AMERICAN ABORIGINAL PIPES AND SMOKING CUSTOMS. 469 



are often fully a span long, and the bowls are about lialf as large again 

 as our English pipes. -The fore part of each commonly runs out with 

 a peak two or three fingers broad and a quarter of an incli thick on 

 both sides of the bowl; lengthwise they cut several pictures with a 

 great deal of skill and labor, such as a buffalo and a panther on op])o- 

 site sides of the bowl, a rabbit and a fox. The savages work so slow 

 that one of their artists is two months at a pipe with his knife before 

 he finishes it; indeed, as before observed, they are great enemies of 

 profuse sweating and are never in a hurry about a good thing. The 

 stems are commonly made of soft wood, about 2 feet long and an inch 

 thick, cut into four squares each, scooped till they join very near the 

 hollow of the stem ; the beaux always hollow the squares except a little 

 at each corner to hold them together, to which they fasten a parcel of 

 bell buttons, different sorts of flue feathers, and several small battered 

 pieces of copper kettles, hammered, round deerskin thongs, and a red 

 painted scalp. They so accurately paint hieroglyphic characters on the 

 stem that all the war actions and the 

 tribe of the owner and a great many 

 circumstances of things are fully de- 

 lineated." ' 



The monitor pi j>e is one upon which 

 more care has been expended in bor- 

 ing its bowl and stem and in grinding 

 and polishing the surface than any 

 other type of pipe on the continent, 

 not excepting the famous mound 

 pipes. They vary in length from 3 

 to 18 inches with bases from 1 to 4 inches wide, the bowls varying from 

 1 to S inches in depth with a diameter of from three-fourths of an inch 

 to If inches, usually cylindrical, though at times distinctly elliptical; 

 they appear to have been smoked without separate stem. The stem 

 holes seldom exceed one-eighth of an inch in diameter and are bored with 

 remarkable accuracy, the variation of the size of the stem hole from 

 end to end being scarcely appreciable. This remarkable accuracy of 

 boring in stone where the walls of the tubes and bowls are commonly 

 not in excess of one-eighth of an inch thick is almost proof positive that 

 the drilling was done with steel tools. 



The most primitive specimen of the monitor type (fig. 89) is from Mil- 

 ford, Massachusetts, collected by Mr. J. H. Olark. It has a bowl of 

 oblong cross section, at the base of which is a slight heel, suggestive of 

 the primitive European pipe; the cross section of the stem is a flattened 

 ellipsoid, but slightly out of the plane of the bowl. This bowl is rudely 

 scratched, as is the stem, the stride crossing and recrossing over the 



' History of the North American Indians, particularly those natives adjoining the 

 Mississippi, east and west Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, and Virginia, 

 p. 423, London, 1775. 



Fig. 89. 



MOrnXOR PIPE. 



Milford, Massachusetts. 



Cat, No. 1-946, U.S.N. M. Collected by J. H. Clark. 



