.^.79 



ANCIENT ABORIGINAL TRADE IN NORTH AMERICA. 



Not loug ago a small Catliiiite pipe of unusual shape was sent to me, 

 which had been ploughed up in a maize-field near Centreville, in Southern 

 Illinois (St. Olair County). Such older specimens are even met in 

 the New England States, near the Atlantic coast. The collection of the 

 Smithsonian Institute contains some pipes and ornaments made of Cat- 

 liuite, which were taken from Indian graves in the State of New York, 

 or obtained from the Iroquois still inhabiting the same State. The raw 

 or worked red pipestoue, therefore, constituted an article of barter, 

 which was brought from its original i)lace of occurrence to the present 

 Eastern States of the Union. A passage in Loskiel, who chiefly treats 

 of the Belawares and Iroquois, refers to this trade. In describing the 

 pipes of those Indians, he says: "Some are manufactured from a kind 

 of red stone, which is sometimes brought for sale by Intlians who live 

 near the Marble river, on the western side of the Mississippi, where they 

 extract it {sic) from a mountain."* This passage, it will be noticed, im- 

 plies.a direct trade-connection of great extent, the distance between the 

 red pipestoue quarry and the Northern Atlantic States being equal to 

 twelve or thirteen hundred English miles. 



SHELLS. 



A substance pleasing to the eye, and easily worked, such as is offered 

 by nature in the shells of marine and freshwater mollusks, could not 

 fail to attract the attention of men in the earliest times. The love of 

 personal adornment, moreover, already manifests itself in the lowest 

 stages of human developraent,t and shells being, above other natural 

 productions, particularly fitted to be made into ornaments, it is not sur- 

 prising that they were employed for that purpose in all parts of the 

 world. The North American tribes made an extensive use of the shells 

 of the sea-coast as well as of those of their rivers, and fossil marine 

 shells were also employed as ornaments. The valves of recent marine 

 mollusks, indeed, must have been widely circulated by barter, consider- 

 ing that they are found, in the shape of ornaments, and sometimes of 

 utensils, in the interior of North America, at great distances from the 

 shores of the sea. The oldest reference to the shell-trade among the 

 aoorigines is contained in the remarkable account of the Spaniard 

 Alvar Nuiiez Cabe^a de Vaca, who accompanied in the year 1527, as 

 treasurer and alguazil mayor, the unfortunate Pamphilo de Narvaez on 



* Loskiel, Mission der evaugeliscbeu Biiider nnter deu ludiaueru in Nordamerika, 

 Barby, 1789, p. 66. 



t It is probable tbat the barbarous manufacturers of the rude flint tools found, asso- 

 ciated with the bones of extinct animals, in the diluvial deposits of Northern France, 

 used small round i^etre facts of tbe chalk {Coscinopora glohularis, D'Orb.) as beads, by 

 stringing them together, those petrified bodies being provided by nature with holes 

 passing through their middle (Lyell, Antiquity of Man, p. 119). Personal vanity is a 

 prominent feature in tbe character of the North American Indians. Among the mis- 

 erable Root-Diggers an old woman has been seen, who "had absolutely nothing on 

 her person but a thread /ound her neck, from which was pendent a solitary bead." 

 (Irving, Adventures of Captain Bonneville, p. 261.) 



