Charles F. Newcombe (1851-1924) was a physician, naturalist, and collector of Northwest Coast material culture. Born and educated in Great Britain, Newcombe immigrated to the United States with his family in 1884. While living in Hood River, Oregon, he participated in regional expeditions and collected plant species and archeological objects. In 1889, the family moved to Victoria, British Columbia, where Newcombe supplemented his medical practice by working as an unpaid researcher at the British Columbia Provincial Museum (now the Royal BC Museum). In 1892, he started to travel by boat to collect marine specimens, fossils, and native plants.¹

During an 1895 expedition to the Kwakwaka’wakw community at Alert Bay and to Haida Gwaii, together with Francis Kermode of the Provincial Museum, Newcombe began to acquire Indigenous material for his own collection. In 1897, he had a boat made especially for his fieldwork and returned to the same regions, collecting objects independently for the first time. On this trip, Newcombe purchased a Haida totem pole on commission for the BC Provincial Government (which gifted it to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in London), and also assembled collections for George Dawson of the Geological Survey of Canada (which now reside in the Canadian Museum of History).²

In the years that followed, Newcombe earned more commissions from European and North American museums to collect both natural history specimens and anthropological materials. On his collecting trips, he recorded detailed field notes and took photographs of communities, villages, and objects in situ. He became famous for traveling to isolated locations, and competed with others for totem poles, masks, and utilitarian items. In 1899, Franz Boas commissioned Newcombe to research the Haida history of southern Haida Gwaii. Newcombe conducted this expedition together with assistant Douglas Scholefield and Haida chief Elijah Ninstints. Late in the same year, George Dorsey, curator of the Columbian Museum of Chicago (now the Field Museum), asked Newcombe to use Boas’s 1897 book as a guide to purchase Kwakwaka’wakw materials—in particular, Hamat̕sa regalia for a planned diorama.³ With the help of Charley Nowell, a Kwagu’l chief, Newcombe searched for regalia similar to that in Boas’s book, traveling through Kwakwaka’wakw territory many times until 1903. During this period, he also collected Haida, Nuu-chah-nulth, and Salish materials for the Columbian Museum. In 1904, Newcombe was hired by William McGee, of the Bureau of American Ethnology, to assemble objects, a house, and Native performers for the anthropology displays at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis.⁴

In 1911, the BC Provincial Museum hired Newcombe as a regular agent to expand its collection of Northwest Coast materials. Two years later, he purchased a house post from Xwamdasbe’ (Newitti) for the museum. The post itself, plus the fees for taking it down, cost 15 Canadian dollars. A drawing of the post had been published in Boas’s 1897 monograph.⁵ Boas likely made the drawing in situ on his first 1886 field trip to Hope Island and had previously published it in his 1888 article, “The Houses of the Kwakiutl Indians, British Columbia.”⁶ The post stands today in the main Northwest Coast gallery of the Royal BC Museum.

By Shuning Wang