Chapter 14

Fig. 77.—Portrait Mound Pipe.

Of these invaluable examples of ancient American iconography, one (Fig. 77) has attracted special notice, not only as the most beautiful head of the series, but from its supposed correspondence to the type of the modern North American Indian. The workmanship of this head is described by its discoverers as “unsurpassed by any specimen of ancient American art which has fallen under the notice of the authors, not excepting the best productions of Mexico and Peru.”[103]In the well-executed illustration which accompanies these remarks, the Red Indian features are unmistakably represented; nor has this failed to receive abundant attention, and to have ascribed to it even more than its due importance. Mr. Francis Pulszky, the learned Hungarian, thus comments on it in hisIconographic Researches on Human Races and their Art:—“A most characteristic, we may say artistically beautiful head, the workmanship of these unknown Mound-Builders, dug up and published by Squier, exhibits the peculiar Indian features so faithfully, and with such sculptural perfection, that we cannot withhold our admiration from their artistic proficiency. It proves three things: 1st, That these Mound-Builders were American Indian in type; 2d, That time (age ante-Columbian, but otherwise unknown,) has not changed the type of this indigenous group of races; and 3d, That the Mound-Builders were probably acquainted with no other men but themselves.”[104]Such are the sweeping deductions drawn from premises supplied by a single example of mound-sculpture: or rather by the depiction of it in Messrs. Squier and Davis’s volume; for after a careful examination of the original, its ethnic characteristics appear to me to be mainly due to the pencil of the draughtsman, who has, no doubt undesignedly, given to his drawing much more of the typical Indian features than are traceable in the original. Of this Figs. 77 and 78 are more accurate copies; and from these it will be seen that the nose, instead of having the salient Roman arch there represented, is perfectly straight, and is neither very prominent nor dilated.

Fig. 78.—Portrait Mound Pipe.

The mouth, though protuberant, is small; the lips are thin; instead of the characteristic ponderous maxillary region of the true Indian, the chin and the upper lip are both short; and the lower jaw, without any marked width between the condyles, is small, and tapers gradually towards the chin. Perhaps it is owing to this smallness of the lower portion of the head and face, that it was supposed to represent a female. But such an idea is not suggested by any marked characteristic either in the features or head-dress. The cheek-bones, though high, are by no means so prominent as in the original engraving. Indeed, the projection is almost entirely in front, giving a tumid cheek immediately under the eye. I doubt if any competent observer, ignorant of the history of this relic, would assign it to an Indian type.

Fig. 79.—Portrait Mound Pipe.

It is apparent, therefore, that the inferences drawn from the representation of a single example of mound-sculpture are based on inaccurate premises. But even supposing the head to reproduce the features of the modern Indian: it would by no means prove the three propositions deduced from its discovery; since it is not the only specimen of sculptured portraiture discovered in the mounds, and we look in vain in other examples for these points of Indian physiognomy which would first attract the eye of the imitative modeller or sculptor. The salient and dilated nose, prominent cheek-bones, massive jaw, and large mouth, may be assigned as the most noticeable characteristics; but all or nearly all of those are wanting in most of the other sculptured heads or masks. The character of these may be seen in the head engraved here (Fig. 79), derived from the same rich depository opened in “Mound City.” It is cut in a compact yellowish stone. The nose is nearly in a line with the forehead, excepting at the point, which projects in a manner certainly by no means characteristic of Indian features; and though the lips protrude, they are delicate, and the mouth is small. The ears in both are large, and in the latter are perforated with four small holes around their upper edges. In this case, from the delicacy of the features, it is suggested with greater probability than in the former example, that it has been designed after a female model. Another head,[105]executed in the same material, is much altered by fire. It has not, like the previous examples, been designed for a pipe-head, but is broken off from a complete human figure, or other larger piece of carving. It is much inferior as a work of art, and indeed approaches the grotesque or caricature. Nevertheless, it has considerable character in its expression; and no one familiar with the Indian cast of countenance would readily assign either to it or the previous specimen of mound-sculpture any aim at such representation, if unaware of the circumstances of their discovery. In this, as in others of the heads, the face is tattooed, and the ears have been perforated; and from the strongly attached oxide of copper, there can be little doubt that they were decorated with rings or pendants of that metal. Other portrait sculptures and terra-cottas, either found in the mounds, or discovered within the region where they chiefly abound, are figured in the works of Squier, Schoolcraft, Lapham, Foster, Jones, and in the American Ethnological Society’s Transactions. The majority of them are inferior as works of art to those already described. But if they possess any value as indications of the physiognomical type of ancient American races, they tend to confirm the idea of a prevailing diversity instead of a uniformity of cranial form and features.

