Charles Hill-Tout was born in England in 1858 and came to British Columbia in 1891. A pioneer settler at Abbotsford in the Fraser Valley, he devoted many years of fieldwork to his studies of the Salish and published in the scholarly periodicals of the day. He was honoured as president of the Anthropological Section of the Royal Society of Canada and as a fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain. In The Salish People, his field reports are collected for the first time.
In The Salish People each volums serves as a useful guide to a specific geographic area, bringing the past to the present. The four volumes, rich in stories and factual details about the old customs of the Coast and Interior Salish, are each edited with an introduction by Ralph Maud, who lives in the Fraser Valley and who teaches a course on the B.C. Indian Oral Tradition at Simon Fraser University.
Volume I of The Salish People deals with the people of the Thompson and Okanagan. It includes stories told to Charles Hill-Tout by Chief Mischelle of Lytton in 1896. The introduction provides biographical sketches of the two men who make this collaboration the remarkable document it is: Hill-Tout, the self-educated and dedicated ethnologist, newly arrived from England, and Chief Mischelle of Lytton, one of the most talented and informed people that a beginning field worker could hope to meet.
First volume of a four-volume set rich in stories and factual information on the Salish people of the Pacific Northwest.
