Tobacco, Pipes, and Smoking Customs of the American Indians is a 1934 bulletin written by George West for the Public Museum of the City of Milwaukee. But don’t let the word ‘bulletin’ fool you – it’s over 400 pages long.
West begins his book by writing a reasonably comprehensive history of tobacco’s discovery by Europeans and its spread across Europe. And then he dives deeply into the cultivation and use of tobacco by the native populations of the Americas.
He writes, “The Indians of this continent believed that tobacco was a gift from the Great Spirit, – that it was a remedy for all their ills and that it had supernatural power.”1 Tobacco was used to cure many diseases. West quotes Girolamo Benzoni’s 1565 account that tobacco was considered “good for headache, lockjaw, toothache, coughs, asthma, stomach ache, obstructions, kidney troubles, disease of the heart, rheumatism, the poisoning from arrows, carbuncles, polypus, consumption, etc.”1 West pulls together many sources to create a picture of native life with tobacco – it’s a well-researched book.
Of the cultivation of tobacco at the time Europeans arrived in America, West writes, “The cultivation and use of tobacco by the Indians of this continent was reported by many of the early explorers, but, as a rule, they not being trained botanists, the species of Nicotiana, thus observed, were not determined with certainty.”2 This is an interesting note, and likely a correct one, but not not something that many other tobacco-related books call attention to.
West calls out that the following species of tobacco were cultivated in the Americas at the time of European exploration: Nicotiana tabacum, Nicotiana rustica, Nicotiana bigelovii, Nicotiana quadrivalvis, Nicotiana multivalvis, Nicotiana attenuata, Nicotiana Clevelandi, Nicotiana trigonophylla, Nicotiana repanda, Nicotiana plumbaginifolia. He includes a map of where each was likely cultivated. He goes on to describe and explain the characteristics and cultivation areas of each of these types with depth that is not found in many other sources.
The book also includes a large number of accounts of uses of tobacco in rituals and social life of native populations, many of them focusing on the upper midwest (West was from Wisconsin, after all). West was an expert on pipes, so a lot of the book focuses on pipe types and use.
Tobacco, Pipes, and Smoking Customs of the American Indians pulls together a lot of sources to tell the story of tobacco in the pre-Columbian Americas. It is an excellent source of information.
Tobacco, Pipes, and Smoking Customs of the American Indians can be read for free at Hathi Trust.