As soon as northern Northwest Coast people acquired from Euro-American seamen the custom of smoking tobacco rather than chewing or sucking it, they began to make pipes. Those they made for their own use were usually of wood, with the bowl reinforced or made of metal. Sometimes this metal, which protected the wooden pipe from the heat of the burning tobacco, was merely a lining of copper. The favorite material for pipe bowls, however, was a section of musket barrel. By the early nineteenth century, firearms had come into common use all over the coast, obtained from Euro-American traders. (Holm, Spirit and Ancestor, 1987)