Scotch-Irish, Brits, Africans, Italians, Native Americans, Russian Jews, Germans, Greeks, Slavs, Armenians, Chinese, Poles, etc, etc. This was the glorious melting pot of 19th century America, only this melting pot had not been on the stove long, and the ingredients had not yet congealed into anything approaching a smooth consistency. Imagine the difficulty in trying to do something as simple as buy a cigar.
Consumers of 1800’s America were as disparate a group of peoples as one could imagine. They were an ad-man’s demographic nightmare. A focus group without a focus. They did not yet truly share a common language and certainly didn’t share a common culture. Simple commerce in this age before wholesale could be a challenging proposition.
Characterizing an “average” customer from a shop owner’s perspective in this melange would be an almost comical task, except for the single obvious trait which everyone shared: the inability to understand one another. Add to this the fact that most people were illiterate and you have the seeds of what would ultimately grow into a ubiquitous American sight: the cigar-store Indian.
“Visual trade signs” were essentially stand-ins for written signposts that might have been incomprehensible to potential customers, many of whom were immigrants or illiterate. Chiropodists (early-day podiatrists) displayed large white feet, teahouses had Chinamen to lure customers, pharmacies used an oversized mortar and pestle, Locksmiths featured large keys, pawnshops were known by three balls. The most popular, however, were the tobacconist’s cigar-store Indian. Tens of thousands of shop figures were carved in the United States and Canada in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.
The origin of the wooden Indian dates back to England in 1617, when small wooden figures called “Virginie Men” were placed on countertops to represent tobacco companies. The “Indian” likeness became synonymous with tobacco products for a century after.
The earliest known representation of a tobacconist figure appeared in 1617 in The Smoking Age, or The Life and Death of Tobacco.
After the Indian became recognized as the standard smoke-shop symbol, certain tobacconists sought to distinguish themselves by using other types of figures. Turks and sultans (for turkish tobacco), Punch figures (which survived into the modern age on rolling papers), Scottish Highlanders (for snuff), baseball players, and “racetrack touts or dandies” with jeering faces dressed in houndstooth coats and top hats.
In America the vast majority of the sculptures were created by shipcarvers trained in traditional Anglo-American woodcarving techniques. In the 1820’s steam ships brought about the decline of sailing ships and these shipcarvers had to find new avenues on which to ply their trade.
The carvers themselves coined the phrase “the image business” to characterize the wide range of shop figures that they were eventually called upon to create. And they were very successful. By mid-century, the phenomenon had reached the dimensions of a fad, with the figures becoming an essential part of any shopkeepers’ operations.
Most of these artisans worked out of the east coast and may never have actually even seen an American Indian. As such they are often characterized as “looking like white men in native garb.” Shaped by nineteenth-century Anglo-American values, they also reflected the tenor of the times, including racial and gender stereotyping and an embryonic popular culture. The cigar-store Indian typified what is now commonly considered the birth of modern advertising techniques in America.
Although some figures were made of cast metal, the great majority were carved from wood. The preferred material for the statues was white pine, usually three to seven-foot sections of masts purchased at spar yards in the maritime district. The carvers’ tools were axes, mallets, and chisels. Industrialization, which was well under way by this time, never made much headway into the craft of “trade figure” carving, and so surviving statues represent an interesting blend of folk, fine, and popular art of the time.
For a variety of reasons, including over supply, changing tastes, and new modes of advertising, the production of new figures virtually ceased by 1900. They were increasingly seen as old-fashioned symbols of an era that was rapidly passing away.
As a result of the 1910 urban-sidewalk-obstruction laws countless Indian statues were sold from the commercial streets and slowly disappeared. During the depression most wooden cigar-store Indians were broken down and burned as firewood.
Of the tens of thousands once carved it is thought that now only a tiny fraction of original trade figures survive. A fact which the people whose likenesses these statues stereotyped are none too broken up about I’m sure.
I find it interesting that this visual mode of salesmanship, which is one of the earliest tropes of advertising, was created to draw in illiterates by employing obvious stereotypes and the most simplistic symbolic language… Looking at the lion’s share of advertising today I can’t help but wonder whether it has really changed that much, in form or ultimate function. Just a thought.
This post incorporated information from the following sources which you should look to for more in-depth information on the subject:
The Image Business, Shop and Cigar Store Figures in America. By Ralph Sessions.
Cigar Store Indian History and the Origin of Tobacco Shops.
The Museum of American Folk Art page on the subject.
Cigar Store Figures.
Also see:
Peace Party for an American Indian viewpoint.
Sidewalk Sculptures. Cigar-Store Indians Served as High-Profile Advertising Tools for Tobacconists. By Nancy Wolfson. Which points us toward Mark Goldman’s collection.
And this page which focuses on one of the most famous and well documented of all surviving 19th century American cigar-store Indians.
Most of the images in this post were scanned from The Book of Pipes and Tobacco by Carl Ehwa Jr. Published in 1974 by random house.
Hope you enjoyed.
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