Franz Boas collected the tales in Tsimshian Texts at Kinkolith, at the mouth of the Nass River in British Columbia, during November and December of 1894, while he was in the region under the auspices of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. His primary assignment was a study of the Athapascan tribe of Portland Canal; the Tsimshian material came incidentally, taken down from four speakers—Philip, Moses, Chief Mountain, and Moody—in the Nass River dialect the people themselves call Nisqa’E. The book presents the stories in interlinear form, Tsimshian line by line with English beneath, followed by running translations and, at the end, a set of abstracts. Most of the texts are tribal myths, and Boas, judging them against the Tsimshian myths he had collected earlier, calls them only moderately well told. He is equally candid about his transcription, admitting he could not decide whether the language has one or two palatalized ts sounds and that his ear for surds and sonants sometimes failed him; he did not aim at a consistent spelling but wrote each word as it sounded to him at the moment.
From the Sun-Box to the Dwarf Coast
The Making of the Collection
The volume belongs to the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology, issued as Bulletin 27 under Director J. W. Powell and printed by the Government Printing Office in Washington. Its contents run from an introduction through a long series of numbered texts—Txa’msEm and Logobola’, The Stone and the Elderberry Bush, The Porcupine and the Beaver, The Wolves and the Deer, The Stars, Rotten-feathers, K-‘eLk”, The sealion hunters, Smoke-hole, Ts’ak-, Growing-up-like-one-who-has-a-grandmother, Little-eagle, She-who-has-a-labret-on-one-side, The Grizzly Bear, Squirrel, Witchcraft—closing with supplementary stories and abstracts.
Boas explains in his introduction that he gathered these texts at Kinkolith, at the mouth of the Nass river, in November and December 1894, while conducting research under the British Association for the Advancement of Science. His chief purpose had been the study of the Athapascan tribe of Portland canal; the Tsimshian material came incidentally. The ethnological results appeared in the reports of the Committee on the Northwestern Tribes of Canada. The texts are in the Nass River dialect, which the natives call Nisqa’E, and came from four individuals—Philip, Moses, Chief Mountain, and Moody. Most are tribal myths, and measured against similar myths Boas had earlier collected among the Tsimshian proper, they are only moderately well told. On transcription he confesses uncertainty: he could not determine whether there are one or two palatized Ts (probably two) and renders all by a single character; his perception of surds and sonants wavered, the fortis or surd followed by hiatus often sounding like the sonant; he did not aim at consistent spelling but followed whatever transcription seemed appropriate as he wrote. The introduction is dated New York, June 1899, and a pronunciation key follows.
The False Death and the Child in the Box
The first text, told by Moses with parts by Philip, opens in a town where a chief and chieftainess live. She takes a lover without the chief’s knowledge and resolves to pretend to die. She feigns sickness, then death, and the people cry. Before “dying” she asks for a large box to be buried in; they make it and place her on tree branches in the woods, with a spoon and fish knife inside. For two nights the chief sits under the box, then stops crying. Maggots seem to fall from it, and he thinks she is full of maggots—in truth she scrapes the spoon with the knife. Her lover climbs the tree, knocks, and calls “Let me in, ghost!” twice; she answers “Ha-ha! I pretend to make maggots in your behalf,” opens the cover, and lies with him nightly until she is pregnant. One man finds out and tells the chief; the chief’s nephews keep watch and kill the man and the woman. Now she is really dead and her body putrefying; her child comes out alive, sucks its mother’s intestines, and is named Sucking-intestines. The child grows in the box; children shooting arrows at a target near the tree lose their arrows as he takes them. They see he comes from the grave and tell the chief, who orders a watch; the nephews catch him and take him to the chief’s house, where he grows up.
