ON THE STONE AGE. 81 



a red or reddish colour, occasionally variegated with spots or streaks of pale yellow ; but 

 nearly all were in an xinfinished state, and so fully bore out the idea of their being the 

 stock in trade of some old native workman, who finished them in sufficient numbers to 

 meet the demands of his customers.' 



From time to time fresh disclosures prove the extent to which such systematic 

 industry was carried on. The collections thus brought to light were unquestionably the 

 result of prolonged labour, and were, for the most part, undoubtedly stored for purposes 

 of trade. In some cases they were probably accumulated in the arsenal of the tribe in 

 readiness for war. But whether v\ e recognize in such discoveries the store of the trader, 

 or the arsenal of the tribe, they indicate ideas of i^rovident foresight altogether distinct 

 from the desultory labours of the Indian savage in the preparation of his own indispen- 

 sable supply of implements for the chase or for war. 



But there were also, no doubt, the home-made weapons and implements, fashioned 

 with patient industry out of the large rolled serpentine, chalcedony, jasper and agate 

 pebbles, gathered from the sea-coast and river beds, or picked up wherever they chanced 

 to occur. When camping out on Nepigon River, with Indian guides from the Saskat- 

 chewan, I observed them carefully collecting pieces of a metamorphic rock, underlying the 

 syenite cliffs, which, I learned from one of them, was specially adapted for pipes. This 

 they would carry a distance of fully eight hundred miles before reaching their lodges on 

 the prairie. Dr. Robert Bell described to me a pipe made of fine green serpentine which 

 he saw in the possession of an Indian on Nelson River. Its owner resisted all attempts 

 to induce him to part with it ; assigning as a reason of its special value that it had been 

 brought from Reindeer Lake distant several hundred miles north of Frog Portage, on 

 Churchill River. The pipe was of a favorite Ohippewayan patern. The diverse forms in 

 which various tribes shape the tobacco pipe are highly characteristic. In some cases this 

 is partly due to the texture and degrees of hardness of the material employed ; but the 

 recovery of pipes of nearly all the very diverse tribal patterns, made from the beautiful 

 catlinite, or red pipe-stone of the Couteau des Prairies, leaves little room for doubt that 

 the stone was transported in rough blocks and bartered by its quarriers to distant 

 tribes. This flesh-colored rock has suggested the Sioux legend of its origin in the 

 flesh of the antediluvian red men, who perished there in the great deluge. It is soft, 

 of fine texture, and easily wrought into minutely varied forms of Indian art, and 

 so was coveted by the pipe-makers of widely severed tribes. Hence red pipe-stone 

 pipes of many ingenious forms of sculpture have been recovered from grave-mounds 

 down the Mississippi, eastward to the Atlantic seaboard, and westward beyond the Rocky 

 Mountains. This prized material appears to have circulated among all the Plain tribes. 

 Pipes made of it were to be found in recent years preserved as cherished possessions 

 among both the Sioux and the Blackfoot tribes. Dr. George M. Dawson found in 18*74 

 part of an ancient catlinite pipe on Pyramid Creek, about lat. 49°, long. 105'^. 



A very different material was in use among the Assiniboin Indians, limiting the art 

 of the pipe-sculptor to the simplest forms. It is a fine marble, much too hard to admit 

 of minute carving, but susceptible of a high polish. This is cut into pipes of graceful 

 form, and made so extremely thin, as to be nearly transparent; so that when lighted the 



' Smithsonian Report, 1877, p. 293. 



Sec. 11, 1889. 11. 



