, labeled with Teit’s name, the date of
the original letter, and the notation “Copied. LK Jan. 1931” have been located
among the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) files relating to
Teit’s notes and have been reunited to the extent possible with the original
letter. As there is no instance where a marginal label of a bracketed section
is demonstrably in Boas’s hand, and as all of the labels are obvious notations
of the topic of the bracketed portion with no additional interpretive value,
we have eliminated both the bracketing and the marginal labels.
Teit dated all his letters, and these dates have been reproduced in full.
However, not reproduced are dates added to the top of letters by someone
other than Teit, administrative directions such as “File,” and numbers placed
at the top of certain letters, the purpose of which is unclear.
Teit’s spelling of societal names has been retained (e.g., Pend d’oreille), as
has his use of British or Canadian spelling, as in “neighbouring.” Both Teit and
Sapir wrote “Boas’” as opposed to “Boas’s,” and this has not been changed.
Words crossed out have not been included unless they show uncertainty on
Teit’s part. In that case they have been included and marked as having been
crossed out. Teit often added postscripts to his letters, usually at the end,
but occasionally in the top margin of the first page of a letter. This practice
generally reflected an economical use of paper. Postscripts appearing at the
beginning of the original letters have been repositioned at the end. Teit and
his correspondents often ended their letters with expressions of cordial good
wishes. Most of these have been eliminated, although a certain proportion
have been retained to confirm the character of the correspondence. Final
salutations, such as “Yours truly,” and signatures have not been included.
Teit wrote clearly, but without academic polish, and his prose is marked
by certain eccentricities. He often omitted periods at the end of sentences and
very seldom used question marks. Where the absence of periods or question

Editorial Method | xv
marks interferes with ready understanding, these have been introduced in
square brackets for clarity. He also seldom used apostrophes in abbreviations
such as “won’t” or “can’t.” Apart from an occasional [sic] to confirm that this
was Teit’s usage, these have not been changed or marked. Bracketed words or
letters indicate words missing or misspelled, and a few bracketed question
marks indicate points of uncertain meaning. From time to time Teit under-
lined words or phrases, indicating that he was giving them special emphasis.
These have been rendered here in italics. Words and phrases that are illegible,
or obscured by ink blots or tears in the original letter, are marked as [illeg].
Teit inaugurated each letter with a paragraph indentation but seldom
marked paragraphs in the body of a letter. This practice has been respected.
Where there are variant spellings of terms such as “Utamkt”/ “Utamqt,” the
variations have been marked once by [sic] but not thereafter. Some changes
have been universal. Teit used “&” and “&c” throughout his letters. In all
cases “&” has been changed to “and” and “&c” to “etc.” Similarly, Teit’s
abbreviation “do,” has been replaced by [ditto] in most uses. His abbrevia-
tion “f.i.,” meaning “for instance,” has been retained. Superscripts in dates
(e.g., “March 1st”) have been changed to “March 1st.” Teit occasionally pre-
sented linguistic or other data in a casual tabular form, somewhere between
prose and a formal table. In these instances the information has been orga-
nized into a formal table in order to present the information clearly. In each
case a title has been added.
The monographs, anthologies, and essays that emerged from the col-
laboration between Boas and Teit were published under the names then
in common use by non-Indigenous people for these tribal groups: Thomp-
son, Lillooet, Shuswap, Okanagon, Flathead, Coeur d’Alene, Colville, Mid-
dle Columbia Salish, and Lakes. In the following pages these societies are
also identified by various current names, such as Nlaka’pamux (nɬeʔképmx,
Thompson), St’at’imc (Stl’atl’imx, šƛ̕̕áƛ̕̕imx), and Lilwat (Lílwat, Lilloet—there
is no common name). Others include Secwepemc (sexwépemx, Shuswap),
Syilx (Okanagan in Canada, Okanagon in the United States), the Confeder-
ated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Nation, or seliš (Flathead),
the Schi ̱tsu’umsh (sčicuʔumš, Coeur d’Alene), and the .skowa’xtsEnEx or
.tskowa’xtsEnux (Sinkiuse-Columbia). The original names of the Colville and
Lakes, both members of the Colville Confederated Tribes, are sx̣wəyiʔɬp
and snʕayckstx, respectively. The Colville use the term Colville, and the Lakes
are identified as both Lakes and Sinixt.
Each of the co-editors of the present volume came to this work with a
particular focus and expertise, and as the book took shape we found new
relevance for the letters and Teit’s associated notes and drawings in our
own ongoing work—in the history of the Nicola Valley; in the history of the

xvi | Editorial Method

Sinixt; in the revitalization of language, law, and land via the St’at’imc Papt
du Gwenis (winter fish) community project; and through Teit’s list of pho-
tographs, in the connection between the current Nlaka’pamux community
and the individuals and families he knew.

Teit’s Orthography
In many of his letters to Franz Boas, James Teit included terms from Salishan
languages as well as from an Athapascan language spoken in the Nicola
Valley. Teit was writing in longhand and thus was free to develop his own
symbols for sounds not used in English. Many of these symbols appear in
the standard Microsoft Word Symbols menu. Symbols from the International
Phonetic Alphabet are from either the Word Symbols menu or the character
set developed by Laurence and M. Terry Thompson for nɬeʔkepmxcín and
other Salish languages. Symbols used in the modern orthographies of cer-
tain First Nations can be found in the First Voices (https://www.firstvoices
.com) for the particular language.

Editorial Method | xvii

THE FRANZ BOAS PAPERS, VOLUME 2
Introduction
ANDREA LAFORET

The letters between James Teit (1864–1922) and Franz Boas (1858–1942)
chronicle Teit’s career as an ethnographer from shortly after his initial meet-
ing with Boas in 1894 to the posthumous publication of the manuscripts that
remained at his death.1 In the course of this correspondence, Boas, who was
thirty-six years old when he met Teit and seventy-nine when the last manu-
script was published, also moves through several major stages of his career,
although his developing interests and scope of work at any one point are
much less on view. This introduction tracks the impact of the differing career
trajectories of Teit and Boas on the primary product of their collaboration,
the initial development of the ethnography of societies speaking Interior
Salish languages.
In a literature that is now voluminous Boas’s legacy has been explored,
contested, assessed, and reassessed since his death in 1942.2 More recently
Han Vermeulen (Before Boas, 2015) has explored the substantial legacy of
the European empirical tradition that influenced Boas’s approach to eth-
nography and Rosemary Zumwalt has published a two-volume biography,
Franz Boas: The Emergence of the Anthropologist (2019), and Franz Boas: Shap-
ing Anthropology and Fostering Social Justice (2022). Scholars continuing to
consider Boas’s work through the University of Nebraska Press Histories
of Anthropology Annual series include Darnell (“Franz Boas as Theorist,”
2017), Michael Harkin (“‘We Are Also One,’” “What Would Franz Boas Have
Thought?” 2017a, 2017b), David Dinwoodie (“Boas and the Young Intellectu-
als,” 2017), Sharon Lindenburger (“Ich Bin Ju̎discher Abstammung,” 2019), Ira
Jacknis (“No Object Without Its Story,” 2019), and Saul Schwartz (“The Boas
Plan,” 2019). Michael Silverstein has considered his approach to linguistics
in a new “Introduction” to the Introduction to Handbook of American Indian
Languages/Indian Linguistic Families of America North of Mexico (2017); Rafael
Ocasio (Race and Nation, 2020) has examined Boas’s 1915 field work in Puerto
Rico; and Isaiah Wilner, “Friends in This World: The Relationship of George
Hunt and Franz Boas” (2015), and Rainer Hatoum, “‘I Wrote All My Notes in
Shorthand’: A First Glance into the Treasure Chest of Franz Boas’s Shorthand
Field Notes” (2016), have considered Boas’s work with George Hunt. Indigenous

1
Visions: Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas, edited by Ned Blackhawk and
Isaiah Lorado Wilner (2018) is an anthology of essays focused on the Indig-
enous thinkers on whom Boas relied, and the Bard Graduate Center in New
York is host to a major digital project by Aaron Glass, Judith Berman, and
co-workers on Boas’s ethnography, “The Distributed Text: An Annotated Dig-
ital Edition of Franz Boas’s Pioneering Ethnography.”3
The most comprehensive consideration of Teit’s work, in both ethnography
and political advocacy, is Wickwire’s 2019 At the Bridge: James Teit and the
Anthropology of Belonging. Teit’s contribution was first systematically exam-
ined in an unpublished 1970 master’s thesis in which Judith Banks compared
his work with that of his contemporary, Charles Hill-Tout. Published consid-
eration of Teit’s work began in the 1980s, with a presentation of Teit’s pho-
tography in the Interior of British Columbia,4 discussion of his contribution
to ethnomusicology,5 his advocacy of the resolution of Indigenous land claims
in British Columbia,6 his collections of Nlaka’pamux clothing,7 aspects of his
work as an ethnographer,8 and a brief biography.9 Judith Dean Thompson
(Recording Their Story, 2007) has explored Teit’s work among the Tahltan of
northwestern British Columbia, and Andrea Laforet (“The Ethnographic Leg-
acy of Franz Boas and James Teit,” 2015) has examined issues in the approach
to ethnography represented in the initial monograph produced through the
collaboration of Teit and Boas. Wendy Wickwire reviewed the inaugural
volume in the present series, Franz Boas as Public Intellectual—Theory, Eth-
nography, Activism.10
Teit’s initial work was among the Nlaka’pamux near his home in British
Columbia, but the scope of his work with Boas eventually included all of the
societies speaking Interior Salish languages, as well as the Sto:lo, among whom
he worked briefly, and coastal groups in Washington state, among whom he
worked in 1910. The collaboration between Teit and Boas produced a paper
on Nlaka’pamux rock art, ethnographic monographs, The Thompson Indians
of British Columbia, The Lillooet Indians, The Shuswap, three anthologies of
narratives retold in English, two additional papers on narratives, and fifteen
unpublished maps with associated notes. All were authored by Teit and the
publications were edited by Boas. Teit’s posthumous publications, prepared
under Boas’s supervision, include an extensive contribution to a co-authored
paper on Salish coil basketry; a set of ethnographic essays, “The Okanagon,”
“The Flathead Group,” “The Coeur d’Alêne,” and “The Middle Columbia Sal-
ish”; a paper on Nlaka’pamux tattooing and face and body painting; a mono-
graph on Nlaka’pamux ethnobotany; and a final paper on narratives.
Boas also facilitated the publication of anthologies of Kaska (Kaska Dena
or Denek’éh) and Tahltan narratives generated through Teit’s work for
Edward Sapir at the Geological Survey of Canada. As well, Teit published

2 | Introduction
Chizikut
(Chezacut)

Atlin

Cassiar

Telegraph
Creek

BRITISH COLUMBIA

Port
Essington Fraser's Lake
(Fraser Lake) ALBERTA
CO

R
O
AS

For detail, C
see page xx K
T

Anahim Y
Bella Coola
Tatla Lake
Fras
M
O

Revelstoke For detail,

U

M
er R

TA see page xx
N

IN O
Columbia River
iver

S Kootenay U
N
Vancouver District TA
Island CANADA
USA
I N

Pacific
S

Ocean

MONTANA

WASHINGTON IDAHO

Co
lu m
b ia River
For detail,
see page xx

OREGON
200 km

Map 1. Geographic scope of Teit’s research. Cartography by Eric Leinberger, Depart-

ment of Geography, University of British Columbia.

independently a brief paper on the Tahltan,11 a paper on Shetland folk-

lore,12 and a popular publication with a Canadian publisher.13 Teit’s paper
on Nlaka’pamux rock art was published in 1896; the last posthumous
paper was published in 1937. In addition, Teit assembled substantial collec-
tions of material culture, now lodged in the American Museum of Natural

Introduction | 3
History, the Smithsonian Institution, the Peabody Museum at Harvard, the
British Columbia Provincial Museum, and the Canadian Museum of History.
Teit’s photographs and song recordings made during his time with the Geo-
logical Survey of Canada, as well as a manuscript he wrote to accompany his
recordings of Nlaka’pamux song, are preserved in the Canadian Museum of
History,14 while unpublished notes assembled during his work for Boas are
preserved in both the American Museum of Natural History and the Ameri-
can Philosophical Society Library.
In addition to collaborating with Boas in the development of Interior Salish
ethnography, Teit actively worked between 1909 and 1922 to support Indig-
enous groups in British Columbia who were seeking recognition of Aborigi-
nal title and resolution of their outstanding claims to land. While this work
was separate from his ethnographic research and sometimes in competition
with it, his land claims work was supported by the extensive network that
Teit developed across tribal borders, which in turn was facilitated by the
geographic breadth of his work with Boas.
The Teit-Boas collaboration falls into four periods:

(a) 1894–1911, the period of most active collaboration, in which the prin-
cipal field expeditions took place, the major collections of material
culture were assembled, and the three major Canadian ethnographies
and the first narrative anthology were published. During this period
Teit’s political advocacy also took shape and acquired momentum.
(b) 1912–1916, the initial years of Teit’s employment by the Geological
Survey of Canada, during which he conducted field work among the
Tahltan and Kaska; worked to finish projects begun earlier for Boas,
including writing up his notes from field work conducted between
1908 and 1910; and responded to new initiatives concerning Nla-
ka’pamux basketry. He also widened the scope of his political work.
(c) 1917–1922, six years, ending with Teit’s death, that saw his work
with the Geological Survey come to an end, his political advocacy
move to the national stage in Canada, and his direct reliance on
Boas as the sole source of ethnographic work re-established. During
this time Teit also finalized maps and notes on earlier territorial
boundaries of Plateau tribes as well as his manuscripts on the Coeur
d’Alene, Flathead, Okanagon, and Middle Columbia Salish, and
developed the extensive body of notes on Nlaka’pamux ethnobotany
that he had assembled throughout his career. Inspired by his 1912
work among the Tahltan, which included the recording of songs,
Teit made a major collection of songs from the Nlaka’pamux and
some neighboring societies between 1913 and 1921. He also made a

4 | Introduction
substantial photographic record of Nlaka’pamux people in communi-
ties near his home.
(d) 1923–1937: Following Teit’s death on October 30, 1922, Boas recruited
current and former Columbia University students to assist with the
preparation for publication of Teit’s remaining manuscripts through
the Bureau of American Ethnology and the University of Washington,
a project that unfolded over a period of more than ten years.

