Franz Boas’s Traditions of the Ts’ets’a’ut collects oral narratives he gathered in the winter of 1894–95 at Portland Inlet, the deep fjord that marks the boundary between Alaska and British Columbia. Boas sought out the last survivors of a tribe the Tsimshian and Nass River peoples called Ts’ets’a’ut and found them to belong to the Tinneh stock. Reduced to twelve members, the tribe could offer little beyond what Boas recorded here. He notes that these traditions resemble those E. Petitot collected from Mackenzie Basin Tinneh tribes, though long contact with Tlingit storytelling plainly shaped them. The book is a rescue of stories as much as a study of them.
“Once upon a time there were four brothers and a sister whose parents had died.”
The Brother Who Killed with His Gaze
The collection opens with “Brother and Sister,” the longest and strangest of the early tales. Four orphaned brothers and their sister travel up the Tci’nax River to hunt mountain goats, and the eldest brother and sister fall in love. The horrified younger brothers bind the pair together with cedar withes and abandon them, but the eldest tears free and the two take shelter in a cave. A son is born to them, and the father discovers that his gaze kills whatever he looks at: mountain goats drop dead across the valley when he turns his eyes on them. From this point the tale becomes a creation story. The family skins goats and dresses in the hides, and the father goes downriver to make a natural bridge, carve caves, and set the sea in place, with ocean to the west and land to the east. He proposes a hole for the tides, and his wife asks that it be placed far out in midocean so it will not swallow the people nearby. When the Ts’ets’a’ut—including the brothers who bound them—come upriver in wonder, the father steps out and kills them all with a look; a single woman hides and survives. Husband and wife then part: she goes upriver, leaving a rock shaped like a woman carrying a child, and settles at the headwaters of the Nass. He wanders downriver making curious rocks as marks of his passage, and Boas identifies him plainly as the raven, called Yét by the Tlingit. The tide-origin episode closes the tale: the raven builds a house under a rock in the sea, fits a lid over a hole through the earth, and appoints a man to open and close it twice a day. A Tlingit chief named Ta’é, hunting sea otters, is swept out to the rock by the current, saves himself with his canoe-line, and rides the flood home. Boas’s notes trace the story to two Tlingit traditions—an earthquake origin about a brother and sister who become supernatural beings, and the Raven legend—and observe that the tide episode is lifted bodily from tales of Yét and Qanuk.
“The Origin of Mountains” follows two brothers raised by their aunt after their mother dies. Hunting, they find a large bag hanging from a tree, cut it open, and kill the man who falls out; they cut off his immense member, chop it, mix it with caribou meat, and boil it. Their wives, returning from caching meat in the mountains, eat the dish heartily. The men then shout from a distance that their wives have eaten their sweetheart’s member, and flee. As the women pursue with clubs, the men throw the contents of a caribou stomach over their shoulders, and these become valleys and cañons that obstruct the chase. The men come at last to the monster adda, bear-like with huge claws and horns, and ask its protection.
The Cloud Wife and the Trial by Fire
The next tales turn from creation to marriage between human beings and the sky. In “The Cloud Wife,” two brothers and their mother hunt marmots in the mountains. The elder nearly starves until a cloud comes to his lodge and marries him, after which he catches marmots in abundance. The younger brother, worried, crosses the mountain and finds a bark lodge full of meat, where an unseen mist serves him berries, water, and cooked meat. The elder warns him never to speak the word “cloud” in his wife’s presence. The mist gradually takes human form—toes and fingers first, then limbs, then a beautiful face—and she bears a red-haired boy and then a girl. The end comes through the children: the boy cries out, “O mother! see the cloud on that mountain,” and the woman begins to vanish, taking her daughter in her arms. The house bursts, rain pours down, and the girl’s cries are heard in the clouds. The elder brother later disappears while hunting, and the narrator supposes his wife took him with her. Boas’s editorial note points to a similar legend in Petitot’s collection of Hare Indian tales.
“The Visit to the Sky” carries a man abruptly into the sky, where he wakes among strangers on a vast prairie with a young girl at his side, who tells him her father will make him clean and strong. The chief orders a great fire built with stones on top, and the man is laid on the red-hot stones, blanketed, covered with ashes, and burned under a new fire for a whole day. Taken off with wooden tongs, he is red hot but not steamed, and in the morning he rises hale and well. The chief explains that he burned him to make his body hard as stone, and gives him the daughter as wife. The chief’s lodge holds many foods unknown to the visitor, and when the couple prepare to descend to earth, the chief gives his daughter a pot and a black tube through which she alone may drink its liquid.
The Sisters Who Married the Stars
The notes then reach the story of two sisters who sleep in a little hut they have built and joke about the stars: one says she will take the white star as husband, and tells her sister to take the red one. That night two men come, one in a white blanket and one in a red, and carry the girls into the sky—they were the stars themselves. The sisters wake beside strange husbands, and their mother, calling them to breakfast, finds them gone. A boy who overheard their talk explains what has happened. The star-husbands hunt cariboos nightly and look down at the earth through holes in the sky, while the women skin the game and secretly cut long thongs spirally from hides, hiding clothing and thongs away. There is no water, cloud, or rain in the sky, and the sisters suffer from thirst until they have enough thongs to attempt escape. When their husbands leave on a long hunt, they tie stones to one end of a thong and let it down through the hole in the sky, knotting on new lengths from morning to night, one bringing the hidden cloths while the other pays them out. After four days the rope strikes ground. The elder sister ties sticks on either side of the rope to act as a brake and glides down, her clothing and gloves nearly worn through by friction, and the younger follows much faster because her sister holds the rope’s end below. They land atop a tall spruce with no way down and make a bed in its branches.
Men pass below—the sisters recognize the wolf, the bear, and many other animals—but none heed their calls until the fisher comes, and he will climb only on condition that they marry him. The elder agrees, and he carries her down; she insists he first fetch her sister, and then that he bring food before any marriage. While he kills a bear, the women hide meat under their blankets and pretend to go for water, then run. The elder throws pieces of meat at the trees, asking one to whistle and another to talk, and each delays the pursuing fisher by making him climb in search of them. Toward evening the sisters reach a deep cañon and are discovered by the grizzly bear, who wants to marry them. They dare not refuse, but ask him first to bring food, and while he hunts they build a platform overhanging the precipice, held in place by two ropes—and there the surviving notes break off.
What the Stories Carry
Read together, these narratives show a world in which the boundaries between people, animals, weather, and the sky are porous and dangerous. Marriage across those boundaries—with a cloud, with a star, with a bear—brings abundance but also catastrophe, and the tales are frank about the cost. Boas’s apparatus is as revealing as the stories: he tracks motifs across Tlingit and Tinneh traditions, flags borrowings, and admits when a tale’s origin is uncertain, as when he supposes the mysterious wives in “The Origin of Mountains” to be animals in human shape. The prefatory note gives the collection its poignancy—twelve surviving speakers, and little more material ever likely to be obtained.
The book’s legacy lies in that urgency. Boas recorded these traditions at the moment a tribe was disappearing, and he recorded them with a comparativist’s care, setting Ts’ets’a’ut stories beside Tlingit and Mackenzie Basin analogues and letting the reader see both the shared stock of Northwestern storytelling and its local inflections. What remains is a compact, unsentimental record of a cosmology: a raven who made the tides, a gaze that kills, a rope of thongs let down through a hole in the sky.
