The Indian Tipi: Its History, Construction, and Use

by Reginald Laubin, Gladys Laubin

Overview

When the first edition of this book was published in 1957, the art of making a tipi was almost lost, even among American Indians. Since that time a tremendous resurgence of interest in the Indian way of life has occurred, resurgence due in part, at least, to the Laubins' life-long efforts at preservation and interpretation of Indian culture.

As The Indian Tipi makes obvious, the American Indian is both a practical person and a natural artist. Indian inventions are commonly both serviceable and beautiful. Other tents are hard to pitch, hot in summer, cold in winter, poorly lighted, unventilated, easily blown down, and ugly to boot. The conical tipi of the Plains Indian has none of these faults. It can be pitched by one person. It is roomy, well ventilated at all times, cool in summer, well lighted, proof against high winds and heavy downpours, and, with its cheerful fire inside, snug in the severest winter weather. Moreover, its tilted cone, trim smoke flaps, and crown of poles, presenting a different silhouette from every angle, form a shapely, stately dwelling even without decoration.

In this new edition the Laubins have retained all the invaluable aspects of the first edition, and have added a tremendous amount of new material on day-to-day living in the tipi: the section on Indian cooking has been expanded to include a large number and range of Indian foods and recipes, as well as methods of cooking over an open fire, with a reflector oven, and with a ground oven; there are new sections on making buckskin, making moccasins, and making cradle boards; there is a whole new section on child care and general household hints. Shoshoni, Cree, and Assiniboine designs have been added to the long list of tribal tipi types discussed.

This new edition is richly illustrated with color and black and white photographs, and drawings to aid in constructing and living in the tipi. It is written primarily for the interested amateur, and will appeal to anyone who likes camping, the out-of-doors, and American Indian lore.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780806188522
Publisher:	University of Oklahoma Press
Publication date:	11/28/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	1,015,814
File size:	8 MB

About the Author

Reginald and Gladys Laubin, his late wife, have devoted their personal and professional lives to the preservation and interpretation of American Indian dance and culture. They are recognized authorities on and performers of Indian dances and ceremonies. In 1972 for their contribution to dance they were presented the Capezio Dance Award, the first ethnic dancers to be honored with this highest award of the dance world. They were presented the Catlin Peace Pipe Award by Red Dawn, Sioux. They are the authors of The Indian Tipi: Its history, Construction, and Use and American Indian Archery, both published by the University of Oklahoma Press.

Read an Excerpt

The Indian Tipi

Its History, Construction, and Use

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By Reginald Laubin, Gladys Laubin

UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS

Copyright © 1977 University of Oklahoma Press, Norman
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-8852-2

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CHAPTER 1

THE HISTORY OF THE TIPI

Conical shelters have no doubt been used for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years, wherever the climate demanded shelter from the weather, if straight poles, bark, grass, sod, materials for making mats, or the skins of large animals were available.

Sedentary people may be content with heavy mats or bark for covering the framework of their permanent dwellings, but migratory hunters, fishermen and pastoral people, who have to keep moving or make seasonal journeys to find game, fish, or forage for their domestic animals, require light, movable dwellings which can be easily transported. A conical tent of skins meets that need.

In fact, within historic times, we find people living in conical skin tents all around the Arctic Circle—the Lapps in Europe, the Americanoid Yukaghir in Siberia, Indians throughout the entire Mackenzie Area of Canada, among the Caribou Eskimo west of Hudson Bay, and in Labrador. In all these tents we have the inside central fire, the smoke hole centering around the crossing of the poles at the top, the eastern entrance, the place of honor within opposite the door, just as in the tipis of the Plains Indians. Indeed, because of these fundamental similarities, such shelters have sometimes been inaccurately described as "tipis."

But, in fact, they are not true tipis, for they all lack two essentials of the tipi as known to the buffalo hunters on our Great Plains. For the true tipi is not a symmetrical cone like these, but is always a tilted cone, steeper at the back, with the smoke hole extending some distance down the more gently sloping side, or front of the tent, and with two flaps—called smoke flaps, ears, or wings—flanking the smoke hole and supported by movable outside poles to regulate the draft, ventilate the tent, and carry off the smoke. Compared with the true Plains Indian tipi, those primitive conical skin tents are only miserable, smoky dens.

