Franz Boas’s 1917 collection gathers oral narratives that four fieldworkers—James Teit, Livingston Farrand, Marian Gould, and Herbert Spinden—recorded among Interior Salish and Sahaptin peoples of the Columbia Plateau and the Fraser and Thompson river country. Named elders and chiefs told them the tales, and Boas edited the volume for the American Folk-Lore Society, adding comparative notes and a few stories he had himself collected in 1888. What results is less a single authored book than a mapped territory: dozens of stories in several languages and dialects, arranged by tribe, with the tellers’ own asides and the collectors’ footnotes left visible.
Running through the whole volume is the figure of Coyote, the transformer who sets the world in order and then spoils half of what he fixes. Around him cluster the origin tales—how death came, how fire was stolen, how salmon were released into the rivers—and the etiological stories that explain why a rock on the Thompson River has a certain shape or why the sucker’s flesh is full of bones. The collection moves from the Thompson and Okanagon material through Sanpoil, Pend d’Oreille, and Coeur d’Alêne tales to the Lower Fraser and the Sahaptin and Nez Percé cycles, so that the same trickster reappears under different names and with different reputations.
How the World Gets Made and Remade
The Volume and Its Makers
The book opens as Volume XI of the Memoirs of the American Folk-Lore Society, issued in 1917 under the title Folk-Tales of Salishan and Sahaptin Tribes. James A. Teit, Livingston Farrand, Marian K. Gould, and Herbert J. Spinden collected the tales; Franz Boas edited them for the American Folk-Lore Society, with G. E. Stechert & Co. as agents. The contents run from an introductory essay into numbered bodies of tales: Thompson, Okanagon (from both Teit and Gould), Sanpoil, Pend d’Oreille, Coeur d’Alêne, tales of the Lower Fraser River, Sahaptin tales gathered by Farrand and edited by Theresa Mayer, and Nez Percé tales from Spinden.
The introduction credits Homer E. Sargent of Chicago with making possible Teit’s decade of work among the interior Salish—their distribution, dialects, customs, and stories—and notes that an earlier Lillooet collection had already appeared in the Journal of American Folk-Lore. Teit’s previous publications are listed, among them his work on the Thompson River Indians, Thompson mythology, European tales from the Upper Thompson, Lillooet traditions, and the Shuswap. Boas contributed a few tales he himself collected in 1888, Gould supplied the Okanagon and Sanpoil material, and the volume also carries Farrand’s 1902 Sahaptin tales and Spinden’s from 1907; most of the comparative notes are Boas’s. An abbreviation key follows, signed by Boas at Columbia University on December 30, 1916.
Coyote’s Decrees
Teit’s Thompson tales begin with Coyote. In the Origin of Death from Nicola Valley, Coyote meets Raven, a selfish chief who wants the game kept for himself, long winters, and an end to people. Raven argues that the world would be overcrowded and hungry, and Crow, Fly, and Maggot side with him, eager for corpses to feed on. Coyote proposes instead that people die like sleep and revive, but at last agrees that bodies be buried and souls go to a spirit-land until the world changes. Raven’s daughter is the first to die; his attempt to bring her back fails, and Coyote refuses to alter the decree.
Coyote Steals Fire takes him toward a distant light, after his own excrements mock his ignorance. With Fox, Wolf, Antelope, and relay runners he reaches the Fire people and dances among them until his pitchy head-dress catches; he flees, passing the fire hand to hand while pursuers kill the animals, then hides it in a tree, turns himself into dung to escape, and lets fire spread until rain and flood check it. Ever after fire lives in trees, which explains cedar-bark, pitch-wood, smoke, and the habit of blowing a flame. In Coyote and Elk he finds people helpless against Elk, who hunts them; he transforms Bull Elk into the common elk and teaches bow-making, hunting, butchering, and hide dressing. Deer he ordains as game, with no tales of them as humans.
