Exhibits > Traditional Art >
Breastplate 1
4. Breastplate with hair and pipe beads
 Balcom:
“One large necklace, hair pipe and beads (hair pipe with green
beads and mussel shell ornamentation).” This breastplate styled
necklace has 88 bone hair pipes or long bone beads and 352 garnets.
It also has one shell disc. It had been previously re-strung with
leather and copper wire. The breastplate is 23 inches long and about
10 inches wide. WHC2000.17.16.
The Smithsonian
Institution Libraries online library includes a 1996 edition
of John C. Ewers, “Hair Pipes in Plains Indian Adornment.”
The following is derived from John C. Ewers article:
The wearing of hollow, cylindrical beads, 1 inches or more
in length, as costume ornaments was a custom known to prehistoric
Indians of the Eastern United States. There is archaeological
evidence of Indian use of long, tubular beads of bone, shell,
copper, and stone before the time of Columbus.
Prior to 1880 the hair pipe in common use among the Plains
Indians was the one manufactured from the shell of the strombus
gigas by Whites in New Jersey. The long shell tubes were very
breakable. Yet the demand for large numbers of hair pipes for
use in making elaborate breastplates increased throughout the
1870s. At the same time, corncob pipes, invented in 1872, were
becoming popular. Corncob pipes were equipped with bone stems
and some of these stems were put to use as a replacement for the
fragile shell beads. The raw material to make the corncob pipe
stems came from the lower leg bones of cattle processed by Armour
and Company of Chicago. Bone hair pipes replaced shell hair pipes
as the most common form of hair pipe. The New Jersey shell hair-pipe
manufacturers discontinued operations in 1889.
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