The discovery of a sculptured head betraying traces of Indian features, among many of a different type, corresponds to another interesting fact, that animals foreign to the region, and even to the North American continent, are figured in the mound-sculptures. It presents a parallel to well-known examples of Etruscan vases moulded in the form of negroes’ heads; and of Greek pottery painted with the same characteristic features and woolly hair. Specimens of both are preserved among the collections of the British Museum, and furnish interesting evidence, alike of the permanency of the negro type, and of the familiarity both of Greek and Etruscan artists with the African features, long prior to the Christian era. Similar examples of foreign portraiture have attracted attention on the older monuments of Egypt, and among the basso-relievos of the tomb of Darius Hystaspes at Persepolis: supplying interesting illustrations of imitative art employed in the perpetuation of ethnic peculiarities of physiognomy. Supposing, therefore, the Mound-Builders to have been a settled population, as distinct from a contemporaneous Indian race as the classic nations of antiquity differed from the barbarian tribes beyond the Alps and the Rhine: it is no more surprising to trace the genuine Indian features in mound-sculptures, than to discover those of the Dacian or the Gaul on the column of Trajan. It proves that the Mound-Builders were familiar with the American Indian type, but nothing more. The evidence indeed tends very distinctly to suggest that they were not of the same type; since the majority of sculptured human heads hitherto recovered from their ancient depositories do not reproduce the Indian features.

The physical type of the Mound-Builders will again come under consideration in a subsequent chapter; but it is interesting meanwhile to observe that even in the characteristics of this portrait-sculpture distinctive qualities appear. The imitative faculty manifests itself in expressive varieties of style, in modern Indian art. Some tribes, such as the Algonquins, confine themselves to literal reproductions of natural objects, while others, such as the Babeens, indulge in a grotesque and ingeniously diversified play of fancy. But the intellectual development implied in individual portraiture goes beyond this, and is rare indeed among nations in the earlier stages of civilisation. Even among the civilised Mexicans, imitations of the human face and figure appear to have seldom passed beyond the grotesque; and although the sculptors of Central America and Yucatan manifested an artistic power which accords with the civilisation of a lettered people: yet in the majority of their statues and reliefs, we see the subordination of the human form and features to the symbolism of their mythology, or to mere decorative requirements. It thus seems that, amid the general prevalence of an aptitude for imitative art, alike among the ancient and modern nations of the American continent, the Mound-Builders, though working within a narrow range, developed a power of appreciating its minuter delicacies such as is only traceable elsewhere among the choicest sculptures of Uxmal and Palenque.

To this imitative skill we owe other works which have an important significance in relation to ethnological problems affecting the ancient population of the New World. Reference has already been made to the curious collection of stone pipes, recovered from one of the smaller tumuli of “Mound City.” They included some of the sculptured human heads; but the bowls of most of them were carved into figures of beasts, birds, and reptiles. On these the ancient sculptors appear to have lavished their artistic skill with a degree of care bestowed on none other of the less perishable works, from which alone we can now judge of their intellectual development. “Not only,” as Messrs. Squier and Davis observe, “are the features of the various objects represented faithfully, but their peculiarities and habits are in some degree exhibited. The otter is shown in a characteristic attitude, holding a fish in his mouth; the heron also holds a fish; and the hawk grasps a small bird in its talons, which it tears with its beak. The panther, the bear, the wolf, the beaver, the otter, the squirrel, the racoon, the hawk, the heron, crow, swallow, buzzard, the paroquet, toucan, and other indigenous and southern birds; the turtle, the frog, toad, rattlesnake, etc., are recognised at first glance”;[106]and in addition to those, the jaguar or panther, the cougar, the elk, the opossum, the alligator, and numerous land and water birds, including several varieties of the owls, herons, and other species, have all been recognised among more recent disclosures. Many of those are represented in characteristic attitudes, and with much skill and fidelity of portraiture. The exuberant fancy of the ancient sculptors also displays itself at times in humorous masks, and incongruous devices, such as a goose’s head cut in a hard black stone, which on looking to the back becomes a human skull. Some of those works appear to have been executed, like the sportive sketches of the modern artist, with no other object than the carver’s own gratification.