Coyote’s Follies
A bag on a pole holds the Sun people: Fox’s pipe says “Sun-rays,” Coyote’s excrements say “Hot wind.” Coyote pierces the bag and burns his hand; Fox bursts it with an arrow and hot wind and sun-rays escape noisily, and the two flee, threatening pursuers who retreat. Coyote teaches people to mate, and the women detain him until he is exhausted, bearing children afterward. Two Marmots clash rocks to kill passers-by until Coyote blocks them with his antler arrow-flaker and transforms them and the rocks. In an underground lodge a comb, awl, smoothing stones, and stone hammer attack him as he takes them, and he decrees they become mere tools. Geese fall at his clapping, then rise carrying him off; he drops into swamp mud, is bitten by insects, and Fox pulls him out. Women tickle sleepers with feathers and exchange their noses, and the pair quarrel at their reflections. Kingfisher dives through ice four times to catch fish for Coyote; Coyote imitates him, breaks his nose and head, and Kingfisher laughs and fishes for him. An Elk chief gives Coyote a daughter, allowing one healing bite from her rump after four nights; hungry, Coyote bites her, she flees and becomes an elk, and elks grow numerous in Nicola country. Coyote becomes a baby to live among berry-pickers, vanishes, and the women find his hairs, swell, and give birth at their lodge entrances. Digging tatu’En roots, he opens a hole and sees people below: the roots were stars and he was in the sky country. Fox eats the ground-squirrels Coyote has baked, and the rock where Coyote reclines holds him fast.
Kokwe’la and Qwa’qtqwEtl
The Transformer Kokwe’la, native to Botani Valley, angered that his mother lied about his father, questions trees, stones, and water until a bird tells him and the kokwe’la-root confirms it. He turns his mother into a stone near Lytton as a warning to liars, declaring women may no longer bear children to roots. Travelling among the Shuswap and down the Fraser to Nkai’a, he meets the Qwa’qtqwEtl brothers going upriver; neither can transform the other, so they agree they are equals and camp on a flat rock still visible. Kokwe’la strikes water from the ground with his staff, and the four men carry tiny basketry kettles, food packs, and sheep’s-horn spoons that swell to full size at will, their food inexhaustible. Qwa’qtqwEtl cannot finish Kokwe’la’s soup in one spoonful, but Kokwe’la sweeps it up with his thumb and leaves the basket empty. They part to travel opposite ways: Kokwe’la descends to the western ocean, vanishes, takes the name SEsuwElia’n, and will remain there until the dead return, when he reappears with Coyote as chief and judge. Qwa’qtqwEtl and his brothers go east up the Thompson to the other ocean; the youngest transforms them, their dog, and a hunted bear into the Grizzly Bear stars, takes the name CEkwo’liatc, and waits at the east end of the earth for the great change.
Between Lytton and Spences Bridge the brothers work transformations: a Snake woman who kills men with her body is turned to rock by Qwa’qtqwEtl’s arrow-flaker, and the rock is prayed to by people with swollen limbs; a huge horse with its mouth gaping on the trail becomes stone, with the decree that horses be man’s friends (informants, told the horse was recent, guessed it was a buffalo or elk); a cannibal and his underground lodge become stone, while his kindly wife becomes a short-tailed mouse feeding on roots.
Kwolina’u.l and Chief Tcexe’x at Lytton
When Kwolina’u.l reached Lytton, Tcexe’x held the chieftainship of the Spences Bridge band—a man of standing, a great orator, one-eyed, never a practising shaman yet wielding more influence than most who were. The narrator traced his own descent directly from him. Tcexe’x had a large family and was already elderly when the whites first came to Lytton in midsummer, with berries ripe and much of the tribe gathered at Botani digging roots and playing games. Some Thompson men returning on horseback from La Fontaine brought word of the approaching strangers. Tcexe’x hurried from Botani to Lytton and was there to meet them. Their chief was called “Sun,” though his real name went unknown. Several chiefs spoke, but Tcexe’x’s speech surpassed them all and pleased Sun so much that he gave him a large silver brooch from his own person. Tcexe’x wore it fastened in his hair at the front on special occasions; the narrator saw it worn by his sons, and it passed from one son to a brother, then probably to a third, who died at Lytton as an old man and was buried on the north side of the Thompson River at Drynoch, some seven miles below Spences Bridge—the ornament vanishing about the time of that death. A footnote fixes Tcexe’x’s birth around 1830 and his death in 1912 near Spences Bridge, and notes that “Kwolina’u.l,” meaning “birch-bark canoe,” was a common name for Simon Fraser’s party.