This being so, we may wonder who added these features to the ancient skin tent and so invented the true tipi, and when and where this happened.

It has been plausibly suggested that the smoke flaps on our tipi grew out of an attempt to improve the ventilation of the primitive skin tent by tying a skin between the tops of two outside poles leaned against the structure. The smoke flaps on the true tipi are supported and managed by outside poles opposite each other, and it would seem a simple step to attach the hide to the tent proper, and so make a handier arrangement. But this, of course, is only supposition.

The earliest mention in European records of skin tents in use on our Great Plains will be found in the reports on the expedition of Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, 1540—42. He encountered buffalo hunters living in skin tents whom he called "Qerechos," because they spent their winters with Pueblo Indians of the Keres group. Most historians have assumed that these Indians were Apaches.

Both Coronado and Jaramillo comment on the Indian tents: "They fasten ... poles at the top and spread them apart at the bases," covering the frame with buffalo hides. Their dogs were "larger" than those of Mexico.

"They load the dogs like beasts of burden and make light packsaddles for them like ours, cinching them with leather straps.... The dogs go about with sores on their backs like pack animals.... When they move—for they have no permanent residence anywhere, since they follow the cattle [buffalo] to obtain food—these dogs transport their houses for them. In addition to what they carry on their backs, they transport the poles for the tents, dragging them fastened to their saddles. A load may be from 30 to 50 pounds, depending on the dog."

These tents are described as "tall" and "beautiful." Nothing is recorded of smoke flaps or tilted cones, but the passage in which these tents are mentioned is acknowledged to be the classic description of Plains Indian culture, never to be superseded. Inasmuch as this description exactly fits the Plains tribes in every other respect, it is no unreasonable assumption that their tents were true tipis.

However, Don Juan de Oñate gives a fuller account in his report on the expedition of 1599: "There were 50 tents made of tanned hides, very bright red and white in color and bell-shaped, with flaps and openings, and built as skillfully as those of Italy, and so large that in the most ordinary ones four different mattresses and beds were easily accommodated. The tanning is so fine that although it should rain bucketfuls, it will not pass through nor stiffen the hide, but rather upon drying it remains as soft and pliable as before.... the Sargento Mayor bartered for a tent and brought it to this camp, and although it was so very large, it did not weigh over two arrobas [50 pounds]."

"Openings" here obviously refers to doorway and smoke hole. If "flaps" mean smoke flaps, then the tipi as we know it was already in general use before 1600.

It is possible, however, that the tipi as we know it is much older, for the literature and photographs, as well as the testimony of living Indians, inform us that where loose stones were available on camp sites, the skirts of tipis were weighted down with them whenever a severe windstorm threatened, or when in winter it was impossible to drive pegs into the frozen ground, or simply to keep out small animals, insects, and cold drafts. This was also sometimes done in pitching burial tipis. On many, many sites on the plains and along the Rocky Mountains from Edmonton, Canada, into New Mexico, we find clusters of circles of small stones known as "tipi rings."

Professor Carling Malouf of Montana State University, who has been extremely helpful in our research on tipi rings, has mapped over two hundred such ring clusters. His findings follow:

These rings vary from four to eighty feet in diameter, and those twenty feet across or more seem to be primarily ceremonial in origin, such as the famous Medicine Wheel in northern Wyoming and those on the Smith River and Sun River in Montana. These contain lines of stone radiating from the center, like spokes in a wheel. Smaller rings, sometimes as many as 130 in one cluster, are actually walled structures ten feet in diameter, probably used by shamans seeking mana. On the average we find fifteen rings in a group.

In nearly all cases the smaller rings are near water, fuel, and other resources, and appear to be the remains of dwellings. Sometimes in mountain areas these rings are on or near the ridges, where people might avoid the deep snowdrifts in the side draws. On the plains, rings are generally clustered near or along drainages. However, in early spring, when water was found everywhere on the prairie, this was not necessary, and tipi rings were then made higher up and some distance from the streams. Sometimes artifacts, chips, and stone scrapers, knives and points—usually the corner-notch type—are found. But though central rings of stone occur, fire hearths and storage pits are rarely found. Such circles abound in Utah, eastern and western Colorado, Montana, and Wyoming.

