cigar store Indian

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English

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19th-century example from Seattle

Alternative forms

Etymology

From the once common use of sculpted wooden Indians as a symbol for tobacco selling.

Noun

cigar store Indian (plural cigar store Indians)

  1. (US) A sculpture, typically wooden and painted, of a Native American Indian, of the sort prominently used in tobacco stores.
    • 1888, Adolph F. Bandelier, “Letter to Thomas Janvier”, in Charles H. Lange, Carroll L. Riley, Elizabeth M. Lange, editors, The Southwestern Journals of Adolph F. Bandelier, 1889-1892, volume 4, University of New Mexico Press, published 1984, page 339:
      ... Fenimore Cooper's Indian is a fraud. ... The cigar-store red man and the statuesque Pocahontas of the "vuelta abajo" trade as they are paraded in literature and thus pervert the public conceptions of our Indians, THEY—I want to destroy first if possible.
    • 1912 Dec, Modern Electrics, page 913, column 2:
      "Do you think I'm going to stand here on one foot all night like a dodgasted cigar store Indian?"
    • 1914 April, Leslie W. Quirk, “The Hook Slide”, in Boys' Life, volume IV, number 2, page 3:
      "You had plenty of time to get under that ball, too. But you lost your nerve at the end, and stood there like a cigar store wooden Indian while it fell safe."
    • 1930, William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying, Harrison Smith, page ?:
      Still staring straight ahead, his pale eyes like wood set into his wooden face, he crosses the floor in four strides with the rigid gravity of a cigar store Indian dressed in patched overalls and endued with life from the hips down, and steps in a single stride through the opposite window and into the path again just as I come around the corner.
    • 1930, Ezra Pound, “Canto XXVIII”, in A Draft of XXX Cantos, Hours Press, page ?:
      She sat there in the waiting room, solid Kansas/Stiff as a cigar-store indian from the Bowery/Such as one saw in " the nineties ",/First sod of bleeding Kansas/That had produced this ligneous solidness; ...
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