Chapter XV: Art Chroniclings (2)

The enterprising traveller speaks elsewhere of thousands of inscriptions and drawings observed by him on the neighbouring rocks; while the feeling in which they originate was thus illustrated by an Indian whose portrait he painted when in the Mandan country:—“My brother,” said the Mandan, “you have made my picture, and I like it much. My friends tell me they can see the eyes move, and it must be very good; it must be partly alive. I am glad it is done, though many of my people are afraid. I am a young man, but my heart is strong. I have jumped on to the Medicine Rock; I have placed my arrow on it, and no Mandan can take it away. The red stone is slippery, but my foot was true; it did not slip. My brother, this pipe which I give to you I brought from a high mountain; it is towards the rising sun. Many were the pipes we brought from thence, and we brought them away in peace. We left our totems on the rocks; we cut them deep in the stones; they are there now. The Great Spirit told all nations to meet there in peace, and all nations hid the war-club and the tomahawk. The Dahcotahs, who are our enemies, are very strong; they have taken up the tomahawk, and the blood of our warriors has run on the rocks. We want to visit our medicines. Our pipes are old and worn out.”

The Medicine or Leaping Rock, here referred to, is a detached column standing between seven and eight feet from the precipitous cliff; and the leap across this chasm is a daring feat which the young warriors are ambitious of performing. It was pointed out to Catlin by a Sioux chief, whose son had perished in the attempt. A conical mound marked the spot of his sepulture; and though the sanctity of this ancient neutral ground has been invaded, and the Sioux now refuse to permit other tribes to have access to it, this is of quite recent occurrence. The memorials of many tribes on the graven rocks; numerous excavations, sepulchral mounds, and other earthworks in the vicinity; and the recovery from time to time, in chance excavations, or in ancient ossuaries and grave-mounds, of pipes wrought in the favourite material: all confirm the Indian tradition that this had been recognised as neutral ground by the tribes to the west, and many of those to the east of the Mississippi, to which they have made regular pilgrimages to renew their pipes from the rock consecrated by the footprints of the Great Spirit. The marks of his footsteps are pointed out, deeply impressed in the rock, and resembling the track of a large bird!

Mandan traditions respecting this sacred spot have a special interest; for the migrations of that once powerful Indian nation have been traced from the country lying between Lake Erie and Cincinnati, down the Valley of the Ohio, over the graves of the ancient Mound-Builders, and thence up the western branch of the Mississippi, until the extinction of nearly the whole nation, by the ravages of the small-pox, in the year 1838, at their latest settlements on the Upper Missouri. The site of their last homes lies to the north of the Sioux’s country, in whose possession the pipe-stone quarries are now vested by the law of the strongest. To the Sioux, accordingly, the guardianship of the traditions of the locality belongs. For, although they have thus set at defiance its most sacred characteristic, and so slighted the mandate of the Great Spirit, they do not the less strongly hold by the superstitious ideas associated with the spot.

One of these legends is connected with the peculiar features of the scene. Five large granite boulders form prominent objects on the level prairie in the vicinity of the pipe-stone quarries; and two holes under the largest of them are regarded by the Sioux as the abodes of the guardian spirits of the spot. Catlin, who broke off and carried away with him fragments of these sacred boulders, remarks: “As for the poor Indian, his superstitious veneration of them is such, that not a spear of grass is broken or bent by his feet within three or four roods of them, where he stops, and, in humble supplication, by throwing plugs of tobacco to them, solicits permission to dig and carry away the red stone for his pipes.” For here, according to Indian tradition, not only the mysterious birth of the peace-pipe, but the postdiluvian creation of man, took place.

