568 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1931 



Likewise the tribes farther south can not be considered. The 

 Bellabellas were painters rather than carvers. The Kwakiutl and 

 the Nootka plastic art always remained very crude compared with 

 that of the northern nations; and, besides, it reveled in grotesque 

 forms by preference. It seldom was at the service of heraldry 

 as in the north, heraldry being of minor import on the coast 

 south of the Skeena. Totem poles among the Kwakiutl and the 

 Nootka are all very recent; not many of them, as they are currently 

 known, may antedate 1880. The most familiar of the Kwakiutl poles, 

 those of Alert Bay, were all carved and erected since 1890. None 

 of them stood at the time when the late C. F. Newcombe visited the 

 village at that date. 



At first sight it seems more likely that the Tlingit, of the southern 

 Alaskan frontier, might have initiated the custom of erecting me- 

 morials to the dead. They were closer to the Russian headquarters 

 and must have been among the first to obtain iron tools. There is no 

 doubt, besides, that they were most skillful carvers and weavers, 

 through the whole local evolution of these crafts. Yet there are good 

 reasons why the credit for originating totem poles should not fall 

 to their lot. The early circumnavigators that called at some of their 

 villages made no mention of large carvings that we know, not even 

 of such house or grave posts as they observed among the Haidas far- 

 ther south. From a keen and experienced observer of these people, 

 Lieut. G. T. Emmons, who was stationed on the Alaskan coast for 

 many years in an official capacity, we learn that the northern half of 

 the Tlingit nation never had totem poles until very recently; and 

 the few of those that have sprung up in that district within the scope 

 of his observation are the property of a family or families that origi- 

 nally belonged to the southern tribes and have retained their southern 

 affiliations. 



The Haidas must next be dismissed from consideration as likely 

 originators of the art. The Haida poles, as we know them, are partly 

 house poles and partly totem poles proper; the former far more 

 numerous proportionally than among the Tsimsyan. Indeed, almost 

 none of the present Nass River carvings were house poles. The two 

 large posts observed among the Haidas by Bartlett and Marchand 

 in 1788-1792 were house portals. Though the Haida villages were 

 often visited at the end of the eighteenth century and in the first part 

 of the nineteenth, we find no other reference to large poles, still less 

 to the famous rows of poles at Massett and Skidegate as they were 

 photographed about 1880. The Haida poles as we know them in our 

 museums are all of the same advanced type of conventionalism, all 

 of the same period, that is 1830-1880, and presumably all from 

 the hands of carvers that were contemporaries. They were from 10 



