Note 1826 — Chapter VI · (continued 3)

There is some question if the early Americans ever carried on the heavier parts of the quarrying arts, as for building-stones. Cf. Morgan’s Houses and House Life, 274. They did quarry soap-stone (Elmer R. Reynolds, Schumacher and Putnam, in Peabody Mus. Repts., xii.) and mica (Smithsonian Report, 1879, by W. Gesner; C. D. Smith in Ibid. 1876; Dr. Brinton in Proc. Numism. and Antiq. Soc. of Philad., 1878, p. 18). That they quarried pipe-stone is also well known, and the famous red pipe-stone quarry, lying between the Missouri and Minnesota rivers, was under the protection of the Great Spirit, so that tribes at war with one another are said to have buried their hatchets as they approached it. Wilson, in the last chapter of the first volume of his Prehistoric man, examines this pipe-carving and tells the story of this famous quarry. He refers to the tobacco mortars of the Peruvians in which they ground the dry leaf; and to the pipes of the mounds in which it was smoked. Cf. J. F. Nadaillac’s Les pipes et le tabac (Paris, 1885), taken from the Materiaux pour l’histoire primitive de l’homme (ii. for 1885); and Lucien de Rosny on “Le tabac et ses accessoires parmi les indigènes de l’Amérique,” in Mémoires sur l’Archéologie Américaine, 1865, of the Soc. d’Ethnographie.