The Collaboration
Following his first meeting with Teit in September 1894 at a Nlaka’pamux vil-
lage in the hills just west of Spences Bridge, British Columbia, Boas, impressed
with Teit’s knowledge of and fluency in Nlaka’pamuxcin, requested that Teit
write a paper on the Nlaka’pamux. This project anticipated Boas’s approach to
ethnography formalized during the Jesup Expedition, but it predated Boas’s
appointment as assistant curator of anthropology at the American Museum
of Natural History in 1896 and the formal inauguration of the Jesup Expe-
dition, which Boas developed within his first two years there. However,
as Teit’s work proceeded and grew beyond an initial draft paper on the
Nlaka’pamux living in the vicinity of Teit’s home to encompass a retrospec-
tive view of Nlaka’pamux society as a whole, the Nlaka’pamux ethnography
was drawn into the Jesup Expedition both in fact and in ethos, and it became
a focus of the first Jesup Expedition field work in 1897.
During that process the Nlaka’pamux ethnography came to follow to a
degree the vision of ethnography Boas expressed in defining Jochelson’s work
in Siberia for the Jesup North Pacific Expedition in 1898 and 1900,15 with
study of the ethnology of the society at the core of the work, buttressed by
archaeology, physical anthropology, material culture collections, photogra-
phy, and recordings of song, with a focus on language running through the
whole. Teit initially concentrated on ethnographic description, the compila-
tion of narratives, and collections of material culture supported by detailed
descriptions. In documenting his first collection for the American Museum
of Natural History in 1895, he included Nlaka’pamux terms for the objects
and identified the Nlaka’pamux makers and vendors of the objects, at the
same time identifying members of the local community with whom he had
rapport. Harlan Smith, who joined Boas, Teit, and Boas’s Columbia Univer-
sity colleague Livingston Farrand at Teit’s home in Spences Bridge in 1897,
took photographs of Nlaka’pamux people near Teit’s home, and conducted
archaeological research at Nlaka’pamux sites near Lytton and at Kamloops
in Secwepemc (Shuswap) territory.16 During the 1897 field work Boas made
casts of the faces of local people, continuing work he had been doing during

Introduction | 5
his visit to the region in 1894. During this visit Boas and Teit also recorded
songs by Nlaka’pamux men and women living in the vicinity of Spences
Bridge, with Boas cataloguing the wax cylinders and Teit recording the
names of the singers.
After 1897 the conduct of Nlaka’pamux ethnographic research was largely
left to Teit. Formal work on Nlaka’pamux archaeology stopped after Har-
lan Smith’s publication of The Archaeology of Lytton, British Columbia.17
In Teit’s subsequent ethnographic work among other societies he worked
independently of other specialists, such as Roland Dixon, who conducted
archaeology among the Lillooet.
Teit began research among the St’at’imc and Lilwat even before the pub-
lication of The Thompson Indians of British Columbia in 1900, following the
template established for the Nlaka’pamux. He followed this with field work
among the Canadian Okanagan (Syilx), and Secwepemc. In 1907 Boas sug-
gested that Teit expand his ethnographic work to include the societies in
the United States speaking Salishan languages. In 1908 and 1909 he con-
ducted work in eastern Washington and Idaho; his work in 1909 included a
brief sojourn among the Sinixt of southeastern British Columbia. In 1910 Teit
worked among Coast Salish groups in Washington state.
In the period between 1894 and 1911, which encompassed Teit’s major field
expeditions, the collaboration involved a specific division of labor. Boas set
the original topic and, apparently, the template that guided the structure
of the eventual manuscript. In this regard Teit, at least initially, had less
latitude than Jochelson and his colleagues, Bogoras and Shternberg, had in
Siberia. Prior to the start of Jochelson’s expedition Boas provided detailed
lists of the kinds of illustrative collections the expedition should make but
left the specific approach to the ethnography undefined.18 Boas anticipated
that the ethnologists working in Siberia would develop their own publications
of the results, although under the aegis of the American Museum of Natural
History. Where Teit’s work was concerned, Boas also assumed control of the
publication process, and although Teit always reviewed galleys, this meant
in practice that the final shape of each volume was set in New York. In a
way that may have proved significant years later; it also meant that Teit was
spared both the pressure and experience of developing his manuscripts into
final, publishable form. Where the primary ethnographic research was con-
cerned, Teit worked largely on his own, with the correspondence providing
connection and occasional feedback. During this period Boas’s interventions
were largely in the form of requests for information concerning specific issues.
The only other intervention in the research itself was a request in 1908 from
Teit’s hunting client and financial sponsor, Homer Sargent, that Teit develop,
under Boas’s supervision but with Sargent’s financial support, a publication

6 | Introduction
on coiled basketry. Although this began as an expression of personal inter-
est on Sargent’s part, it had a long-range impact on the shape of Teit’s work.
The pattern of collaboration between Boas and Teit changed significantly
in 1912, when Teit joined the Geological Survey of Canada and the research
shared with Boas was redefined as a set of projects to be finished. It changed
again in 1916, when Boas drew Teit’s ongoing research on Nlaka’pamux bas-
ketry into the production of a broader monograph on Salish basketry, to
be guided by Boas and authored by Teit and Boas’s newly graduated stu-
dent, Herman Haeberlin. Up to this point Teit had conducted research on
basketry as an extension of his Nlaka’pamux ethnography, although he had
also responded to particular questions posed by Boas. In the reformulated
project, Boas placed emphasis on theoretical questions he felt Haeberlin was
better positioned than Teit to answer and asked Teit to supply data from the
field in support.
The relationship between Teit and Boas was cordial but professional. In
his letters to Boas, Teit was forthcoming about his current research; less so
about personal events. He wrote only rarely about his work advocating for
the recognition of Aboriginal title. Boas’s letters to Teit were largely about
administrative matters pertaining to the research; for example, the progress
of manuscripts, the proofing of galleys, and issues concerning finances. He
included little, if any, information about his personal life or his other work,
such as his Kwakiutl19 research with George Hunt. Both Teit and Boas were
dedicated family men. When they met, Boas already had a growing family.
Teit and his Nlaka’pamux first wife, Antko, had no children. Following Ant-
ko’s death, Teit and his second wife, Leonie Josephine Morens, the daughter
of settlers in the Thompson River valley, had six children, including one lost
in childbirth, all born during the years of his correspondence with Boas. On
only one occasion, however, does Teit mention the birth of a child to Boas,
and Boas mentions only one of his children, a grown daughter assisting him
in his research on tree sugar.

Career Trajectories
In the course of their decades-long collaboration, Boas and Teit developed
profoundly different career trajectories.20 Teit came to ethnography with a
sound basic education in Scotland,21 an ability to write concisely and lucidly,
an interest in socialism, and experience in working at different things, includ-
ing hunting and guiding, fishing with Nlaka’pamux in-laws, cattle raising,
and working for local ranchers. When his collaboration with Boas began,
he had an established interest in Nlaka’pamux population and culture that
went beyond household life. His archived notes contain lists of residents

Introduction | 7
of communities near Spences Bridge and farther up the Thompson River,
dated in a way that suggests he was recording observations before he met
Boas. One list, entitled “List of Cooks Ferry Band of Indians—or Whistem-
nitsa’s Band”—is dated “Jan. 1893.” A second handwritten document lists
the members of “Shoomaheltsa’s House,” farther up the Thompson River,
while a third, entitled “Some Statistics of Whistemnitsa’s Band of Indi-
ans, Thompson River Tribe of Indians or N-kla-kapin-ooghs,” is also dated
1893, although it includes a notation concerning the number of people who
had died “since the spring of 1894.”22
In constructing his livelihood Teit functioned, at least to a degree, as a
bricoleur,23 constructing the whole from sometimes disparate elements that
were available in his environment but not necessarily found together in a
single structure. Hunting, and working as a professional guide for clients
who came to hunt big game in the Interior of British Columbia, to which
Teit devoted a period of several weeks each fall, had considerable influence
on both the methodology and scope of his ethnographic research. Hunting
brought him into close contact with the terrain, natural history, and people
of regions stretching from his home in Spences Bridge in south-central Brit-
ish Columbia to the northern regions of the province. During the first Jesup
Expedition field trip in 1897 Teit’s experience in preparing for and leading
hunting expeditions allowed him to guide Livingston Farrand to his field
work site among the Chilcotin and guide Boas to meet George Hunt in Bella
Coola. Teit continued to work as a hunting guide at least through 1910, in
spite of the substantial growth of his ethnographic work and work support-
ing the political advocacy of the Nlaka’pamux and other Indigenous societ-
ies. Between 1899 and 1905 he relied on the knowledge of the terrain and
Indigenous societies of BC’s interior that he had acquired through hunting in
conducting the ethnographic research for The Lillooet Indians, The Shuswap,
and “The Okanagon,” and he relied on it again in 1912 during his initial field
research among the Tahltan, among whom he was already well known as a
hunting guide. In that year he appears to have arranged a hunting expedi-
tion for a client,24 although it is unlikely that he actually served as a guide.
Boas’s short-term field work contracts with the British Association for the
Advancement of Science, which occupied several summers between 1888 and
1897, his position as editor of Science (1887–1889), his academic post at Clark
University (1889–1892), and his work with Frederick Putnam at the World’s
Columbian Exhibition (1892–1893) served as relatively short-term resting points
in a search for an institutional position.25 Following Boas’s appointment to
the American Museum of Natural History in 1896, with a cross-appointment
to Columbia University beginning later in 1896, the American Museum of

8 | Introduction
Natural History became the principal institution within which he generated
and conducted his work, including his direction of Teit’s work. At Columbia
he trained students with the assistance of the museum’s collections. After his
resignation from the American Museum of Natural History in 1905, Colum-
bia University provided the operational base for Boas’s work, including the
administration of Teit’s research and Sargent’s sponsorship, and the prepa-
ration of Teit’s posthumous publications.
Both Boas and Teit developed extensive professional contacts, but they
overlapped only to a limited degree. Boas was in touch with a wide array of
academics and museum personnel in the United States and Europe, including
Russia, and with a more limited but still significant number of Native Amer-
ican and Canadian Indigenous people in the regions in which he conducted
research. Teit’s contacts encompassed a wide array of Indigenous people in
Canada and Native American people in the northwestern United States, schol-
ars at the American Museum of Natural History whom he met through Boas
and with whom he continued to correspond from time to time, professional
botanists in Ottawa whom he began to contact early in his Nlaka’pamux
research, non-Indigenous political activists working to establish recognition of
Aboriginal title, hunting clients in Europe and the United States, and British
Columbia and Canadian government officials. They also included colleagues
such as Charles Newcombe, an amateur ethnologist and professional collector
based in Victoria, British Columbia, who contacted Teit following the publi-
cation of The Thompson Indians of British Columbia, and John Davidson, the
British Columbia provincial botanist, whom Teit consulted concerning
the identification of plants and to whom he provided guidance when David-
son was conducting botanical field work in Nlaka’pamux territory.
The years between 1895 and 1905 were crowded for both Teit and Boas,
but while they solidified their collaboration during this time, they also
took their careers in different directions. During those ten years Teit wrote
The Thompson Indians of British Columbia and grew sufficiently comfortable
with the work and the template for the work that he moved relatively seam-
lessly into the research for The Lillooet Indians and, later, The Shuswap. While
these were directly mandated by Boas, the paper on rock art (1896), based
on the knowledge of his Nlaka’pamux neighbor, Waxtko, and Traditions of the
Thompson River Indians (1898) appear to have been initiated by Teit, although
their publication was certainly facilitated by Boas.
In 1904 Teit began research among the Okanagan living north of the inter-
national border. In 1904, as well, he went hunting for the first time with
Homer Sargent, an independently wealthy client then based in Chicago, and
in 1905 he began a long and extensive correspondence with Bryan Williams, a

Introduction | 9
newly appointed BC game warden. Although Teit continued to collect during
the years he worked with Sapir, most of the collections of Nlaka’pamux, Lil-
looet, and Shuswap material culture were assembled and documented during
the early years of his work with Boas.
At the time of his first meeting with Teit in 1894 Boas was already conduct-
ing in-depth research among the Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw, which culminated in the
publication of The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl
Indians in 1897. The publication of The Thompson Indians of British Colum-
bia in 1900 coincided with the trial of George Hunt in British Columbia for
participating in a Hamatsa ceremony during a potlatch, which temporarily
threatened both Hunt’s and Boas’s prospects for continuing research.26 Boas
sent a copy of The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl
Indians, in which George Hunt’s name and contribution appeared on the title
page, to Charles Newcombe, asking his help in submitting it to the court to
demonstrate that Hunt had attended the potlatch as a scientific observer.27
This was successful and was followed by Boas’s field work in Alert Bay
in the summer of that year.
For Boas the years between 1896 and 1902 were dominated by the Jesup
North Pacific Expedition, funded, following Boas’s advocacy, by Morris K.
Jesup, the president of the American Museum of Natural History. The research
in 1897 by Boas, Teit, and Harlan Smith in Spences Bridge, Boas and George
Hunt in Bella Coola and Rivers Inlet, and Livingston Farrand among the Chil-
cotin was conducted as part of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, although
it was also partly funded by the British Association for the Advancement of
Science, and the scope of the Jesup Expedition grew to include research by
other scholars on the coast of British Columbia and in Siberia.28
Following his permanent appointment to Columbia University in 1899,
Boas began to train a group of graduate students at the PhD level. Boas’s
Clark University student Alexander Chamberlain had completed the first
American PhD in anthropology in 1892. In 1901 the first Columbia PhD in
anthropology was awarded to Boas’s student Alfred Kroeber. In that year, as
well, Boas inaugurated the development of the Handbook of American Indian
Languages, recruiting scholars in linguistics from Europe and the United
States, including his students at Columbia, over the next several years, and
calling for an approach to the analysis of language that departed from the
approach championed by John Wesley Powell (1834–1902) of the Bureau of
Ethnology.29 In 1905, following conflict with a newly appointed director
of the American Museum of Natural History concerning the role of research
in exhibitions, Boas resigned from the museum and moved permanently to
Columbia University.30

10 | Introduction
The years between 1906 and 1911 saw the completion of Teit’s major field
research for Boas. The Lillooet Indians and The Shuswap were published during
this time, and the second anthology of Nlaka’pamux narratives, Mythology
of the Thompson Indians, was prepared, although not published until 1912. In
1906 Teit contributed a paper on the Tahltan to the Festschrift presented to
Boas on the 25th anniversary of his PhD, the substance of the paper derived
from research conducted while hunting in Tahltan territory. The field work
Teit began at Boas’s request in the United States in 1908 not only expanded
his expertise and range of contacts; it also highlighted for him the meager
character of Indian reserves in Canada in comparison with land allocations
to the Native Americans he met in the United States. Following his 1909 field
work, Teit worked with Nlaka’pamux chiefs to send a petition to the Cana-
dian superintendent of Indian Affairs concerning issues regarding reserves
and land claims. In 1910 he conducted field work in western Washington
state, began his involvement with the Indian Rights Association in Brit-
ish Columbia, and, on behalf of British Columbia chiefs, scribed a petition
to Canadian Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier. The petition was presented to
Laurier at Kamloops, British Columbia, in August 1910, while Teit was hunt-
ing with Homer Sargent.
Homer Sargent made his first financial contribution to Teit’s work in 1907,
following a visit to New York and correspondence with Boas. Sargent largely
funded the research Teit undertook for Boas between 1908 and 1922 as well
as the posthumous preparation of his manuscripts. Although the funds came
in single installments provided in response to current need, they eventually
amounted to a very substantial sum.
During the years between 1906 and 1911 Boas’s career also branched out,
as he combined his Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw research and teaching at Columbia
with new initiatives. In 1906 he made a convocation speech to graduates
at Atlanta University, describing the achievements of African societies,31
something not commonly done at that time at American university convo-
cations. In 1908 Boas began research sponsored by the Dillingham Commis-
sion on immigrant children in New York. In 1909 he published The Kwakiutl
of Vancouver Island and began working to establish a School of Ethnology
and Archaeology in Mexico.
Boas’s Columbia student Robert Lowie received his PhD in 1908, followed
by Edward Sapir in 1909. In 1910, on Boas’s recommendation, Edward Sapir
was hired by the Geological Survey of Canada to head a new Division of
Anthropology and design a program of ethnographic research. With Kroeber
at the University of California, Lowie at the American Museum of Natural
History, Sapir at the Geological Survey of Canada, and Chamberlain at Clark