The Okanagon Tales and Coyote’s Commission
Most of the Okanagon stories came from Red-Arm (KwElkwElta’xEn), an old Nespelim man related to the Okanagon, who held that the tales were shared between Nespelim and Lower Okanagon. The cycle opens with the Chief sending Coyote to set the world in order, since people were preyed upon by evil beings and faced being killed off. The Chief endowed him with power to surmount obstacles, to transform evil beings, with wisdom and cunning, and gave his excrements the power to be friends and advisers. Coyote was to travel the world; when finished, the Chief would meet him, inspect his work, and give him rest.
The Origin of the Columbia River
Coyote heard water dripping and four times tried to silence it by imitating the sound; he kicked the spot, the noise ceased, then resumed. Water followed him, growing. He grew thirsty and descended into the coulee where the Columbia now runs—no river then—to drink, but thirst returned each time despite drinking. The fourth time, angry, he turned back; the water was now a good-sized river. He walked along and then in the water, deeper each time—knees, waist, arms—then swam drinking constantly until he lost consciousness. Thus the water got even with Coyote for kicking it, and the Columbia River originated from a few drops.
Coyote and the Water
Travelling south of the Columbia in a dry coulee, hot and dry, he rested in the shade of a rock; the rock cracked and leaned, so he fled; a tree creaked and leaned, so he fled. He wished for a cloud, then many clouds, then rain, then much rain, then a creek (he walked in it), then a river—which reached his chin and carried him to a distant country where he floated ashore exhausted. Ravens, crows, magpies, and buzzards came to feed on him thinking him dead; he got up and chased them away. The informant had forgotten more of this tale.
The Introduction of Salmon
Coyote floated in a large river, regained consciousness, feared, and changed himself into a small canoe. Below, somewhere above where Portland now is, at a fall, lived the two We’lwel sisters, who owned a weir across the stream; below the weir the river was full of salmon, above it none, and the Indians above knew nothing of salmon, living on game, roots, and berries. Coyote, as a canoe bottom-up, struck the weir. The sisters came to clean driftwood; the younger said they must save it for a dish; the elder warned not to touch it—possibly Coyote. The younger took it home and put boiled salmon in it; returning from root-digging, they found the salmon and some drying fish gone, and the elder said, “I told you!” The younger, angry, tried to break the dish on a rock; it assumed the shape of a baby crying; she pitied it, saying it would make a nice younger brother. Coyote grew fast; when the women went root-digging they tied him up; out of sight, he unfastened himself, ate their roots and dried salmon, then retied himself, appearing meek; the women praised their good younger brother. Coyote planned to break the weir. The fourth day the elder sister’s root-digger broke; she said something was wrong (it was of very strong wood) and they hastened home. Coyote had put a sheep’s-horn spoon on his head and was breaking the weir; the women beat him with sticks, but the spoon protected him and he worked faster. The weir broken, he ran up the opposite bank; king-salmon ascended in great numbers. The sisters wept, crying that he had stolen their salmon for his Coyote people, calling them bad people. He answered that they thought they had a little brother who knew nothing, but he was greater than they knew.
The Nature of the Ancient Beings
Each of the ancient beings had great powers in certain ways but was weak and helpless in others, exceedingly wise in some things and foolish in others. All had the gift of speech. As a rule they were selfish, and much trouble existed among them. Some were cannibals who lived by eating one another—some knowingly, others through ignorance. They knew they had to live by hunting but did not know which beings were people and which deer; they thought people were deer and preyed on them. Some people lived on earth at the same time, having all the characteristics Indians have now but more ignorant. Deer were real animals then as now, and people hunted them; they were never people or semi-human ancients. Some say moose and caribou were also animals like the deer, and that elk, antelope, and buffalo were animals too, though stories are told of the last three as though they were ancients or semi-human.
Old-One made each ball of mud a little different, rolled and shaped them, and made them alive. The last balls were almost all alike, formed like Indians, and he called them men; he blew on them and they became alive. They were Indians but ignorant, knew no arts, were the most helpless of all things created, and cannibals preyed on them particularly. People and animals were made male and female so they might breed; thus everything living sprang from the earth, whose parts we see everywhere.
The Close of the Fraser River Tale
The Sahaptin material opens with the tail of a preceding story: a man of great stature at the mouth of the Fraser River, a killer who went up the river as far as Hope with his wife at his side, demolishing houses and carrying home the heads of the men and women he slaughtered. He and his wife bore heavy burdens and he never came back. A note names him saskets, or sLaleqam.