The institution of the peace-pipe is thus narrated by the Sioux: “Many ages after the red men were made, when all the tribes were at war, the Great Spirit called them together at the Red Rocks. He stood on the top of the rocks, and the red nations were assembled on the plain below. He took out of the rock a piece of the red stone, and made a large pipe. He smoked it over them all; told them that it was part of their flesh; that though they were at war, they must meet at this place as friends; that it belonged to them all; that they must make their calumets from it, and smoke them to him whenever they wished to appease him or get his goodwill. The smoke from his big pipe rolled over them all, and he disappeared in its cloud. At the last whiff of his pipe a blaze of fire rolled over the rocks and melted their surface. At that moment two Indian maidens passed in a flame under the two medicine rocks, where they remain to this day. The voices of Tsomecostee and Tsomecostewondee, as they are named, are heard at times in answer to the invocations of the suppliants, and they must be propitiated before the pipe-stone is taken away.”

An offering of tobacco is the usual gift, and it appears to have been employed in similar acts of worship from the earliest period of intercourse with Europeans. In the narrative of the voyage of Drake, in 1572, it is stated that the natives brought a little basket made of rushes, and filled with an herb which they called _tobak_. This was regarded as a propitiatory offering; and the writer subsequently notes: they “came now the second time to us, bringing with them, as before had been done, feathers and bags of _tobak_ for presents, or rather, indeed, for sacrifices, upon this persuasion that we were gods.” Harriot in like manner tells, in his “Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia,” of a plant which the Spaniards generally call _tobacco_, but there named by the natives _uppówoc_. “This _uppówoc_ is of so precious estimation among them, that they think their gods are marvellously delighted therewith, whereupon sometime they make halowed fires, and cast some of the powder therein for a sacrifice. Being in a storme upon the waters, to pacifie their gods they cast some up into the aire, and into the water; so a weare for fish being newly set up, they cast some therein and into the aire; also after an escape of danger, they cast some into the aire likewise; but all done with strange gestures, stamping, sometime dancing, clapping of hands, holding up of hands, and staring up into the heavens, uttering therewithal and chattering strange words and noises.”

Such practices and ideas of propitiatory offerings among southern Indian tribes of the sixteenth century, show that the offerings of tobacco still made by the Sioux to the spirits that haunt the pipe-stone quarry, are of no merely local origin, but were anciently as universal as the peace-pipe itself. Nor were such religious associations confined to the favourite narcotic of the northern continent. Among the Peruvians the coca-plant took the place of tobacco; and Dr. Tschudi states that he found it regarded by the Indians as something sacred and mysterious. “In all ceremonies, whether religious or warlike, it was introduced for producing smoke at the great offerings, or as the sacrifice itself. During divine worship the priests chewed coca-leaves; and, unless they were supplied with them, it was believed that the favour of the gods could not be propitiated.” Christianity, after an interval of upwards of three hundred years, has not eradicated the Indian’s faith in the virtues of the sacred plant. In the mines of Cerro de Pasco, masticated coca is thrown on the hard veins of metal to propitiate the gnomes of the mine, who, it is believed, would otherwise render the mountains impenetrable; and leaves of it are secretly placed in the mouth of the dead, to smooth the passage to another world. Thus we find, in the superstitions perpetuated among the Indians of the southern Cordilleras, striking analogies to those which survive among the Sioux, and give character to the strange rites practised by them at the red pipe-stone quarry, on the Coteau des Prairies.

