During this time, the American tradition continued to develop with an independence which it has kept up until very recent times. Three groups of societies were the special object of the researches which were concerned with totemism. These are, first, certain tribes of the North-west, the Tlinkit, the Haida, the Kwakiutl, the Salish and the Tsimshian; then, the great nation of the Sioux; and finally, the Pueblo Indians in the south-western part of the United States. The first were studied principally by Dall, Krause, Boas, Swanton, Hill Tout; the second by Dorsey; the last by Mindeleff, Mrs. Stevenson and Cushing.[189] But however rich the harvest of facts thus gathered in all parts of the country may have been, the documents at our disposal were still fragmentary. Though the American religions contain numerous traces of totemism, they have passed the stage of real totemism. On the other hand, observations in Australia had brought little more than scattered beliefs and isolated rites, initiation rituals and interdictions relative to totemism. It was with facts taken from all these sources that Frazer attempted to draw a picture of totemism in its entirety. Whatever may be the incontestable merit of the reconstruction undertaken in such circumstances, it could not help being incomplete and hypothetical. A totemic religion in complete action had not yet been observed.
It is only in very recent years that this serious deficiency has been repaired. Two observers of remarkable ability, Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen, discovered[190] in the interior of the Australian continent a considerable number of tribes whose basis and unity was founded in totemic beliefs. The results of their observations have been published in two works, which have given a new life to the study of totemism. The first of these, _The Native Tribes of Central Australia_,[191] deals with the more central of these tribes, the Arunta, the Luritcha, and a little farther to the south, on the shores of Lake Eyre, the Urabunna. The second, which is entitled _The Northern Tribes of Central Australia_,[192] deals with the societies north of the Urabunna, occupying the territory between MacDonnell's Range and Carpenter Gulf. Among the principal of these we may mention the Unmatjera, the Kaitish, the Warramunga, the Worgaia, the Tjingilli, the Binbinga, the Walpari, the Gnanji and finally, on the very shores of the gulf, the Mara and the Anula.[193]