PIPES AND SMOKING CUSTOMS OF THE AMERICAN ABORIGINES, 

 RASED ON MATERIAL IX THIi U. S. NATIONAL MUSEUM 



By .Joseph D. McGiike, 

 Ellicott Citij, Mari/lctnd. 



MEXICAN AND PUEBLO TUBULAR PIPES. 



The use of the tobacco plant for smoking- piiq^oses is undoubtedly of 

 Ameiicau origin, and bas been common tbrongbout Korth America 

 among- tbe Indians from a period long jirior to tiie arrival of the whites 

 on the continent. Using the i^lant for snulliug, however, appears to 

 have been a peculiarity of the Southern Continent, while of the habit 

 of chewing- there seems to be but meager reference by early writers, 

 consequently little is known of the extent to which the practice pre- 

 vailed. The accounts of all early American voyagers, with scarcely an 

 exception, who have come in first contact with the Indians have referred 

 to the common emj)loyment of tobacco in all treaties, councils, and, in 

 fact, fiinctionsof every kind, including social intercourse, in divination, 

 and in the cure of disease. Other plants, however, have been used quite 

 commonly for the same jDurpose from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic 

 Ocean, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific. There is no doubt that 

 tobacco smoking in pipes such as we are now familiar with, as a habit 

 or pastime, is an invention of the European. Smoke in some form has 

 been emi^loyed in the treatment of disease from a time long prior to the 

 Christian era; and the early Spanish, French, and English references to 

 smoking all bear evidence that tobacco was considered a plant of won- 

 derful properties. Herodotus says the Messagetae, a people of Asia 

 Minor, supposed to be Scythians, in battle with whom Cyrus was killed 

 about 529 B. C, are reported "to have discovered trees that produce 

 fruit of a peculiar kind, which the inhabitants, when they meet together 

 in companies and have lit a fire, throw on a fire, as they sit in a circle; 

 and that bj" inhaling the fumes of the burning- fruit that has been 

 thrown on, they become intoxicated by the odor just as the Greeks do 

 by wine; and that the more fruit that is thrown on, the more intoxi- 

 cated they become, until they rise up to dance and betake themselves 

 to singing."^ 



' Herodotus, Book I, p. 88, translated by Henry Gary, New York, 1855. 



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