The Cigar Store Indian

For two hundred years, a carved Indian figure outside a shop meant one thing: tobacco sold here. In the days before everyone could read, shopkeepers used these figures as signs, and they chose the Indian because Native Americans first introduced tobacco to Europeans. By the early 1900s, most of the old figures had been hauled off the sidewalks and destroyed. The few survivors are now museum pieces.

This chief belongs to the revival of that tradition. He was carved from a single aspen log in the late twentieth century, in the style of Frank Gallagher, a Mandan carver from the Southwest whose family has made cigar store figures for three generations. The surface still shows every cut of the gouge, and the colors were painted by hand. In his right hand he holds the one thing every cigar store Indian carries: a bundle of cigars.