One of the Indian traditions connected with that locality, which seems to perpetuate the idea of a general deluge, was thus narrated by a distinguished Knisteneaux on the Upper Missouri, on the occasion of presenting to Catlin a handsome red-stone pipe: “In the time of a great freshet, which took place many centuries ago, and destroyed all the nations of the earth, all the tribes of the red men assembled on the Coteau des Prairies, to get out of the way of the waters. After they had gathered here from every part, the water continued to rise, until at length it covered them all in a mass, and their flesh was converted into red pipe-stone. Therefore, it has always been considered neutral ground; it belongs to all tribes alike, and all were allowed to get it and smoke it together. While they were all drowning in a mass, a young woman, Kwaptahw, a virgin, caught hold of the foot of a very large bird that was flying over, and was carried to the top of a high cliff not far off, that was above the water. Here she had twins, and their father was the war-eagle, and her children have since peopled the earth.” The idea that the red pipe-stone is the flesh of their ancestors is a favourite one among different tribes. When Catlin and his party attempted to penetrate to the sacred locality, they were stopped by the Sioux, and one of them addressing him, said: “This red-pipe was given to the red men by the Great Spirit. It is a part of our flesh, and therefore is great medicine. We know that the whites are like a great cloud that rises in the east, and will cover the whole country. We know that they will have all our lands; but if ever they get our red-pipe quarry they will have to pay very dear for it.” Thus is it that even in the farthest West the Indian feels the fatal touch of that white hand; and to the intrigues of interested traders is ascribed the encroachment of the Sioux on the sacred neutral ground, where, within memory of living men, every tribe on the Missouri had smoked with their enemies, while the Great Spirit kept the peace among his red children.

Apart, then, from such indications of an artistic power of imitation, by which the ancient pipe-sculptors are distinguished, it becomes an object of interest to observe other elements, either of comparison or contrast, between the memorials of the Mound-Builders’ skill, and numerous specimens of pipe-sculpture produced by modern tribes.

Notwithstanding the endless variety which characterises the ancient Mound-Builders’ pipes, one general type is traceable through the whole. A curved base forms the stem and handle, from the centre of which rises the bowl, as shown in Fig. 78, so that it is complete as found; whereas the modern Indian generally employs a pipe-stem, and ascribes to it the peculiar virtues of the implement. The medicine-man decorates it with his most elaborate skill, and it is regarded with awe and reverence by the whole tribe. The stem would seem, therefore, to be characteristic of the modern race; if indeed it be not the distinguishing memorial of an origin of the Northern tribes diverse from Toltecan and other ancient nations. One idea which such comparisons suggest is that in the sacred associations with the pipe of the Mound-Builders, we have indications of contact between a migrating race of Central or Southern America, where no superstitious pipe-usages have been found, and one of the Northern tribes among whom such superstitions are most intimately interwoven with all their sacred mysteries.

The utmost variety distinguishes the pipes of the modern Indians: arising in part from the local facilities they possess for a suitable material, and in part also from the special style of art and decoration which has become traditional with the tribe. The easily wrought red pipe-stone has been generally sought after, from the beauty of its colour and texture, as well as the mysterious virtues attached to it. But the pipe-sculptures of many tribes can be distinguished no less certainly by the material, than by the favourite conventional pattern.

Among the Assinaboin Indians a fine marble, much too hard to admit of minute carving, but susceptible of a high polish, is cut into pipes of graceful form, and made so extremely thin, as to be nearly transparent. When lighted the glowing tobacco shines through, and presents a singular appearance at night, or in a dark lodge. Another favourite stone is a coarse species of jasper, also too hard to admit of elaborate ornamentation. But the choice of material is by no means invariably guided by the facilities which the position of the tribe affords. Mr. Kane informed me that, in coming down the Athabaska river, when near its source in the Rocky Mountains, he observed his Assinaboin guides select the favourite bluish jasper from among the water-worn stones in the bed of the river, to carry home for the purpose of pipe manufacture, although they were then fully five hundred miles from their lodges; and my own Chippewa guides carried off pieces from the pipe-stone rock, at the mouth of the Neepigon river, though they had several hundred miles to traverse before they would reach their homes. Such traditional adherence to the choice of materials peculiar to a remote source, as well as the perpetuation of special forms and patterns, are of value as clews to former migrations, and indications of affinity among scattered tribes.

