The source from whence the tribes on the Pacific obtained the coveted metal has not yet been ascertained; but it was obviously procured only in small quantities, insufficient to be turned to account for economic uses. Among a curious collection of objects illustrative of the arts of the Haida Indians, now in the Museum of the Geological Survey at Ottawa, is a large copper ring, or torque, which appears to have been handed down for successive generations, from chief to chief, as a prized heirloom; and, it may be assumed, as a symbol of official rank. The ring, or necklet, is composed of three twisted bars, or strands of hammered copper, each tapering at both ends, and is fashioned with remarkable skill, if due allowance be made for the imperfect tools of the native artificer. This unique relic seems to show the accumulated metallic wealth of the tribe fashioned into a symbol of official rank; not improbably with mysterious virtues ascribed to it, which passed with it to its official custodian. A block of native copper now in the National Museum at Washington is described by the Père Charlevoix as a sacred object of veneration by the Indians of Lake Superior, on which a young maiden had been offered in sacrifice.[[29]] But it is beyond question that throughout the region north of the Mexican Gulf the native manufacturer resorted mainly to the abundant hornstone, chert, quartzite, and the like materials of the Stone period. These were in universal demand, and must have been industriously collected in the localities where they abound, and disposed of by a regular system of exchange for furs, wampum, or other objects of barter. Mr W. H. Dall, in his report on The Tribes of the Extreme North-West, notes the absence in the Aleutian Islands of any stone, such as serpentine, fit for making the celts or adzes, recovered by him from the shell mounds. “They were,” he says, “probably imported from the continental Innuit at great cost, and very highly valued”; and on a subsequent page he adds: “The intertribal traffic I have referred to is universal among the Innuit.”[[30]]
The occurrence of well-stored caches in some of the ancient mounds of the Ohio valley, as well as their repeated discovery in other localities, accords with the idea of systematised industrial labour, and the storing away of the needful supplies for agricultural and domestic operations, and for war. Messrs. Squier and Davis, in their Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, describe one of the mounds opened by them within the great earthwork on the North Fork of Point Creek, in which, according to their estimate, about four thousand hornstone disks were disposed in regular order, in successive rows overlapping each other. In 1864, I had an opportunity of examining some specimens retained in the possession of Dr. Davis. They were mostly disks measuring about six inches long and four wide, more or less oval, or broad spear-shaped, and fashioned out of a fine gray flint with considerable uniformity of character. Mr. Squier assumed that the deposit was a religious offering; but subsequent disclosures of a like character confirm the probability that it was a hoard of material stored for the tool-maker.[[31]]
In other, though rarer cases, the cache has been found containing finished implements. In digging a cellar at Trenton, New Jersey, a deposit of one hundred and twenty finished stone axes was brought to light, at a depth of about three feet below the surface. Another discovery of a like character was made when digging for the construction of a receiving vault of the Riverview Cemetery, near Taunton; and similar deposits are recorded as repeatedly occurring in the same state.[[32]] In two instances all the specimens were grooved axes. In another, fifty porphyry celts were found deposited in systematic order. Mr. Charles Rau has given the subject special attention, and in a paper entitled “Ancient Aboriginal Trade in North America,” he furnishes evidence of addiction to certain manufactures, such as arrow heads, hoes and other digging tools, spear heads, chisels, etc., by skilled native craftsmen.[[33]] Deposits closely corresponding to the one reported by Mr. Squier as the sole contents of one of the mounds, in “Clark’s Work,” Ohio, have been subsequently discovered in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Kentucky. One of the Illinois deposits contained about fifteen hundred leaf-shaped or rounded disks of flint arranged in five horizontal layers. Another, said to have contained three thousand five hundred specimens, was discovered at Fredericksburg, in the same state. A smaller, but more interesting hoard was accidentally brought to light in 1868, when some labourers in opening up a new street, at East St. Louis, in the same State of Illinois, came upon a collection of large flint tools all of the hoe and shovel type. There were about fifty of the former and twenty of the latter, made of a yellowish-brown flint, and betraying no traces of their having been used. Near by them lay several large unworked blocks of flint and greenstone, and many chippings and fragments of flint.