138 



ASSINNIBOIKE AND SASKATCHEWAN EXPEDITION. 



When inhaling the fumes of tobacco, the bear-berry or 

 the inner bark of the red willow, the Indian relinquishes 

 himself to the narcotic influences of the " w r eed," a term 

 by the way applied to the bear-berry, and to the dry and 

 gravelly ridges where that pretty little creeping plant 

 flourishes ; the local names, " weed-ridge," " weed-hill," 

 being not uncommon in Rupert's Land. It has been well 

 said that " the tobacco pipe constitutes the peculiar and 

 most characteristic symbol of America, intimately inter- 

 woven with the rites and superstitions and with the relics of 

 ancient customs and historical traditions of the aborigines 

 of the New World. If Europe borrowed from it the 

 first knowledge of its prized narcotic, the gift was received 

 unaccompanied by any of the sacred or peculiar virtues 

 which the Red Indian still attaches to it as the symbol of 

 hospitality and amicable intercourse, and Longfellow, ac- 

 cordingly, with no less poetic vigour than fitness, opens 

 his "Song of Hiawatha," with the institution of the 

 " Peace-pipe" by the Great Spirit, the Master of Life.* 



Pipe No. 1 was presented to me by Ta-wa-pit, an old 

 Indian of Dauphin Lake. He had another in his pouch 

 nearly completed, made from the soft shale which crops 

 out on the Riding Mountain. I asked Ta-wa-pit " what 

 he would clo for a smoke " until he had finished the new 

 pipe ? After the half-breed with me had made him un- 

 derstand my question, he rose to his feet, and walking to 

 the edge of a swamp close by, cut three or four reeds, 

 and joining some pieces together, after he had made a hole 

 through the joints, he gently pushed one extremity in a 

 slanting direction into the earth, which he had previously 

 made firm by pressure with his foot ; he then cut out a 

 small hole in the clay above the extremity of the* reed, 



* u Narcotic Usages and Superstitions of the Old and New World," by 

 Daniel "Wilson, LL.D. Canadian Journal, new series, vol. ii. 