Introduction | 11
University, Boas’s students were now deployed at four institutions and in two
countries, with new opportunities on the horizon for then-current students
to conduct research in Mexico.
In Boas’s career 1911 was a signal year. The publication of “Changes in
Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants,” the result of his work for the
Dillingham Commission in New York, had huge implications for current the-
ories about race and solidified a significant dimension to Boas’s expertise,
while the publication of the first volume of the Handbook of American Indian
Languages definitively changed the character of linguistic analysis and placed
the study of language at the forefront of his research. Finally, publication
of “The Mind of Primitive Man,” established Boas as a public intellectual,
particularly where issues concerning race were involved.32 The proposed
School of Ethnology and Archaeology in Mexico was set to open, and he was
planning to spend a period of time there.
In 1911 Teit’s political work was involving him in negotiations with the
provincial government of British Columbia, with the prospect of taking
the negotiations to Ottawa. Boas, particularly, saw this as a good moment
to place Teit’s work on a more secure financial footing. Until this point Boas
had been supporting Teit’s work on an ad hoc basis with monies derived from
Columbia University and Homer Sargent. Although neither source provided
a secure stream of revenue, Boas wrote to Teit, suggesting that he move to
an annual salary, with an arrangement for regular periods of work and vaca-
tion. Always concerned to reserve time for activities apart from research and
opportunities for other work that might arise, Teit expressed reluctance. Boas’s
alternative was to suggest that Teit join Sapir’s new Anthropology Division
in the Geological Survey of Canada. From Boas’s perspective, a transfer to
the Geological Survey of Canada under Sapir allowed Teit to continue his
ethnographic work while having a secure income, with new work mandated
and directed by Sapir and Teit finishing up a few remaining projects from
his time with Boas.
This plan was not flawless. Boas saw the institutional solidity of the Geo-
logical Survey of Canada as likely to provide a financially secure platform
for Teit’s work, but his equally strong single-mindedness led him to disregard
the disjunction between Teit’s clearly stated preference for pursuing multiple
kinds of work and the Canadian bureaucratic system that expected employ-
ees of the Geological Survey of Canada to work full-time. Teit was not the
only person who gave voice to the problem. Homer Sargent wrote a letter to
Sapir indicating that Teit would need substantial time off for hunting—not
something routinely provided to employees of the Canadian civil service,
then or now. However, the prospect of full-time employment was also a fac-
tor in Teit’s decision, and with the provision that his status would be that of

12 | Introduction
an “outside man,” allowing him to remain in British Columbia and not move
to Ottawa, he accepted Sapir’s offer.
In this apparently felicitous compromise there were several hidden dan-
gers. Unlike an appointment to a research position based in the Geological
Survey of Canada’s offices in Ottawa, appointment to the outside service
was not, technically, permanent. It was a contractual arrangement that was
expected to be renewed without interruption as long as the resources were
available and the contractual obligations were met, but it was also vulnerable
to termination in a way that research appointments of employees based in
Ottawa were not. Sapir did explain the difference, but with a newly funded
research division and World War I still two years away, that potential vul-
nerability did not appear significant. Mythology of the Thompson Indians, and
“Traditions of the Lillouet” were published soon after Teit joined the Geo-
logical Survey (GSC). In a sign of his increasing public recognition, Teit also
published “Indian Tribes of the Interior” in volume 21 of the series Canada
and Its Provinces in 1914.
Teit’s work for the GSC began in 1912 with field work among the Tahl-
tan. An agreement among Boas, Teit, and Sapir stipulated that Teit would
not begin work for Sapir until after Boas’s remaining Salishan projects had
been completed, but to Sapir’s mildly expressed chagrin, Teit overlooked it.
Teit’s difficulty in finding sufficient time in 1912 to fulfill his commitments
to Boas was exacerbated in 1913 by the unanticipated need to rebuild his
house in Spences Bridge to accommodate the new Canadian Northern Pacific
Railway right-of-way, and in 1914 by a debilitating bout of typhoid fever.
Beyond this, his political advocacy grew in scope, and he also continued to
fold other non-GSC work into his schedule, such as meetings with collector
and amateur ethnologist C. F. Newcombe, and field work with botanist John
Davidson. As a result, between 1912 and 1917 Teit never worked a full con-
tractual year for the Geological Survey of Canada.
World War I, which began in September 1914, had greater implications for
Canada, which entered the war immediately, than for the United States, but
it also affected Boas. The school in Mexico was closed. Boas took the oppor-
tunity to do field work among the Ktunaxa in eastern British Columbia in
1914, following up on his own earlier work and the work of Alexander Cham-
berlain, who had died in 1914.33 In 1915 Boas had facial surgery to remove
a cancerous growth and spent some time doing research in Puerto Rico.34
Teit was able to complete his delayed second season of Athapaskan field
work for the GSC in 1915, and the following year he completed a manuscript
on Tahltan and Kaska mythology. His “European Tales from the Upper Thomp-
son Indians” was also published in the Journal of American Folklore. At the
same time he was under increasing pressure from the Geological Survey of

Introduction | 13
Canada to write up a comprehensive report on the ethnography of the Tahl-
tan. The completion and submission of this report had been stipulated in his
first year’s contract and had been carried forward in subsequent contracts.
While the anthology of Tahltan and Kaska narratives was welcome, the GSC
did not consider it a substitute for a full ethnographic report on the results
of his field work. In addition, the year 1916 also saw Boas’s realignment of
Teit’s basketry work to accommodate the larger basketry project with Her-
man Haeberlin, and Haeberlin’s field work in western Washington state on
basketry and linguistics. The developing momentum of the pursuit of reso-
lution to land claims and recognition of Aboriginal title by Indigenous orga-
nizations in British Columbia placed additional pressure on Teit’s time. In
1916 the Indian Rights Association and the Interior Tribes came together to
form the Allied Tribes of British Columbia, with Teit heavily involved.
By 1916 demands of the war had forced the GSC to tighten its operating
budget. Teit’s salary was preserved, but money for field work was no lon-
ger available. To accommodate the GSC’s lack of funds for publication, Boas
arranged to publish Teit’s Tahltan and Kaska tales in the Journal of American
Folklore. During this period there seems to have been uneven communication,
and perhaps miscommunication, among Teit, Boas, and Sargent concerning
the GSC’s ability to support Teit. Although Sapir continued to make full pro-
vision for Teit’s salary in his yearly contract, Sargent, particularly, was under
the impression that Teit was “practically laid off,” with the implication that
he was in need of additional work if Boas could provide it.
At the beginning of 1917 Teit’s commitment to complete the Salishan
projects for Boas still remained unfulfilled. Haeberlin’s 1916 field work in
western Washington had been interrupted by a diagnosis of diabetes, a fatal
illness prior to the discovery of insulin. Haeberlin and Teit did meet, briefly
but cordially, at Spences Bridge in 1917 while Haeberlin was in a period of
remission, but Teit’s subsequent work was complicated by the urgency to
complete the work on basketry before Haeberlin’s impending death. A com-
bination of factors, including the amount of time Teit was able to allocate to
GSC projects, which never equaled the full year foreseen in his contract, his
tendency to be casual about fiscal year deadlines in the handling of financial
accounts, although never the accounts themselves, and his failure to produce
the finished ethnography foreseen in his original contract and each succes-
sive contract, led to Teit’s loss of status with GSC administrators other than
Sapir. These factors, ultimately combined with the limitations on the GSC
budget imposed by the war, led to the curtailment of his contract in 1918
and his loss of employment in 1919.
In the last years of his life Teit returned to his earlier sources of work,
including prospecting, but divided the balance of his time between work for

14 | Introduction
Boas and work with the Allied Tribes, including a review with representa-
tives of the governments of Canada and British Columbia of the report of
the Royal Commission on Indian Affairs for the Province of British Colum-
bia. Between 1916 and 1922 Teit completed the essays on the Coeur d’Alene,
Okanagan, Flathead, and Middle Columbia Salish and his contribution to
“Coiled Basketry in British Columbia and Surrounding Region,” co-authored
with Herman Haeberlin and Helen Roberts, and compiled his research on
Nlaka’pamux ethnobotany. Apart from “Tatooing and Face and Body Paint-
ing,” which had been completed earlier, additional material on Nlaka’pamux
ethnography was integrated with the “Notes on Songs of the Indians of Brit-
ish Columbia,”35 which Teit sent to Sapir in 1921.
Although Teit expressed bitterness over his loss of GSC employment in
his subsequent letters to Sapir, his relationship with Sapir remained cordial.
Sapir arranged to pay Teit for materials not included in earlier submissions.
The principal outstanding obligation was the report on Tahltan ethnog-
raphy, for which Sapir had been asking since 1913. While Teit submitted
a brief report on his Tahltan field work for the GSC annual report, which
Sapir found useful but more detailed than necessary, he hesitated when it
came to longer reports. When he submitted his manuscript on Tahltan and
Kaska narratives he invited Sapir to rearrange it as he wished. He was hes-
itant, as well, about the report on Tahltan field work, suggesting that The
Thompson Indians of British Columbia might be a model. He did not com-
plete the Tahltan manuscript, although Sapir offered to help with advice. In
the absence of the hands-on editorial work for which Boas had always assumed
responsibility, Teit appears to have been at something of a loss. Although
Sapir and the GSC took for granted Teit’s ability to produce a fully publish-
able manuscript based on his research, Teit had never actually been through
the process. Later, in anticipation of receiving Teit’s remaining manuscripts,
Boas mentioned to Sargent that Teit’s material always had to be rewritten
but subsequently expressed surprise that the manuscripts he received on the
American Plateau were well presented. The sections of Teit’s unpublished
notes that are clearly related to his published monographs read well, as do
his published monographs. There is no real doubt of his ability to write an
ethnographic report on the Tahltan.
Different authors favor different genres. Teit’s most natural genre may well
have been the letter. His letters are clear, straightforward and coherent, and
contain a considerable amount of ethnographic information. Penciled brack-
ets and marginal labels indicate that Boas mined them for contributions to
the developing manuscripts. A close second might have been the essay on a
single topic. In his discussion of approaches to and consequences of Chris-
tian conversion among the Nlaka’pamux incorporated into his letter to Boas

Introduction | 15
on November 9, 1895, he presented a kind of analysis largely absent from
the declarative statements characteristic of his ethnographies. In terms of
longer publications Teit was apparently most comfortable with the narra-
tive anthology. He worked on these at intervals throughout his career, often
when deadlines loomed for other material.
In the years between 1917 and Teit’s death the letters between Teit and
Boas follow a long-established pattern, although those that are most detailed
are those in which he reports the results of field work, generally in relation
to basketry. Haeberlin died early in 1918. Although Teit’s relationship with
Helen Roberts, the former Columbia University graduate student whom Boas
recruited to edit the manuscript, was sometimes strained, he appears to
have enjoyed the work on the basketry itself. In Boas’s letters to Teit during
this period there is no hint about other events in Boas’s life—for example, his
profound aversion to the war, which the United States joined in 1917,
his response to reports that anthropologists working in Mexico had been
recruited as spies by the United States government, or his censure in 1919
by the American Anthropological Association.36
After Teit’s death in 1922 Boas supervised the preparation of the remaining
manuscripts for publication. In support of this work, three people undertook
field work, including Boas himself, who conducted field work in Washing-
ton state in 1927.37 Gladys Reichard (1893–1955) conducted field research on
language and myth among the Coeur d’Alene in 1927 and 1929,38 and Eliz-
abeth Dijour (1910–1991) spent three months in 1931 doing field research
among the Nlaka’pamux to resolve certain issues in Nlaka’pamuxcin and to
edit Teit’s Nlaka’pamux texts.
Boas edited the essays published in “The Salishan Tribes of the Western
Plateaus” (1930), including “Tatooing and Face and Body Painting” (1930),
and the separately published, relatively short essay “The Middle Columbia
Salish” (1928). Elsie Viault Steedman (1892–1972), a student who later taught
at Hunter College, edited the ethnobotany manuscript. Lucy Kramer (Lucy
Kramer Cohen, 1907–2007), then a student at Columbia, reviewed Teit’s let-
ters with a view to incorporating any material that had been previously over-
looked and edited the final compilation of narratives.
Publication of the paper on Salish coiled basketry continued to require
time, effort, diplomacy, and money well into 1928, when it was finally issued
in the Forty-first Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology. In this
matter Boas and Sargent worked as a tag team, with Sargent negotiating with
both the Field Museum and the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE). As the
intention of the Bureau of American Ethnology to publish the manuscript
appeared to falter, in 1923 Sargent arranged with the Field Museum to pub-
lish the work and sent a letter to BAE Director Walter Fewkes, asking him to

16 | Introduction
return the manuscript to Boas.39 However, the BAE refused, on the grounds
that according to an arcane system whereby the Bureau funded clerical work
on manuscripts through payment to authors, funds had been expended by
the Bureau to obtain it.40 Pessimistic about his relationship with the BAE,
Boas wrote to Sargent, “I heard, indirectly, from information received from
a member of the Bureau, that Dr. Fewkes proposes to lock the paper up in
the vaults,” and suggested that the best option would be for Sargent to per-
suade Fewkes to publish the paper in 1924.41 By late May 1924 the Bureau
had agreed to print it, but the preparation and negotiations continued for a
further four years, with Boas arranging or doing the work of proof reading,
documenting illustrations from which the Bureau had removed identifying
information, and providing additional color plates. Sargent contributed addi-
tional funds, as required. In 1928, as “Coiled Basketry in British Columbia
and Surrounding Region” was about to be published, the Bureau of American
Ethnology offered to publish “The Salishan Tribes of the Western Plateaus.”
In 1930 Boas wrote to Sargent, “I still have here one big drawer full of
notes collected by Mr. Teit. I want to get somebody to go over all this ma-
terial and to compare it with his published notes and to throw away whatever
had been published and to pick out any new material, of which there must
be quite a little.” Judging from the initials “L.K.” and the date, “Jan. 1931”
written on the copied fragments of letters in the APS files, this work appears
to have been undertaken by Lucy Kramer. Sargent contributed funds for this
work as well. On February 25, 1931, Boas wrote to Sargent, “The revision of
Teit’s notes is going on. We found quite a little that is worth preserving,”
but in his last extant letter to Sargent he had revised his assessment, writing:
“We have also worked out quite a few of the notes of Mr. Teit, although I am
afraid they will not yield as much as it seemed in the beginning.” A review
of the passages earmarked by Lucy Kramer indicates that by 1931 much of
it was already in print.
By the end of 1932 (Haeberlin et al.) “Coiled Basketry in British Colum-
bia and Surrounding Region,” (Steedman) “Ethnobotany of the Thompson
Indians,” (Teit) “The Middle Columbia Salish,” and (Teit and Boas) “The
Salishan Tribes of the Western Plateaus” were all in print. In his last known
letter to Sargent, Boas also reported on additional work in progress: “I have
now a report from Miss Dijour on the Thompson language based largely
upon Teit’s notes and upon the results of her study in and around Spences
Bridge during the summer of 1931.” However, this work remained unfin-
ished. Dijour, whom Boas had met in Paris when she was a student of Paul
Rivet interested in South American languages, had arrived at Columbia in
September 1930 just as Boas was departing to work with Bogoras’s student,
Julia Averkieva, in Fort Rupert and Alert Bay. In his absence Dijour worked

