ABSTRACT
A key year in the history of Northwest Coast collecting was 1875, when James Swan was given funds by Congress to acquire artefacts for the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. This was already a hundred and one years after Northwest Coast objects had first been directly acquired by a European - Juan Perez. In the intervening years, much had been bought or bartered for by explorers, fur traders, whalers, Hudson's Bay Company men, colonists, government agents and others, and their collections were lodged in capital cities from Madrid to Leningrad, London to Washington DC. Swan's collection for Philadelphia, however, marked the beginning of the competition for Northwest Coast objects between the major US museums - the Smithsonian, the American Museum of Natural History, the Field Museum in Chicago, the Peabody, the University Museum at Pennsylvania. Collecting continued into the 1920s and beyond, and many other museums in the US and Canada joined the scramble, but it had already peaked by 1900. Thousands upon thousands of artefacts were collected by entrepreneurs like Swan (who would sell to the highest bidder), by local agents like Charles Newcombe, by anthropologists like Boas and Swanton, by Native 'informants' working on their behalf like George Hunt, and Louis Shotridge. It is in capital cities thousands of miles from British Columbia and Alaska that ninety-nine percent of Northwest Coast 'traditional' material culture has its home. I now propose to turn to those cities, and to those huge culture repositories within them, and ask what meanings the objects had once they had arrived there.
