University of Virginia Library

PIPES AND CLOUD BLOWERS

Among the Pueblo Indians smoking is a formality, beginning and
ending every important ceremony. The chief priest accepts a pipe
filled with native tobacco and, after a few solemn puffs, hands it to his
associate next on the left. Each in turn puffs smoke toward the altar
and passes on the pipe. Smoke reconsecrates altar and altar paraphernalia.
Formal smoking is a recognized rite without which no ceremony
would be regarded as complete and efficacious. As bearers of individual
prayers, smoke clouds rise to mingle with clouds in the sky and
thus bring rain.

The Bonitians used both stone and earthenware pipes. In shape,
these vary from the tubular or "cigar-holder" form to the "elbow"
type, whereon the bowl stands more or less at right angles to the stem.
Six of our pipes and pipe fragments are of stone; 10, of earthenware.

Three earthenware pipes belong to that class commonly called
"cloud blowers." One, the fragmentary example in figure 94, a, has a
bowl that comes to within seven-eighths inch of the mouthpiece. This
suggests a relatively short pipe, since the fragment itself is only 1⅝
inches long. While plastic, and in the process of manufacture, the pipe
was ornamented three-fourths of the way around with spaced punctations
produced by the hollow end of a wire-grass stem or something
akin. A similar reed could have formed the smoke passage in any of
the pipes before us.

Figures 94, e, and 95, both from Kiva R, are cloud blowers of
Pueblo III vintage. The first remains unstained by tobacco while the
second carries within its bowl unmistakable evidence of having been
smoked, if only half a dozen times.

Considering the shallowness and position of its bowl, a cloud blower
could not be used as we are accustomed to seeing pipes smoked. From
earliest times, no doubt, the type was employed to produce symbolic
clouds. Smoke was blown through the stem and out the bit end rather
than drawn into the mouth of the smoker and then expelled. The
procedure is clearly portrayed by Voth (1903, p. 15) in his description
of the Oáqöl ceremony at Oraibi.

During the sixth song on the first day the chief priest goes to the
fireplace and lights his cloud producer, "a large, cone-shaped pipe
which he has previously filled, takes a little honey into his mouth,

kneels before the medicine bowl, and taking the wide end of the pipe
between his lips, blows large clouds of smoke towards the altar, over
the objects in front of it, and into the medicine bowl."

Fig. 94—Earthenware pipes and cloud blowers.

We lack the dimensions of that particular Hopi pipe but our specimen
(fig. 95), 1⅝ inches across the bowl, when filled with burning
tobacco would test the elasticity of any priestly mouth. Or perhaps
Pueblo cloud-making practices have changed since introduction of
this bell-ended form early in Pueblo III times.

Seven of the nine pipes Fewkes (1923, p. 95) found in Pipe Shrine
House, Mesa Verde, are cloud blowers and five possess the expanding
bowl of our figures 94, e, and 95. Two of the five have an over-all
width of 3⅛ inches. One wonders, then, whether bell-ended cloud
blowers were not originally held a short distance from the lips as the
priest blew into the lighted bowl and caused smoke clouds to issue
from the opposite end. Related examples from the Pagosa-Piedra
region, as described by Jeancon and Roberts (1923-24, pp. 35, 304),
are cruder and presumably older than those from Pipe Shrine House.

Figures 94, d, and 96 illustrate earthenware elbow pipes. Both are
from Kiva G; both were thinly slipped with white before the black

mineral paint was applied. Within the broken bowl of the second a
painted rim band may be seen and part of a circle below. The paste
is a uniform blue-gray, apparently sherd-tempered, and almost overfired.
A serpent stretches its undulating length down the back of the
stem. On the first example, the stem has been ground off to provide
a new mouthpiece.

The diminutive pipe represented by figure 94, c, is sand-tempered,
unslipped, and unpainted.[6] Its size and finish are in marked contrast
to figure 96, for instance, or 94, b. This latter, from Old Bonitian
Room 320, is stone-polished over a thin black paint, presumably
organic. Its basal protuberance is more pointed than that on the
miniature.

Specimens shown in figure 94, f and g, might reflect intermediate
stages in pipe development. They seem about midway between the

tubular pipes of Basket Maker times and the elbow variety of Pueblo
I-III. The first came from apparently Old Bonitian rubbish in Kiva
V; the second, from an exploratory trench on the east side of the
West Court. Both are smoothed externally but unslipped; the paste
of the second (g) is light gray and rock-tempered. A ⅛-inch deposit
of ash clings to the inside of its broken bowl.

With a single exception, that from Room 320 (fig. 94, b), our
earthenware pipes and fragments came from Late Bonitian rooms and
kivas. One of these, Room 327, was half full of dominantly Late
rubbish and two, Room 307 and Kiva V, contained mixed debris. The
fragment from Room 327 is an inch-long section (U.S.N.M. No.
336046) from a pipe of cigar-holder type. Its surface is polished black
and its fine-grained paste discloses no visible temper.

