8 
and museums. But any native in the least endowed with a sense of con- 
servatism still clings to these last vestiges of the past as one would to the 
memories they stand for. When the purchase of a fine pole — now lost in 
the wilderness on the lower Nass — was proposed to its owner, Chief Mountain 
of Kincolith, he asked the writer to consider the price, namely, the monu- 
ment erected to Sir James Douglas, the first Governor of the Hudson's 
Bay Company in British Columbia. This retort was illuminating; it 
embodied the chief’s implicit definition of his totem pole — -a monument 
to his “uncle” — a fine wooden shaft embodying the heraldic symbols of 
his glorious ancestors, the Eagles that once migrated from the north after 
fabulous trials and peregrinations along the west coast; in other words, a 
monument not unlike that of Douglas, the great white chief of old. To 
him one was at least worth the other, and the pole was, after all, much the 
more precious. 
These native memorials were, in the past century, a symbol of social 
standing, perhaps the outstanding symbol of identity and rank. The 
desire of their owners was to vie with their rivals and excel them in their 
achievements. The totem pole, after 1830, everywhere became a fashion- 
able way of displaying one’s own power and crests, while commemorating 
the dead. The size of the pole and the beauty of its carvings published 
abroad the fame of those it represented. 
The Gitksan, of the three Tsimsyan nations to whom they belong, 
were the least centralized and the most democratic. Their chiefs never 
claimed great wealth or transcendant power. The length and beauty of 
their poles, as a result, were determined by the resources at their command 
rather than by a preconceived plan. Not so elsewhere, for instance among 
the Nass River villagers, whose “nobles” were proud and ambitious. 
Feuds over the size of totem poles at times broke out between rival leaders 
within one village. The quarrel between Hladerh and Sispegut, of Gitr- 
hatin, will not soon be forgotten. Hladerh, the head -chief of the Wolves, 
would not allow the erection of any pole that exceeded his own in height. 
One day Sispegut, the head-chief of the Finback-whales, thought he could 
disregard his rival’s jealousies. As soon as his new pole was carved, 
over sixty years ago, the news went out that his would be the tallest in the 
village. In spite of Hladerh’s pointed warning, Sispegut issued invitations 
for its erection. But he was shot and wounded by Hladerh as he passed 
in front of his house in a canoe. The festival perforce was postponed for 
a year. Meanwhile Hladerh managed, through a clever plot, to have 
Sispegut murdered by one of his own nephews, whose ambitions served his 
secret purpose. Hladerh later compelled another chief of his own phratry, 
much to the chief’s humiliation, to shorten his pole twice after it was 
erected; and he was effectively checked only when he tried to spread his 
ascendancy abroad to an upper Nass village. 
CRESTS OR HERALDIC EMBLEMS 
The figures carved on totem poles were crests or heraldic emblems of 
their owners. They varied with each family and clan. Their ownership 
was jealously guarded. It was handed down from generation to genera- 
tion, exclusively on the side of the mother — -kinship being computed 
according to a system of unilateral descent through the mother. 