The Chippewas, at the head of Lake Superior, carve their pipes out of a dark close-grained stone procured from Lake Huron; and frequently introduce groups of animals and human figures with considerable artistic skill. _Pabahmesad_, or the Flier, an old Chippewa, still living on the Great Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron, is generally known as _Pwahguneka_, the Pipe Maker, literally “he makes pipes.” Though brought in contact with the Christian Indians of the Manitoulin Islands, he resolutely adheres to the pagan creed and rites of his fathers, and resists all encroachments of civilisation. He gathers his materials from the favourite resorts of different tribes, using the _muhkuhda-pwahgunahbeck_, or black pipe-stone of Lake Huron; the _wahbe-pwahgunahbeck_, or white pipe-stone, procured on St. Joseph’s Island; and the _misko-pwahgunahbeck_, or red pipe-stone of the Coteau des Prairies. His saw, with which the stone is first roughly blocked out, is made of a bit of iron hoop; and his other tools are correspondingly rude. Nevertheless the workmanship of Pabahmesad shows him to be a master of his art; as will be seen from a characteristic illustration of his ingenious sculpture, engraved here (Fig. 84) from the original, in the museum of the University of Toronto.

But the most elaborate and curious specimens of pipe-sculpture are those executed by the Chimpseyan or Babeen Indians, who also carve skilfully in wood and bone. They display much ingenuity in grass-plaiting for hats and waterproof baskets, or kettles; and in the manufacture of basket-nets of wicker-work, with which they catch the ulikon, a kind of smelt abundant in the rivers along their coast. They are, indeed, pre-eminent among the savages of the North Pacific coast for artistic skill; yet to all appearance, in the collision with the whites, their extermination is inevitable at no distant date. The frontispiece, Plate 1. illustrates the characteristic physiognomy of this people. It is the portrait of Kaskatachyuh, a Chimpseyan chief, from sketches taken by Mr. Paul Kane, while travelling in their country. He wears one of the native hats made of dyed and plaited grass. The Chimpseyans belong to the Thlinket stock, tribes of which extend as far north as Behring Bay. They do not feast on the whale, because it is one of their tribal totems; but the blubber of the porpoise and seal is a favourite delicacy. The Babeens or big-lip Indians,—as the Chimpseyans are most frequently called,—have received this name from the deformation of the under-lip in the women of the tribe, produced by the insertion of a piece of wood into a slit made in infancy, and increased in size until the lip protrudes like the bill of a duck; and among the wooden masks which they carve of life-size, this protruding lip is the invariable characteristic of those of the women. Other and not less singular customs mark the distinction between the sexes, and are perpetuated even after death. Their women are wrapped in mats and placed on an elevated platform, or in a canoe raised on poles, while the bodies of the males are invariably burned. The Chimpseyans and the Clalam Indians, occupying Vancouver’s Island and the coasts in the neighbourhood of Charlotte’s Sound, carve bowls, platters, and other utensils out of a blue claystone or slate, from which also they make their pipes, and decorate them with many ingenious and grotesque devices. One of the smaller and simpler of these pipes, shown in Fig. 85, is placed here alongside of a _chef-d’œuvre_ of Pabahmesad, the Chippewa artist. Nothing could better serve to illustrate the contrast between the ingenious imitative art of Algonquin pipe-sculpture and the exuberant fancifulness of the Babeen carvings. Large and complicated designs are common, sometimes inlaid with bone or ivory, and embracing every native or foreign object adapted to the sculptor’s fancy. The same talent for carving finds room for its display on their ivory combs; and on ladles and spoons made from the horns of a mountain goat, which is one of the principal animals that they hunt on land. The claystone carvings of strictly native design chiefly occur on their pipe-sculptures, and consist of human figures, and of strange monstrosities intermingling human and brute forms, in which curious analogies may frequently be traced to the sculptures of Central America. But the powers of observation and imitation are most strikingly illustrated in claystone carvings of objects of foreign origin. The collections formed by the United States Exploring Expedition, now at Washington, include numerous specimens of this class, representing European houses, forts, boats, horses, and fire-arms; and reproducing in minute detail the cords, pulleys, and other minutiæ of the shipping which frequent the coast. The example shown in Fig. 86 is a curious combination of native and foreign elements; and may be regarded as the conventional representation by the native artist of a bear hunt in the vicinity of one of the Hudson Bay Company’s stations. The animal-heads on some of the human figures represent the grotesque masks already referred to as among their favourite carvings, and a special branch of native art. They are executed in wood, the size of life, and brilliantly coloured; and are worn in the grand dances of the tribe.

