How To Make A Peace Pipe

The Peace Pipe past E. Irving Couse, Metropolitan Museum of Art (1901)

A couple of branches up in my family tree is a slap-up uncle of some sort who was an Indian agent for the U.S government in the belatedly 1800s. I mainly know near this person, whose proper noun I do not recollect, because many of the Native American artifacts that he collected during his career remained in my great-grandfather'due south house. There was a saddle frame made of os, a leather knife sheath, some beaded clothing, an incredibly smelly partial buffalo hide, and most fascinating, a pipe.

Indian agents were not highly thought of by society, which is somewhat reassuring given the level of disrespect shown to Native Americans and their artifacts, particularly the peace pipe, which is a sacred item. Indian agents were responsible for making sure Native Americans learned to subcontract, learned to speak English, did not "idle for desire of an opportunity to labor," did not drink alcohol, and did not exit the reservation without a let.

From our perspective, that is a loathsome job that no ane should hold. But even in the 1800s, Indian agents were publicly deemed every bit corrupt, unprincipled opportunists and were routinely subject to derogatory news articles. I'm not proud of this ancestor'southward career choice, but there are worse in my family unit tree, so I won't obsess about him.

However, he did inadvertently gift me with an interest in pipes. Whenever we visited my great-grandfather, I would bolt to the basement, which was filled with fascinating objects, the all-time of which was the peace piping. Made of 18-carat pipestone, also known as catlinite, mined only in Minnesota and only by Native Americans, the bowl was a deep red streaked with white, and the stem was a white wood (probably ash or sumac, most often mentioned in articles).

It was decades later when I started wondering near pipes like the one I'd known every bit a child. Native Americans did not have electric drills or long drill bits of any sort. How, I wondered, did they drill a fume pigsty through a foot and a one-half or more of solid wood? The question is fifty-fifty more than intriguing when considering those sacred pipes with curved stems. Flexible drill $.25 were equally unthought of equally regular drill bits.

Pipe Dance, Assiniboine by George Catlin, Smithsonian American Art Museum (1835-1837)

At final, I ran beyond a 1949 article in Pipage Lovers magazine that satisfied my curiosity. The cores of the woods used for stems contain pulpy, soft, pith centers. The Native pipemaker would pour grease into the wood and the pith would soak it upwards. And so a small hole was fashioned for placement of a hungry chow, which was sealed inside with pitch. The grub would eat through the greasy pith and come out the other side, leaving a smooth, even fume hole behind.

What an elegant solution to a puzzling problem. Further research indicated that some tribes merely laid lengths of wood on pismire hills, and the ants would eat the soft pith. Quartz was used as a smoothing agent, similar sandpaper, and some tribes did use drill $.25 of sorts, with difficult white quartz points at the end of a thin shaft wrapped by a bow cord attached to a bow, generating rotation as the bow moved forward and back, similar to a well-known fire-starting technique.

The ingenuity of ancient peoples continues to amaze me. In fashioning pyramids or pipe stems, they found brilliant ways to achieve their goals. Many problems that puzzle us today were solved long ago with simpler and more insightful means than we would imagine.

Source: https://www.smokingpipes.com/smokingpipesblog/single.cfm/post/the-secrets-ancient-shank-drilling

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