Introduction | 17
with Gladys Reichard, and studied the Interior Salish literature as well as
Teit’s collections in the American Museum of Natural History. During the
1930–31 academic year she also finished her master’s thesis, “Preliminary Study
of Runasimi (Q’eswa) of the Cuzqueno and Bolivian Groups.”
Dijour’s correspondence with Boas during her field work in the summer of
1931 indicates that that her progress with the language was uncertain. Toward
the end of her field season she wrote to Boas, “Now I can understand why
you like Salish. It is so terribly complicated that it is interesting.”42 In October
of 1931, the field work completed, she returned to France. The twenty-two
letters written by Dijour and Boas between November 1931 and September
1933 document a kind of paper chase, with Boas trying, ultimately in vain, to
secure a publishable report on the Nlaka’pamux language, and Dijour trying,
again without long-term success, to establish herself as a linguist specializing
in South American languages. At the outset Boas was optimistic and listed
Dijour’s anticipated publication on Thompson grammar and texts in a brief
publication, “Recent Work in American Indian Languages.”43 While he never
flagged in his queries about the progress of the work, by September 1933 he
appeared less optimistic that Dijour would finish it, and in 1933 their corre-
spondence stopped. Dijour’s field notes have not been preserved in the APS,
and while she lodged a small collection of Nlaka’pamux objects and a catalog
in a museum in Paris, her field notes do not appear to be there.44
In Canada two scholars worked a generation or so apart to bring Teit’s
Tahltan and Kaska notes to publication. Diamond Jenness, appointed to a
permanent position in the National Museum of Canada in 1920, read Teit’s
field notes while doing field work among the Carrier and Sekani in 1923 and
1924, and decided to edit them for publication following his return to Ottawa.
Although his time was subsequently constrained by his appointment as Sapir’s
successor as chief of the Anthropology Division following Sapir’s resignation
in September 1925, he did review the notes and “type up, organize and edit
approximately 180 entries related to Tahltan social organization and reli-
gion, with a view to incorporating these into Teit’s draft manuscript.”45 In
1956 June Helm MacNeish edited and published Teit’s Tahltan manuscript
as “Field Notes on the Tahltan and Kaska Indians: 1912–1915.”46

Interior Salish Ethnography

The initiative for the ethnography developed by Teit and Boas emerged
from Boas’s work with the Committee on North-Western Tribes of the Brit-
ish Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS). Following his first,
privately financed, field work in British Columbia in 1886, Boas conducted

18 | Introduction
field research for the BAAS in 1888, 1889, 1890, 1894, and 1897, primarily
on the west coast of British Columbia, but also in the interior among the
Ktunaxa and Secwepemc, including a brief visit to the Nlaka’pamux in 1888.
In his Second General Report on the Indians of British Columbia he included
a brief essay entitled “The Salish Languages of British Columbia,” which
included vocabulary and relationship terms in “Stlā’tlumH” [Stl’atl’imx],
“Okanā’kēn,” and “Shuswap.”47 In 1890 he conducted research in the north-
western United States with funds from the Bureau of American Ethnology.
In the years in which he did not conduct field work, he published in the
committee’s annual report various reports based on his prior research. For
his 1897 field work he combined funds from the British Association and the
Jesup North Pacific Expedition, and filed his last report with the British Asso-
ciation for the Advancement of Science in 1898.
The pillars of Boas’s research as it developed during these early years were
physical anthropology, linguistics, mythology, and a rather broadly focused
ethnographic description collated under functional headings, for example
“Houses and Boats” and “Customs Referring to Birth, Marriage and Death.”
This preliminary approach to ethnography was encouraged by the BAAS com-
mittee’s insistence on general survey over in-depth inquiry. He moved to sep-
arate brief descriptions of particular societies in his Second General Report on
the Indians of British Columbia (1890).
In his first days in Victoria in 1886 he reported that he was able to re-
establish rapport with the two Bella Coola [Nuxalkmc] men he had met in
Europe by speaking to them in their language,48 but for general conversa-
tion at a time when relatively few Indigenous people in British Columbia
were fluent in English, he relied on Chinook jargon49 as a lingua franca. Chi-
nook jargon was a trade jargon, not to be confused with the Chinook lan-
[128.104.46.196] Project MUSE (2024-04-09 03:55 GMT) UW-Madison Libraries

guage.50 In the preface to Chinook Texts, published in 1894, Boas wrote about
his experience in working with Charles Cultee, who spoke the Chinook lan-
guage: “My work of translating and explaining the texts was greatly facili-
tated by Cultee’s remarkable intelligence. After he had once grasped what I
wanted, he explained to me the grammatical structure of the sentences by
means of examples, and elucidated the sense of difficult periods. This work
was the more difficult as we conversed only by means of Chinook jargon.”51
Chinook jargon, itself, was not uniform across the northwest. Working on
the Siletz Reservation in Oregon in 1890, Boas found that the Chinook jargon
used in that locality was different from the Chinook jargon used in BC “and
therefore I experience difficulty in talking with them.”52 Even in much later
field work Boas continued to use Chinook jargon. Working in Bella Bella in
December 1923, he wrote to his wife, “I speak Chinook [Jargon] with all the

Introduction | 19
people except my main language [?]. I speak the Chinook [Jargon] quite
well, although there are always . . . words that pop up. I take it down in
shorthand,53 everything they tell me.”54
However, from the beginning, inquiry into the actual language of the peo-
ple he met was a primary focus of his research. Reflecting on his initial work
in Victoria, he wrote, “I began to ask about the languages. In the beginning
it is always hard work. But I soon found the pronouns and a few verbs.
That is usually sufficient to break the ice.” At Comox, later that fall, he wrote,
“I now have about four hundred words in both the Comox [and Pentlatch]
languages. I still have no texts but hope to get some soon. It is always quite
difficult to get started in a language, but I shall be very happy if I can get
one thousand words and a few texts in both.”55 During his visit to Lytton in
July 1888, he wrote in his diary, “I am still here and am not sorry, because
I must know something of the language to get ahead.” With the help of the
resident missionary, who invited Nlaka’pamux residents of the village to meet
Boas at the church and tell him stories, he was able to collect some narra-
tives and a small vocabulary.56
Boas expected that his own expertise in a new language would quickly
progress to the point of enabling him to record texts, and his facility with
language was apparently sufficient to accomplish this. During his first visit
to Alert Bay he recorded family histories, learned about the cannibal figure
prominent in Kwakwaka’wakw mythology, and about “a rattle belonging to
a long story,”57 a phrase revealing that he understood a primary point about
the relationship between narrative and object in Northwest Coast societies.
Although he recorded texts from two men in Rivers Inlet in 1897, and worked
with Willy Gladstone on texts in Bella Bella in 1923,58 his long associa-
tion with George Hunt and Fort Rupert ensured that his greatest familiar-
ity with a Wakashan language was with Kwaḱwala. Remembering Boas in
the early 1950s, Kwakwaka’wakw people at Alert Bay recalled that he spoke
Kwaḱwala, though slowly.59
In his 1886 field work he was intent on developing a general understand-
ing of the region in which he was working, commenting at one point, “I then
will have covered all tribes of the seashore between Vancouver Island and
the continent,”60 but more broadly, he saw language and mythology as indi-
cators of the connections among Indigenous societies, saying, “This mass of
stories is gradually beginning to bear fruit because I can now discover cer-
tain traits characteristic of different groups of people. I think I am on the
right track in considering mythology a useful tool for differentiating and
judging the relationship of tribes.”
In November 1888 Boas wrote to J. W. Powell of the Bureau of American
Ethnology, summarizing his methodology. “I endeavor to obtain vocabularies

20 | Introduction
and grammatical notes and at once proceed to obtain texts principally on
ethnological subjects, which I make the basis of further ethnological and
linguistic researches. I attempt to study the customs and traditions of each
tribe in the greatest detail and later on proceed to make a card catalog of
all characteristic peculiarities of a tribe, which are finally tabulated. Then
it appears, that certain phenomena are always coexistent. These must have
originally belonged together while newly developed or introduced phenom-
ena appear in various combinations or [are] isolated.”61
His initial survey on the coast completed, Boas wanted to do in-depth
work, and particularly to follow up on his short Ktunaxa field work from
1886. In this he was at odds with Horatio Hale,62 who administered his work
for the BAAS Committee on the North-Western Tribes at that time. The scope
of work outlined by Hale for two or three months’ field work in the sum-
mer of 1888 involved a survey of “eleven or twelve” linguistic stocks with
an outline of the grammar, accompanying vocabulary, a description of the
physical traits of the people, and ethnographic data concerning tribal and
social organization, customs, and arts, all supported with an ethnographic
map.63 Having secured two months’ leave (not three, to Hale’s concern) from
his job with Science, Boas left for British Columbia in May 1888, intending
to concentrate on the Ktunaxa and satisfy the committee’s survey require-
ments with information on the distribution of tribes as well as a visit to the
Interior Salish. Hale won. Between June 1 and July 26, 1888, Boas conducted
research in physical anthropology, linguistics, and ethnography the length
of the coast, privileging coastal societies not visited in 1886, but with a little
time for the Ktunaxa. Boas’s physical anthropology had four components:
the measurement of living people, the making of casts of faces of living peo-
ple, the measurement of skeletal material, and portrait photography of living
people from several angles—front, side and three-quarter views—intended
to represent physical types.64 The original goal was to define the physical
character of particular human populations through recording and tabula-
tion of data on as many individual representatives as possible. The method
involved the reduction of a defined array of individual characteristics to
statistics, correlated to determine broad characteristics defining a popula-
tion “type,” and, eventually, to define relationships among populations in a
given geographic setting. Boas had learned the techniques of measurement
from Virchow prior to his field work on Baffin Island.65 In 1888 his physi-
cal anthropology was limited to anthropometry research at the jail in Victo-
ria and the measurement of eighty-eight skeletons. His report, published in
1889, presented tables of measurements of some individuals and drawings
of skulls. He also conducted research on the Tsimshian, Tlingit, Haida, and
Nuu-chah-nulth (Nootkan) languages and ethnographic research among the

Introduction | 21
Squamish, Tsimshian, Haida, Nootka, and Ktunaxa. The two days spent in
Lytton afforded his first meeting with Nlaka’pamux.66
The ethnographic survey Boas carried out for the British Association
for the Advancement of Science provided him with field work experience
and an early publication record touching several areas of the Northwest
Coast and the Interior of British Columbia. By 1889 he had published twelve
papers on the basis of his field work between 1886 and 1888. Several of
these papers were published in German, in Petermann’s Mittheilungen, Glo-
bus, and the Verhandlungun der Beliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie; those in
English were published in Canada in the Transactions of the Royal Society of
Canada, at that time the only learned journal in Canada publishing anthro-
pology, and in the United States in the Journal of American Folklore, the Pro-
ceedings of the U.S. National Museum, the Bulletin of the American Geographical
Society, and the American Anthropologist. By 1894 Boas had presented eth-
nographic information on the Bilqula (Nuxalkmc), along with the results
of his research in physical anthropology in “Physical Characteristics of the
Tribes of the North Pacific Coast,”67 and a report on “The Indian Tribes of
the Lower Fraser River.”68 In every year between 1888 and 1898 except 1891
Boas published a report of his previous year’s work in the annual reports of
the BAAS Committee on North-Western Tribes. The 1891 report presented a
brief ethnography of the Ktunaxa authored by Boas’s Clark University PhD
student Alexander Chamberlain.69
Between 1888 and 1894 Boas had stayed, somewhat impatiently, within
the limits of the BAAS preference for broad survey work, but at this point he
was clearly ready to move on to in-depth research. The Committee on North-
Western Tribes planned to terminate its work with the 1894 field season, with
a final report in 1895. By the end of 1894 Boas had published Chinook Texts
and was preparing “Indianische Sagen”70 for publication in Europe. He had
taken his Kwakwaka’wakw research to the point where he had trained George
Hunt to carry on with tasks in his absence, and his serendipitous meeting
with Teit, who was knowledgeable, articulate, and fluent in Nlaka’pamux-
cin, had sparked the inception of Nlaka’pamux ethnography.
Boas’s 1895 BAAS report served to document his own late 1894 work among
the Nlaka’pamux, anthropology research entitled “Physical Characteris-
tics of the Tribes of the North Pacific Coast,” which included results of the
Nlaka’pamux measurements facilitated for him by Teit, while a paper on “The
Tinneh Tribes of Nicola Valley” presented the results of Teit’s research in
the spring of 1895 among people descended from the Stuwixamux.
At this point Boas and Teit were not alone in their interest in Indigenous
societies in the Interior of British Columbia. Although Boas’s relationship
with Horatio Hale was limited to administrative matters, he had a stronger

22 | Introduction
professional relationship with the geologist George Dawson (1849–1901), with
whom he corresponded between 1886 and 1898. Dawson was nine years older
than Boas, and had spent considerable time in British Columbia during the
1870s and 1880s, combining his work for the Geological Survey of Canada
with an informal, but keen, interest in ethnography. In their early correspon-
dence Dawson offered Boas advice on various matters, including preparations
for field work among the Kwakwaka’wakw, and, in turn, solicited advice
from Boas on the topography of Baffin Island and the publication of maps in
Science. Dawson, who was also on the Committee for North-Western Tribes
and had brought its work to Boas’s attention, replaced Horatio Hale on the
committee in 1891 and effectively became the administrator for Boas’s work
with the BAAS between that time and its conclusion in 1898. Dawson even-
tually became director of the Geological Survey of Canada and remained
better known as a geologist than as an anthropologist, but his 1891 paper
presented to the Royal Society of Canada (at that time the principal learned
society in Canada) titled “Notes on the Shuswap People of British Colum-
bia,”71 predated The Shuswap by seventeen years and in 1895 was one of a
very few published contributions to Interior Salish ethnography.
Joseph McKay (1829–1900), who had served many years with the Hudson’s
Bay Company, also knew the interior of British Columbia well. He served
as commissioner for the 1881 Canada census of British Columbia, and by
the late 1880s was the Canadian Department of Indian Affairs agent for the
Kamloops Agency, with jurisdiction over some Nlaka’pamux and Secwepemc
Indian bands. Boas cited McKay in his introduction to “The Tinneh Tribe of
Nicola Valley,” noting: “Some notes on the history of this tribe were given
by Dr. Dawson according to information obtained from Mr. J. W. McKay,
formerly Indian Agent at Kamloops, who has an extensive knowledge of the
Indians of the interior.” Boas’s 1895 introduction of Teit as a person “thor-
oughly familiar with the NtlakyāˊpamuQ,” whom he had delegated to carry
out research on the Nicola Athapascan people,72 did not go unremarked.
Citing his own previous Nicola Valley field work in general terms, Dawson
objected to the extent of Stuwix territory outlined by Teit. Dawson and Boas
continued to correspond until 1898, and although Dawson took issue with
minor points in certain of Boas’s BAAS reports and independently assumed
a surprising degree of editorial control over one or two reports, eliminating
some material without prior consultation, their correspondence did not touch
on Interior Salish or Stuwixamux ethnography again. McKay and Teit also
corresponded, although Teit did not always agree with McKay’s interpreta-
tion of the history of the region. By 1901 both Dawson and McKay had died.
Charles Hill-Tout (1858–1944),73 who was born in Devon, England, and
had early theological training in England, had settled in British Columbia

Introduction | 23
permanently in 1891, raising his growing family in Vancouver, where he
taught at one private school and was the proprietor of another for a time,
and in the Fraser Valley, where he had a sawmill. In the 1890s he conducted
archaeological investigations in the lower Fraser Valley and, following a
meeting with Michel, an Nlaka’pamux chief at Lytton, began conducting
ethnographic research among Interior Salish societies. While keenly inter-
ested in Indigenous history, he had no relevant training. During Boas’s time
with the BAAS Dawson arranged for Boas to analyze a skull excavated by
Hill-Tout, and in 1895 Hill-Tout’s analysis appeared in print,74 followed
by Boas’s analysis, which countered Hill-Tout’s conclusions.75
Hill-Tout’s ethnographic research in British Columbia paralleled Teit’s to
a degree. Hill-Tout’s essay on the Nlaka’pamux preceded The Thompson Indi-
ans of British Columbia by a year, and he published “Report on the Ethnology
of the Stlatlumh [Lillooet] of British Columbia” in 1905 ( just preceding Teit’s
The Lillooet Indians), and “Report on the Ethnology of the Okanák’en of Brit-
ish Columbia, an Interior Division of the Salish Stock,” in 1911. Hill-Tout was
peripherally involved in the first Jesup Expedition in 1897, when he assisted
Harlan Smith in the archaeological excavations at Lytton. Hill-Tout’s eth-
nographies are shorter and less comprehensive than Teit’s, and Boas’s sum-
mary of Teit’s critical notes on Hill-Tout’s interpretation of St’at’imc and
Lilwat ethnography are appended to The Lillooet Indians. Although Boas later
included some vocabularies compiled by Hill-Tout in his manuscript on the
distribution of Salish languages, Hill-Tout did not have a positive or endur-
ing connection with either Boas or Teit.

