36 THE MAGIC OP JEWELS AND CHARMS
is
named. "While it is impossible to determine with any degree of
certainty for how long a time the Indians were familiar with this
material, there are those who believe that the quarries were worked and
the material used for pipe-bowls by native sculptors long before the
earliest notice we have to that effect.59 Great skill and
patience were displayed by the Indians in the making of these
pipe-bowls, which were sometimes carved with various symbolical
figures. We have an early record of such pipes from the pen of Jacques
Marquette, a Jesuit missionary to the Indians, who saw one when
visiting the Illinois Indians in 1673. He reports it as being of
polished red stone, like marble, so pierced that one orifice served to
hold the tobacco, while the other was fastened on the stem, which was a
stick two feet long, as thick as a common cane and pierced in the
middle. The whole was covered with large feathers of red, green, and
other colors.
Catlin
states that at the time of his visit the "pipe-stone" quarry was
guarded with a certain religious reverence from the visit of the white
man, the Indians declaring that this red stone was "a part of their
flesh," and that to take it from them would be to tear out their flesh
and spill their blood. This highly poetic language may or may not have
signified a superstitious reverence for the substance; indeed, it may
simply have voiced the fear of these Indians that they might be
despoiled of what for them was an especially valuable material, which
they asserted had been bestowed upon them by the Great Spirit for the
making of pipes exclusively. In our day an old Ojibway Indian,
especially skilled in the work, has a name signifying "he who makes
pipes," and carved pipe-bowls of catlinite are usually sold for from $1
to $10 apiece; as much as $20,
• Basher, " Catlinite, Its Antiquity as a Material for Tobacco Pipes," Am. Nat., vol. xvii, p. 745, July, 1883.
