VI.
Detroit, Sept. 16th, 1843.
The antiquities of Western America are to be judged of by isolated and disjointed discoveries, which are often made at widely distant points and spread over a very extensive area. The labor of comparison and discrimination of the several eras which the objects of these discoveries establish, is increased by this diffusion and disconnection of the times and places of their occurrence, and is, more than all, perhaps, hindered and put back by the eventual carelessness of the discoverers, and the final loss or mutilation of the articles disclosed. To remedy this evil, every discovery made, however apparently unimportant, should in this era of the diurnal and periodical press be put on record, and the objects themselves be either carefully kept, or given to some public scientific institution.
An Indian chief called the Black Eagle, of river Au Sables (Michigan), discovered a curious antique pipe of Etruscan ware, a few years ago, at Thunder Bay. This pipe, which is now in my possession, is as remarkable for its form as for the character of the earthenware from which it is made, differing as it does so entirely from the coarse earthen pots and vessels, the remains of which are scattered so generally throughout North America. The form is semi-circular or horn-shaped, with a quadrangular bowl, and having impressed in the ware ornaments at each angle. I have never before, indeed, seen any pipes of Indian manufacture of baked clay, or earthenware, such articles being generally carved out of steatite, indurated clays, or other soft mineral substances. It is a peculiarity of this pipe that it was smoked from the small end, which is rounded for the purpose of putting it between the lips, without the intervention of a stem.
The discoverer told me that he had taken it from a very antique grave. A large hemlock tree, he said, had been blown down on the banks of the river, tearing up, by its roots, a large mass of earth. At the bottom of the excavation thus made he discovered a grave, which contained a vase, out of which he took the pipe with some other articles. The vase, he said, was broken, so that he did not deem it worth bringing away. The other articles he described as bones.
Some time since I accompanied the chief Kewakonce, to get an ancient clay pot, such as the Indians used when the Europeans arrived on the continent. He said that he had discovered two such pots, in an entire state, in a cave, or crevice, on one of the rocky islets extending north, of Point Tessalon, which is the northern cape of the entrance of the Straits of St. Mary's into Lake Huron. From this locality he had removed one of them, and concealed it at a distant point. We travelled in canoes. We landed on the northern shore of the large island of St. Joseph, which occupies the jaws of those expanded straits. He led me up an elevated ridge, covered with forest, and along a winding narrow path, conducting to some old Indian cornfields. All at once he stopped in this path. “We are now very near it,” he said, and stood still, looking toward the spot where he had concealed it, beneath a decayed trunk. He did not, at last, appear to be willing to risk his luck in life—such is Indian superstition—by being the actual discoverer of this object of veneration to a white man, but allowed me to make, or rather complete, the re-discovery.
With the exception of being cracked, this vessel is entire. It corresponds, in material and character, with the fragments of pottery usually found. It is a coarse ware, tempered with quartz or feld-spar, and such as would admit a sudden fire to be built around it. It is some ten inches in diameter, tulip-shaped, with a bending lip, and without supports beneath. It was evidently used as retorts in a sand bath, there being no contrivance for suspending it. I have forwarded this curious relic entire to the city for examination. I asked the chief who presented it to me, and who is a man of good sense, well acquainted with Indian traditions, how long it was since such vessels had been used by his ancestors. He replied, that he was the seventh generation, in a direct line, since the French had first [arrived] in the lakes.