True, by no means all these rings are actually tipi rings. Some on high points were obviously used as lookouts. Some were apparently defensive, and many appear to have been ceremonial.

An archaeological survey of the High Western Plains exploring 1,436 sites found 858 old camps and several hundreds of probable remnants of camp sites partly obliterated or blown out. The fact that these sites were used over and over again is shown by the varying depths of the stones and circles and the fact that they touch each other, or overlap, or cross over one another. In some sites more than one hundred rings can still be counted. The fact that no post or post holes are found in these rings may indicate that the shelters were tents, not permanent dwellings.

The average width of these tipi rings is from twelve and one-half to seventeen and one-half feet. Allowing for the fact that the stones must have been displaced and probably more widely separated when the tent was moved and the skin cover pulled out from under the stones, it would appear that many of these tents were quite small, which may indicate that the rings were made before horses replaced dogs as draft animals.

The Spanish explorers were not only impressed by the tents of the Indians, but also by their use of dogs.

Oñate goes on to say, "The Indians ... are as well sheltered in their tents as they could be in any house."

Oñate also reports that these Indians had "great trains" of dogs to carry their goods, "traveling, the ends of the poles dragging on the ground," and Fray Alonso de Benavides reports "five hundred dogs in one train, following one another." With enough big dogs, light poles up to twenty feet in length might be so transported. Tribes on the Southern Plains in historic times preferred poles of red cedar, much lighter than those of lodge-pole pine. Fir, where available, was even lighter.

It is noteworthy that in these early Spanish accounts, there is no mention of the two-pole-and-basket dog-drawn vehicle known as the travois.

Clark Wissler believed that the travois antedated the tipi because the tips of its dragging poles were pointed to make it slip easily over the ground. It seems just as probable that, since tipi poles must be pointed to hold their place on the ground when the tent is pitched, tipi poles antedated the travois. It is hardly likely that an Indian would put a dog's comfort ahead of his own convenience.

The first account of a tipi describing the smoke flap and its use will be found in the Report of An Expedition from Pittsburg to the Rocky Mountains performed in the years 1819 and '20 by order of the Hon. J. C. Calhoun, Sec'y of War; under the command of Major Stephen H. Long, From the Notes of Major Long, Mr. T. Say and other gentlemen of the exploring party, compiled by Edwin James Botanist and Geologist for the Expedition in Two Vols. with an Atlas. Philadelphia, 1823.

The tents described are those of the Kaskaias, usually identified today as Kiowa-Apaches, or Bad Hearts. The description is accompanied by an illustration showing three lodges with smoke pouring from their tops entitled "Movable Skin Lodges of the Kaskaias." The description runs as follows: "When pitched, the skin lodge is of a high conic form; they are comfortable, effectually excluding the rain, and in cold weather a fire is kindled in the centre, the smoke of which passes off through the aperture in the top; on one side of this aperture is a small triangular wing of skin, which serves for cover in rainy weather, and during the rigors of winter to regulate the ascent of the smoke."

The drawing by T. R. Peale, however, clearly shows a second flap hanging loose on the side nearest the reader, while the far flap is erected against the wind. Of course, it is not unusual for the leeward flap to be left hanging idle when it can be of no use. Here, then, we have our first description and portrayal of the true tipi with smoke flaps. The report goes on to say, "The doorway is a mere opening in the skin, and closed when necessary, by the same material."

As is usual in these early pictures of the tipi, no attempt was made by the artist to show the arrangement of the poles in the smoke hole, and Peale here shows the ends of only seven poles protruding from the top of the tent, though his drawing plainly indicates seven poles showing like ribs through the tipi cover on the visible side. Just what supported the other side of the tent is not clear! Like most painters who have sketched or painted Indian tipis, Peale reproduced the painted designs on the tent more accurately than the tent itself. For it is reported here: "They are often fancifully ornamented on the exterior, with figures, in blue and red paint, rudely executed, though sometimes depicted with no small degree of taste."

In another passage we learn that "These skin lodges are the only habitation of the wandering savages during all seasons of the year. Those of the Kaskaias differ in no respect from those already described, as used by the Otos and others of the Missouri Indians." Thus, it appears that smoke flaps were in common use on the tipis of other tribes Major Long visited.

