AMERICAN ABORIGINAL PIPER AND SMOKING CUSTOMS. 589 



Cook speaks of the natives of the Ahiskau Coast being acute traders, 

 even requiring pay for grass and endeavoring to get pay for water. lie 

 speaks also of the carvings of their canoes. 



G. H. Von Lingsdorf refers to the Aleutian Islanders in the first 

 decade of this century as not being "addicted to smoking, but are pas- 

 sionately fond of snutt". They will work a whole day at the hardest 

 labor to get a single leaf of tobacco as their wages, and when obtained 

 tliey prepare it for use by grinding it to powder in a mortar made of 

 the bones of whales, mixing it with ashes and water." ' 



The Kutchin and eastern Tinneh, we are informed by Mr. W. H. Dall, 

 use a pipe modeled after the clay pipes of the Hudson Bay Company, 

 but he says "they also carve very pretty ones out of birch knots and 

 the roots of the wild rosebush.'- ^ 



The writer is informed by Capt. E. P. Herendeen, Avho has spent 

 many years in northern Alaska, that the natives use willow twigs, 

 which have been cut crosswise, for smoking purj)oses. The Siberian 

 natives use the willow root for dyeing, but the remainder of the root is 

 used for smoking. 



At Point Barrow, in 1837, we are told "the grand article in demand 

 here was tobacco, which, as in Dease Inlet, they call tawac or tawacah, 

 a name acquired, of course, from the Russian traders. Not content with 

 chewing and smoking it, they swallowed the smoke until they became 

 sick, and seemed to revel in a momentary intoxication. Beads, rings, 

 buttons, tire steels, everything we had, were regarded as inferior to 

 tobacco, a single inch of which was an acceptable equivalent for the 

 most valuable article they possessed."^ 



Sir Edward Belcher says of the Point Barrow Eskimo in 1825-1829: 

 "They had long had the habit of smoking, but used the stem and down 

 of a peculiar grass steeped in some aromatic gum, probably derived 

 from a tir. They did not use tobacco until we introduced it." ^ 



John Murdoch, who was a member of the International Polar Expe- 

 dition to Point Barrow, Alaska, 1881-1883, has very fully discussed 

 the smoking habit of these natives. Among other things relating 

 thereto, he says: "The only narcotic in use among these people is 

 tobacco, which they obtain directly or indirectly from the whites, and 

 which has been in use among them from the earliest time when we 

 have any knowledge of them. When Mr. Elson, in the Blossom\^ barge, 

 visited Point Barrow in 182(;, he found tobacco in general use and the 

 most marketable article. This undoubtedly came from the Russians 

 by way of Siberia and Bering Strait, as Kotzebue found the natives of 



'Voyages and Travels, Pt. 2, p. 48, Loudon, 1813. 



'^Alaska and its Resourci^s, p. 81, Boston, 1870. 



^'Thomas Simpson, Narrative of the Discoveries on the North Coast of America, 

 eifected by the officers of the Hudson Bay during the years 1836-1839, p. 156, Lon- 

 don, 1843. 



^ Works of Art by the Esquimaux, p. 133, Icy Cape and to the North, 1825-1829, 

 Transactions Ethnological Society, London. 