Approaches to Ethnography
As the intellectual heir to a tradition of ethnological research derived from
a long tradition of scholarship in Europe and developed specifically by
scholars of the German Enlightenment, Boas was committed to empiricism.
As Vermeulen has noted, in the German tradition “ethnography was set up as
an empirical, systematic, and intimately comparative research program of
peoples and nations.” Ethnography involved “comprehensive descriptions
of all aspects of all peoples,” descriptions made in order to “enable world-
wide comparison.” The index attribute was not customs but language.76 In
moving to in-depth ethnographies of the Kwakiutl and the Nlaka’pamux,
Boas continued to incorporate an emphasis on language and a comparative
perspective into an empiricist approach. He had first expressed his central
position, which was antithetical to the evolutionary theory prevailing among
better established anthropologists in the United States when he arrived in
North America, in exchanges with Otis Mason, then director of the U.S.

24 | Introduction
National Museum, in the pages of Science in 1887.77 In his address, pub-
lished as “Human Faculty as Determined by Race,” at the conclusion of his
term as president of the American Association of the Advancement of Sci-
ence in 1894, Boas affirmed that rather than following a fixed evolutionary
scheme, societies developed through their own interaction with their envi-
ronment and influences exerted through their interaction with neighboring
groups. As Stocking has noted, “Human Faculty as Determined by Race”
laid the foundation of his long-term endeavor to establish historical events
rather than race as the primary factor in the shaping of human societies.78 In
the preface to The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl
Indians, published in 1897, Boas emphasized the importance of history and
context in studying Northwest Coast Aboriginal societies, writing: “While a
hasty glance at these people and a comparison with other tribes emphasize
the uniformity of their culture, a closer investigation reveals many peculiar-
ities of individual tribes which prove that their culture has developed slowly
and from a number of distinct centers, each people adding something to the
culture which we observe at the present day,”79 and in an early report on
the Jesup Expedition, he affirmed: “Anthropology has reached the point of
development where the careful investigation of facts shakes our firm belief
in the far-reaching theories that have been built up.”80 In the development
of ethnography, Boas’s primary interest was in what he termed the ‘men-
tal life’ of the people studied, and their understanding of their own cultural
phenomena. The primary method for arriving at this understanding was the
collection of data through field work.
Boas had a broad view of both ethnography and its scientific necessity,
and from the beginning he envisioned a program of work larger than any
one person could accomplish. During his first field work in the Arctic Boas
assumed full responsibility for both the conception and execution of the work,
and he continued to do so during the years he worked with the British Asso-
ciation for the Advancement of Science. However, during the BAAS years he
began to develop his practice of delegating work beyond what he himself
could do. Chamberlain’s field research among the Ktunaxa, a project Boas
had once hoped to pursue himself, is an early example. Later he arranged for
Chamberlain to edit a grammar of the Haida language produced by the former
missionary, Charles Harrison.81 Still later, he arranged for Livingston Farrand
to edit Teit’s manuscript for the Mythology of the Thompson Indians.
Judith Berman has identified three types of individuals able to produce the
ethnographic data that Boas sought. In addition to the “professional anthro-
pologist,” epitomized by Boas himself, there were the “native fieldworker,”
such as George Hunt, and the “resident outsider,” ideally a person “who had
lived for a long time in proximity to the culture, spoke the language, and

Introduction | 25
[was] on terms of intimate friendship with the natives.”82 James Teit met
the criteria for a “resident outsider.”
Boas also had particular views regarding the data forming the basis of an
ethnography. Berman, citing Boas’s introduction to the Handbook of Amer-
ican Indian Languages, has noted his distinction between “raw, unprocessed
ethnographic materials,” directly created by members of a society—for exam-
ple, texts in the native language, material culture and song—and “second-
hand accounts,” which, however carefully researched and composed by an
observer raised in another society, were inevitably filtered through other
cultural perspectives and expectations.
While primary utterances, material or non-material, originating within the
society and secondary expositions penned by a non-Native observer became
elements, to one degree or another, in the ethnographic projects begun by
both Boas and Teit in the mid-1890s, as well in as the ethnographies gen-
erated through the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, Boas used two quite dif-
ferent approaches to shape the ethnography that emerged from his own
work among the Kwakwaka’wakw and the ethnography that emerged from
Teit’s work among the Interior Salish. Boas’s Kwakwaka’wakw methodol-
ogy emerges most clearly in his description of his field work practice in let-
ters written from the field during the summer of 1900.83 At that time he was
studying Kwaḱwala with a tutor, so as to be able to understand better and
revise the more than seven hundred pages of texts he had previously recorded
in the language. He spent weeks on this during the 1900 field season, and only
afterwards turned to ‘customs.’ In his 1889 BAAS report, First General Report
on the Indians of British Columbia,84 Boas had provided significant information
about various aspects of Kwakwaka’wakw belief and practice. A stand-alone
report the following year introduced the component Kwakwaka’wakw tribes,
situated them geographically, and presented ethnographic data organized
under headings such as Social Organization; Customs re Birth, Marriage and
Death; Religion, Shamanism and Witchcraft; and Secret Societies. The Social
Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians, published in 1897
but planned since 1894, also situated the Kwakwaka’wakw tribes geographi-
cally, outlined certain aspects of their economy and daily practice, and pro-
vided a detailed account of the winter ceremonial, a central institution. In
later years he considered his truly reliable work to have begun with this pub-
lication.85 By 1900 Boas seems to have been approaching the elucidation of
Kwakwaka’wakw mental life from the inside out, with the texts, considered
to be primary utterances unfiltered by other cultural perceptions, as a key.
He subsequently turned his attention to other aspects of Kwakwaka’wakw
cultural practice and understanding—food preparation, material culture and
technology, geographic names—but in his own approach to Kwakwaka’wakw

26 | Introduction
culture he appears to have worked with a kind of ideal “whole” in mind. He
published sections of his work as they became ready but with relatively lit-
tle in the way of additional overview. Even The Kwakiutl of Vancouver Island,
the title of which suggests a comprehensive exposition, is a compendium of
information on technology and material culture, which seems to begin more
or less in medias res.
In contrast, the approach Boas suggested for Teit moved from the outside
in. At first glance, this seems counterintuitive. Teit was a fluent speaker
of Nlaka’pamuxcin, and in 1894 he was also a member of a Nlaka’pamux
family. He might have been seen to be ideally positioned to work from the
inside out. As Wickwire has pointed out, Teit had recorded narratives and
historical information about the Nlaka’pamux, particularly in the area near
his home, prior to his meeting with Boas, and as noted earlier, lists of mem-
bers of Nlaka’pamux communities near Spences Bridge, recorded in 1893,
are preserved among Teit’s notes.86 Teit thus approached his first ethnogra-
phy with prior knowledge. However, he had no training in anthropology and
no experience in the construction of ethnography, and it appears that Boas
provided guidance. In Teit’s letter to Boas of October 29, 1894, he refers to
an October 7 letter from Boas. Teit writes, “I have commenced writing the
report on this tribe of Indians as you desired and will include all the points
which you enumerated in your last letter to me,” and he goes on to list the
chapters he has covered: “Introduction,” “Names of the tribe,” “Ethnological
sketch of the people with their chief Characteristics,” “Extent, physical fea-
tures, and climatical condition of their country,” “Recognized divisions, and
boundaries, dialects, villages,” “Numbers of tribe past and present, principal
cause of their decrease,” and “Migrations and mixture with other tribes and
races,” noting that the more difficult chapters were yet to come and would
require more time. All of these topics are represented in the chapter head-
ings of the eventual publication; for example, Historical and Geographical
Setting, Clothing and Ornaments, Subsistence; Travel, Transportation and
Trade; Social Organization and Festivals; Birth and Childhood, Puberty, Mar-
riage and Death; and Religion. As in Boas’s first published ethnography, The
Central Eskimo, the associated information is presented in straightforward,
declarative exposition. When Teit was writing The Thompson Indians of Brit-
ish Columbia he was thus channeling both established and newly acquired
knowledge through and against a relatively rigid predetermined template.
Once established, the Nlaka’pamux template was transferred with modest
adjustments to the The Lillooet Indians and The Shuswap, and he carried at
least a version of it with him into his field work in the United States.
Both Boas and Teit employed an approach to ethnography that has come
to be known as the “ethnographic present.” Although monographs written

Introduction | 27
in the ethnographic present often included information current at the time
of writing, the overall descriptive approach was retrospective, intended to
create an image of a society at a time before contact. This approach to the
work was designed to fit, and even exemplify, Boas’s historicist approach.
Darnell has noted that Boas “insisted that there must be an ethnographic
baseline before grand generalization could proceed.”87 The first three mono-
graphs, particularly, followed a relatively standard format, implicitly orga-
nizing the content for comparison, although neither Boas nor Teit wrote an
encompassing comparative work.
In the course of critiquing Boas’s work on the central Northwest Coast,
Michael Harkin has considered the role of the ethnographic present in Boas’s
ethnography, finding that as a device, the ethnographic present provided
“[s]ocial, temporal, emotional, and geographic distance” that were “essential
to Boas’ view of anthropology as a science,” and in limiting the focus to what
was local and cultural, supported its claim to be a science.88 As other scholars
have noted,89 the use of the ethnographic present to describe cultural practice
in a putative past time ignored the profound challenges and upheavals that
the societies studied by Teit, Boas, and others of that era were facing. Teit
was not only aware of the impact of the major societal changes that affected
the people about whom he wrote, but was also actively advocating remedi-
ation through political channels. However, even during his most active and
demanding time as a political advocate he continued to write ethnography
using the ethnographic present. On February 16, 1911, immediately following
news that he was planning to accompany Interior chiefs to Victoria, he com-
mented to Boas, “I am glad to see lately the Canadian gov. have appointed
a Dominion Ethnologist in the person of Sapir. This may help things along
on the Canadian side.” This suggests that he saw ethnography not only as a
hedge against the loss of cultural knowledge but also as a scientific support
in the struggle for recognition.
By highlighting past cultural practice and drawing unchanged cultural prac-
tice into an image of the past, the ‘ethnographic present’ also, perhaps inad-
vertently, defined information about past cultural practice as a cornerstone
of ethnography. Eventually this led to a sense on the part of some ethnogra-
phers that ethnography itself depended on the availability and foregrounding
of information about the past. In his introduction to The Flathead Indians of
Montana in 1937, fifteen years after Teit’s death, Harry Holbert Turney-High
observed, “I cannot presume to say that this work is complete. A complete
Flathead ethnography will never be written. The elderly informants are dying
rapidly, and the younger people are thoroughly acculturized.”90 Implicit in
Turney-High’s statement is a sense that a significant part of Flathead iden-
tity was placed out of reach on this account. In crystallizing the identity of

28 | Introduction
societies in past time, the ethnographic present created a complicated legacy
for people struggling for recognition of their political, social, and cultural
identity in the time in which they actually live.91
As his work with George Hunt suggests, texts had a central place in Boas’s
concept of ethnography. J. R. Swanton’s Jesup Expedition research among
the Haida in 1900–1901, conducted under Boas’s long-distance supervision,
focused on religious ideas, social organization, and language,92 and fore-
grounded the recording and analysis of texts. In 1905 Boas wrote to W. H.
Holmes of the Bureau of American Ethnology to make the case that the
Bureau should publish the entire set, saying: “I do not think any one would
advocate the study of antique civilizations, or, let me say, of the Turks or the
Russians, without a thorough knowledge of their language and of the literary
documents of these languages, and contributions not based on such material
would not be considered as adequate. In regard to our American Indians we
are in the position that practically no such literary material is available for
study, and it appears to me as one of the essential things that we have to do,
to make such material accessible.”93
Boas was anxious that Teit record texts in Nlaka’pamuxcin, both for their
value as theoretically unfiltered cultural expressions and to provide assistance
in analyzing the language itself. Encouraging Teit to do so became a theme of
his letters from 1898 on, and Boas promised funds to support this work. Teit
expressed willingness but it was not until December 1904 that, according to
Teit’s own report, the first short texts were recorded. The work proceeded
at intervals. Much of Teit’s work on aspects of Nlaka’pamux grammar was
done in anticipation of facilitating the analysis of texts. Between 1904 and 1910
he sent Boas at least eighty-five and possibly over one hundred handwritten
pages of texts and translations. Boas intended to publish them. In 1916, fol-
lowing Teit’s assembly of vocabularies in all of the Interior Salish languages,
he wrote: “My present plan is to publish most of the material, including the
vocabularies, in one volume, to be entitled ‘Contributions to the Ethnology
of the Salish Tribes.’ Your Thompson texts will go in there too, so that the
bulk of the material that I still have will appear in this form.” This volume
was never published. While texts are represented in Teit’s unpublished notes,
it is possible that others remained in the possession of Elizabeth Dijour after
her correspondence with Boas stopped in 1933.
Other “unfiltered” elements of culture—that is, material culture and
song—were significant in Teit’s work. Teit assembled substantial collec-
tions of material culture, particularly from the Nlaka’pamux, St’at’imc, and
Secwepemc. Like The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl
Indians, Teit’s ethnographies emphasize the material and visual and, particu-
larly in the first three monographs, support the exposition with line drawings