In some of the larger pipes, the entire group presents much of the grotesque exuberance of fancy, mingled with imitations from nature, which constitute the charm of ecclesiastical sculptures of the thirteenth century. Figures in the oddest varieties of posture are ingeniously interlaced, and connected by elaborate ornaments; the intermediate spaces being perforated, so as to give great lightness to the whole. But though well calculated to recall the quaint products of the medieval sculptor’s chisel, such comparisons are not suggested by any imitation of European models. Their style of art is thoroughly American; and traits of the same peculiar devices and modes of thought which mark some of the most finished sculptures of Yucatan are replete with interest, when thus recognised in regions so remote, and in the productions of rude Indian tribes.

But while the modern Indian thus rivals in the elaborateness of his art the ingenious pipe-sculpture of the mounds, all his superstitious reverence is reserved for the pipe-stem. On it depends the safety of the tribe in peace, and its success in war. It is guarded accordingly with jealous care, and produced at the medicine dance or the war-council with mysterious ceremonies. Even on such great occasions, so long as the medicine pipe-stem is used, it is a matter of indifference whether the bowl attached to it be of the richest carving, or a common trader’s clay-pipe. Many special privileges and honours pertain to its bearer. It is not only disrespectful, but unlucky, to pass between him and the fire. An ornamental tent is provided for his use, and his other official accoutrements are so numerous that frequently he requires to maintain several horses for their transport. A bear-skin robe is employed for wrapping up the consecrated pipe-stem, and thus enveloped, it is usually borne by the favourite wife of the dignitary. But it is never allowed to be uncovered in her presence; and should a woman, even by chance, cast her eyes on it, its virtues can only be restored by a tedious ceremony.

Among the Indian portraits executed by Mr. Paul Kane, is one of Kea-keke-sacowaw, head chief of the Crees, whom he met on the Saskatchewan, engaged in raising a war-party against the Blackfeet. He had with him eleven medicine pipe-stems, the pledges of different bands that had joined him. The grim old chief appears decorated with his war-paint, and holding in his hand one of the pipe-stems adorned with the head and plumage of an eagle. Before beginning his work, the artist had to witness the ceremony of “opening the medicine pipe-stem,” in the course of which he smoked each of the eleven pipes; and, thus enlisted in the cause, his painting was esteemed a great medicine, calculated to contribute materially to the success of the war-party.

A young Cree Half-breed confessed to the painter that, in a spirit of daring scepticism, he had once secretly thrown down the medicine pipe-stem and kicked it about; but soon after, its official carrier was slain, and such misfortunes followed as left no doubt on his mind of the sanctity pertaining to this guardian and avenger of the honour of the tribe.

But all the ideas and superstitions which such usages illustrate, are peculiar to the modern Indians. The pipes of the Mound-Builders show that they used no pipe-stem; and the same appears to have been the case with the Mexicans before the Conquest. Throughout the whole of Lord Kingsborough’s great work, traces of the use of the tobacco-pipe are rare; and where they do occur they tend to confirm the idea that it was not invested, either in Mexico or Central America, with such sacred attributes as were attached to it by the ancient race of the Mississippi Valley: and which, under other but no less peculiar forms, are maintained among the Indian tribes of the North-west.

