566 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 31 



long ago to commemorate a historical event of first magnitude, 

 they erected a tall slab of stone. If the Tsimsyan proper as a body 

 were not swayed by the modern fashion of erecting carved memo- 

 rials to their dead, they retained until fairly late the older custom of 

 painting in native pigments their heraldic symbols on the front of 

 their houses. While not a single totem pole seems ever to have 

 stood in the village of Gitsees, near the mouth of the Skeena, five 

 house- front paintings were still clearly remembered and described 

 a few years ago. And it was related that many houses in the neigh- 

 boring tribes were decorated in this style, which at one time may 

 have been fairly general along the coast. 



The remarkable west coast custom of carving and erecting house 

 poles and tall mortuary columns or of painting coats of arms on 

 house fronts is sufficiently uniform in type to suggest that it origi- 

 nated in a single center and thence spread outward in various direc- 

 tions. The limits of its distributions coincide with those of the west 

 coast art proper which embrace the carving or painting of wood, 

 leather, stone, bone, and ivory. 



This art itself seems much more ancient in some of its smaller 

 forms than in its larger ones. Its origin on the northwest coast is 

 remote. It goes back to prehistoric times. It was already in existence 

 and fully mature and quite as conventionalized as it is today at the 

 time of the early Spanish, English, and French explorers (1775-1800) . 

 Most of the early circumnavigators — Cook, Dixon, Meares, Vancou- 

 ver, Marchand, and La Perouse — give ample evidence that masks, 

 chests, ceremonial objects were at the end of the last century deco- 

 rated in the style now familiar to us. They also mention that house 

 fronts were decorated with painted designs. There is, however, a 

 striking lack of evidence everywhere as to the existence of totem 

 poles proper or detached memorial columns, either south or north. 

 For instance, Dixon examined several of the Haida villages on the 

 Queen Charlotte Islands ; but he fails to mention totem or even house 

 poles, even though he minutely described small carved trays and 

 spoons. 



But there were already, from 1780 to 1800, some carved house 

 posts in existence. Captain Cook ^ observed a few carved posts inside 

 the house of some chiefs at Nootka Sound, where he wintered in 

 1780; and Webster, his artist, reproduced the features of two of 

 them in his sketches. Meares, in 1788 and 1789, observed like Nootka 

 carvings in the same neighborhood, which he describes thus : " Three 

 enormous trees, rudely carved and painted, formed the rafters, which 

 were supported at the ends and in the middle by gigantic images, 



» Cook, James, A voyage to the Pacific Ocean, vol. 2, p. 317. 3 vols., London, 1784. 