Introduction | 29
Other documents randomly have
different content
ses tables en imitation de Boule, ses vitrines dorées remplies de
Saxe moderne: pourquoi supposer qu'elle désirât chez elle autre
chose? Le jeune homme se consola à l'idée d'arranger lui-même son
cabinet de travail, qu'il meublerait de ces nouveaux meubles anglais
genre «pré-raphaélite,» avec de solides bibliothèques sans portes
vitrées.
La servante revint, ferma les rideaux, tisonna le feu, répéta en
souriant: Verrà, verrà. Quand elle fut partie, Archer se leva et
commença à marcher à travers la pièce. Attendrait-il plus
longtemps? Sa position devenait assez ridicule. Peut-être avait-il mal
compris Mme Olenska; peut-être n'avait-elle pas eu l'intention de
l'inviter...
De la rue silencieuse monta le bruit sec des sabots d'un steppeur.
Une voiture s'arrêta et Archer entendit une portière qui s'ouvrait. En
écartant les rideaux, il vit, à la lueur du réverbère, Julius Beaufort
qui aidait Mme Olenska à descendre de son petit coupé anglais.
Beaufort, le chapeau à la main, disait quelque chose à la jeune
femme, qui parut répondre négativement. Ils se serrèrent la main; le
banquier sauta dans la voiture, et Mme Olenska monta lentement les
marches du perron.
Elle entra dans le salon sans paraître surprise d'y trouver Archer. La
surprise était un sentiment auquel elle semblait rarement
s'abandonner.
—Ma petite cabane vous plaît-elle? demanda-t-elle en souriant. Pour
moi, c'est le Paradis!
Tout en parlant, elle dénouait son chapeau à brides et l'envoyait
rejoindre sur une chaise son long manteau.
—Vous l'avez arrangé avec un goût exquis, répondit Archer,
rougissant de la banalité du propos. Il se sentait comme emprisonné
dans le convenu par son désir même de dire quelque chose de
frappant.
—C'est bien insignifiant! Ma famille méprise mon petit coin. En tout
cas, c'est moins triste que chez les van der Luyden.
Archer fut ébloui de tant d'audace: on aurait trouvé peu d'esprits
assez subversifs pour traiter de triste l'imposante demeure des van
der Luyden. Les privilégiés qui y pénétraient, avec un léger frisson,
étaient d'accord pour louer l'élégance des salons. Archer était ravi
que la comtesse Olenska eût traduit l'impression générale.
—Ce que vous avez fait ici est délicieux, répéta-t-il.
—Je l'avoue, j'aime cette petite maison; mais c'est surtout, je crois,
parce qu'elle est dans mon pays, à New-York, et... et que j'y suis
seule.
Elle parlait si bas qu'il entendit à peine la fin de la phrase.
Embarrassé, il répondit:
—Vous aimez tant que ça être seule?
—Oui, puisque mes amis m'empêchent de sentir ma solitude...—Elle
s'assit près du feu et ajouta: Nastasia nous apportera le thé.—Puis,
faisant signe à Archer de reprendre sa place: Je vois que vous avez
déjà choisi votre coin.
Renversée dans un fauteuil, elle croisa ses bras derrière sa tête, et
regarda le feu, les yeux mi-clos.
—C'est l'heure que je préfère, dit-elle; et vous?
Archer crut devoir au sentiment de sa dignité de demander:
—Je craignais que vous n'eussiez oublié l'heure. Beaufort vous a
sans doute retardée.
Elle prit un air amusé.
—Que voulez-vous dire? Avez-vous attendu longtemps? Mr Beaufort
m'a menée voir un tas de maisons, puisqu'on a décidé que je ne
devais pas rester dans celle-ci.—Elle avait l'air de se désintéresser et
de Beaufort et de son visiteur, et continua:—Je n'ai jamais vu une
ville où l'on ait plus de répugnance à habiter les quartiers
excentriques. Quelle importance cela a-t-il? On m'a dit que cette rue
est très convenablement habitée.
—Elle n'est pas à la mode.
—À la mode? Attachez-vous tant d'importance à la mode? Pourquoi
ne pas se faire sa mode à soi? Peut-être ai-je toujours vécu avec
trop d'indépendance. En tout cas, je veux faire ce que vous faites
tous: je veux sentir de l'affection et de la sécurité autour de moi.
Il fut ému, comme la veille quand elle lui avait parlé de son désir
d'être guidée.
—Voilà justement ce que souhaitent vos amis. Il n'y a rien à craindre
à New-York, ajouta-t-il avec une pointe de sarcasme.
—Oui, n'est-ce pas? On en a l'impression, s'écria-t-elle, sans saisir
l'ironie. C'est comme d'entrer en vacances, quand on a été une
bonne petite fille qui a bien fait tous ses devoirs.
La comparaison ne plut pas à Newland. Il voulait bien parler de
New-York sur un ton cavalier, mais il n'aimait pas que d'autres
prissent la même liberté. Il se demandait si Ellen ne commençait pas
à comprendre que la société de New-York était une redoutable
machine qui avait été bien près de la broyer. Le dîner des Lovell
Mingott, retapé in extremis, fait de pièces et morceaux pris à
différents milieux sociaux, aurait dû lui apprendre le péril auquel elle
avait échappé. Elle n'avait jamais compris le danger, ou elle l'avait
perdu de vue dans le triomphe de la soirée des van der Luyden.
Archer inclinait à la première supposition, et l'idée que, pour la jeune
femme, les distinctions sociales de New-York n'existaient pas encore,
l'agaçait vaguement.
—Hier soir, dit-il, tout New-York se pressait pour vous faire honneur.
Les van der Luyden ne font pas les choses à moitié.
—Les aimables gens! Leur réunion était si charmante! Tout le monde
paraît avoir pour eux tant d'estime!
Les termes semblaient peu appropriés: les mêmes eussent convenu
pour un goûter chez la chère vieille miss Lanning.
—Les van der Luyden, dit pompeusement Archer, disposent d'une
grande influence sur la société de New-York. Malheureusement, à
cause de la santé de Mrs van der Luyden, ils reçoivent très
rarement.
Elle dégagea ses mains de dessus sa tête et attacha sur Archer des
yeux pensifs.
—N'est-ce pas là, la raison?...
—La raison?...
—De leur grande influence... qu'ils se fassent si rares!
Il rougit un peu, la regarda fixement, puis soudain il comprit la
portée de cette remarque. D'un seul coup elle avait frappé les van
der Luyden, et ils s'écroulaient! Il rit et les sacrifia.
Nastasia apporta le thé avec des tasses japonaises sans anses, et
des assiettes couvertes. Elle plaça le plateau sur une table basse
auprès de la comtesse Olenska.
—Vous m'expliquerez tout: vous me direz tout ce que je dois savoir,
continua-t-elle, en s'approchant pour lui offrir une tasse de thé.
—C'est vous qui m'expliquez, vous qui ouvrez mes yeux à des choses
que je regarde depuis si longtemps que je finis par ne plus les voir!
Elle détacha de son bracelet un petit porte-cigarettes en or, le lui
tendit, et prit elle-même une cigarette.
—Alors, nous pouvons nous aider mutuellement. Mais c'est surtout
moi qui ai besoin de secours. Dites-moi exactement ce que je dois
faire.
Il fut sur le point de lui dire: «Ne vous montrez pas en voiture avec
Beaufort;» mais il était trop pénétré par l'atmosphère de la chambre,
qui était son atmosphère à elle, pour risquer cet avis. C'eût été
comme de dire à quelqu'un, au moment où il achète des parfums à
Samarkande, qu'il est nécessaire de s'approvisionner de vêtements
chauds pour passer l'hiver à New-York. New-York semblait beaucoup
plus loin que Samarkande, et si vraiment ils devaient s'entraider, elle
lui rendait le premier de leurs services mutuels en lui faisant voir sa
ville natale objectivement. Vu ainsi, comme par le gros bout d'un
télescope, New-York semblait singulièrement petit et distant: c'est
ainsi qu'on l'aurait vu de Samarkande.
Une flamme jaillit des bûches, et la comtesse Olenska, se penchant
en avant, tendit ses mains fines si près du feu qu'une fine auréole
entoura l'ovale de ses ongles. La lumière soudaine fit rougir les
boucles échappées des nattes sombres de la jeune femme et rendit
plus pâle encore la pâleur de son visage.
—Il y a assez de monde pour vous dire ce que vous devez faire,
reprit Archer avec une secrète envie.
—Mes tantes? Et ma chère vieille grand'mère?... Elles m'en veulent
un peu de m'être émancipée, ma pauvre grand-mère surtout. Elle
aurait voulu me garder avec elle; mais j'avais besoin d'être libre.
Archer fut abasourdi par cette façon légère de s'exprimer sur la
formidable Catherine, et ému à la pensée de ce qui avait pu donner
à Mme Olenska cette soif d'une liberté qui comportait tant de
solitude. Mais l'image de Beaufort l'irritait.
—Je crois comprendre ce que vous éprouvez, dit-il. Votre famille
vous conseillera, vous expliquera les différences, vous montrera la
voie.
Elle releva ses fins sourcils.
—New-York est-il un tel labyrinthe? Je le croyais tout droit d'un bout
à l'autre, comme la Cinquième avenue, et avec toutes ses rues
numérotées.—Elle sembla deviner, chez le jeune homme, une légère
désapprobation, et ajouta, avec ce sourire qui illuminait tout son
visage:—Si vous saviez comme je l'aime, précisément à cause de
cela: toutes ces lignes droites, dans tous les sens, avec toutes ces
grandes étiquettes honnêtes sur chaque chose!
Il saisit la balle au bond.
—On peut mettre des étiquettes sur les choses, pas sur les
personnes.
—Peut-être. Sans doute je simplifie trop: mais vous m'avertirez
quand je me tromperai.—Elle se tourna vers lui.—Il n'y a que deux
personnes ici qui puissent me renseigner: vous et Mr Beaufort.
Archer fut un peu saisi d'entendre accoler son nom à celui de
Beaufort. Mais il songea à l'atmosphère malsaine où Ellen avait vécu;
il pensa qu'il devait profiter de la confiance qu'elle lui témoignait
pour lui montrer Beaufort et tout ce qu'il représentait sous son jour
véritable, et lui en inspirer le dégoût.
Il répondit doucement:
—Je comprends: mais tout d'abord, gardez l'appui de vos vieux
amis, des femmes comme votre grand'mère Mingott, Mrs Welland,
Mrs van der Luyden. Elles vous aiment, vous admirent, désirent vous
aider.
Elle hocha la tête et soupira:
—Oh! je sais, je sais. Elles veulent m'aider, mais à la condition de ne
rien entendre qui leur déplaise. Ma tante Welland me l'a dit en
propres termes. On ne désire donc pas savoir la vérité ici? La
solitude, c'est de vivre parmi tous ces gens aimables qui ne vous
demandent que de dissimuler vos pensées.
Elle cacha sa figure dans ses mains et Archer vit ses minces épaules
secouées par un sanglot.
—Madame Olenska! Je vous en prie... Ellen, supplia-t-il, en se levant
et se penchant sur elle.
Il prit une de ses mains, la serra, la caressa comme celle d'un
enfant, pendant qu'il murmurait des mots de réconfort. Mais elle se
libéra, et leva sur lui des yeux encore pleins de larmes.
—Ici, on ne pleure pas; au Paradis, il n'y a pas de raison de pleurer,
dit-elle, en rajustant ses tresses, et se penchant, déjà souriante, au
dessus de la bouilloire.
Archer se disait en tremblant que deux fois il l'avait appelée «Ellen»
et qu'elle ne l'avait pas remarqué. Bien loin, comme par le petit bout
de la lorgnette, il aperçut la blanche image, estompée, de May
Welland, à New-York.
Tout à coup, Nastasia passa la tête, dit quelques mots à voix basse.
Mme Olenska, la main encore dans ses cheveux, poussa une
exclamation, un vif «già! già!» et le duc de St-Austrey entra, pilotant
une grosse dame, coiffée d'une perruque noire surmontée de plumes
rouges: d'abondantes fourrures l'emmitouflaient.
—Ma chère comtesse, je vous ai amené une de mes vieilles amies,
Mrs Struthers. On ne l'avait pas invitée à la soirée d'hier, et elle
désire vous connaître.
Mme Olenska s'avança, avec des paroles de bienvenue, vers le
singulier couple. Elle ne sembla pas trouver insolite la liberté que
prenait le duc en lui amenant ainsi une étrangère. Le duc lui-même
semblait trouver cela parfaitement naturel.
—J'ai tant désiré faire votre connaissance, ma chère! s'écria Mrs
Struthers, d'une voix sonore qui s'accordait avec ses plumes
éclatantes et avec sa perruque aux reflets métalliques.
Je veux connaître tous ceux qui sont jeunes, intéressants et
charmants. Le duc me dit que vous aimez la musique. N'est-ce pas,
mon cher duc? Vous êtes pianiste, vous-même, je crois. Alors
voulez-vous venir demain entendre Joachim? Je reçois tous les
dimanches. C'est le jour où New-York ne sait que faire; alors je lui
dis: «Venez, amusez-vous!» Le duc a pensé que vous seriez attirée
par Joachim. Vous retrouverez beaucoup d'amis.
Le visage de Mme Olenska s'illumina de plaisir.
—Comme c'est aimable! Comme le duc est bon d'avoir pensé à moi!
Je serai trop heureuse de venir.
Elle avança un fauteuil près de la table à thé et Mrs Struthers s'y
installa béatement.
—Voilà qui est convenu, ma chère; et amenez ce jeune homme avec
vous.
Mrs Struthers tendit à Archer une main cordiale.
—Excusez-moi, je ne peux pas retrouver votre nom; mais je suis
sûre de vous avoir déjà rencontré. J'ai rencontré tout le monde, ici, à
Paris, ou à Londres. Êtes-vous dans la diplomatie? Tous les
diplomates viennent chez moi. Vous aussi, vous aimez la musique?
Mon cher duc, ne manquez pas de l'amener.
Archer remercia et prit congé; il se sentait gêné comme un écolier.
Au surplus, il ne regrettait pas que sa visite eût été interrompue par
cette entrée inopinée: si seulement elle s'était produite un peu plus
tôt, elle lui aurait épargné une dépense d'émotion bien inutile.
Dehors, il se rappela qu'il était à New-York et il eut l'impression que
May Welland se rapprochait de lui. Il se dirigea vers sa fleuriste
habituelle, pour envoyer à la jeune fille la corbeille de muguets qu'à
sa grande confusion il avait oublié de commander le matin. Après
avoir écrit un mot sur une carte, comme il attendait une enveloppe,
il parcourut des yeux la boutique fleurie, et son regard fut attiré par
un bouquet de roses jaunes. Il n'en avait jamais vues d'un jaune
aussi doré, aussi lumineux. Son premier mouvement fut de les
envoyer à May au lieu des muguets. Mais ces fleurs ne seyaient pas
à la jeune fille: elles avaient quelque chose de trop riche, de trop
fort, dans leur chaud éclat. Presque sans savoir ce qu'il faisait, dans
une brusque saute d'humeur, Newland fit signe à la fleuriste de
mettre les roses dans un long carton, et glissa une carte dans une
seconde enveloppe, sur laquelle il inscrivit le nom de la comtesse
Olenska. Puis, au moment de s'en aller, il retira la carte, laissa
l'enveloppe vide sur la boîte.
—Portez-les tout de suite, fit-il, en désignant les roses.

