“In the event my good name becomes somehow inextricably entangled with all manner of buffoon, including but not limited to, doltish actors, thieving hack writers, slavering media dimwits, confused religious fanatics, and idiotic pea-brained people who simply can not make a mental distinction between fiction and non-fiction, this device will sense the besmirchment of my name and begin, through the complex interaction of gears and pulley systems, to rotate my coffin within my final resting place, allowing me to literally “turn over in my grave” for the rest of eternity, or until such time as I am searched on google for my actual accomplishments.”

A fucking genius that guy! Wow.

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.

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.

For my safety, landlubber that I am, the captain brought me down into the hold of the ship amid a payload of instruments and devices, the purposes of which I dared not ponder. He sat me down saying, “just relax, lay back, you shouldn’t feel a thing. It will all be over before you know it.” His first mate placed a cup of water at my side and the they went about their duties, not paying me any heed.

What followed was… well unpleasant. I closed my eyes, feeling nothing so much as numb. I opened my mouth as if to yawn but no sound issued. Outside thunder did what it does best and rumbled ominously. Other noises sounded above me and my closed eyes which were less familiar and is as much perhaps even more ominous.

I heard machinery revving and spinning and a wet spluttering as though the boats motor were meeting resistance and throwing water against rocks. I heard the scraping and clinking of unknown devices being put to use, and the voices of the crew, calling out in the lingo of their kind, the meanings impenetrable to such as I. I’d swear I could feel the heat of these unknown machines on me as though they were a millimeter from my face. I found it hard to swallow. The burning smell of motors and hot friction was inescapable. I promised myself I’d take whatever precautions needed to avoid trips like this in the future.

Suddenly everything seemed to stop. No more sounds; no more fury. I opened my eyes. As if on cue the captain reappeared, saying, “Pick up that cup of water and use it son! Then get up out of that chair and come with me. It’s all over.” And indeed it was.

As it turns out while I was down in the hold the storm had blown over. I walked out onto the upper decks to find bright clear skies. We’d docked and my leg of this blasted trip was at an end. The captain handed me my writs of passage, informed me the price of the voyage had been taken care of (miracle of miracles!), and simply bid me farewell, as though it were just another day at the office for him, which I guess it was. I disembarked from the ship and headed out into a gloriously warm and sunny day, my trial at sea over.

All of which is to simply to say:

It was pouring this afternoon here in New York, and I had the misfortune of being obliged to head down to my local dentist, in the pissing rain, to have two, counte em’, two root canals. Not a fun scenario. But as it turns out when it was all over and I left the office the rain had stopped, giving way to a gorgeous sunny day. I had a scrip for some heavy pain-killers in hand and a stroll through a glistening Central Park in front of me. So it ain’t all bad!

Oh wait, I spoke too soon. It’s pouring again, worse than before. And the Novocain is wearing off… I think I’m about to have a flashback…

yeesh. For more on the trials and tribulations of dentistry see this previous post pulling teeth.

To me they look, more than anything else, like overhead shots of failed civilizations, or possibly the images now returned on a daily basis from the surfaces of distant moons and planets. Me Likey.

One final note: Discovering Droste today had extra punch for me, though not because of the sculpture pictured above. While looking for more info on him I came across his photography, which he evidently began dabbling in latter in his career. Take a look at these images and then take a look at these (especially those toward the bottom of the page) and it shouldn’t be hard to tell why.

Every so often I come across an artist who I’ve never heard of and am humbled to see (what I feel to be) my own aesthetic in evidence elsewhere, created long before I ever touched a camera or brush. In the case of Droste’s photographs I can see immediately what he was after. How many times have I stood by the edge of the lake in Central Park trying to capture the same kind of thing? Fascinating; for me anyway.

Hope you enjoyed. If anyone out there has further info on Droste please let me know.