Theft of Daylight
He hears of a chief’s daughter beyond the hole where the heavens meet. He skins a bird, wears its skin, and flies, crying “G’ltg’it g’lt g’insaaaaa!” Meeting a person, he shoots and skins a woodpecker for the other to wear; they fly, the woodpecker crying “How-how!” People tell him to go farther to find where the heavens meet; after many towns they reach the hole in the sky, where it is always dark, no daylight. They fly through and inside both remove their skins. He comes to a spring near the chief’s house; the chief’s daughter comes with a small basket for water; he transforms into a cedar leaf floating on the water, she dips and drinks it, returns, and after a short time is with child, bearing a boy. The chief and chieftainess are glad and wash him regularly; he grows and creeps about; the chief smooths and cleans the floor. The child cries “Hamaxii, hamaxii!” constantly; the chief calls the people, not knowing what he wants—he wants the box called max, in which daylight is kept hanging in a corner of the house. A wise man understands and tells the chief; the max is taken down and laid before the boy, who stops crying, glad, and rolls it about the house for four days, sometimes to the door. The chief forgets it; the boy takes the max on his shoulders and runs out; a man says “The giant is running away with the max, ha!”—hence his name Giant. He runs to the hole of the sky where his companion sits; both put on their bird skins and fly through, the Giant carrying the max, the world then always dark.
Daylight Loosed and the Water Stolen
The Giant goes on; daylight remains; darkness does not return. He wears something tied over his head; farther up the river he puts it under a stone in a steep cliff, where it is yet. He does not know where his companion has gone; the Giant has come down at the mouth of the Nass river, while Logobola—here the notes break off into dialogue. In the Tsimshian exchange that follows, a person asks “What is this talking,” and Txa’msEm declares he will take something from the sea to land, threatening to “tear the max” for the ghosts. The ghosts reply, addressing a “great slave” with “scabby leg below knee,” asking where he got it and calling him a “great thief.” Txa’msEm opens the box slightly, making light; the ghosts’ large box-canoes float up and capsize; he shuts the box and the ghosts resume catching olachen. Txa’msEm becomes sick; he opens the box a little again and it becomes daylight, revealing blanket-boxes and capsized canoes; he shuts it once more and the ghosts again make olachen.
Tricking the Chief out of Water
Txa’msEm comes to a sleeping chief’s house where water is kept and plans to steal it. He tears bark from a rotten tree, chews it to resemble excrement, enters secretly, lifts the chief’s blanket, places the excrement by his anus, wakes him, and claims the chief soiled his blanket. The chief, ashamed, believes it. Txa’msEm fetches moss, wipes the blanket, shows the chief the mess, then carries it outside. Re-entering, he says he is thirsty; the chief tells him to get water himself.
The Wolves and the Deer
The Wolves open the sequence with a piece of deadly flattery. They urge the Deer to laugh with their mouths wide open, insisting that nobody laughs with a closed mouth and that there is nothing to fear. The Deer oblige — “Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!” — and in opening wide they reveal their toothless gums. The Wolves fall on them at once, biting them all over and devouring them, and only a few escape. The tale closes on that grim etymology: this is why the Deer are afraid of the Wolves.
The Boy Who Mocked a Star
A father and his son sit on the beach at evening, and the boy looks up at a star and pities it — “Poor fellow! You little twinkler, you must feel cold.” The Star hears. It comes down one night and carries the boy off to the sky, and the people search everywhere, asking every tribe, without finding him; his parents cry for many days. Walking and weeping, the father sees smoke rising from a mountain, climbs it, and meets a woman who tells him what has happened: the Star has tied his child at the edge of the smoke-hole, where the sparks burn him. She tells him to make many arrows quickly. He makes four bundles, climbs a long mountain, and shoots into the hole in the sky until the arrows form a chain; he climbs it carrying tobacco, red paint, and sling-stones. A person advises him to carve a wooden image in his child’s likeness, and he makes figures of spruce, hemlock, balsam fir, red cedar, and yellow cedar, burning them over a fire until the sparks scorch them and they cry out, then fall silent. He meets G’ix’sats’a’ntx’ splitting firewood and gives him tobacco — which makes him swell, a condition called “being troubled” — along with red paint and sling-stones. G’ix’sats’a’ntx’ tells him where the child lies and to wait until all are asleep. The father takes his boy, ties the wooden image at the smoke-hole, and flees; the image cries, the chief grows suspicious, finds a stick, and orders pursuit. The man throws tobacco, red paint, and sling-stones behind him, and the pursuers stop to pick them up — the paint red, the sling-stones blue, which is said to account for the colors of the stars. G’ix’sats’a’ntx’ swells until he blocks the trail, and the Star tribe cannot catch them. The man descends the arrow chain, pulls it down after him, and returns home glad with his wife.
