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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 that date, when the late C. F. Newcombe visited the village. 
At 6rst sight it seems more likely that the Tlingit, of the southern Alaskan 
frontier, might have initiated the custom of erecting memorials 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 skilful carvers and weavers. 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, not even of such house or grave posts as they 
observed among the Haidas farther south. The custom of erecting these 
monuments seems modern to a keen and experienced observer of these 
people, Lieutenant G. T. Emmons, who was stationed on the Alaskan 
coast for many years in an official capacity. From Lieutenant Emmons 
we learn® that the northern half of the Tlingit nation never had totem 
poles until very recently; and the few that have sprung up in that district 
within the scope of his observation are the property of a family or families 
that originally belonged to the southern tribes and have retained their 
southern affiliations. The custom of planting poles, in other words, is 
not typically Tlingit, it is characteristic only of the southern half of their 
tribes, those next to the Haida and Nisrse frontiers. Most if not all the 
Haida and the Nisrae tribes, on the other hand, were totem pole carvers 
and owned many poles in each village. The concept is more typically 
theirs than it is Tlingit. 
The Haidas might next be dismissed from consideration as likely 
originators of the art, for the following reasons. The Haida poles, as we 
know them, are partly house poles and partly totem poles proper; the 
house poles are proportionally far more numerous among them than 
among the Tsimsyan. Indeed, none of the present Nisrae 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* and from photographs or Miss Carr’s paintings® are all of the 
same advanced type of conventionalism, all of the same period — 1830 to 
1880 — and from the hands of carvers that were contemporaries.® They 
were presumably from 10 to 30 years old when the Haidas became converts 
‘The relations of the early Ruasiana on the Tlingit are not yet known to us, being in manuscript form and un- 
available. 
*Thi8 information was obtained in the course of long personal conversations we had in Prince Rupert, in the 
summer of 1927. 
*See Appendix, No, 6. 
‘The Haida poles are well represented in several museums, even to the comp.arntive exclusion of the others — 
at the Field Museum in Chicago, the American Museum of Natural History in New York, at Victoria, B.C., in 
Ottawa, and elsewhere. 
‘Emily Carr, of Victoria, British Columbia, visited several Haida villages about 1912 and reproduced quite 
a few of their totem poles in her fine pictures. 
•Our Tsimsyan interpreter, William Beynon, reported that at Klawak (in a bay, southwest of Prince of Wales 
island, in the northern Haida country) a carved pole can be seen that must have fallen many years ago. A hemlock 
tree grown on it is now about a foot in diameter, that is, about thirty years old. The pole was about 12 feet high 
(it may have been a house pole), but the top seems broken off, and it represents the Grizzly-bear. A photograph of 
it U included in T. T. Waterman’s Alaskan collection (presumably for the Heye Museum, N.Y.). 
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