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Stone Tobacco Smoking Pipes in the Canadian Fur Trade

Tobacco was an integral part of the Canadian fur trade. It was smoked, chewed and snuffed. It was traded and gifted to Indigenous peoples, and consumed by both men and women. One of the most common ways of smoking tobacco was with a clay tobacco pipe. However, not all pipes were made of clay. This is a story of one of the most interesting and unusual types of tobacco pipes I have run across – a stone tobacco pipe.

Metis dog driver, Lac La Biche, Alberta, smoking a clay tobacco pipe. (Arthur Heming sketch, courtesy of Glenbow Archives)

Clay Tobacco Pipes

Whenever we excavate at the inland fur trade posts in Canada, one of the most common artifacts we recover are clay tobacco pipe fragments. These pipes are the remnants of smoking activities at these posts. They come in a variety of shapes and sizes. At the end of the 18th century the stem on some of these pipes, known as Churchwardens, was nearly three feet long. Only the upper classes smoked them while the laborers smoked the shorter stemmed cuttie.

Man smoking the excessively long-stemmed churchwarden tobacco pipe.
These two clay tobacco pipes were recovered from the c.1830 – 1917 Hudson’s Bay Company Fort Edmonton. Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. The pipes were made from ball clay and mostly manufactured in Europe. While they were relatively cheap, they were also quite fragile.

Many of the 18th and 19th century clay tobacco pipes shipped to the inland posts, were made in Europe. The Hudson’s Bay Company imported most of their pipes from England. Many of the pipe bowls and stems were stamped sometimes with the maker’s name or initials. It wasn’t until the latter half of the 19th century that a Canadian clay pipe industry took hold in eastern Canada. Bannerman of Montreal clay pipes were shipped to the Alberta fur trade posts.

These tobacco pipe fragments came from the Northwest/Hudson’s Bay Company Fort Vermilion (c.1798-1830) site. This pipe bowl has the letters ‘TD’ stamped on it. It refers to Thomas Dormer, a pipe maker in England during the late 18th – early 19th centuries.
Ornate clay tobacco pipe stem fragments with floral designs. In the second half of the 19th century many pipes had very elaborate decorations on them. Some of the bowls even had faces on them. The bottom stem has ‘Baltic’ (origins unknown) stamped on it, probably referring to the manufacturer. These fragments were recovered from the HBC Fort Edmonton (c.1830-1917), Alberta.
Hudson’s Bay Company men smoking outside of Fort Edmonton (1871), on what are now the Alberta legislature grounds. The Company inventories list thousands of pounds of tobacco shipped to these inland posts. These men might have been smoking one of the pipes above. (Photograph by Charles Horetzky, Library and Archives of Canada/c-7534)

The Somewhat Puzzling History of Western Canadian Stone Tobacco Pipes

But not all pipes were made of clay. When we excavated the North West Company Fort George (c.1792-1800) site in east-central Alberta we found platform (a type) tobacco pipes made from soapstone, pipestone or local mudstone. They were found in domestic household refuse along with many other common fur trade artifacts (beads, buttons, etc.). These pipes are poorly documented.

This rare, complete mudstone tobacco pipe was found at Fort George, Alberta. The mudstone occurs in round nodules found in the North Saskatchewan Sands and Gravels. We found the mud balls and partially finished pipes in the household refuse at the site.

We often speculated who made and smoked these pipes. They certainly were not European. Or, so we initially thought. And, what were they doing in Alberta, Canada?

Peter Rindisbacher painting, 1821, Red River, showing a First Nations family smoking. The man is smoking a stone elbow pipe. And the woman is smoking what looks like a stone platform pipe similar to the one found at Fort George.

Initially we thought these pipes were made by local Indigenous men or women working at the western Canadian fur trade forts. But there is no record of this kind of pipe being used prior to White contact in Alberta. Only recently I realized that these pipes were similar to Iroquois platform pipes. Iroquois? In Alberta? Well, yes. The Northwest Company brought Iroquois hunters out west to trap furs in the late 18th – early 19th centuries. (The community of ‘Calahoo’, Alberta is named after an Alberta Iroquoian family.)

This image of an Iroquois man smoking tobacco from what looks like a platform stone pipe. Many stone pipe fragments, similar to the Alberta pipes, have been found at St. Lawrence Iroquoian archaeological sites. (photo image courtesy of Marie-Helene Daviau, 2008)

I thought at this point at least we now knew the possible origins of this pipe style. Quite possibly brought west by the Iroquois hunters who lived at the forts. But then, after seeing the image below, I wasn’t so sure anymore.

In this image, taken from the cover of Daviau’s monograph, shows a French Canadian farmer smoking what looks like a stone platform pipe. (Frederick von Germann, 1778) In 1749, Peter Kalm noted the French Canadian woodsmen borrowed this style from the Iroquois of the St. Lawrence River Valley (Daviau 2008:189).

The North West Company hired many French Canadians to work at their inland western Canadian posts. These men made up the famous canoe brigades and worked mostly as laborers at the posts when not paddling. So, it is entirely possible that they brought their stone pipes with them, or fashioned them out of local material at the forts.

We found similar stone pipe fragments at the remote northern Alberta fur trade posts, such as Fort Vermilion, Peace River region. But the peculiar markings on these pipes add a bit of a twist to the story.

This stone tobacco pipe base (the bowl on the top is missing), found at Fort Vermilion, Alberta, is of the platform variety, but with some unusual circle-and-dot markings on it. We are still trying to figure out how these perfectly symmetrical circles were incised into the stone. Possibly by a small auger bit.

Over the years I have noticed artifacts with similar circle-and-dot markings on them in other western Canadian fur trade assemblages. The circle-and-dot motif is an Athabaskan symbol that has a geographical distribution ranging from central Alberta to northwestern Alaska. Was this tobacco pipe style adopted by Athabaskan-speaking people who then put their markings on it? Quite possibly. Interestingly, in Alberta the style seems to disappear by the 1840s.

Bone artifacts from Rocky Mountain House, Jasper House and Dunvegan, showing the circle-and-dot motif. Left to right: Quill smoother; bone fragment; bone flesher.

A Few Final Thoughts

Occasionally archaeologists recover artifacts from a documented period of Canadian history whose origins and uses are puzzling. Not all material culture is well documented. Especially when it belongs to people who aren’t doing any of the documenting. These objects were likely made and used by Indigenous people and/or French Canadian voyageurs (who were mostly illiterate) – a people without a written history. In the case of the stone tobacco pipes, careful dating and geographic location are extremely important to figure out their possible origins and uses.

References

Daviau, Marie-Helen. 2008. La Pipe de pierre dans la societe conadienne des XVII et XIX siecles. Centre interuniversitaire d’etudes sur les letters, les arts et les traditions (CELAT), Quebec.

Heinz W. Pyszczyk. 2015. The Last Fort Standing: Fort Vermilion and the Peace River Fur Trade, 1798-1830. Occasional Papers of the Archaeological Society of Alberta. Number 14.

Note: In my next post, I’ll tell you about another unusual tobacco pipe in the fur trade. However, before I reveal more about this artifact, I will write a short story about it first.