Warning: Smoking May Be Hazardous to Your Health

On this day in 1964, the U.S. Surgeon General issued the first government warning that smoking may be hazardous.

Smoking is banned in Smithsonian buildings, but luckily these early cigar-store Indians are not.

The cigar-store Indian was among the trade signs that originated in Europe. Sixteenth-century English explorers introduced Europeans to the tobacco firs cultivated by Native Americans; in the early seventeenth century, English tobacco shops adapted the exotic "red man" as their commercial symbol. Colonial artisans continued the tradition, and by the mid-nineteenth century, the cigar-store Indian was the principal character carved or cast in metal as "show" figures for American business.

Within this genre, Indian Trapper and Indian Squaw … depart considerably from the highly decorative cigar-store Indians usually made along the eastern seaboard by shipcarvers who adapted their skills as the country's call for wooden ships declined. The male figures does not conform to the conventional depictions of Indian braves, scouts, or chiefs—often bare-chested, draped in tunics or blankets, and adorned with feathered headdresses.… True to the show-figure tradition, the carver worked from a single softwood log (probably pine), anchored the figures on bases, and hollowed their hands—no doubt to hold an object chosen by a shopkeeper.

Source: National Museum of American Art (Washington, D.C. and Boston, New York, Toronto, and London: National Museum of American Art with Bulfinch Press, Little Brown and Company, 1995).

Pictured top: Unidentified, n.d., Indian Trapper, about 1850–1890, carved softwood with traces of paint and stain and metal, 60 1/2 x 20 x 19 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Herbert Waide Hemphill, Jr. and museum purchase made possible by Ralph Cross Johnson.

Pictured bottom: Unidentified, n.d., Indian Squaw, about 1850–1890, carved softwood with traces of paint and stain, and metal, 48 3/4 x 16 3/4 x 16 1/4 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Herbert Waide Hemphill, Jr. and museum purchase made possible by Ralph Cross Johnson.