The answer to this question is a little from column A and a little from column B. Dependent upon the culture in question individuals could smoke. Among the Mandan of North Dakota tobacco was reserved for elder males and specific ceremonies, whereas individual Creek could smoke and did so from less ornate clay pipes. However, the deep ceremonial role of tobacco in many Native American cultures meant pipe smoking became an essential aspect of negotiations, including the debates surrounding peace, war, and trade. Paintings from Colonial America often depicted European-Native American interactions surrounding peace or trade, those meetings would, by tradition, be authenticated by tobacco smoke.
Tobacco was cultivated in Mesoamerica more than three thousand years ago and spread to both North and South America quickly thereafter. To generalize greatly, tobacco held deep ritual and spiritual significance throughout the Americas as well as being used for medicinal purposes. In North America a special type of ceremonial pipe style and usage developed. A stone bowl was carved from a soft material, often pipestone, and then attached to a longer stem that was adorned with decorations signifying the unique purpose of the pipe (peace, war, trade, etc). Other pipe styles could be used for everyday affairs, but a ritual known as the calumet evolved around this unique ceremonial pipe form.
By the time the French explorers ventured into the heart of North America the shocks of contact were already reverberating across the continent. The French, following their allies west during the Huron/Wendat displacement, encountered other nations displaced by the Haudenosaunee/Iroquois expansion of the Beaver Wars when they ventured along the great waterways of the Eastern Woodlands. In the Southeast the Indian slave trade out of the Carolinas likewise caused the migration, disruption, and eventually the coalescence of previous distinct nations into new, powerful confederacies. Into this world of upheaval, of refugees and new migrants attempting to carve out territory in a new land filled with different languages and dialects, the calumet ceremony became crucial.
As Calloway states in One Vast Winter Count "for Indian people, peace meant more than a lack of conflict or ending hostilities; it was a state of being that required a positive assumption of moral duties" (p.237). Smoking the calumet and participating in the ritual dances associated with the ceremony allowed participants to enter the proper mindset, reminded participants of their responsibilities, and soon developed into a prerequisite for negotiation. Marquette wrote
There is nothing more mysterious or respected among them... It seems to be the God of peace and of war, the Arbiter of life and death.
And Perrot said this about the calumet among the nations of the Great Lakes...
The calumet halts the warriors belonging to the tribe of those who sung it, and arrests the vengeance which they could lawfully take for their tribesmen who have been slain. The calumet also compels the suspension of hostilities and secures the reception of deputies from hostile tribes who undertake to visit those whose people have been recently slain by theirs. It is, in one word, the calumet which has authority to confirm everything, and which renders solemn oaths binding.
To a rapidly changing, often violent, world the calumet offered a way to signify peace. Travelers could use their pipe as a passport to guarantee safe travel through others' territory. The ceremony turned, if only for a time, strangers into kin and enemies into friends (Calloway). Anything worth saying, worth doing, worth remembering was marked by the smell of pipe smoke.
The French, understanding the vital importance of the ceremony to their hopes of traveling unmolested, seized upon the ritual and may have been partially responsible for it's spread across the interior of the continent. By the late 1600s the calumet was an essential preface to negotiations from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico and onto the Great Plains. In 1682 La Salle encountered the ritual among the Quapaws and the Caddos as he made his way south. By the time of English colonial expansion away from the Atlantic seaboard the importance of the calumet ceremony was solidified for many in the interior of the continent. Painters, and later photographers, recognizing the ceremonial importance would include pipes with images of Native Americans, especially during important occasions like Benjamin West's 1766 The Indians giving a Talk to Colonel Bouquet.
