In the Old World, the ideas connected with the tobacco-pipe are prosaic enough. The chibouk may, at times, be associated with the poetical reveries of the oriental daydreamer, and the hookah with pleasant fancies of the Anglo-Indian reposing in the shade of his bungalow; but its seductive antique mystery, and all its symbolic significance, pertain to the New World. Longfellow, accordingly, fitly opens his Song of Hiawatha with the institution of “the peace-pipe.” The Master of Life descends on the mountains of the prairie, breaks a fragment from the red stone of the quarry, and, fashioning it with curious art into a pipe-head, he fills it with the bark of the red willow, chafes the forest into flame with the tempest of his breath, and kindling it, smokes the calumet as a signal to the nations. The tribes gather at the divine summons from river, lake, and prairie, to listen to the warnings and promises with which the Great Spirit seeks to guide them; and this done, and the warriors having buried their war-clubs, they smoke their first peace-pipe, and depart:—
“While the Master of Life, ascending,
Through the opening of cloud-curtains,
Through the doorways of the heaven,
Vanished from before their faces
In the smoke that rolled around him,
The pukwana of the peace-pipe!”
In this, as in other passages of his national epic, the American poet has embodied cherished legends of the New World: placing the opening scene of Hiawatha on the heights of the red pipe-stone quarry of Coteau des Prairies, between the Minnesota and Missouri rivers.
On the summit of the ridge between these two tributaries of the Mississippi rises a bold cliff, beautifully marked with horizontal layers of light grey and rose or flesh-coloured quartz. From the base of this a level prairie of about half a mile in width runs parallel to it; and here it is that the famous red pipe-stone is procured, at a depth of from four to five feet from the surface, in a ravine at the head of the Pipe-stone Creek, a tributary of the Big Sioux River. Numerous excavations indicate the resort of Indian tribes to the locality. “That this place should have been visited,” says Catlin, “for centuries past by all the neighbouring tribes, who have hidden the war-club as they approached it, and stayed the cruelties of the scalping-knife, under the fear of the vengeance of the Great Spirit who overlooks it, will not seem strange or unnatural when their superstitions are known. That such has been the custom there is not a shadow of doubt, and that even so recently as to have been witnessed by hundreds and thousands of Indians of different tribes now living, and from many of whom I have personally drawn the information.”[[109]]
The enterprising traveller speaks elsewhere of thousands of inscriptions and drawings observed by him on the neighbouring rocks; while the feeling in which they originate was thus illustrated by an Indian whose portrait he painted when in the Mandan country:—“My brother,” said the Mandan, “you have made my picture, and I like it much. My friends tell me they can see the eyes move, and it must be very good; it must be partly alive. I am glad it is done, though many of my people are afraid. I am a young man, but my heart is strong. I have jumped on to the Medicine Rock; I have placed my arrow on it, and no Mandan can take it away. The red stone is slippery, but my foot was true; it did not slip. My brother, this pipe which I give to you I brought from a high mountain; it is towards the rising sun. Many were the pipes we brought from thence, and we brought them away in peace. We left our totems on the rocks; we cut them deep in the stones; they are there now. The Great Spirit told all nations to meet there in peace, and all nations hid the war-club and the tomahawk. The Dahcotahs, who are our enemies, are very strong; they have taken up the tomahawk, and the blood of our warriors has run on the rocks. We want to visit our medicines. Our pipes are old and worn out.”