Tobacco pipe tomahawk blade

Tobacco pipe tomahawk steel blade, haft missing, probably made for trade between white settlers and Native Americans, of the type sold by Hudson's Bay Company, British manufacture, 1780-1850

This blade with a loop to fit a wooden haft, now missing, formed part of a pipe tomahawk, a combined axe and smoking pipe. While they have often been exclusively associated with Indigenous Americans, pipe tomahawks were a unique product of Euro-Indigenous interactions. Their dual features symbolise war (blade) and peace (pipe).

The Wellcome Historical Medical museum’s accession register recorded the blade as made in Britain, but the majority were made in North America by rural blacksmiths. Pipe tomahawks were used as tools and weapons, but they were also symbolic, prized as status symbols and exchanged as diplomatic gifts.

Tomahawks were Indigenous stone or bone axes pre-European contact. Indigenous Americans valued the durable metal blades that the white settlers introduced and traded them for beaver pelts in the North American fur trade which operated from the 16th to the 19th centuries. The fur trade was dominated for over two centuries by the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), the oldest corporation in North America. HBC was granted exclusive trading rights by the British Crown since 1670 in the territory known as Rupert’s Land, now northeastern Canada.