A Hair pipe is a term for an elongated

bead A bead is a small, decorative object that is formed in a variety of shapes and sizes of a material such as stone, bone, shell, glass, plastic, wood, or pearl and with a small hole for threading or stringing. Beads range in size from under ...

, more than 1.5 inches long, which are popular with American Indians, particularly from the Great Plains and Northwest Plateau.

History

In 1878, Joseph H. Sherburne became a trader to the Ponca people. The Ponca purchased great quantities of

corn cob pipe A tobacco pipe, often called simply a pipe, is a device specifically made to smoke tobacco. It comprises a chamber (the bowl) for the tobacco from which a thin hollow stem (shank) emerges, ending in a mouthpiece. Pipes can range from very simp ...

s from Sherburne, but only used the stem of the pipes as beads. White Eagle showed the trader a necklace made of the pipestems and asked if they could be ordered in bulk. Sherburne contacted S. A. Frost in New York about producing tubular bone beads and within a year, he had enough hair pipe beads to sell to the Ponca as well as other Indian traders. Ewers, John C.br>"The Substitution of the Bone Hair Pipe."
''Hair Pipes in Plains Indian Adornment: A Study in Indian and White Ingenuity.'' (retrieved 6 August 2011)

Pow-wow

Hair pipe beads were extremely popular from 1880–1910 and are still very common in powwow regalia today. These beads are used in chokers, breast plates, earrings, and necklaces worn by women and men. File:Woolaroc - Blackfoot Bone Hairpipe Breastplate 1885.jpg, Blackfoot bone hair pipe breastplate,

Woolaroc Woolaroc is a museum and wildlife preserve located in the Osage Hills of Northeastern Oklahoma on Oklahoma State Highway 123 about southwest of Bartlesville, Oklahoma, and north of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Woolaroc was established in 1925 as the ranc ...

, Oklahoma, 1885

Notes

External links

*
Hair Pipes Indian Adornment
' (1957) John C. Ewers Smithsonian Institution Libraries {{DEFAULTSORT:Hair Pipe Indigenous beadwork of the Americas Indigenous culture of the Great Plains