Fig. 96.—Earthenware pipe from Kiva G.

Our stone pipes are of materials foreign to Chaco Canyon. The first,
figure 97, a, is of pale yellow claystone, a rock sometimes employed
for tcamahias. In its present condition the specimen measures 1[fraction 11 by 16]
inches long by three-fourths inch in greatest diameter. But the bowl
as it now exists is only seven-sixteenths inch deep; a newly ground
edge evidences repair with a view to retention after the original rim
was broken. Part of a hollow bone mouthpiece crowds the [fraction 7 by 32]-inch
drilling at the small end—the only one of our pipes, stone or earthenware,
so fitted. This interesting example comes from 201, a storeroom
built by Late Bonitians against the outer north wall of Old Bonitian
Room 6. Since it lay among fallen masonry and blown sand, the
specimen presumably had been placed for safekeeping either in a
second-story wall niche or between ceiling poles.

Figure 97, c, illustrates an elbow pipe of steatite, found by one of
our Navaho while loading wagons outside the northeast quarter of
the ruin, between Rooms 186 and 189. I did not learn whether it
was found among earth and rock thrown out of those four rooms
or beneath the lower, older accumulation of blown sand and fallen
stonework.

An even more interesting specimen is that pictured in figure 97, b.
It is of translucent travertine that might have been obtained in southwestern

Colorado or in the Zuñi Mountains of New Mexico. The
bowl base is flat but merges with the rounded stem, the bit end of
which is missing. Above, the bowl is rimmed by a disklike collar that
protrudes slightly all around. The bore is one-half inch in rim diameter
by thirteen-sixteenths inch in depth. About one-eighth inch from its
rounded bottom the hole has a diameter of five-sixteenths inch, thus
showing use of a stone drill rather than a hollow reed. Ringing of the
orifice is the result of incipient boring on the part of a tubular drill

Fig. 97.—Stone pipes and accessories.

five-eighths inch in diameter. As noted in the drawing, the stem
perforation was drilled a little above center.

At time of finding, the pipe was equipped with a bowl plug (fig. b′).
This plug is of a mineral similar to, but more opaque than, travertine;
it fits closely but not snugly; the drilled hole through one side conforms
with that in the pipestem. The lesser, incomplete hole to the
right suggests that the plug slipped after drilling began. Neither pipe
nor plug is fire-stained.

The pipe (fig. 97, b) lay among a small quantity of sweepings on
the floor of Room 332, one of two Late Bonitian closets east of
Kiva U. In those same sweepings were two other pipe fragments
of translucent travertine (U.S.N.M. No. 336049).

Still another Room 332 specimen is illustrated by figure 97, d. It,

too, is of travertine. Length is three-fourths inch; greatest diameter,
three-eighths inch. The larger portion is polished; the smaller end,
also conical, is not polished. The longitudinal boring is five-thirtyseconds
of an inch in diameter at the larger end, and less than oneeighth
at the smaller. This unusual object has been tentatively identified
as an ornamental mouthpiece for a pipe.

Among Late Bonitian rubbish in Old Bonitian Room 307 we found
a fragment of "satin spar" (U.S.N.M. No. 336044) that looks like a
vertical section from a pipe bowl. The fragment had been squared off
top and bottom and longitudinal grooves at either edge evidence an
attempt to salvage the middle quarter-inch, perhaps for a pendant.

Among the pipes described by Pepper were one of coarse green
steatite, elbow type, from Room 9, and an earthenware bell-ended
cloud blower from Room 12 (Pepper, 1920, p. 52, fig. 12, b; p. 64,
fig. 20, c). Both are Old Bonitian rooms in the north-central portion
of the pueblo.

We have no certain knowledge of the tobacco smoked by Bonitian
ritualists. In response to my request, Navaho and Zuñi members of
the excavation crew brought in plants of native tobacco which were
said to occur both in Chaco Canyon and on the mesas above. These
plants were later identified at the National Herbarium as Nicotiana
attenuata Torrey, a species widely distributed throughout the Upper
Sonoran Life Zone of the Southwest and the one most commonly
used by the Indians.

Both Zuñi and Navaho say they gather the plants when in flower;
dry them out of doors and crush the leaves in the palm for rolling in
cornhusk cigarettes. As described by Fewkes (1896, p. 19), N.
attenuata is smoked in Hopi pipes on ceremonial occasions, and is
used at other times as an ingredient in prayer offerings. Hopi practices
have not changed appreciably although Whiting (1939, pp. 40, 90)
observes that the tobacco is now often mixed with other plants. For
instance, rain is more likely to follow if the dried leaves and flowers
of Onosmodium thurberi are added. Young leaves of spruce, pine,
and aspen are gathered every four years to be dried, carefully stored,
and mixed with native tobacco so that larger smoke clouds on ceremonial
occasions will bring rain sooner.