Dictionary

cigar store Indian en · NOUN

Etymology

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

Meanings

1. (US) A sculpture, typically wooden and painted, of a Native American Indian, of the sort prominently used in tobacco stores.
   • "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." 1914 April, Leslie W. Quirk, “The Hook Slide”, in Boys' Life, volume IV, number 2, page 3:
   • 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, William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying, Harrison Smith, page ?:
   • ... 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. 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:
   • "Do you think I'm going to stand here on one foot all night like a dodgasted cigar store Indian?" 1912 Dec, Modern Electrics, page 913, column 2:
   • 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; ... 1930, Ezra Pound, “Canto XXVIII”, in A Draft of XXX Cantos, Hours Press, page ?:

Forms