PROCEEDINGS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. 39 



The Origin of the Salishan Tribes of British Columbia and Wash- 

 ington. By John Campbell, LL.D. 



(Read January 16, 1897.) 



So little of the nature of history attaches to the aboriginal races of Canada as 

 to make a survey of them a mere study of the baldest anthropology. Yet even 

 mere anthropology is not biology ; its object is man possessed of a soul and a soul's 

 record. It is hardly probable that a race has passed through the four thousand 

 odd years of post-diluvian history without taking some part in its historic events. 

 The modern Chinese are supposed to be the descendants of the ancient Baby- 

 lonians. The degraded Yeniseians and the ambitious Japanese are equally derived 

 from those Hittite tribes that conquered Egypt and overthrew Assyrian Monarchy. 

 In Mexico, the native Aztecs or Nahuatl are most of what remain of the Nahiri of 

 Mesopotamia, who contended in ancient days with the Thothmes and the Tiglaths ; 

 while Homer's Dardanians, the expelled Toltecs from that same American state, 

 are now to be found in the aborigines of Peru. The records of the League, which 

 we term the league of the Iroquois, are engraved on the rocks of the Sinaitic 

 Peninsula, some of them in characters as old as the patriarch Isaac. Old inscriptions 

 and old books tell part of these stories, but most of them lie hidden in language, in 

 proper and common names, in grammatical constructions, as well as in legends and 

 traditions of the past. Just as old families fall into decay and poverty by the 

 misbehavior of ancestors, so nations that once ruled the world become pariahs ; 

 exempli gratia, Amalek, the first of them all, whose name now lives in the Amalig-mut 

 of the Eskimo. There are very ancient families with far more than sixteen 

 quarterings among our most degraded tribes. 



I have looked into the antecedents of the Salishans, not because I know 

 anything of them personally, but because they live largely on Canadian soil, and 

 because I know their grammar, and can thus reason back into their past history- 

 If you would like to become acquainted with the books that treat of them, get 

 the late James Constantine Pilling's " Bibliography of the Salishan Languages," 

 published by the Bureau of Ethnology at Washington, and Major Powell's " Indian 

 Linguistic Families," in the report of the same bureau for 1885-86. If language be 

 your quest, consult the vocabularies of Gibbs, Tolmie, and Mengarini in the first 

 volume of " Contributions to North American Ethnology," published by the United 

 States Geographical and Geological Survey of the Rocky Mountain Region; and 

 "Comparative Vocabularies of the Indian Tribes of British Columbia," by Drs. 

 Tolmie and Dawson, given out by the Geological and Natural History Survey of 

 Canada. According to Major Powell, the Salishans of the United States number 

 5,500, and those of Canada, that is, of British Columbia, 12,325. Of the latter, the 

 larger number are connected with the Eraser River Agency, but the Kamloops 

 Agency overlooks over 2,500, and others report to the Williams' Lake, Cowichan, 

 Okanagan, and Kootenay Agencies. Major Powell gives the names of no fewer than 

 sixty-four septs or tribes belonging to this family. The earliest record of them is 

 that of Alexander Mackenzie, in his " Voyages from Montreal Through the Continent 

 of North America," published in 1801. On page 257 he gives a brief vocabulary ot 

 the Atnah sept, and, on page 276, a shorter one of the Eriendly Village Indians. 

 The Salishans have erroneously been called Flatheads, a term that applies to their 

 neighbours, the Tsinuks. 



