The Antelope Pipe.

A pipe of this kind was never made to be looked at, and looking at it will tell you very little. It was made to be held, and the long Plains pipes with their wood stems are carried in the hand by the bowl itself, the stem lying out across the forearm while the weight of the stone rests in the palm. A few minutes of handling one will teach you the design, but years of handling leave a record in the stone, so that the high points of the carving go soft and the surface darkens wherever the hand kept returning. When this pipe came to me I could read most of what mattered in that surface before I looked at a single piece of paper.

Not all of the black is from the hand. Some of it came from the inside, drawn through the bowl by smoke over a long stretch of years until it settled permanently into the stone, and the distinction is worth pausing over, because the two kinds of darkening say different things. Polish is the record of a pipe being carried, while smoke is the record of a pipe being used for the purpose it was made for, and this one carries both.

The carving is an antelope, which was the first thing that stopped me. In forty years of handling Plains pipes I have watched the effigy forms repeat themselves without much variation, buffalo and horse and bear and eagle and elk and the human head, and in all that time the antelope has almost never appeared, so that I can still count the examples I have seen on one hand. This one was carved by a man who knew the animal, and you can see it in the turn of the head and in the line of the back, which is exactly right, without a trace of stiffness anywhere in the piece. Whoever made it had watched antelope moving across open country and carried that memory into the stone.

The second thing was the writing. Someone set words on this pipe a long time ago and they are worn now, so that you have to turn it into the light to make them out, and what they say is Sitting Bull, Sioux Lakota of the Dakotas. On the underside, in another hand, a collector named Tribbett recorded what he believed the object to be, a carved antelope deer pipe from the Dakotas and the upper Missouri River.

I want to be exact about what that writing is, because I have spent four decades watching this business trade on the opposite of exactness. It is not proof and it is not provenance, but rather one man's belief, written in his own hand, about an object he happened to own, and Sitting Bull's name has been put on a great many things over the last century and a half without being true of any of them. I do not know who carried this pipe but the likelihood of Sitting Bull and his relationship with Running Antelope makes it certainly a very strong possibility.

What I can tell you is the world it came out of. It was carved in the 1860s, on the upper Missouri, among the Lakota, in the years when Sitting Bull was attacking the forts and refusing every offer put in front of him, telling the priest De Smet that he did not propose to sell any part of his country. Among the four principal chiefs who advised him through that period was a man named Running Antelope, elected a shirt wearer of his people in 1851, a member of the societies, and by common agreement the finest orator the Sioux Nation ever produced.

In 1868 the two of them came to the same table and went opposite ways, because Sitting Bull would not sign the treaty and Running Antelope did, and when he signed it he signed with a drawing of a running antelope. The animal was his name and it was his mark, the figure by which his word was made binding, set down on the document that ended the fighting and began the reservation, and he came to regret it, saying so plainly in his last years, speaking of the time when the Lakota had been free, returning to Sitting Bull at the end.

So we have an antelope pipe, carved on the upper Missouri in the 1860s, and a man who owned it long ago who looked at it and wrote Sitting Bull's name across it. I understand the impulse without endorsing the conclusion, and what I take from that inscription is not a claim about ownership but a claim about belonging, because the people who held this pipe before me understood it to have come out of that world, and in that much they were almost certainly right.

Which is why the patina moves me more than the carving does. The carving records an intention, while the patina records a life, and pipes of this kind were the instruments by which agreements were sealed and prayers were carried upward. Someone held this in his hand across many years, and each time he lit it, he meant something by it.

The pipe has been in three collections, those of Tribbett, Perry Hansen, and Slack, and it sits now where I can reach it, which I do more often than I expect to.

Mark Blackburn