Unfinished carvings show the process by which they were wrought. A toad, in a characteristic attitude, but only roughly shaped out, “very well exhibits the mode of workmanship. While the general surface appears covered with striæ running in every direction, as if produced by rubbing, the folds and lines are clearly cut with some sort of graver. The marks of the implement, chipping out portions a fourth of an inch in length, are too distinct to admit the slightest doubt that a cutting tool was used in the work.” Again, in another pipe-head, blocked out into the form of a bird, “the lines indicating the feathers, grooves of the beak, and other more delicate features, are cut or graved on the surface at a single stroke. Some pointed tool appears to have been used, and the marks are visible where it has occasionally slipped beyond the control of the engraver. Indeed, the whole appearance of the specimen indicates that the work was done rapidly by an experienced hand, and that the various parts were brought forward simultaneously. The freedom of the strokes could only result from long practice; and we may infer that the manufacture of pipes had a distinct place in the industrial organisation of the Mound-Builders.” But this, though full of interest, need not surprise us, since the art of the arrow-maker, which required both skill and experience, was pursued among the forest-tribes as a special craft; nor is that of the pipe-maker even now wholly abandoned.

Fig. 80.—Manatee, Pipe-Sculpture.

So far, therefore, we are enabled by such means to look back into that remote past. We see the industrious sculptor at his task; and holding silent converse with him over his favourite works, we learn somewhat of his own physical aspect, of the range of his geographical experience, his mental capacity and intellectual development. The pottery of the mounds, in like manner, adds to our knowledge of the art and civilisation of the age in which it was produced. But, next in importance to the evidence thus furnished, the miniature sculptures of the mounds derive their chief value from indications they supply of the extent and nature of the geographical relations of their owners. By the fidelity of the representations of so great a variety of subjects copied from animal life, they furnish evidence of a knowledge in the Mississippi Valley of fauna peculiar not only to southern but to tropical latitudes, extending beyond the Isthmus into the southern continent: and suggestive either of arts derived from a foreign source, and intercourse maintained with regions where the civilisation of ancient America attained its highest development; or else indicating migration into the northern continent of the race of the ancient graves of Central and Southern America, bringing with them the arts of the tropics, and models derived from animals familiar to their fathers in the parent-land of the race.

Of one of the most interesting of those exotic models, theLamantinorManatee, seven sculptured figures have been taken from the mounds of Ohio. This phytophagous cetacean, which, when full-grown, measures from fifteen to twenty feet in length, is found only in tropical waters. Species haunt the estuaries and large rivers of Central and intertropical South America; as also those of both the eastern and western sides of tropical Africa: and sometimes ascend the rivers to a great distance from the sea. Examples were seen by Humboldt in the Rio Meta, a branch of the Orinoco, one thousand miles above its mouth. They are also found among the Antilles, and on the coast of the Florida peninsula. The most characteristic details in their form which chiefly attracted attention when the Manatee was first brought under the notice of Europeans, are faithfully reproduced in the Mound sculptures. Fancy helped to exaggerate the peculiarities of this strange animal to the earliest European voyagers, and from them it received the name of the Siren. But its most remarkable feature is the fore paw, occupying the usual place of the cetacean fin, but bearing so close a resemblance to a human hand that the name Manatee is generally supposed to have been conferred on it by the first Spanish explorers on this account.[107]It is ranked according to ecclesiastical natural history as a fish; and its flesh is in special request at St. Christopher’s, Guadaloupe, Martinique, and in various South American localities, during Lent. Its form is therefore familiar to the natives of South America, and was once equally well known to those of the Antilles, and probably to the ancient coastmen of the Gulf. But we must account by other means for the discovery of accurate representations of it among the sculptures of the far-inland Ohio mounds; and the same remark applies to the jaguar or panther, the cougar, the toucan; to the buzzard possibly, and also to the paroquet. The majority of those animals are not known in the United States; some of them are totally unknown within any part of the North American continent. Others may be classed with the paroquet, which, though essentially a southern bird, and common around the Gulf, does occasionally make its appearance inland; and so might become known to the untravelled Mound-Builder in his northern home.

