AMERICAN ABORIGINAL PIPES AND SMOKING CUSTOMS. 417 



was ill America about the same time. Tlie length of this pipe and stem 

 ai)i)eais jiioat in comparison with pipes with which we are familiar, 

 though (leorge Catlin rei)resents a Chippewa Indian standing erect, 

 leaning on a i)ipestem. It should be remembered, however, that some 

 of Ilolm's assertions have been questioned, aud are to be taken with 

 grains of allowance, notably that reference to '^a large and horrible 

 serpent which is called a rattlesnake. It has a head like that of a dog 

 and can bite off a man's leg" as clear as it had been hewn down with 

 an ax.'" Though such snake stories are of course the exaggerations of 

 ignorant people, it is the wonderful and mysterious which has greatest 

 attraction for the multitude, and consequently such material will stray 

 into print when histories are written by persons not themselves ac- 

 quainted intimately with the country of which they write. The suake 

 was a totem of many Indian tribes, if not of most of them, aud is often 

 represented coiled around the pipe bowls in graceful curves or lying 

 along the stems, usually facing the smoker. Certain of the Pueblo 

 Indians, the writer is informed, never kill suakes, even the deadly rat- 

 tlers, because of their sacred character. When one is found in too 

 close proximity to a camp, it is caught between the forks of a stick and 

 carried to some secluded spot, where it is released. A similar veneration 

 is said by the elder Pliny to have prevailed. ''In Syria also," he says, 

 "and especially along the banks of the Euphrates, the serpents never 

 attack the Syrians when they are asleep; on this account they never 

 kill them."- 



Kalm, who was in iv^ew Sweden in 1749 at a place called Raccoon, on 

 the Delaware Eiver below Philadelphia, says "the natives had tobacco 

 pipes of clay, manufactured by themselves, at the time the Swedes 

 arrived here. * * * They did not always smoke true tobacco, but 

 made use of another plant instead of it, which was unknown t.) the old 

 Swedes, one of whom assured me it was not the common mullein, Avhich 

 IS generally called Indian tobacco."^ 



Roger Williams says of the ISTarragan setts : "They generally all take 

 tobacco; and it is commonly the only plant which men labor in, the 

 women managing all the rest; they say they take tobacco for two 

 causes; first, against the rheume, which causeth toothache, which they 

 are impatient of; secondly, to revive and refresh them, they drinking 

 nothing but water." ^ 



This tobacco he calls " Wuttammanog;" "that is a weak tobacco, 

 which the men j^lant themselves very frequently; yet I never see any 

 take so excessively as I have seen men in Europe; yet excess were more 



'Thomas Campanius Holm, A short Description of tlie Province of New Sweden, 

 p. 53. 



-The Natural History of PJiiiy, II, p. 354, translated by .John Bostock and H. S. 

 Eiley, London, 1866, Bohn edition. 



'Peter Kalm, Tra\ els into America, II, p. 117, London, 1771. 



■•Koger Williams, A Key into thi^ Langnage of America, p. 43, London, 1643, in 

 Narragaiisett Club publications, 1, cdittMl by J. Hammond Trumbull, 

 NAT MUS 97 L*7 