Various early writers on the customs of the American Indians refer to expiatory sacrifices, which present striking, though rude analogies, to the ancient offerings by fire on the mound-altars. Hearne describes a custom among the Chippewas, after the shedding of blood, of throwing all their ornaments, pipes, etc., into a common fire, kindled at some distance from their lodges; and Winslow narrates of the Nanohiggansets of New England, that they had a great house ordinarily resorted to by a few, whom he supposes to be priests; but he adds, “Thither, at certain times, resort all their people, and offer almost all the riches they have to their gods, as kettles, skins, hatchets, beads, knives, etc., all which are cast by the priests into a great fire that they make in the midst of the house.”[110] The analogies, however, which appear to be traceable in such practices of tribes remote from the localities of the old Mound-Builders, are after all slight, and lack the most important elements which give a special character to the ancient mound-altars. The use of tobacco is no longer a characteristic peculiar to the New World; but it may be that in the mode of indulging in its favourite narcotic, we have perpetuated as a practice of mere sensual indulgence, what was once a solemn rite associated with the mysterious worship of the sacred enclosures and the altar-mounds of the Mississippi Valley. Oviedo, who is the earliest authority, at least for any minute account of tobacco-smoking among the native tribes, speaks of it as an evil custom practised among the Indians of Hispaniola to produce insensibility; and greatly prized by the Carribees, who called tobacco _kohiba_, and “imagined, when they were drunk with the fumes of it, the dreams they had were in some sort inspired.”[111] Again, Girolamo Benzoni narrates in his travels in America, recently translated from the edition of 1753 by Rear-Admiral Smyth: “In La Española, and the other islands, when their doctors wanted to cure a sick man, they went to the place where they were to administer the smoke, and when he was thoroughly intoxicated by it the cure was mostly effected. On returning to his senses, he told a thousand stories of his having been at the council of the gods, and other high visions.”[112]

Many Indian legends ascribe a divine origin to tobacco. A chief of the Susquehannas told of two hunters of the tribe sharing the venison they had cooked with a lovely squaw, who suddenly appeared to them; and on returning to the scene of their feast thirteen moons after, they found the tobacco plant growing where she had sat. Harriot, who sailed in Sir Walter Raleigh’s expedition of 1584, states that the Indians of Virginia regarded tobacco as a means of peculiar enjoyment, in which the Great Spirit was wont freely to indulge, and that he bestowed it on them that they might share in his delights. Repeated allusions also refer to its intoxicating effects as an influence analogous to that which produced the visions and inspirations of their fasting dreams. It seems, therefore, by no means improbable, that the original practice of inhaling the fumes of tobacco was associated exclusively with superstitious rites and divination; so that the tobacco-plant may have played a part in the worship of the ancient Mound-Builders, analogous to that of the inspiring vapour over which the Delphic tripod was placed, when the priestess of Apollo prepared to give utterance to the divine oracles.

-----

[100] Vide _Prehistoric Annals of Scotland_, vol. i. pp. 496-498.

[101] _Prehistoric Races of the United States_, p. 293.

[102] This collection has since been acquired for the Blackmore Museum.

[103] _Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley_, p. 245, fig. 145.

[104] _Indigenous Races of the Earth_, p. 183.

[105] _Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley_ (No. 143).

[106] _Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley_, p. 152.

[107] This derivation from the Spanish _Mano_ is rejected by some etymologists for a native Carib one, _Manattoüi_.

[108] _Archæology of the United States_, p. 122.

[109] _Illustrations of the Manners, etc., of the North American Indians._ By Geo. Catlin. Eighth edition. Vol. ii. p. 167. _Vide Proceed. Amer. Philosoph. Soc._, vol. x. p. 274.

[110] _Mass. Hist. Coll._, Second Series, vol. ix. p. 94.

[111] _Historia General de las Indias_, second edit. p. 74.

[112] _History of the New World._ By Girolamo Benzoni. Hakluyt Society, 1857.

THE END

PRINTED BY T. AND A. CONSTABLE, PRINTERS TO HER MAJESTY,
AT THE EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS.

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

Some illustrations were moved to facilitate page layout.

[The end of _Prehistoric Man: Researches into the Origin of Civilization in the Old and the New World_, by Daniel Wilson.]