The importance of such evidence that the ancient dwellers in the Scioto Valley had some knowledge of tropical animals, and even of those confined exclusively to the southern continent, has not escaped the notice of the explorers of the mounds. It has even induced them to hesitate in assigning the name of the toucan to sculptures concerning the design of which there could be no other reasonable ground for doubt. Referring to the manatee sculptures, they remark: “These singular relics have a direct bearing upon some of the questions connected with the origin of the mounds. They are undistinguishable, so far as material and workmanship are concerned, from an entire class of remains found in them, and are evidently the work of the same hands with the other effigies of beasts and birds; and yet they faithfully represent animals found (and only in small numbers), a thousand miles distant upon the shores of Florida, or—if the birds seemingly belonging to the zygodactylous order be really designed to represent the toucan,—found only in the tropical regions of South America. Either the same race, possessing throughout a like style of workmanship, and deriving their materials from a common source, existed contemporaneously over the whole range of intervening territory, and maintained a constant intercommunication; or else there was at some period a migration from the south, bringing with it characteristic remains of the land from which it emanated. The sculptures of the manatees are too exact to have been the production of those who were not well acquainted with the animal and its habits.” Of the representations of the toucan, the accompanying woodcut (Fig. 81) will furnish a sufficient illustration. It is imitated with considerable accuracy, though inferior to some of the finest specimens of mound sculpture. The most important deviation from correctness of detail is, that it has three toes instead of two before, although the two are correctly represented behind. It is stooping its head to take food from a rudely outlined human hand; and as it is known that the brilliant plumage of the toucan leads to its being frequently tamed by the natives of Guiana and Brazil, this tends not only to confirm the idea of its representation by the sculptures in question: but to suggest that the Mound-Builders may have had aviaries, like those in which the Aztec caciques assembled birds of splendid plumage and beautiful form from every part of their Mexican empire.

Fig. 81.—Toucan, Pipe-Sculpture.

Unless we assume such a lapse of time as may suffice for important changes in the climate and fauna of the Ohio Valley, the evidence thus far adduced suggests the inference either that the whole extensive regions thus indicated were occupied at some remote period by a common race; or we must recognise in such indications of familiarity with the natural history of the tropics, and even of the southern continent, proof that that very people, who derived all their metal from the great northern regions of Lake Superior, had themselves migrated from southern latitudes rich in metallic ores.

Various considerations tend to favour the idea of such a migration, rather than the maintenance of intercommunication and exchange, among a people of the same race, throughout regions so extensive and so geographically distinct. If the Mound-Builders had some of the arts and models, not only of Central but of Southern America: they also employed in their ingenious manufactures pearls and shells of the Gulf of Florida; obsidian from Mexico; mica believed to have been brought from the Alleghanies; jade, such as that described by Humboldt among the rare materials of ancient manufacture in Chili; the lead of Wisconsin; and the copper, and probably the silver, of Ontonagon and the Keweenaw peninsula. The fact indeed that some of their most elaborate carvings represent birds and quadrupeds belonging to latitudes so far to the south, naturally tends to suggest the idea of a central region where arts were cultivated to an extent unknown in the Mississippi Valley; and that those objects, manufactured where such models are furnished by the native fauna, remain only as evidences of ancient intercourse maintained between these latitudes and the localities where now alone such are known to abound. But in opposition to this, full value must be given to the fact that neither the relics, nor the customs which they illustrate, pertain exclusively to southern latitudes; nor are such found to predominate among the singular evidences of ancient and more matured civilisation which abound in Central and Southern America. The varied nature of the materials employed in the arts of the Mound-Builders, we must also remember, indicates a wide range of relations; though it cannot be assumed that these were maintained in every case by direct intercourse.

The earlier students of American archæology, like the older school of British antiquaries, gave full scope to a system of theorising which built up comprehensive ethnological schemes on the very smallest premises; but in the more judicious caution of later writers there is a tendency to run to the opposite extreme. Perhaps Messrs. Squier and Davis indulge at times in an exaggerated estimate of the merits of the remarkable works of art discovered and published as the result of their joint labours; but subsequent critics have either unduly depreciated them, or solved the difficulties attendant on such discoveries, by ascribing their manufacture to an undetermined foreign source. Mr. Schoolcraft specially manifested a disposition to underrate the artistic ability discernible in some of them; while Mr. Haven, who fully admits their skilful execution, derives from that very fact the evidence of foreign manufacture. After describing the weapons, pottery, and personal ornaments obtained from the mounds, the latter writer adds, “and, with these were found sculptured figures of animals and the human head, in the form of pipes, wrought with great delicacy and spirit from some of the hardest stones. The last-named are relics that imply a very considerable degree of art; and if believed to be the work of the people with whose remains they are found, would tend greatly to increase the wonder that the art of sculpture among them was not manifested in other objects and places. The fact that nearly all the finer specimens of workmanship represent birds, or land and marine animals belonging to a different latitude; while the pearls, the knives of obsidian, the marine shells, and the copper equally testify to a distant, though not extra-continental origin, may, however, exclude these from being received as proofs of local industry and skill.”[108]

Fig. 82.—Peruvian Black Ware.