Le lendemain, après le déjeuner, Archer put obtenir de May qu'elle

vînt avec lui faire une promenade au Central Park. C'était un
dimanche et, selon la vieille coutume de New-York, elle devait
accompagner ses parents à l'église matin et après-midi; mais Mrs
Welland ferma les yeux sur cette infraction aux usages, car, le matin
même, elle avait obtenu de sa fille de se plier aux longues fiançailles
qui permettraient de constituer un trousseau brodé à la main, et
comptant le nombre de douzaines nécessaires.
Le temps était exquis. Le long du Mail, la voûte des branches
dépouillées se dessinait sur un fond de lapis, au-dessus d'une
couche de neige étincelante. Les couleurs de May s'avivaient dans le
froid, comme celles d'un jeune érable à la première gelée. Archer,
fier des regards qu'elle attirait, oubliait ses perplexités secrètes dans
la joie de la regarder.
—C'est une sensation délicieuse de s'éveiller le matin en respirant
l'odeur des muguets! dit-elle en souriant.
—Pardonnez-moi, si, hier, votre bouquet est arrivé en retard; je
n'avais pas eu le temps de passer chez la fleuriste le matin, répondit-
il.
—C'est la preuve que vous les choisissez vous-même chaque jour.
Pour rien au monde je ne voudrais que votre bouquet arrivât
toujours à la même heure, comme un professeur de piano, car je
saurais alors que vous l'avez commandé d'avance une fois pour
toutes. Ainsi avait fait Lawrence Lefferts, lorsqu'il s'est fiancé avec la
pauvre Gertrude.
—Ça leur ressemble, dit Archer, enchanté de cette fine remarque.
Et il se sentit assez sûr de lui-même pour ajouter:
—Quand je vous ai envoyé des muguets hier, j'ai vu quelques belles
roses jaunes, et je les ai fait porter à la comtesse Olenska. Ai-je bien
fait?
—Comme c'est gentil! Cela lui fait tant de plaisir quand on pense à
elle! Ce qui m'étonne, c'est qu'elle n'ait pas parlé de vos roses. Elle a
déjeuné avec nous ce matin, et nous a dit que Mr Beaufort lui avait
envoyé de magnifiques orchidées et que Mr van der Luyden avait fait
venir pour elle de Skuytercliff toute une corbeille d'œillets. Il semble
que ce soit nouveau pour elle de recevoir des fleurs. N'en envoie-t-
on pas en Europe? Elle trouve que c'est une coutume charmante.
—Mes fleurs auront été éclipsées par celles de Beaufort! songea
Archer, légèrement piqué. Puis il se souvint qu'il n'avait pas joint sa
carte à l'envoi des roses, et regretta d'en avoir parlé. Il était sur le
point de dire: «J'ai été voir votre cousine hier,» mais il hésita. Si Mme
Olenska avait passé sa visite sous silence, mieux valait faire comme
elle. Tout cela prenait un air de mystère qu'Archer n'aimait qu'à
moitié. Pour changer de sujet, il se mit à parler de leur mariage, de
leur avenir, et de l'obstination de Mrs Welland à prolonger le temps
des fiançailles.
—Rappelez-vous qu'Isabelle et Reggie Chivers ont été fiancés deux
ans, Grace et Thorley près d'un an et demi! Et puis, est-ce que nous
ne sommes pas très bien comme nous sommes?
C'était la réponse classique de toute jeune fiancée. Archer s'en
voulait de la trouver un peu puérile dans la bouche de May, qui avait
près de vingt-deux ans. Et il se demandait à quel âge les femmes
«bien élevées» commençaient à penser par elles-mêmes.
—Nous pourrions faire beaucoup mieux que d'attendre: être
ensemble tout à fait, voyager.
La figure de la jeune fille s'illumina: elle avoua qu'elle adorait les
voyages. Mais sa mère ne comprendrait pas qu'on pût désirer ne pas
faire comme tout le monde.
—Mais ne pas faire comme tout le monde, c'est justement ce que je
veux! insista l'amoureux.
—Vous êtes si original! dit-elle, avec un regard d'admiration.
Une sorte de découragement s'empara du jeune homme. Il sentait
qu'il prononçait exactement toutes les paroles que l'on attend d'un
fiancé, et qu'elle faisait toutes les réponses qu'une sorte d'instinct
traditionnel lui dictait,—jusqu'à lui dire qu'il était original.
—Original? Nous sommes tous aussi pareils les uns aux autres que
ces poupées découpées dans une feuille de papier plié. Ne
pourrions-nous pas être un peu nous-mêmes, May?
Ils s'étaient arrêtés l'un en face de l'autre, excités par la discussion.
May le regardait, les yeux brillant d'admiration.
—Mon Dieu! Vous voulez donc m'enlever?
—Je ne demande pas mieux!
—Comme vous m'aimez, Newland! Je suis si heureuse! Nous ne
pouvons pourtant pas agir comme des amoureux de roman, dit-elle
en riant.
—Pourquoi pas? Pourquoi pas?
Elle parut un peu contrariée de son insistance. Elle sentait très bien
que ce qu'il voulait était impossible, mais visiblement elle ne trouvait
pas de raison à lui opposer.
—Je ne suis pas assez forte pour discuter avec vous; mais ne serait-
ce pas—comment dire?—«mauvais genre?» suggéra-t-elle
doucement.
Elle avait conscience d'avoir énoncé l'argument sans réplique.
—Avez-vous si peur de paraître «mauvais genre?»
—Mais oui, j'en serais fâchée. Et vous aussi, ajouta-t-elle,
légèrement piquée.
Il restait silencieux, frappant nerveusement le bout de sa bottine
avec sa canne. Il sentait qu'après tout elle avait trouvé le vrai moyen
de clore l'incident. Elle reprit, rassurée:
—Vous ai-je dit que j'avais montré ma bague à Ellen? Elle assure
qu'elle n'a jamais vu une aussi jolie monture. Il n'y a rien de pareil
rue de la Paix. Vous êtes tellement artiste, Newland!...
Le jour suivant, pendant qu'Archer, avant le dîner, fumait un cigare
dans la bibliothèque, Janey vint le trouver. Archer, comme presque
tous les jeunes gens de son monde, avait fait son droit, et avait
maintenant un emploi dans l'étude d'un avocat distingué[1]. Il était
revenu de l'étude ce jour-là d'assez mauvaise humeur, vaguement
déprimé, et obsédé par l'idée que jusqu'à la fin de sa vie il ferait
vraisemblablement toujours la même chose à la même heure, et
dans le même cadre.
«Monotonie!... monotonie!...» soupira-t-il. Ce mot l'obsédait. En
rentrant, ce soir-là, il ne s'était pas arrêté au cercle comme
d'habitude. À la vue des grandes fenêtres derrière lesquelles les
mêmes figures connues, coiffées des mêmes chapeaux haut-de-
forme, se montraient toujours à la même heure, le courage lui avait
manqué. Il devinait non seulement ce dont on parlait, mais comment
chacun en parlait. Le duc de Saint-Austrey était naturellement le
thème principal des conversations; et sans doute on ne manquerait
pas d'épiloguer sur l'apparition, dans la Cinquième avenue, d'une
demoiselle aux cheveux teints, dans un petit coupé jaune canari
attelé de deux cobs noirs—et Beaufort en porterait la responsabilité.
En effet, «ces personnes,» comme on les appelait dans le milieu de
Mrs Archer, étaient rares à New-York, et aucune d'elles, jusqu'à
présent, n'avait osé se montrer dans sa propre voiture. Aussi, la
veille, le coupé jaune ayant croisé l'attelage de Mrs Lovell Mingott,
celle-ci avait à l'instant même donné l'ordre à son cocher de rentrer.
Dire que cela aurait aussi bien pu arriver à Mrs van der Luyden! se
disaient les douairières en frissonnant d'horreur. Archer croyait
entendre Lawrence Lefferts prophétisant la débâcle de la société...
Il leva brusquement la tête à l'entrée de sa sœur, puis, sans faire
attention à elle, se replongea dans sa lecture. C'était le Chastelard
de Swinburne, qu'on venait de lui envoyer de Londres.
Janey s'approcha du bureau chargé de livres, ouvrit un volume des
Contes Drolatiques, fit la moue sur le vieux français et soupira:
—Quelles choses sérieuses tu lis!
Elle continuait à rôder autour de lui avec une mine mystérieuse;
énervé par son mutisme, il finit par lui demander:
—Tu as quelque chose à me dire?
—Oui. Maman est très fâchée.

À
—Fâchée? Contre qui? À propos de quoi?
—Miss Sophie Jackson sort d'ici. Elle a dit que son frère viendrait
après le dîner. Elle n'a pas voulu raconter grand'chose, son frère le
lui a défendu; il veut nous donner tous les détails lui-même. Il est
maintenant chez notre cousine van der Luyden.
—Pour l'amour du ciel, ma chère, de quoi s'agit-il? Il faudrait être le
bon Dieu pour comprendre tes énigmes.
—Allons, Newland, ne plaisante pas; maman a déjà assez de chagrin
que tu n'ailles pas à l'église.
Avec un geste agacé il se replongea dans son livre.
—Newland! Écoute donc. Ton amie Mme Olenska était à la soirée de
Mrs Lemuel Struthers hier soir; elle y est allée avec le duc et Mr
Beaufort.
À ce nom, une colère irraisonnée s'empara du jeune homme. Il
affecta de rire:
—Et bien? Après? Je savais qu'elle comptait y aller.
Les yeux de Janey sortaient de leurs orbites.
—Comment? Tu le savais, et tu n'as pas essayé de l'empêcher, de
l'avertir?
—L'empêcher? L'avertir?—Il rit de nouveau.—Et de quel droit? Ce
n'est pas avec la comtesse Olenska que je suis fiancé!
Ces paroles lui sonnèrent étrangement aux oreilles.
—Tu te maries dans sa famille.
—Oh! la famille! la famille! railla-t-il.
—Newland! Est-ce que tu ne te soucies pas de la famille?
—Pas pour un hard!
—Ni de ce que pensera notre cousine van der Luyden?
—Pas pour un centime... si elle a des idées saugrenues de vieille
fille.
—Mais, maman n'a pas des idées de vieille fille, dit sa sœur d'un air
pincé.
Il aurait voulu crier: «Si! elle en a, et aussi les van der Luyden, et
nous tous, dès que la réalité nous effleure.» Mais il vit le long et
doux visage de Janey s'assombrir et il regretta la peine inutile qu'il
venait de lui infliger.
—Tant pis pour la comtesse Olenska! Ne fais pas la sotte, ma petite
Janey! Je ne suis pas le tuteur de la belle Ellen!
—Non; mais tu as demandé aux Welland d'avancer l'annonce de tes
fiançailles, afin que nous puissions la soutenir, et c'est seulement
pour faire plaisir à maman que la cousine Louisa l'a invitée à dîner.
—Eh bien! Quel mal y avait-il à l'inviter? C'était la plus jolie femme
du salon; grâce à elle, le dîner a été un peu moins morne que ne le
sont en général les banquets van der Luyden.
—Tu sais que cousin Henry l'a invitée pour te faire plaisir, que c'est
lui qui a obtenu de notre cousine de la recevoir; et maintenant les
voilà si bouleversés en apprenant qu'elle est allée chez Mrs
Struthers, qu'ils retournent à Skuytercliff dès demain. Je crois,
Newland, que tu feras bien de descendre au salon. Tu sembles ne
pas comprendre ce que maman éprouve.
Newland trouva sa mère dans le salon, penchée sur son métier. Elle
leva sur lui un regard troublé, et demanda:
—Janey t'a dit?
—Oui.—Il sourit.—Mais je ne trouve pas que ce soit très sérieux.
—Le fait d'avoir froissé nos cousins?
—Le fait qu'ils puissent se sentir froissés parce que la comtesse
Olenska a été chez une femme qu'ils trouvent commune!
—Ils ne sont pas seuls de cet avis.
—Eh bien! oui, d'accord, elle est commune; mais on fait chez elle de
la bonne musique, et ses réceptions du dimanche apportent une
distraction à des gens qui meurent d'ennui.
—De la bonne musique? Tout ce que je sais, c'est qu'il y avait chez
elle, dimanche dernier, une créature qui est montée sur la table, et
qui a chanté des choses comme celles qu'on chante dans les
endroits où tu vas à Paris. On a fumé, et bu du champagne.
—Eh bien, après? Tout cela est arrivé, et le monde continue à
tourner.
—Je ne suppose pas, mon enfant, que tu défendes sérieusement la
manière française de passer le dimanche?
—Je vous ai souvent entendu, maman, vous plaindre de la tristesse
maussade des dimanches à Londres, quand nous y étions!
—New-York n'est ni Paris, ni Londres.
—Ah, fichtre non! soupira Archer.
—Tu veux dire sans doute que notre société est moins amusante que
celle des villes d'Europe? Peut-être as-tu raison; mais nous sommes
d'ici, et, quand on vient parmi nous, on doit respecter nos habitudes.
Ellen Olenska surtout, puisqu'elle est revenue dans son pays pour
échapper à la vie dissipée des sociétés plus brillantes.
Newland ne répondant pas, sa mère s'aventura à dire, après un
moment de silence:
—Je vais mettre mon chapeau, et te demanderai de m'accompagner
chez Louisa. Je veux la voir un instant avant le dîner.
Archer fronça le sourcil, mais elle insista, conciliante:
—J'ai pensé que tu pourrais lui expliquer ce que tu viens de me dire:
que la société à l'étranger est différente, qu'on y est moins collet-
monté, que la comtesse Olenska n'a peut-être pas cru froisser mes
sentiments. Ce serait, tu sais, mon chéri, ajouta-t-elle avec une
inconsciente habileté, dans l'intérêt même de Mme Olenska.
—Chère maman, je ne vois vraiment pas en quoi cette affaire nous
regarde. Le duc a mené Mme Olenska chez Mrs Struthers? Le fait est
qu'il était venu voir Mme Olenska avec Mrs Struthers. J'étais là. Si les
van der Luyden veulent se disputer avec quelqu'un, le véritable
coupable est sous leur toit.
—Se disputer?... Newland! Quelle expression! Notre cousin, se
disputer? Et puis, le duc est un étranger, et leur hôte. Les étrangers
ne connaissent pas nos habitudes. Comment les connaîtraient-ils?
Tandis que la comtesse Olenska est une New-Yorkaise, et devrait
avoir égard aux sentiments de New-York.
—Eh bien, puisqu'il leur faut une victime, je vous permets de leur
livrer la comtesse Olenska, s'écria Archer. Je ne me soucie pas du
tout de m'offrir en holocauste pour expier les crimes de Mme
Olenska.
—Naturellement tu es tout entier du côté Mingott, répondit la mère
d'un ton qui trahissait son irritation intérieure.
Le maître d'hôtel ouvrit les portières du salon et annonça: «Monsieur
Henry van der Luyden.»
Mrs Archer piqua son aiguille et repoussa sa chaise d'un geste
nerveux.
—Une autre lampe, ordonna-t-elle au domestique, pendant que
Janey se penchait sur sa mère pour lui rajuster son bonnet de
dentelle.
Mr van der Luyden apparut sur le pas de la porte, et Newland Archer
s'avança pour le recevoir.
—Nous parlions justement de vous, mon cousin, dit-il.
Mr van der Luyden sembla déconcerté par ces paroles. Il retira son
gant pour serrer la main des dames, et lissa son haut-de-forme avec
un peu d'embarras, pendant que Janey avançait un fauteuil.
Archer continua en souriant:
—Et de la comtesse Olenska...
Mrs Archer pâlit.
—Une femme charmante! Je sors de chez elle, dit Mr van der
Luyden, rasséréné.
Il s'assit, déposa ses gants et son chapeau à côté de son fauteuil,
selon le vieil usage, et continua:
—Elle a un véritable don pour arranger les fleurs. Je lui avais envoyé
quelques œillets de Skuytercliff, et j'ai été émerveillé de la façon
dont elle les a groupés. Au lieu de les masser en gros bouquets
comme notre jardinier-chef, elle les avait dispersés, je ne saurais pas
dire comment. Le duc m'avait prévenu; il m'avait dit: «Allez voir avec
quel goût elle a meublé son salon!» Et c'est vrai. J'aurais bien voulu
lui mener Louisa, si le quartier n'était pas si bohème.
À vrai dire, poursuivit Mr van der Luyden, appuyant sur son pantalon
gris sa main décolorée, alourdie par la grande bague du Patroon, à
vrai dire, j'étais allé la remercier du mot charmant qu'elle m'avait
écrit à propos de mes fleurs, et aussi,—mais ceci entre nous,—pour
lui donner un avertissement amical sur l'inconvénient de se faire
mener dans le monde par le duc. Je ne sais pas si vous en avez
entendu parler.
Mrs Archer prit un air naïf:
—Le duc l'a-t-il menée dans le monde?
—Eh, oui! Vous savez ce que sont ces grands seigneurs anglais; tous
les mêmes. Louisa et moi aimons beaucoup notre cousin, mais on ne
peut s'attendre à ce que des gens habitués à la vie des cours
tiennent compte de nos petites distinctions républicaines. Le duc va
où il s'amuse.
Mr van der Luyden fit une pause, mais personne ne prit la parole.—Il
l'a menée, paraît-il, hier soir chez Mrs Lemuel Struthers. Sillerton
Jackson est venu tout à l'heure nous raconter cette sotte histoire, et
Louisa en a été un peu troublée. J'ai pensé que le plus court serait
d'aller tout droit chez Mme Olenska et de lui expliquer, très
amicalement, ce que nous pensons à New-York. Il m'a semblé que je
le pouvais sans indiscrétion, car le soir où elle a dîné chez nous, elle
m'avait laissé entendre qu'elle accepterait mes conseils avec quelque
gratitude. Et c'est ce qu'elle a fait.
Mr van der Luyden regarda autour de lui. À défaut d'un air de
satisfaction que ne pouvait revêtir un visage aussi distingué, il eut un
sourire de sereine bienveillance, que le visage de Mrs Archer se fit
un devoir de refléter.
—Comme vous êtes bons tous les deux, mon cher Henry! Newland
sera particulièrement touché de ce que vous avez fait là pour lui et
la chère May.
Elle jeta un regard à son fils, qui dit aussitôt:
—Je vous suis très reconnaissant, mon cousin; mais j'étais sûr que
Mme Olenska vous plairait.
Mr van der Luyden le regarda avec une extrême affabilité.
—Je n'invite jamais chez moi, mon cher Newland, les gens qui ne me
plaisent pas. Je viens de le dire à Sillerton Jackson.—Puis, ayant jeté
un coup d'œil à la pendule, il se leva et ajouta:—Mais Louisa
m'attend. Nous dînons de bonne heure pour mener le duc à l'Opéra.
Quand les portières se furent refermées sur leur cousin, le silence
tomba sur la famille Archer.
—Bonté du ciel! Que tout cela est romanesque! finit par s'écrier
Janey.
Personne n'avait jamais su ce que voulaient dire ses brusques
sorties, et sa famille avait depuis longtemps renoncé à y rien
comprendre. Mrs Archer secoua la tête en soupirant.
—Espérons que tout tournera pour le mieux, dit-elle, d'un ton qui
signifiait visiblement le contraire.—Newland, il faut que tu restes à la
maison pour voir Sillerton Jackson quand il viendra ce soir. Je ne
saurais vraiment que lui dire.
—Ma pauvre maman! Mais il ne viendra pas, dit son fils en riant, et
en se penchant pour poser un baiser sur le front inquiet de sa mère.
[1]Aux États-Unis, les avocats s'associent, et cumulent les rôles
d'avocats et d'avoués.