[[34]] Deposits of a like character, but varying both in the number and diversity of their contents, and, in general, showing no traces of use, have been discovered in other states to the east of the Mississippi. In the Smithsonian Report for 1877, Mr Rau prints a curious account of “The Stock in Trade of an Aboriginal Lapidary.” In the spring of the previous year Mr. Keenan presented to the National Museum at Washington a collection of jasper ornaments, mostly unfinished, which had been found in Lawrence County, Mississippi. They were brought to light in ploughing a cotton field, where a deposit was exposed, lying about two and a half feet below the natural surface. It included four hundred and sixty-nine objects, of which twenty-two were unwrought jasper pebbles; one hundred and one were beads of an elongated cylindrical shape, and a few of them partially perforated. Others were ornaments of various forms, including two animal-shaped objects. The whole were made of jasper of a red or reddish colour, occasionally variegated with spots or streaks of pale yellow, but nearly all were in an unfinished 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.[[35]]
From time to time fresh disclosures prove the extent to which such systematic industry was carried on. The various 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 may have been accumulated in the arsenal of the tribe in readiness for war. But whether we recognise in such discoveries the store of the trader, or the military arsenal, they indicate ideas of provident foresight altogether distinct from the desultory labours of the Indian savage in the preparation of his own indispensable supply of implements for the chase or for war.
But there were also, no doubt, 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 the Neepigon river, with Indian guides from the Saskatchewan, 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 800 miles before reaching their lodges on the prairie. Dr. Robert Bell described to me a pipe made of fine green serpentine, of a favourite Chipewyan pattern, 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 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 pipestone 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-coloured 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 pipestone 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 1874 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 glowing tobacco presents a singular appearance in a dark lodge. Another favourite stone is a coarse species of jasper, also too hard for any elaborate ornamentation. But the choice of materials is by no means limited to those of the locality of the tribe. I have already referred to my Indian guides carrying away with them pieces of the pipestone rock on Neepigon river; and Paul Kane, the artist, during his travels, when on Athabaska river, near its source in the Rocky Mountains, observed his Assiniboin guides select a favourite bluish jasper from among the water-worn stones in the bed of the river, to carry home for the purpose of pipe manufacture, although they were then fully 500 miles from their lodges.
The favourite material of the Chippewas was a dark, close-grained schist obtained at some points on Lake Huron. It is easily carved, and many of their pipes are decorated with groups of human figures and animals, executed with much spirit. Pabahmesad, an old Chippewa pipe-maker of unusual skill, pursued his craft on Great Manitoulin Island, on Lake Huron, in comparatively recent years. The peculiar style of his ingenious carvings may be detected on pipes recovered from widely scattered localities, for his fame as a pipe sculptor was great. He was generally known among his people as Pwahguneka, the pipe-maker. He obtained his materials from the favourite resorts of different tribes, using the black pipestone of Lake Huron, the white pipestone procured on St. Joseph’s Island, and the catlinite or red pipestone of the Couteau des Prairies. But the most varied and elaborate in device of all the peculiar native types of pipe sculpture are those executed by the Chimpseyan or Babeen and the Clalam Indians, of Vancouver Island and the neighbouring shores along Charlotte Sound. They are carved out of a soft blue claystone or slate, from which also bowls, platters, and other utensils are made, decorated with native legendary symbols and other devices. But the most elaborate carving is reserved for their pipes, which are not less varied and fanciful in design than the details of Norman ecclesiastical sculpture. The same easily carved claystone was in great request among the Haida Indians of the Queen Charlotte Islands for their idols, and for ornamental gorgets and utensils of various kinds. Thus the available materials of different localities are seen to modify the forms alike of implements, weapons, and articles designed for personal ornament or domestic use, and were sought for and transported to many distant points, with the same object as the tin and copper which played so important a part in the commercial exchanges of nations at the dawn of history.
