15 
Porcher island). Of the two kinds, the house-front paintings (neksugyet) 
were the most important; they were the real crest boards. The poles 
(ptscen) were merely commemorative.” 
* + * * 
Our subject here is largely confined to the totem poles of the Gitksan, 
yet we may for a moment venture beyond the frontiers of the upper Skeena, 
and discuss the problem of more remote origins. 
The remarkable North 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 originated in a single 
centre and spread in various directions. Its frontiers coincide with those 
of the North West Coast art proper, which embraces the carving or painting 
of wood, leather, stone, bone, or ivory. 
This art itself seems much more ancient in some of its smaller forms 
than in its larger ones. Its origin on the North West coast is remote. 
It goes back to prehistoric times. It w’as 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). The carved 
dish or the Kaven head on a horn ladle observed by Dixon^, about 1785, 
is substantially like those that were carved later, in the nineteenth century, 
and that we find in our museums. JMost of the early circumnavigators— 
Cook, Dixon, Meares, Vancouver, Marchand, and la P^rouse — give ample 
evidence that masks, chests, and ceremonial objects were, at the end of the 
last century, decorated in the style now familiar to us {See the excerpts 
from these explorers’ records in the Appendix, Nos. 1-7). They also some- 
times mention that house-fronts were ornamented with painted designs. 
In a drawing reproduced in Vancouver’s A Voijage of Discovery. . . .^ 
at least eighteen out of about twenty-eight houses in a village in Johnston 
straits® were thus decorated. 
There is in the accounts of the early navigators a striking lack of evid- 
ence of the existence of totem poles proper, that is, of detached funeral 
memorials, either south or north. Yet several villages of the Tlingit, 
the Haidas or the Tsimsyan, the Kwakiutl, and the Nootkas were often 
visited by mariners in the early days. The verbal descriptions or the 
sketches that casually appear in some of their records of exploration fail 
to give us any hint of their presence, still less of their actual appearance.^ 
For instance, Dixon examined several of the Haida villages on Queen 
Charlotte islands; yet there is no mention of totem poles in his records. 
He, however, described small carved objects, trays and spoons, and left 
some illustrations. 
But there were already — from 1780 to 1800 — some carved house 
poles in existence. These early references are particularly valuable, and 
w’e will reproduce them here in full. 
Voyage ffound the World but More Fnrlicularly to the North West Coast of America and Performed in 1785, 1788, 
1787. Captains Portlock and Dixon. By Captain George Dixon. Second edition, p. 188. 
^See Appendix, No. 4 . The drawing appears on p. 345, vol. I. 
•This village must have been one among the northern Kwakiutl or the nellabellas, where such paintings were 
in vogue until fifty years ago. The Bellabellas were reputed the best painters of the North West Coast. 
*See two such sketches in Meares Voyages, p. 221— Nootka sound: or in Vancouver’s Voyage, p. 346. 
