The Faribault Pipe: A Riddle Carved in Pipestone

The Faribault pipe is considered one of the most detailed figurative catlinite carvings in the Minnesota Historical Society's collection. It depicts a man lying on his back with his legs raised in the air: the body, head, and headgear form the bowl, and the legs extend to form the shank leading to the mouthpiece. It fits neither a known peace pipe pattern nor any recognized ceremonial-pipe mold; who made it, when it was made, and who it depicts remain unresolved to this day.

The Object Itself

The carving is a single piece of stone; it measures 11.5 inches, roughly 29 centimeters, from the elbows to the tip of the mouthpiece. The smoke channel was opened through four separate drilling operations, and the opening left by two short channels starting at the hip is sealed with a gear-shaped stone plug. On the front of the mouthpiece is a geometric design filled with poured lead, within which sit the letters "D.F."

The figure's dress is European-American from head to toe. The boot soles are applied separately, with raised heels; a row of alternating triangles and a downward-pointing feathered arrow are cut into their faces. The short, downturned visor on the headgear matches the pattern used by the US Army between 1821 and 1851. The stitching on the outer seams of the jacket and trousers, in the eyes of some interpreters, recalls the technique of piercing and lacing leather garments, and to others recalls porcupine-quill embroidery; the cuffs, pocket flaps, and short belt at the back, meanwhile, point to a fabric uniform.

The Donation and the Contradiction in the Letter

The pipe entered the institution's collection in 1904, as a donation from Annie Rankin Adams, widow of Rev. Moses N. Adams. The donor also sent a letter dated March 12 to Warren Upham, the institution's secretary at the time. According to the letter, after the 1862 Dakota War, families who had left Sisseton and settled around Flandreau had fallen into poverty; Adams provided them with farm equipment using $6,000 sent from Washington, and the families gave him the pipe as thanks around 1863-64. A footnote in the letter stated that the letters "D.F." belonged to the carver, David Faribault.

The document was absent from the object's file for a long time; it surfaced in 1984 when the institution's correspondence files were being surveyed. When Jeffrey P. Tordoff cross-checked every point in the letter against archival records in 1989, he found that every verifiable detail was wrong. Those who settled around Flandreau had not come from Sisseton but from the Santee reservation in Nebraska in 1869. The sum Adams collected wasn't $6,000 but at least $10,000; and the distribution of oxen, plows, wagons, and hand tools took place not in 1863-64 but on June 14, 1873. The records also show not a single David Faribault but a father and son who shared the same name.

The Dating Dispute

Tordoff's basis is less the documents than the figure itself: the hairstyle and close-cut clothing match the fashion of around 1845, not 1873. At that date the father, David Faribault, was twenty-eight years old; Dakota and French-Canadian by descent, literate, and engaged in business straddling both cultures. The son David, meanwhile, was only seven years old at the time, ruling him out both as the person depicted and as the carver. On the other hand, the father had lost everything in the looting of his home in 1862 and in a second raid in 1868; that it was the son who, holding the pipe in 1873, could have given it to Adams therefore seems the more plausible reading. Tordoff himself does not carry his own inference beyond an informed guess.

John C. Ewers, who worked on the sculptural art of Plains peoples, published a photograph of the object in his 1986 book and lamented that the carver remained unnamed; Annie Adams's letter had not yet come to light at that point. Ewers compared the figure's facial features to those of Moses Adams, while Tordoff wrote that he saw no shared feature beyond the width of the cheekbones.

Why a Riddle

The source of the debate is that the object looks toward two traditions at once. The material, the leg ornamentation, and the poured-lead inlay point to Native workmanship, while the person depicted and their dress belong to the European-American world. In the Plains, pipestone brings to mind first the calumet and the ceremonial idiom built around it; here, instead, stands a bearded, ostentatiously booted white man. It's also known that the stone was worked at commercial scale in the same century: a Minnesota-based fur company founded in the late 1850s is on record, in a report from 1866, as having produced roughly two thousand pipes over the previous two years and traded them with communities along the upper Missouri. The Faribault pipe, in its craftsmanship, stands outside such mass production. The only remaining trace of how it came into Adams's hands is a single line for a red pipestone item in the family's 1878 household inventory.