In regions where flint or hornstone is not available, the quartzite appears to have been most commonly resorted to. I have in my possession some spear heads measuring from seven to nine inches long, which were dug up on an old Indian trail at Point Oken, lying to the north of Lake St. John, Quebec; and implements of the like material are common throughout eastern Canada. The same widely diffused material was no less freely resorted to by the tribes on the Pacific coast. The arrow heads found throughout the Salish country of southern British Columbia are chiefly formed of quartzite, though chert is also used. The quartzite occurs in so many localities that it is difficult to trace its special source. But near the east end of Marble Cañon, and at the Big Bock Slide, about six miles above Spence’s Bridge, on Thompson river, chips occur in considerable quantities, suggestive of one of the chosen localities resorted to for quarrying and manufacture.
The old arrow-makers evidently derived pleasure from the selection of attractive materials for some of their choicest specimens of handiwork. The true crystalline quartz was prized for small arrow heads, some of which are equally pleasing in material, form, and delicacy of finish. But the material most usually employed in eastern Canada, as well as that previously referred to as in request by the old workers of the Ohio valley for their largest implements, is a gneissoid rock of comparatively common occurrence, which chips off with a broad facet when sharply struck, and leaves an acute edge and point. Mr. Seller’s valuable paper on the ancient workshops of Ohio and Pennsylvania also contains an account of his own experience relative to the flaking and chipping of flint implements.[[36]] In this communication he remarks: “Most of the arrow points found within my reach in Philadelphia, Delaware, and Chester Counties, Pennsylvania, were chipped from massive quartz, from the opaque white to semi-transparent, and occasionally transparent.” He further describes his first chance discovery of one of the native work-places. He was in company with two scientific mineralogists, when, as he writes, “we came to a place where (judging from the quantities of flakes and chips) arrow points had been made. After much diligent search, only one perfect point was found. There were many broken ones, showing the difficulty in working the material. Mr. Lukins, a scientific mineralogist, collected a quantity of the best flakes to experiment with, and, by the strokes of a light hammer, roughed out one or two very rude imitations.” Major J. H. Long traversed the continent westward to the Rocky Mountains, as head of the United States Military Topographical Department; and from him Mr. Sellers derived information of the habits of the rude western tribes long before they had been brought into direct contact with any civilised settlers. “He said that flakes prepared for points and other implements seemed to be an object of trade or commerce among the Indian tribes that he came in contact with; that there were but few places where chert or quartzite was found of sufficient hardness, and close and even grain, to flake well, and at those places there were men very expert at flaking.”[[37]]
Mr. Sellers had known Catlin, the artist and traveller, in his youth, while he was still an expert worker in wood and ivory in the service of the elder Catlin, a musical instrument maker in Philadelphia; and from him he learned much relative to the modes of operation and the sources of material of the Indian workers in stone. “He considered making flakes much more of an art than the shaping them into arrow or spear points, for a thorough knowledge of the nature of the stone to be flaked was essential, as a slight difference in its quality necessitated a totally different mode of treatment. The principal source of supply for what he termed home-made flakes was the coarse gravel bars of the rivers, where large pebbles are found. Those most easily worked into flakes for small arrow points were chalcedony, jasper, and agate. Most of the tribes had men who were expert at flaking, and who could decide at sight the best mode of working. Some of these pebbles would split into tolerably good flakes by quick and sharp blows, striking on the same point. Others would break by a cross fracture into two or more pieces. These were preferred, as good flakes could be split from their clean fractured surface, by what Mr. Catlin called ‘impulsive pressure,’ the tool used being a shaft or stick of between two and three inches in diameter, varying in length from thirty inches to four feet, according to the manner of using them. These were pointed with bone or buckhorn.” It is thus apparent that among rude tribes of modern centuries, as in the prehistoric dawn, exceptional aptitude and skill found recognition as readily as in any civilised community. There were the quarriers and the skilled workmen, on whose joint labours the whole community largely depended for the indispensable supply of all needful tools.