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investigation. It means cash, perhaps enough for a down payment on a new car.
In the collector market, prices of these relics run high. The range is from $250 to $1,000; depending, of course, on condition and beauty of the object.
A tobacco shop owner in Hawaii needed a cigar'Store Indian badly. He purchased it from a Terre Haute, Indiana, collector for $800 and then incurred additional expense by having it shipped by air express. It was just an ordinary wooden Indian up to that time, but now it has the distinction of being the first to travel by air — and the first to be in business in the land of pineapples and leis.
The vanishing of the wooden Indian began when some cities and towns passed ordinances forbidding obstacles on the sidewalks. The laws branded the statues as hazardous to pedestrians.
At the same time, large-scale carving as an occupation and a hobby went into a nose-dive. Those persons handy with a knife turned to smaller subjects such as model trains, coveredwagons, automobiles and airplanes.
"Now you can't seem to get people with enough patience to sit down and carve one," Turkey opined. He cited that the shortage of cigar-store Indians could be solved by convincing collectors to part with them and by encouraging persons to make them as a profitable hobby. "One is just as difficult as the other."
The average age of the 3,000 in existence is 70 years. It takes just a little paint to make them look younger.
If you look closely at the next one you encounter, you'll see that he
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October, 1950
really doesn't look like an Indian. He„ ^ has definite Caucasian features. That's only natural, because the men who knew tobacco Indians best at the beginning had never seen a real redman. Most of the original carvers were Englishmen.
When the days of steam naviga-, tion arrived just before 1880, the artisans who carved the bowsprits for the old sailing ships were forced to look for a new field. They took up figure-carving. These carvers were astute and shrewd, and played on the imagination to convince merchants to display figures as trade-marks of their businesses. "Look," they maintained, "there's no question about the location of a pawnbroker's establishment. He has educated people to look for the three balls."
The wooden Indian was the British idea of America, and owners of to-' bacco shops in England adopted him to attract attention, wooden feathers and all. Everybody talked about it, and the idea caught on quickly. Later, after noting the success in England, American tobacconists adopted the same symbol. Odd that the American wooden Indian shouldn't be a native!
Now, if you really go into the enterprise, there's plenty of opportunity to make the tobacconist's best friend more lifelike and more realistic* so far as facial features are concerned. There might be some people who'll insist you whittle the face to resemble a movie actor, but don't let that influence deter you. Sitting Bull and all his cousins made no claim to glamour — except when they daubed on their war paint. And an Indian o!