Rotten-feathers and the Children Who Rose to Heaven
In a town, children play noisily on a prairie every day until Heaven grows annoyed and sends down feathers. A strong, nearly grown boy puts them on his head and rises; the others grab his feet and are lifted too, until the whole town ascends, leaving only howling dogs behind. A menstruating girl, secluded in a small house inland with her little grandmother, finds the empty town. She puts an old crab-apple wedge, a sloe wedge, a spruce wedge, a grindstone, a knife, and snot into her belly, lies four days and nights, and bears six children: Little-crab-apple-tree, Little-sloe-bush, Little-spruce, Little-mountain, Little-knife, and Snot. She warns them to stop playing ball, since their grandfathers were killed for it and Heaven took the tribe; they play again, Heaven sends feathers, and the eldest puts them on and rises. Little-sloe-bush grabs him and cries “Break, my roots!” and rises; Little-spruce does likewise; Little-grindstone becomes a great mountain but is pulled up; Snot sticks but is lifted. The little girl climbs her brothers’ heads and cuts the feathers, and they fall down. The feathers stay on the eldest’s head, and he is called Rotten-feathers. He and his brother come to a town, he marries, returns to his own town, and has a boy whom he names.
The Drifting Log
Children play at camping daily inside a large hollow log, making a fire and eating salmon. One day the tide rises and floats the log out to sea, and the children, playing inside, never notice. A wise child sees gulls and proposes hitting their noses and rubbing the blood on the log so the birds’ feet stick fast; they do it, the feet dry quickly, and a boy twists off the gulls’ necks, killing many. They eat and forget they are drifting. A great noise brings them to a whirlpool, where a one-legged man harpoons the log and pulls it ashore.
One-Leg and the Canoe That Eats
One-leg tells the boys a town is not far off and that they will start in the morning in his canoe at the end of the village. He sends them to take the cover off it — “near by yonder” — but they tire of walking about and cannot find it, and return saying no. He sends them again with the same result. Then One-leg goes himself to a rotten tree covered with small branches, strips them away, and reveals a large canoe shaped like a man, with a mouth at each end, named “Wa’sE-at-each-end.” Nothing may cross its bow or stern; when a man did, it ate him. One-leg warns the boys not to pass in front of it, and they obey out of fear. They launch the fine, large canoe and load many seals aboard as food; bow and stern each eat five seals, and after finishing it goes very fast, so they give five more to each end. At last the children land at the town of their fathers and find their fathers, mothers, and all relatives crying; the boys come back, and that is the end.
The Sealion Hunter Who Was Dragged to Sea
Four great hunters — one of the Wolf clan, one Raven, one Eagle, one Bear — work four rocks full of sealions. One man’s rock is not full: he catches only two while the others catch many. Ashamed, he comes home almost empty-handed, having taken only one, and is sad. One evening he starts out and steals the sealions on the Wolf-clan man’s rock. Next morning that man finds none and knows someone stole them. He carves a sealion from wood and floats it; four kinds of wood fail, but a hard wood red like a sealion’s skin makes a good one that does not weaken, and he lays it on his rock. The thief comes again at night, sees the sealion, and harpoons it. The sealion dives and swims away — formerly harpoons were fastened to cedar-bark lines — and the man holds the line as it pays out, dragged in his canoe until the line is all gone. He tries to let go, but the line sticks to his hands, and the sealion swims away with him. Four days it swims, until the mountains are lost from sight and he cries the whole time; ten days and ten nights they go on.
The Prince Who Fed the Eagles
A chief’s son refuses food and does nothing but make bows and arrows. When the salmon run, his father orders the people to catch and dry great quantities of fish. The prince takes a single salmon, lays it on the sand, and feeds the eagles; the birds descend in numbers, devour every fish, and fly off, leaving him their feathers. He gathers the feathers and fletches swift arrows until many boxes are full, and both he and the eagles are glad. When the salmon are gone, he stops.
Winter arrives and for some three months the people live on dried salmon, berries mixed with grease, elderberries, and currants. As the stores run low the chief grows sad and sends his great slave to bid the people move. They depart in the morning, abandoning the chief’s son, his little grandmother, and one small, weak slave. The prince’s mother buries a clamshell holding fire and half a large spring salmon and tells the old woman where it lies hidden.