XI

Environ quinze jours plus tard, Archer, assis, inoccupé et distrait,

devant son bureau du cabinet «Letterblair, Lamson et Low,» avocats
à la cour, fut demandé par Mr Letterblair.
Le vieux Mr Letterblair, le conseil accrédité de la haute société de
New-York depuis trois générations, trônait derrière son bureau
d'acajou en proie à une évidente perplexité. Le voyant caresser ses
favoris blancs, passer ses doigts dans ses cheveux en broussaille au-
dessus de ses gros sourcils froncés, son jeune associé le comparait,
peu respectueusement, au médecin de famille auprès d'un malade
dont les symptômes se refusent à tout diagnostic.
—Cher monsieur,—Mr Letterblair, très cérémonieux, disait toujours
«monsieur» à son jeune associé,—je vous ai fait demander à propos
d'une petite affaire, une affaire dont, pour le moment, je préfère ne
pas parler à Mr Lamson ni à Mr Low. Il se renversa sur sa chaise, le
front ridé.—Pour des raisons de famille, continua-t-il. Archer leva la
tête.—La famille Mingott, dit Mr Letterblair, avec un sourire
significatif et en s'inclinant. Mrs Manson Mingott m'a fait demander
hier. Sa petite-fille, la comtesse Olenska, désire plaider en divorce
contre son mari. Certains documents m'ont été remis.—Il s'arrêta et
tapota sur son bureau.—En raison de vos projets d'alliance avec la
famille, je voudrais vous consulter, étudier le cas avec vous, avant
d'aller plus loin.
Archer sentit le sang lui monter au visage. Depuis sa visite à la
comtesse Olenska, il ne l'avait vue qu'une fois, à l'Opéra, dans la
loge des Mingott. Et, dans cet intervalle, l'image de la jeune femme
s'était atténuée dans son esprit, tandis que May Welland y reprenait
légitimement le premier plan. Il n'avait pas entendu parler du
divorce de Mme Olenska depuis l'allusion faite en passant par Janey,
et dont il n'avait tenu aucun compte. Théoriquement, il était presque
aussi hostile que sa mère à l'idée du divorce et il en voulait à Mr
Letterblair (sans doute poussé par la vieille Catherine Mingott) de se
montrer ainsi disposé à le mêler à l'affaire. Les hommes de la famille
étaient assez nombreux, et lui-même n'était pas encore un Mingott.
Il attendit que son chef continuât. Mr Letterblair ouvrit un tiroir et en
tira une liasse de papiers.
—Si vous voulez parcourir ces documents?...
Archer s'en défendit:
—Excusez-moi, monsieur, mais précisément à cause de mes projets
d'alliance, je préfère que vous consultiez Mr Low ou Mr Lamson.
Mr Letterblair parut surpris et légèrement froissé. Généralement un
jeune associé ne rejetait par de telles ouvertures. Il s'inclina.
—Je respecte votre scrupule, monsieur; mais, dans le cas présent, je
crois que la vraie délicatesse vous oblige à faire ce que je vous
demande. La proposition, du reste, ne vient pas de moi, mais de Mrs
Manson Mingott et de son fils. J'ai vu Lovell Mingott, et aussi Mr
Welland; ils vous ont tous désigné.
Archer eut un mouvement d'irritation. Depuis quinze jours il s'était
laissé porter par les événements. La beauté, le charme de May lui
avaient fait oublier la pression des chaînes Mingott. Le
commandement de la vieille Mrs Mingott lui rappela tout ce que le
clan se croyait en droit d'exiger d'un futur gendre: il se rebiffa.
—C'est l'affaire de ses oncles.
—Ses oncles s'en sont occupés: la question a été examinée par la
famille. Tous sont opposés au désir de la comtesse, mais elle tient
ferme, et insiste pour avoir un avis juridique.
Le jeune homme gardait le silence. Il n'avait pas ouvert le paquet
qu'il tenait toujours à la main.
—Est-ce qu'elle veut se remarier?
—On le suppose; mais elle le nie.
—Alors?
—Vous m'obligerez, Mr Archer, en parcourant d'abord ces papiers.
Ensuite, quand nous aurons examiné la question ensemble, je vous
dirai mon opinion.
Archer sortit, emportant à contre-cœur les documents. Depuis leur
dernière rencontre, les circonstances l'avaient aidé à se libérer de la
pensée de Mme Olenska. Les instants passés au coin de la cheminée
les avaient amenés à une intimité momentanée, que l'arrivée du duc
de Saint-Austrey, pilotant Mrs Lemuel Struthers, et si bien accueilli
par la comtesse, avait interrompue assez à propos. Deux jours plus
tard, Archer avait assisté à la comédie de la rentrée en grâce de la
jeune femme auprès des van der Luyden. Il s'était dit, avec une
pointe d'aigreur, qu'une femme, qui, par ses remerciements à propos
d'un bouquet de fleurs, avait su toucher le vieux et important
personnage qu'était Mr van der Luyden, n'avait nul besoin, ni des
consolations, ni de l'appui moral d'un jeune homme d'aussi petite
envergure que lui, Newland Archer.
Ces considérations ironiques rendaient quelque lustre aux ternes
vertus domestiques. Impossible d'imaginer May Welland étalant ses
affaires privées et répandant ses confidences parmi des étrangers!
Jamais elle ne lui sembla plus fine et plus charmante que dans la
semaine qui suivit. Il s'était même résigné aux longues fiançailles,
depuis qu'elle avait trouvé à lui opposer un argument qui l'avait
désarmé. «Vous savez que vos parents vous ont toujours cédé
depuis votre enfance,» avait-il dit. Elle, avec son clair regard, lui
avait répondu: «C'est bien pour cela qu'il me serait dur de leur
refuser la dernière chose qu'ils aient à me demander, avant que je
ne les quitte.» C'était la note du vieux New-York: c'était celle qu'il
aimerait toujours à retrouver chez sa femme.
Les documents dont il prit connaissance ne lui apprirent pas
grand'chose, mais le plongèrent dans un courant d'idées pénibles.
C'était un échange de lettres entre l'avocat du comte Olenski et
l'étude parisienne à laquelle la comtesse avait confié la défense de
ses intérêts financiers. Il y avait aussi une courte lettre du comte à
sa femme. Après l'avoir lue, Archer se leva, serra les papiers dans
leur enveloppe et rentra dans le bureau de Mr Letterblair.
—Voici les lettres, monsieur. C'est entendu, je verrai la comtesse
Olenska, dit-il, d'une voix nerveuse.
—Je vous remercie, Mr Archer. Êtes-vous libre ce soir? Venez dîner;
nous causerons ensuite, pour le cas où vous voudriez voir notre
cliente dès demain.
Newland Archer rentra directement chez lui. C'était une soirée d'une
lumineuse transparence: une lune jeune et candide montait au-
dessus des toits. Archer voulait imprégner son âme de cette pure
splendeur, et ne parler à personne jusqu'au moment de son rendez-
vous avec Mr Letterblair. Depuis la lecture des lettres, il avait compris
qu'il fallait qu'il vît lui-même Mme Olenska, afin d'éviter que les
secrets de la jeune femme ne fussent exposés devant d'autres. Une
grande vague de compassion avait eu raison de son indifférence.
Ellen Olenska se présentait à lui comme une créature malheureuse
et sans défense, qu'il fallait, à tout prix, empêcher d'entreprendre
une lutte dont elle ne sortirait que plus meurtrie.
Elle avait dit que Mrs Welland désirait qu'elle passât sous silence tout
ce qu'il pouvait y avoir de «pénible» dans son passé.
L'innocence de New-York n'était-elle donc qu'une simple attitude?
Sommes-nous des pharisiens? se demanda Archer. Pour la première
fois, il fut amené à réfléchir sur les principes qui l'avaient jusque-là
dirigé. Il passait pour un jeune homme qui ne craignait pas de se
compromettre: son flirt avec cette pauvre petite Mrs Thorley
Rushworth lui avait donné quelque prestige romanesque. Mais Mrs
Rushworth était de la catégorie des femmes un peu sottes, frivoles,
éprises de mystère: le secret et le danger d'une intrigue l'avaient
plus intéressée que les mérites de celui qui avait été son amant.
Newland avait beaucoup souffert de cette constatation: il y trouvait,
maintenant, presque un soulagement. L'aventure, en somme,
ressemblait à celles que les jeunes gens de son âge avaient tous
traversées, et dont ils étaient sortis la conscience calme, convaincus
qu'il y a un abîme entre les femmes qu'on aime d'un amour
respectueux et les autres. Ils étaient encouragés dans cette manière
de voir par leurs mères, leurs tantes et autres parentes: toutes
pensaient comme Mrs Archer que, dans ces affaires-là, les hommes
apportent sans doute de la légèreté, mais qu'en somme la vraie
faute vient toujours de la femme.
Archer commença à soupçonner que, dans la vie compliquée des
vieilles sociétés européennes, riches, oisives, faciles, les problèmes
d'amour étaient moins simples, moins nettement catalogués. Il
n'était sans doute pas impossible d'imaginer, dans ces milieux
indulgents, des cas où une femme, sensible et délaissée se laisserait
entraîner par la force des circonstances à nouer un de ces liens que
la morale réprouve.
Arrivé chez lui, il écrivit un mot à la comtesse Olenska pour lui
demander à quelle heure elle pourrait le recevoir le lendemain. Elle
répondit que, partant le lendemain matin pour Skuytercliff, jusqu'au
dimanche soir, elle ne pourrait l'attendre que le jour même; il la
trouverait seule après-dîner. Archer sourit en pensant qu'elle finirait
la semaine dans la majestueuse solitude de Skuytercliff, mais
aussitôt après, il se dit que, là plus qu'ailleurs, elle souffrirait de se
trouver parmi des gens résolument fermés à tout ce qui est
«pénible.»
Il arriva à sept heures chez Mr Letterblair, heureux d'avoir un
prétexte pour se rendre libre aussitôt après le dîner. Il s'était fait une
opinion personnelle d'après les documents qui lui avaient été
confiés, et il ne tenait pas spécialement à la communiquer à son
chef. Mr Letterblair était veuf: ils dînèrent seuls dans une pièce
sombre, sur les murs de laquelle on voyait des gravures jaunies
représentant «La mort de Chatham» et «Le Couronnement de
Napoléon.» Sur le buffet, entre de beaux coffrets cannelés du XVIIIe
siècle, se trouvait une carafe de Haut-Brion et une autre du vieux
porto des Lanning (don d'un client). Le prodigue Torn Lanning avait
déconsidéré sa famille en vendant sa cave un an ou deux avant sa
mort mystérieuse et suspecte à San Francisco. Ce dernier incident
avait été moins humiliant pour les siens que la vente de sa cave.
Après un potage velouté aux huîtres, on servit une alose aux
concombres, suivie d'un dindonneau entouré de beignets de maïs,
auquel succéda un canard sauvage avec une mayonnaise de céleris
et de la gelée de groseille. Mr Letterblair, qui déjeunait de thé et
d'une sandwich, dînait copieusement et sans hâte; il insista pour que
son hôte fît de même. La nappe enlevée, les cigares s'allumèrent, et
Mr Letterblair, se renversant sur sa chaise, poussa le porto vers
Archer. Chauffant son dos au feu, il dit:
—Toute la famille est contre le divorce, et je crois qu'elle a raison.
Archer se sentit immédiatement d'un avis opposé.
—Pourtant, si jamais un cas s'est présenté...
—Qu'y gagnerait-elle?... Elle est ici, il est là; l'Atlantique est entre
eux. Elle ne retrouvera pas un dollar de plus que ce qu'il lui a rendu
volontairement. Les clauses de cet abominable contrat français y ont
mis bon ordre. À tout prendre, Olenski a agi généreusement. Il
pouvait la renvoyer sans un sou.
Le jeune homme le savait: il resta silencieux.
—Il paraît, cependant, continua Mr Letterblair qu'elle n'attache pas
d'importance à l'argent; alors, comme le dit la famille, pourquoi ne
pas laisser les choses comme elles sont?
Quand Archer était arrivé chez Mr Letterblair il était en parfait accord
de vues avec lui; mais, dans la manière dont ce vieillard égoïste,
bien nourri, suprêmement indifférent, exposait la question, il croyait
entendre la voix pharisaïque de la société, ne songeant qu'à se
barricader contre tout ce qui pouvait être «pénible.»
—Il me semble que c'est à la comtesse Olenska de décider, dit-il
sèchement.
—Hum!... Avez-vous pensé aux conséquences, si elle se décidait
pour le divorce?
—Vous voulez dire la menace de son mari?... De quel poids peut-elle
être?... Simple vengeance d'un mauvais drôle.
—S'il se défendait sérieusement, il pourrait sortir des choses
pénibles.
—Pénibles!... dit Archer avec ironie.
Mr Letterblair le regarda d'un air étonné et le jeune homme,
renonçant à faire comprendre sa pensée, acquiesça par un signe de
tête, pendant que son chef continuait:
—Un divorce est toujours une chose pénible. Vous en convenez?
—En effet... dit Archer.
—Alors, je compte sur vous, les Mingott comptent sur vous, pour
user de votre influence sur Mme Olenska et la détourner de ce projet.
Archer hésita.
—Je ne puis m'engager avant d'avoir vu la comtesse Olenska.
—Mr Archer, je ne vous comprends pas. Voulez-vous vous marier
dans une famille qui est sous le coup d'un scandale?
—Je ne vois pas que mon mariage ait rien à faire là-dedans.
Mr Letterblair déposa son verre de porto et regarda son jeune
associé d'un air inquiet. Archer comprit que Mr Letterblair allait peut-
être lui retirer l'affaire. Mais maintenant que la cause lui avait été
confiée, il prétendait la garder; et il s'appliqua à rassurer le
méthodique vieillard qui représentait la conscience légale des
Mingott.
—Vous pouvez être sûr, monsieur, que je ne m'avancerai pas avant
de vous en avoir référé. Je voulais seulement dire que je préférerais
réserver mon jugement jusqu'à ce que j'aie entendue Mme Olenska.
Mr Letterblair approuva de la tête une discrétion digne de la
meilleure tradition de New-York, et le jeune homme, prétextant un
engagement, prit congé.
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