A reconsideration of the list already given of animals sculptured by the ancient pipe-makers, cannot fail to satisfy the inquirer that it is an over-statement of the case to say that nearly all belong to a different latitude. The real interest and difficulty of the question lie in the fact of discovering, along with so many sculptured figures of animals pertaining to the locality, others represented with equal spirit and fidelity, though belonging to diverse latitudes. To those familiar with early Scandinavian and British antiquities, such an assignment of the mound sculptures to a foreign origin, on account of their models being in part derived from distant sources, must appear a needless assumption which only shifts without lessening the difficulty. On the sculptured standing stones of Scotland—belonging apparently to the closing era of Paganism, and the first introduction of Christianity there,—may be seen the tiger or leopard, the ape, the camel, the serpent, and as supposed by some, the elephant and walrus, along with other representations or symbols, borrowed, not like the models of the Mound-Builders, from a locality so near as to admit of the theory of direct commercial intercourse, or recent migration, but from remote districts of Asia, or from Africa. The most noticeable difference between the imitations of foreign fauna on the Scottish monuments, and in the ancient American sculptures, is that the former occasionally betray, as might be expected, the conventional characteristics of a traditional type; while the latter, if they furnish evidence of migration, would in so far tend to prove it more recent, and to a locality not so distant as to preclude all renewal of intercourse with the ancestral birth-land. Traces of the same reproduction of unfamiliar objects are, indeed, apparent in the mound sculptures. The objects least truthfully represented, in some cases, are animals foreign to the region where alone such works of art have been found. But the South American toucan of the mound sculptor, figured on a previous page, is certainly not inferior to the accompanying specimens of the Peruvian modeller’s imitative skill, wrought on a vessel of black ware (Fig. 82), now in the collection of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland: though it will be remembered that the latter are the work of an artist to whom the original may be presumed to have been familiar. Several of the animals engraved in theAncient Monuments of the Mississippi Valleyfall far short of the fidelity of imitation ascribed to them in the accompanying text: but the characteristic individuality of others displays remarkable imitative power. The lugubrious expression given to more than one of the toads is full of humour; and some of the ruder human heads may be described as portrait-sketches in the style ofPunch. But after making every requisite deduction from the exaggerations of enthusiastic observers, abundant evidence of artistic skill and ingenuity remains to justify the wonder that a people capable of executing such works should have left no large monuments of their art. While, however, this affords no sufficient ground for transferring their origin to another region, we may still look with interest for the discovery of analogous productions in some of the great centres of native American civilisation.

Fig. 83.—Peruvian Stone Mortars.

With one or two stray exceptions, objects precisely similar to the mound sculptures have not hitherto been met with, beyond the valleys where other traces of the Mound-Builders abound; but the points of resemblance between the sculptured mound-pipes and numerous miniature stone mortars found in Peru are too striking to be overlooked. Of the two examples given here (Fig. 83), the one is a llama, from Huarmachaco, in Peru, in the collection of the Historical Society of New York. It is cut in a close-grained black stone, and measures four inches long. The other, of darkish brown schist, is from a drawing made by Mr. Thomas Ewbank, while in Peru. The greater number of those seen by him represent the llama and its congeners, the alpaca, guanoco, and vicuna. They are all hollowed precisely like the bowl of the sculptured mound-pipes, but have no lateral perforation or mouth-piece. Their probable use was as mortars, in which the Peruvians rubbed tobacco into powder, working it with a small pestle until it became heated with the friction, when it was taken as snuff. The transition from this practice to that of inhaling the burning fumes is simple; and the correspondence between the ancient Peruvian tobacco-mortar and the stone pipe of the Mound-Builder is worthy of note, when taken into consideration along with the imitations of birds of the southern continent found among the sculptures of the mounds. Dr. Tschudi describes four of the Peruvian mortars preserved at Vienna, carved in porphyry, basalt, and granite; and he adds: “How the ancient Peruvians, without the aid of iron tools, were able to carve stone so beautifully, is inconceivable.”

