The Mdewakanton Dakota Chief White Dog, one of the 38 Dakota men hung in the largest mass execution in US history, gave the catlinite pipe to one of his captors.
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Catlinite is often used to make the hollow tubes in pipeclay triangles.
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Little Feather Interpretive Center, Pipestone. Most catlinite deposits exist beneath the level of groundwater or are in deep enough layers where the soil is constantly moist as the iron compounds which give catlinite its red color quickly convert into iron oxides when exposed to the elements and the stone degrades and breaks down. The red catlinite from the Pipestone, Minnesota quarries is a soft claystone bed which occurs between layers of hard Sioux Quartzite.Geologic Formations, Pipestone National Monument, Minnesota, National Park Service Only hand tools are used to reach the catlinite so it takes a long time to get to it.
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Native American, Plains (unidentified). Pipe Bowl representing Owl, early 20th century. Catlinite or pipestone, 3 × 5 in. (9.5 × 13.7 cm).
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A large range of pipestones exist, not just those in Minnesota, and numerous Native American tribes use a variety of materials in addition to catlinite for pipemaking.
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Ceremonial pipe bowl of catlinite used by Black Hawk, on display at Black Hawk State Historic Site in Illinois. Minnesota catlinite is buttery smooth and can be cut with a regular hacksaw or even a knife. It comes out of the ground a pinkish color often with a cream layer protecting it from the hard quartzite. It is weaker and more subject to breaking under stress than Utah pipestone.
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A piece of raw argillite from the Queen Charlotte Islands. Argillite is similar to the substance known as catlinite which was used by the indigenous peoples of the American Plains to carve their ceremonial pipes. However, while catlinite is of a reddish-brown color because of its high iron oxide content, argillite is a dark-grey to black color because of its higher carbon content. Argillite used by the Haida is found at the Slatechuck argillite quarry on Slatechuck Mountain near Skidegate on the east flank of Graham Island of Haida Gwaii.
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Brooklyn Museum Protohistoric Catlinite pipe, probably late 17th century Ioway, from the Wanampito site in Iowa. Catlinite, also called pipestone, is a type of argillite (metamorphosed mudstone), usually brownish-red in color, which occurs in a matrix of Sioux Quartzite. Because it is fine-grained and easily worked, it is prized by Native Americans, primarily those of the Plains nations for use in making ceremonial pipes such as chanunpas. Pipestone quarries are located and preserved in Pipestone National Monument outside Pipestone, Minnesota, in Pipestone County, Minnesota, and at the Pipestone River in Ontario, Canada.
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The term Catlinite came into use after the American painter George Catlin visited the quarries in Minnesota in 1835; but it was Philander Prescott who first wrote about the rock in 1832, noting that evidence indicated that American Indians had been using the quarries since at least as far back as 1637.
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Sisseton Sioux. Ceremonial pipe bowl of catlinite used by Black Hawk, of the Sauk people. Communal smoking of a sacred pipe is a religious ceremony in a number of Native American cultures, while other tribes are social smokers only, if they smoke at all. In some cases tobacco is smoked, in other cases, kinnikinnick, or a combination of the two.
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The Sioux Quartzite rocks are 1.2 billion years old and up to high. They are exposed on either side of Split Rock Creek, which also flows through Split Rock Creek State Park in Minnesota. Within the quartzite are deposits of catlinite, a softer mineral essential to many Native American groups to make ceremonial pipes. The park lies on the Coteau des Prairies, a plateau on the northern Great Plains.
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Tracy Hall and others joined the project later. The Schenectady group improved on the anvils designed by Percy Bridgman, who received a Nobel Prize for his work in 1946. Bundy and Strong made the first improvements, then more were made by Hall. The GE team used tungsten carbide anvils within a hydraulic press to squeeze the carbonaceous sample held in a catlinite container, the finished grit being squeezed out of the container into a gasket.
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Catlinite bowl of a ceremonial pipe used by Black Hawk, on display at Black Hawk State Historic Site. Tobacco, Nicotiana rustica,The Native American Chanunpa, the Sacred Pipe , Barefoot's World was originally used primarily by eastern tribes, but western tribes often mixed it with other herbs, barks, and plant matter, in a preparation commonly known as kinnikinnick.Charles L. Cutler. Tracks that speak: the legacy of Native American words in North American culture.
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The people found the red, workable catlinite in the area. They made the head to a sacred pipe of a big piece, later to become a part of the Ponca's tribal pipe. (The Ponca finished the long migration to the northeastern Nebraska before they finally made the stem to the pipe). The people built a village near Big Sioux River, maybe at the Blood Run SiteThiessen, Thomas D. (2004): "Blood Run Site".
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The accuracy of some of Catlin's observations has been questioned. He claimed to be the first white man to see the Minnesota pipestone quarries, and pipestone was named catlinite. Catlin exaggerated various features of the site, and his boastful account of his visit aroused his critics, who disputed his claim of being the first white man to investigate the quarry. Previous recorded white visitors include the Groselliers and Radisson, Father Louis Hennepin, Baron de Lahontan, and others.
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Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (Boston : 2002). One material used for ceremonial pipe bowls in the Upper Midwest is red pipestone or catlinite, a fine-grained easily worked stone of a rich red color of the Coteau des Prairies, west of the Big Stone Lake in South Dakota. The pipestone quarries of what today is Minnesota, were neutral ground as people from multiple nations journeyed to the quarry to obtain the sacred pipestone. The Sioux people use long-stemmed pipes in some of their ceremonies.