Coyote and His Son
Coyote’s son was a chief and a good man, living near the Snake River. One morning he kicked a log and fire came out of it, fire that would thereafter burn to warm people. He told the people to hunt deer, wore owl-feather clothes, and was reckoned the greatest chief. His two wives were Beetle, who was black, and Duck, who was white; Beetle had a son. Old Coyote made a fire of willows, saw the women’s privates through the sparks, and coveted Duck. He resolved to kill his son, claiming an eagle with young sat atop a tree and that the women wanted the feathers. The son agreed to go in the morning. At the tree the old man said he could not climb and sent the youth up, telling him to strip so his clothes would not be spoiled—Coyote wanted them. As the youth climbed, the old man winked and the eyry rose; the tree carried him beyond the clouds into the sky country. There he found a large tent with five doors; opening one, people shouted that it was cold; at the next they seized spears; at the last they tried to strike him. He shouted “Stop, grandfather!” and they said their only grandchild was Coyote’s son, and welcomed and fed him. They promised to send him down, making ropes over five days, and asked him to fill a spoon with deer tallow to rub their sore hands. They put him in a spoon as large as a huge dish and told him to roll over whenever the spoon stopped; five times he struck the clouds and passed through; on solid ground the spoon did not move, so he untied himself, hunted deer, filled the spoon with tallow, and pulled the rope as a signal.
Meanwhile Old Coyote had taken Duck, deceiving her by pretending to be her husband, dancing and claiming he had persuaded his father to climb; most believed him because he looked so different. Beetle disbelieved, put reeds on her back, placed her baby on them, and left with her rawhide tump-line dragging, crying. The son followed, passed ten of her camp-sites, found his boy’s bow at the last, and saw her carrying the child and weeping; the boy saw him and cried “Father has my bow!” She said his father was dead; he caught up, stepped on her rawhide strap, and said “Don’t strike the boy!” They sat down and exchanged stories; she said the people missed him because without him they killed few deer, and that all Coyote did was run ahead to start fire with fire-sticks. He told her to wrap him in reeds, place the boy on top, and stop at a distance; she was to tell him if the people caught a fat deer, then close the tent tightly and take the fattest deer. She kept crying that her child was hungry; the people grew suspicious; Mosquito volunteered to look through a hole but she hit him and drove him back; Raven slipped in silently under the tent, saw Coyote’s son eating, recognized him, and told what he had seen, proving Old Coyote a liar. The old people ordered everyone to shout “Coyote’s son has come back!” It had been his custom to sing every evening and Coyote imitated him. Old Coyote asked what the noise was; Duck was cooking a fawn; the people yelled the news; Coyote pulled off his clothes, jumped into the fire, and cried over his boy; Duck, ashamed, turned into a duck and went into the river. Old Coyote was thereafter treated like a slave.
Coyote’s son decided on revenge. He hunted on a ridge near Waka Lake, came to a hill named Backbone, killed a fat deer near the river, butchered it, left it, and asked Old Coyote to bring in the carcass. Beetle had painted a gut like a tump-line and given it to Old Coyote to carry the carcass. Reaching the deer, he took a great piece and ate it, tied up the pack, and started home; the strap broke; his son told him to tie it and go ahead; it broke five times until he had nothing to carry with; he grew very tired and hot and could go no farther. Then Coyote’s son threw the backbone down the hill, saying, “Henceforth this shall be Backbone Ridge.” Old Coyote sat down ashamed.
A second version runs much the same: Coyote lived with his son up on Snake River; the son had two wives, Hu’Ikuix the duck and Tcalxtcalx the beetle. Old Coyote loved the Duck wife. He proposed hunting chickens in the mountains; Coyote shot a chicken but magically made it stay up in the tree; the son stripped and climbed, telling his father not to look; Old Coyote kept looking up, and each time the son was removed farther until he could not get back. Old Coyote took the wives.
Magpie as Counselor
Coyote floats downstream and drifts ashore; Magpie pecks at his eyes, waking him. Coyote protests that he was dreaming of getting girls at the head of the canyon. Magpie explains that two Humming-Birds who kill everybody, placed there when the world was first made, killed him, and instructs him: return the way he came, make himself an old man, tell them to kill him because he is tired; two white sticks with two white feathers on the hilltop are their hearts; take the canyon trail, run to the sticks, seize the poles and break the feathers to kill them. Coyote says, “That is what I thought.” Transformed into an old man, he meets the Humming-Birds, who say “Let us have war!”; he lies down saying “Come down and kill me,” then runs up the other side; they pursue; he reaches the poles, breaks the feathers, and kills both. He decrees they shall hereafter be only pretty little birds and not kill people.