The Eagles Repay Their Debt
Left without food, the little grandmother kindles a fire from the coal. The prince sits outside at low water and hears an eagle screeching on the beach. He sends the little slave, who finds a trout on the sand; the prince has it roasted, and the old woman and slave eat it while he eats nothing. The pattern repeats and grows: the eagles bring trout and sculpin, then salmon, then a large spring salmon, then halibut, then a seal, a porpoise, sealions, and at last whales—four of them for the prince, the grandmother, and the slave. The houses fill with dried fish, grease, and meat. The eagles give because the prince had pitied and fed them in summer.
The Deserted People Return
Meanwhile his father’s people are dying. The prince skins a gull, wears its skin, takes a piece of seal, and flies to his father’s tribe, dropping the seal slice into a canoe where a hunter takes it. The chief sends men and slaves to search; they find the water covered with grease and the houses full. The prince tells them to eat but carry nothing home and to report that he is dead. One slave hides two pieces of seal in his shirt for his child, and the child chokes on the meat.
The chief, the chieftainess, and all the prince’s uncles cannot sleep. One uncle has two exceedingly pretty daughters. At dawn the chief orders the people back to the place where they left the prince. They arrive to see grease on the water. The uncle dresses his two daughters, has boards laid across the middle of the canoe, and sets the girls on them, thinking his nephew shall marry them. Many canoes approach, but the prince will not let them land; he opens a box, takes out a bow and arrows, and shoots at the canoes, angry because they deserted him. At last the people land and build little sheds, and he gives food to his father and mother out of pity. As they come ashore one woman stretches out her hands to eat the grease on the water; ashamed, the prince refuses to marry her and takes only the younger daughter.
Little-eagle Becomes a Great Chief
The prince invites the people into his house and gives them trout, salmon, spring salmon, halibut, seals, porpoises, sealions, and whales. His father’s people rejoice and give him elk skins, goods, canoes, and slaves. He becomes a great chief with four houses full of elk skins, many slaves, and many canoes. When his father dies he gives a potlatch, inviting all the people and distributing elk skins and slaves because his father was a great chief. After his mother dies he gives another potlatch, again giving away elk skins, slaves, and canoes. He became a great chief because he fed the eagles and the eagles pitied him. His name was Little-eagle.
She-who-has-a-labret-on-one-side
A new tale, told by Moses, begins in a town whose chief and chieftainess have a nearly grown son with four constant friends. One friend sees a little slave girl coming along the street; she enters the last house and sits by the fire. The owner’s wife offers her the back of a salmon, but she refuses and leaves, and does the same in every house. The friend reports her to the prince, and his companions ask why he does not marry her. When she nears the chief’s house they spread a mat at the rear and the prince sits down. The girl enters, her head very large and her body unclean, and sits beside him. The chieftainess roasts dry salmon, breaks it into a dish, and sets it before them. When the dish is empty the girl takes a large scab from her body and puts it in the dish, asking that it be placed before the chief; he looks and beholds a large abalone shell and is glad. A second dish of crab apples mixed with grease follows, and another scab becomes a second abalone shell for the chieftainess. The chief, chieftainess, and prince rejoice to learn she is no slave. In the evening a woman pushes aside the door and asks whether She-who-has-a-labret-on-one-side entered this house; told she has married the chief’s son, she says to take good care of her, and promises her people will come to give him boxes of grease, crab apples, and cranberries.
The Great Grizzly Bear
The great Grizzly Bear is married to a man whose first wife is a woman of his own tribe. The Bear has no children; the woman has one. In summer, before the berries ripen, the Bear says the berries are ripe on her mountain and takes the woman picking—the woman fills a bag, the Bear fills her stomach. Back home the Bear has her bag carried to the middle of the house and defecates berries into a dish until it is full; the Indians are afraid to eat them, though their wives eat the Bear’s food at home, and the Bear is glad. When salmon are in the river the chief builds a weir and trap, and before daybreak the Bear empties the trap and has her father-in-law distribute the fish, night after night, unknown to the people, while she and the woman dry many salmon. A young man finds the trap empty, grows angry, and scolds her—”You rise too early, great Drop-jaw,” “You feed us with your excrements.” The Bear rushes on him, kills him, tears his flesh and breaks his bones, then remembers her own people and two children and goes home angry. Her husband follows; she warns him twice to turn back or she will kill him, and when he refuses because he loves his great wife, she kills him and leaves.