"The poles, which are six or eight to each lodge, are from 20 to 30 feet in length and are dragged constantly about in all their movements.... When they halt to encamp, the women immediately set up these poles, four of them being tied together by the smaller ends; the larger ends, resting on the ground, are placed so far apart as to include as much space as the covering will surround. The remaining poles are added to strengthen the work and give it a circular form.

"The covering is then made fast by one corner to the end of the last pole, which is to be raised, by which means it is spread upon the frame with little difficulty. The structure, when completed, is in the form of a sharp cone. At the summit is a small opening, etc., out of which the lodge poles project some distance, crossing each other at the point where the four shortest are tied together.... The poles, necessary for the construction of these movable dwellings, are not to be found in any part of the country of the Kaskaias, but are purchased from the Indians of Missouri, or others inhabiting countries more plentifully supplied with timber. We are informed by Bijeau, that five of these poles are, among the Bad-hearts, equal in value to a horse."

In 1832 the painter, George Catlin, set out up the Missouri, inspired with an enthusiastic determination to produce a "literal and graphic delineation of the living manners, customs, and characteristics" of Indians—a pursuit in which he spent several years. He painted many pictures of tipis of the Sioux, Crows, and other tribes, pictures which plainly show the smoke flap, smoke hole and other features common to the tipi. He declares, "The Crows, of all the tribes in this region, or on the Continent, make the most beautiful lodge." After telling how the Crows "beautifully garnish" their tipis "with porcupine quills, and paint and ornament them in such a variety of ways as renders them exceedingly picturesque and agreeable to the eye," Catlin describes his own Crow tent in his usual glowing style as "highly ornamented, and fringed with scalp-locks ... with the Great or Good Spirit painted on one side, and the Evil Spirit on the other."

However, his sketch (Plate 20) is not convincing and does not correspond to his description. The painted figure (Good or Evil Spirit?) carries a gun, and in other respects the tent does not differ from those represented by this artist as of other tribes. In one detail the sketch is certainly false, namely, in representing a rope about the crossing of the poles above, a device which is entirely impracticable in a four-pole tipi. Catlin also omits the characteristic streamers on the tips of Crow poles mentioned by Maximilian.

The smoke flap, as represented by Catlin, is not Crow in design and he must have exaggerated in saying that his poles were "about thirty in number." And his tipis are not tilted cones. Catlin gives us our first picture of a travois (Plate 21).

Karl Bodmer, the artist accompanying Prince Alexander Philip P. Maximilian von Wied-Neu-Wied, painted four Blackfoot tipis in his picture of the fight which took place outside Fort McKenzie on August 28, 1833 (Plate 75). Though rather more taper than Blackfoot tents today, they do have the high smoke hole and the oval door.

Like Peale, Bodmer shows, protruding from the tops of his tipis, only a few crooked sticks. Smoke flaps are shown more ragged in outline than the trim flaps in Peale's drawing.

Bodmer's picture (Plate 16 in the Atlas), "Tent of an Assiniboin Chief," shows the smoke hole and flaps, the lacing pins and pegs, and the door flap. The smoke hole is high and the threshold of the doorway is some inches above the ground. All this is accurate. Even a travois is included.

Yet, like Peale, Bodmer shows protruding from the top only as many poles as are indicated on the near side of the tent. The paintings on the tent, however, are carefully reproduced. Apparently the smoke flap is supported through a slit, instead of a pocket as was usual later in tents of this tribe.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Indian Tipi by Reginald Laubin, Gladys Laubin. Copyright © 1977 University of Oklahoma Press, Norman. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Foreword, by Stanley Vestal,
Acknowledgments,
1. The History of the Tipi, by Stanley Vestal,
2. Utility and Beauty,
3. The Sioux Tipi,
4. Pitching the Tipi,
5. Living in the Tipi,
6. The Sweat Lodge,
7. Other Types of Tipis,
8. Transportation,
9. Camp Circles,
10. Modern Indian Camps,
11. Visitors,
Appendix: Tipi Letters, Questions and Answers,
Bibliography,
Index,