The absence of any but such miniature carvings in the northern mounds may also merit notice when viewed in connection with the ideas of religious worship suggested by the contents of the mound altars. Idolatry, in its most striking, and also in some of its most barbarous forms, prevailed, as we know, among the nations of the Mexican Valley, at the period of the Conquest. The monuments of Yucatan and Central America leave no room to doubt that the worship of such visible impersonations of Divine attributes as their sculptors could devise formed a prominent part of their religious services. Reference has also been made in a previous chapter to rudely modelled and sculptured idols, accompanying other ancient remains, in sepulchral deposits in Tennessee. Others have been found in the huacals of Chiriqui, on the Isthmus of Panama, along with numerous gold relics and many fine specimens of pottery. Those facts render it the more singular that, amid so many traces of imitative sculpture, no relics obviously designed as objects of worship have been dug up in the mounds, or found in such circumstances as to connect them with the religious practices of the Mound-Builders. But the remarkable characteristics of the elaborately sculptured pipes, and their obvious connection with services accompanying some of the rites of sacrifice or cremation, may indicate their having played an important part in the religious solemnities of the ancient race; and on this the arts and customs of modern tribes help to throw some curious light.

So far as we can now infer from evidence furnished by relics connected with the use of the tobacco-plant, it seems to have been as familiar to the ancient tribes of the North-west, and the aborigines of the Canadian forests, as to those of the American tropics, of which theNicotiana tabacumis a native. No such remarkable depositories indeed have been found to the north of the great lakes as those disclosed to the explorers of the tumuli in the Scioto Valley; but even now the tobacco-pipe monopolises the ingenious art of many tribes; and some of their most curious legends and superstitions are connected with the favourite national implement. Among them the dignity of time-honoured use has conferred on it a sacredness, which survives with much of its ancient force; and to this accordingly the student of American antiquities is justified in turning, as a link connecting the present with that ancient past. But it is worthy of note that the form of the mound-pipes differs essentially from the endless varieties of pattern wrought by Indian ingenuity. Some consideration, therefore, of the arts of the modern pipe-sculptor, and of native customs and traditions associated with the use of tobacco, is necessary, as a means of comparison between ancient and modern races of the New World.

In the Old World, the ideas connected with the tobacco-pipe are prosaic enough. The chibouk may, at times, be associated with the poetical reveries of the oriental daydreamer, and the hookah with pleasant fancies of the Anglo-Indian reposing in the shade of his bungalow; but its seductive antique mystery, and all its symbolic significance, pertain to the New World. Longfellow, accordingly, fitly opens hisSong of Hiawathawith the institution of “the peace-pipe.” The Master of Life descends on the mountains of the prairie, breaks a fragment from the red stone of the quarry, and, fashioning it with curious art into a pipe-head, he fills it with the bark of the red willow, chafes the forest into flame with the tempest of his breath, and kindling it, smokes the calumet as a signal to the nations. The tribes gather at the divine summons from river, lake, and prairie, to listen to the warnings and promises with which the Great Spirit seeks to guide them; and this done, and the warriors having buried their war-clubs, they smoke their first peace-pipe, and depart:—

“While the Master of Life, ascending,Through the opening of cloud-curtains,Through the doorways of the heaven,Vanished from before their facesIn the smoke that rolled around him,The pukwana of the peace-pipe!”

“While the Master of Life, ascending,

Through the opening of cloud-curtains,

Through the doorways of the heaven,

Vanished from before their faces

In the smoke that rolled around him,

The pukwana of the peace-pipe!”

In this, as in other passages of his national epic, the American poet has embodied cherished legends of the New World: placing the opening scene ofHiawathaon the heights of the red pipe-stone quarry of Coteau des Prairies, between the Minnesota and Missouri rivers.

On the summit of the ridge between these two tributaries of the Mississippi rises a bold cliff, beautifully marked with horizontal layers of light grey and rose or flesh-coloured quartz. From the base of this a level prairie of about half a mile in width runs parallel to it; and here it is that the famous red pipe-stone is procured, at a depth of from four to five feet from the surface, in a ravine at the head of the Pipe-stone Creek, a tributary of the Big Sioux River. Numerous excavations indicate the resort of Indian tribes to the locality. “That this place should have been visited,” says Catlin, “for centuries past by all the neighbouring tribes, who have hidden the war-club as they approached it, and stayed the cruelties of the scalping-knife, under the fear of the vengeance of the Great Spirit who overlooks it, will not seem strange or unnatural when their superstitions are known. That such has been the custom there is not a shadow of doubt, and that even so recently as to have been witnessed by hundreds and thousands of Indians of different tribes now living, and from many of whom I have personally drawn the information.”[109]

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 calledtobak. 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 oftobakfor 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 calltobacco, but there named by the nativesuppówoc. “Thisuppówocis 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.

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