544 



THE LIVING RACES OF MANKIND 



Photo by .Mi'. W. Rau] [Philadelphia. 



A MANDAN INDIAN IN EUROPEAN DRESS. 



As regards personal adornment and orna- 

 ments, the practice of painting the face has 

 been already mentioned; this painting of the 

 face and body being to a large extent symbolical. 

 The various forms of this type of decoration 

 may be best realised by inspecting the plates 

 in Catlin's well-known volumes on the North 

 American Indians; in which work may also be 

 seen the different kinds of head-dress and other 

 ornamental garbs assumed during the war-dances 

 and other ceremonials. In addition to painting, 

 tattooing was fairly common among the western 

 Siouaus and certain other tribes. The employ- 

 ment of human scalps as articles of adornment 

 was to proclaim the prowess of the wearer in 

 battle, while the claws of the grizzly bear indi- 

 cated his success in the chase. Frequently 

 bangles and earrings, and more rarely nose-rings, 

 were worn; while bone or shell lip-ornaments 

 were in use among some of the tribes of the 

 North-west Pacific coast. Special attention must 

 be called to the use of the shell-beads forming 

 the celebrated wampum, which were used both 

 as articles of personal adornment and as a 

 medium of exchange. These were generally 

 made from clam-shells, and took the form of 



elongated or cigar-shaped beads, sometimes of considerable size; they might be employed 

 either of their natural colour or stained of various colours, and were threaded on strings and 

 worn as necklaces or belts; a wampum belt being a badge of friendship. Wampum was little 

 used by the Missouri Siouans, and not at all by the tribes of the North-west. Pearls too for 

 the most part obtained from the fresh-water mussels which swarm in many of the North 

 American rivers were largely employed as articles of personal adornment; vast quantities of 

 them having been discovered in the ancient mounds of the Ohio Valley. 



Originally most of these implements and weapons were made of stone, wood, bone, 

 buckshorn, or horn; but native copper seems to have been used at an early period in the 

 neighbourhood of Lake Superior, and in recent times metal has more or less completely 

 replaced the more primitive material. Very characteristic of American aborigines is the 

 tobacco-pipe, which as the calumet, or pi pe-of- peace, played an important part in the settlement 

 of tribal disputes, and was never smoked except on occasions of ceremony. Among the Siouan 

 tribes pipes were carved from a special sacred stone (catlinite), quarried in the central districts 

 of the habitat of the family. They were frequently carved in the form of the tomahawk or axe, 

 thus symbolising both peace and war. In modern times pipe-tomahawks, manufactured in Europe, 

 came into vogue, and could be used either as an axe or as a pipe; the blade of the former 

 making one extremity of the head, and the bowl of the latter the other, the perforated 

 handle serving as the stem. But by far the most complex pipes were those formerly, and 

 to some extent still, manufactured of black slate by the Haida tribe of Queen Charlotte 

 Islands, on the North-west Pacific coast. They were cut out of a solid slab of stone, and 

 carved into the images of various animals in such an elaborate and complicated manner that 

 it is often difficult to discover the course of the tube, into one aperture of which was probably 

 inserted a movable bowl and into the other a reed. As already indicated, a mixture of tobacco, 

 bark, leaves, etc., known as kinni-kinic, was the material smoked. 



As regards implements of war and the chase, the bow and arrow were to the North 