Continuing upstream, he hears a woman inviting him to lie with her; she is a handsome girl holding a forked white stick. Asked what she wants, she tells him to look down at a big mountain-sheep; as he stoops she pierces his neck with the forked stick, pushes him over, and kills him. Fearing his decaying body will smell, she throws it into the river; it drifts ashore at the same place; Magpie pecks his eyes and cures him. Magpie explains the woman has always killed everybody and advises: climb to her, ask her to come down because you are tired, then push her over and kill her—she is a mountain-sheep. Coyote says “
Coyote, the Chief, and the Unfinished Creation
The Okanagon tellers give the volume its clearest cosmology. Old-One shaped balls of mud into living beings, the last of them nearly alike and formed like Indians; these first people were ignorant, knew no arts, and were preyed on by cannibal beings who took them for deer. The Chief sent his son Jesus to set things right, but Jesus taught only prayer and good conduct, transformed nothing, and was killed; the Chief then sent Coyote to destroy the monsters, teach people to hunt and build and clothe themselves, and settle the transformed ancients in pairs across the earth, each with its own name and language. Coyote does much good and botches much of it. He is wise and powerful and also selfish, boastful, and vain, fond of tricks for his own amusement, ugly enough that women generally dislike him, and occasionally duped by the very persons he means to fool. When the Chief comes down as a poor old man and asks Coyote to move a lake, Coyote can shift it but cannot put it back; only then does he accept that his work is finished and disappear to the home prepared for him.
That ambivalence is the collection’s real subject. Coyote is not a hero and not a god; the informants themselves disagree about what he was—an Indian of unusual knowledge, one of the semi-human ancients, a being from the sky, or a helper of the Chief—and the Okanagon narrator says plainly that some think he acted on orders and others that he never knew he had a mission. The same uncertainty attaches to the other transformers. Kokwe’la, born in the Botani Valley, turns his lying mother to stone and travels the Fraser and Thompson, matching powers with the Qwa’qtqwEtl brothers, driving his staff into the ground for water, and finally vanishing at the western ocean under a new name, due to return as chief and judge when the dead come back. His counterpart goes east to the other end of the earth and becomes the Grizzly Bear stars. The land is littered with the results: a snake-woman turned to rock and prayed to by people with swollen limbs, a horse-monster transformed with the decree that horses shall serve man, a cannibal’s lodge frozen into stone.
What the Stories Carry Besides Plot
The tales are also a record of how a people described themselves. The Thompson migration legends explain why the Lytton country was settled—four camps, each lacking wood or fish or game, and a fourth where all were plentiful—and one version turns elegiac: before the whites came the country was rich in salmon and deer, the people numerous and healthy, and now “we are as in prison,” the lands spoiled or stolen. Chief Cexpe’ntlEm’s speech to the whites of 1858 is preserved as a claim of hospitality betrayed: they entered his house as guests, and had he known they meant to steal the land there would have been war. The closing anecdote of the Okanagon section remembers Tcexe’x, the one-eyed Spences Bridge chief whose oratory so pleased the whites’ chief, called “Sun,” that he was given a silver brooch, worn in his hair on special occasions and probably buried with his son. Alongside these sit stories of a different order—a woman who gradually turns into a horse, two orphans adopted by a childless chief in a town of men, a dead mother who returns nightly to nurse her baby until the shamans tame her.
A Record Rather Than a Retelling
The book’s significance lies in its method as much as its contents. Boas and his collectors printed the tales as they were told, with the narrators’ hesitations, the variant versions set side by side, and the footnotes that flag a forgotten detail or an informant’s correction—when told that horses were a recent arrival, one man suggested the monster “might have been a buffalo or elk.” Names are given: Red-Arm, the old Nespelim man who supplied most of the Okanagon stories; Chief TedlEnl’tsa, who told the migration legend of the crossing of the great lake. Because of that care, the volume preserves not only the plots but the tellers’ own arguments about them—whether Coyote knew what he was doing, whether the deer were ever people, whether the enemies who drove the ancestors across the water were the whites. It remains a primary document of Plateau oral literature, and a reminder that the stories were still being told, and still being debated, when they were written down.