The Squirrel Shaman
Four children shoot squirrels all year, drying skins and storing meat at the foot of a large spruce, until only the chief of the squirrels and his white daughter remain. A boy sees a little white squirrel, which becomes a young woman who calls him; he lays his bow at the tree’s foot.
The Trickster and the Feeders of Eagles
The longest thread in the collection follows Txa’msEm, the figure Boas’s abstracts also call Raven, a glutton and swindler whose appetites shape the world. He cheats a sleeping chief out of his water by planting false excrement and claiming the man soiled his own blanket; he rubs herring roe inside his canoe to convince a gambling house that the olachen run has begun; he lures gulls to eat his roasting fish and then throws them in the fire, which is why their wingtips are black. Time and again he watches a host perform a small miracle—grease dripping from warm hands, roe drawn from a struck ankle, a dish filling with salmon berries at a cry—and tries to copy it, scorching his palms, swelling his foot, and producing nothing but unripe berries. Each failure ends with the same quiet verdict from the host: he tries to imitate me. The cycle closes with him hanging half-dead in Smoke-hole’s chimney, his own voice planted in the woods behind the house to shame his captor into opening the smoke hole, and with a run of hungry, solitary episodes in which he clubs stranded halibut, cooks seals on hot stones, and loses them to a tree stump that sits down on the steaming pit.
Around the trickster sit the tales of people who are tested and rewarded. A poor boy wins the copper hanging behind the chief’s house with a red stone given him by a stranger, shoots a white bear with a bow the wise men insist he be given, kills a copper-clawed frog in a lake, and feeds his starving princess with trout and salmon until his uncle’s deserted village comes begging. A prince who pitied the eagles and fed them his salmon is repaid in whales and sealions when his own people abandon him, and grows into the chief called Little-eagle. A scabby little slave girl turns out to shed abalone shells instead of scabs, and marries the chief’s son. Against these stand the cruel stories: the Wolves who ask the Deer to laugh with open mouths and then see they have no teeth; the sorcerer who wipes the mouth of his own son by mistake and kills him; the smallpox survivor who shoots the sun, becomes a white owl, and says nobody will be left.
What the Stories Carry
Boas’s introduction is modest to the point of dryness, but the texts themselves make an argument he does not spell out. These are not curiosities; they are a literature with its own conventions, and the interlinear apparatus is there so that a reader who never hears a word of Nisqa’E can still watch a narrator build a scene. The etiological tag that closes so many episodes—this is why the water runs back to the sea, this is why the deer fear the wolves, this is why the hands of men bend in old age—is not naivety but a habit of mind, a way of stitching the everyday world to the age when animals and people were not yet separate. The trickster’s failures carry a similar weight: a story about a man who cannot imitate his host’s magic is also a story about the limits of imitation, told by a people watching an outsider take down their words.
The collection also preserves the social machinery of the coast—potlatches given with elk skins and slaves, marriages arranged by a chief’s calculation, the shame that follows a woman who stretches out her hands for grease on the water—without turning any of it into a lecture. The reader meets the culture through its appetites and its etiquette at once.
The Book Behind the Field
Tsimshian Texts belongs to the early years of Americanist anthropology, when the Bureau of American Ethnology under J. W. Powell was printing primary material as fast as collectors could supply it, and when Boas was still working out the method—text first, grammar and ethnology after—that would define his career. The volume’s frankness about its own imperfections, the uncertain ts, the wavering ear for voicing, the note that these myths are only moderately well told, is part of its value: it shows the record being made, not polished. Later readers have mined the Txa’msEm cycle and the origin stories for comparative work on Northwest Coast narrative, and the interlinear format has kept the book useful to linguists long after its ethnographic moment passed. What remains most striking is the plainness of the telling. A chief’s daughter drinks a cedar leaf from a spring and bears the child who steals the sun; a boy climbs a chain of arrows into the sky to bring his sister home; a canoe with a mouth at each end eats anyone who crosses its bow. Boas set them down without ornament, and they do not need any.
