V. CLAY. 



In treating of !N"orth American manufactures of clay, it appears proper to 

 begin with those of a useful character, that is, with the vessels employed Ijy 

 the aborigines for culinary and other purposes. Before the advent of the 

 whites, pottery formed an important branch of industry among the eastern 

 Indians, who discovered, however, soon after their contact with the whites 

 the superiority of the metallic vessels which they obtained in trafRcking with 

 them, and consequently ceased to manuftxcture pottery at a very early period. 

 On the other hand, many tribes in the "Western Territories (New Mexico, Ari- 

 zona, Utah, etc.) still practise the ceramic art, prodiicing earthenware of a 

 very creditable character, numerous specimens of which are preserved in the 

 collection of the National Museum. On a rough estimate, it may be said that 

 the art of pottery, as practised in the aboriginal fashion, has become extinct in 

 the eastern half of the United States. There is indeed, still some pottery 

 made by Indians in that part of the Union, but it hardly can be called Indian 

 pottery. Thus, the Catawba Indians, residing upon the banks of the Catawba 

 River in York County, South Carolina,- — an insignificant remnant of a once 

 l^owcrful tribe — still make a kind of unglazed pottery, not according to abo- 

 riginal taste, but in close imitation of the ceramic productions of the Avhites. 

 Instead of bowls and cooking-pots of the Indian type, they manufacture cups 

 and saucers, tea-pots, pitchers and basins, flower-pots, and other species of 

 earthenware of pattei-ns altogether distinct from the models in vogue among 

 their forefathers. The wi'itings of early and even compai-atively modern 

 authors on North America are not deficient in particulars relating to the art 

 of pottery among the natives occupying the eastern area of the present United 

 States. According to their statements, those tribes were most advanced in 

 the manufacture of earthenware, who inhabited the large tracts of land for- 

 merly called Florida and Louisiana, which comprise at present the Gulf States 

 and those adjacent to the Lower Mississippi, and their testimony is fully coi-- 

 roborated by the character of such specimens of pottery from those parts as 

 have escaped destruction and are preserved in the collections of the country. 

 Though the sites of ancient Indian settlements are frequently strewn with 

 innumerable fragments of pottery, entire vessels of early date have almost 

 exclusively been obtained from mounds and other burial-places, where they had 

 been deposited by the side of the dead, either for holding food, or designed to 

 be of service to the deceased in his fancied world of spirits. 



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