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Smoking pipes molded from wet clay are different from those where the bowl is carved from solid pipestone and then fitted with a wooden stem (as is the case with Catlinite pipes). The Eastern Band Cherokee are social smokers, and use molded clay pipes for this purpose. In the United Kingdom, since the 17th century "pipe-clay" has meant a pale, whitish clay. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as "fine white kind of clay, which forms a ductile paste with water".
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They use small reed cane pipestems made from river cane. These pipes are made from aged river clay hardened in a hot fire. Red pipestone – Catlinite is an iron-rich, reddish, soft argillite or claystone typically excavated from beds occurring between hard Sioux Quartzite layersGeologic Formations, Pipestone National Monument, Minnesota, National Park Service below groundwater level, as the stone erodes rapidly when exposed to the weather and outside air. Red pipestone is used primarily by the Plains Tribes, and the Western and Great Basin Tribes.
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For Life in all Directions, Roxanne Swentzell (Santa Clara Pueblo), bronze, NMAI Pai Tavytera traditional woodcarving, Amambay Department, Paraguay, 2008 Native Americans have created sculpture, both monumental and small, for millennia. Stone sculptures are ubiquitous through the Americas, in the forms of stelae, inuksuit, and statues. Alabaster stone carving is popular among Western tribes, where catlinite carving is traditional in the Northern Plains and fetish-carving is traditional in the Southwest, particularly among the Zuni. The Taíno of Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic are known for their zemis– sacred, three-pointed stone sculptures.
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On the Minnesota side of the coteau is a feature known as Buffalo Ridge, where wind speeds average 16 mph (26 km/h). This windy plateau is being developed for commercial wind power, contributing to the state's ranking as third in the nation for wind-generated electricity. Between the river and the plateau are flat prairies atop varying depths of glacial till. In the extreme southwest portion of the state, bedrock outcroppings of Sioux Quartzite are common, with less common interbedded outcrops of an associated metamorphosed mudstone named catlinite.
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Pipestone, Minnesota is the site of historic Native American quarries of catlinite, which is more commonly known as "pipestone". Another notable outcrop in the region is the Jeffers Petroglyphs, a Sioux Quartzite outcropping with numerous petroglyphs which may be up to 7000–9000 years old. Drier than most of the rest of the state, the region is a transition zone between the prairies and the Great Plains. Once rich in wetlands known as prairie potholes, 90%, or some three million acres (12,000 km²), have been drained for agriculture in the Minnesota River basin.
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Bird Figure from Tremper Mounds Another significant discovery made at Tremper were more than 500 objects that had been deliberately broken and left in one of the eastern chambers. The objects included 136 smoking pipes made of catlinite or pipestone. Ninety were effigy pipes sculpted in the shapes of animals, notably bears, wolves, dogs, beavers, cougars, otters, turtles, cranes, owls, herons, and hawks. It had been thought that the material used to make the pipes had been quarried from Ohio pipestone outcrops across the Scioto River from Tremper, but new tests have shown that the majority of the pipes were made from Sterling pipestone from northwestern Illinois.
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Sioux Quartzite at Sioux Falls, South Dakota Cross-bedding in the Sioux Quartzite, Blue Mounds State Park, Minnesota, USA. The Sioux Quartzite is a Proterozoic quartzite that is found in the region around the intersection of Minnesota, South Dakota, and Iowa, and correlates with other rock units throughout the upper midwestern and southwestern United States. It was formed by braided river deposits, and its correlative units are thought to possibly define a large sedimentary wedge that once covered the passive margin on the then-southern side of the North American craton. In human history, it provided the catlinite, or pipestone, that was used by the Plains Indians to carve ceremonial pipes.
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Scholarly interest in the history of the evolution of the bowl of the clay tobacco pipe, extends as far back as 1863. In the 1860s antiquaries attempted to date clay pipe bowls by their evolving shapes and sizes. The bowls of ceremonial pipes used by some indigenous American nations are often carved from red pipestone or catlinite, a fine-grained easily worked stone of a rich red color of the Coteau des Prairies, west of the Big Stone Lake in South Dakota. The pipestone quarries have traditionally been neutral ground among warring tribes, as people from multiple nations journeyed to the quarry to obtain the sacred pipestone.
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These excavations have also recovered thousands of artifacts. Originally utilized as a "property identifier," a lead seal dated 1701 with the name of the "Company of Indies of France" and a fleur-de-lis provided evidence that the location of the settlement had been properly identified. Among other items discovered at the site included construction materials (fired wall clay known as bousillage, roof tiles), dishware (French faience, Mexican majolica, Chinese porcelain, kettle fragments, wine glasses), weaponry (French gun flints, lead shot, gun and sword parts), clothing remnants (brass and silver buttons, shoe and clothing buckles), currency (French and Spanish coins, glass trade beads), and ceremonial items (catlinite fragments from the bowl of a ceremonial pipe.).
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Catlinite pipe, probably Ioway, from the Protohistoric Wanampito Site (13BM16), Bremer County, Iowa. Protohistoric refers to the period when American Indians were exposed to European trade items and large population shifts occurred because of introduced European diseases and warfare, but there is very little direct written documentation. Explorers such as Marquette and Joliet occasionally documented American Indians along the Mississippi in Iowa, but it was not until the early 19th century that regular written accounts of American Indians in Iowa became common. American Indians in the early Protohistoric period continued many aspects of Oneota culture, but soon almost all indigenous technology disappeared, including ceramics and stone tool production.Alex 2000:211–226 It was during this period that the Meskwaki (Fox) and Sauk appeared in eastern Iowa, displaced from their homelands in the east.
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