Blowing smoke

Guest Editorial - By Richard Sims

The Tobacco Root Mountains in southwestern Montana have nothing to do with commercial tobacco, the noxious leaf that becomes cigarettes and cigars, the shag that fills the bowls of pipes. The Tobacco Roots got their name from the mullein plant, which was mixed with other plant material like river willow bark as a substitute for smoking tobacco; or when cooked, others say, the mullein root smelled like tobacco. Kinnikinnick, the mixture of nontobacco leaves and bark, was first encountered by frontiersmen in the Ohio Valley. In times of scarcity of true tobacco out West, kinnikinnick was a concoction of last resort. Lewis and Clark took tobacco along, but ran out at Fort Clatsop on the Oregon coast. Patrick Gass wrote that crabtree bark was used instead. Gass and other members of the Corps of Discovery probably regretted the many gifts of tobacco their captains gave to Indian leaders, on their westward journey. A comforting smoke during the ceaseless rains of an Oregon winter was a rare treat.

The Tobacco Plains in northwestern Montana were named for the tobacco cultivation of the Salish and Kootenai peoples, who grew Nicotiana attenuata. Other Montana tribes gathered native tobacco growing wild. All tribes across North America used a variety of Nicotiana, primarily for ceremonial purposes. Once Virginia tobacco became a global commodity, trade tobacco was often preferred by Indians, being slow-burning and smoother. Joseph Winter writes in his book Tobacco Use by Native North Americans that “along the headwaters of the Missouri River and on the northern plains in Canada, organized tobacco use became so intense that a number of tribes developed formal tobacco societies whose sole purpose was to grow and revere tobacco.” In southeastern Montana, the Crow people preserved elaborate ceremonies related to tobacco; one subspecies of tobacco is considered so spiritually important that it is not smoked. Thirty tobacco society chapters were known among the Crow in the 1920s.

Native tobacco species are low in nicotine, compared to the pumped-up cigarettes purchased today. “Nicotine delivery system” is the term given by the anti-smoking crusaders for cigarettes. This new Montanan has grown commercial tobacco in western Kentucky on the family farm, and native, or Nicotiana rustica, tobacco in western Colorado in a large garden in Grand Junction. I ordered the rustica seeds through a native seeds catalogue, and managed a small crop that I harvested and gave to a Northern Ute spiritual leader, a Road Man in the Native American Church, where small “tobacco sticks” are smoked along with ingestion of sacred peyote. I was the last Sims to grow burley tobacco, in 1976, and to take part in a tobacco cultivation tradition that went back several generations. When dried in the barn rafters, I had over one thousand pounds tied into “hands” and auctioned for $1.16/pound - a grubstake to get me back out West.

Smoking is addictive, of course, and I am lucky to be a “sport smoker,” the occasional cigar, without having to light up every hour or half hour. My heavy smoking period was in the Army, going through a pack of Pall Malls a day. Long distance running in Oregon ended that. I had my snoose era, when a pinch of the nasty stuff twixt lip and gum got me through some very busy archaeology fieldwork. I learned to down a beer while carefully compartmentalizing the acidic brown wad. I still admire a good corncob pipe once in a long while, stuffed with a tiny cargo of Half and Half. My Kentucky granddaddy “wore” a piece of a King Edward cigar in his cheek, saying that chewing tobacco was “too sweet.”

Ceremonial use of tobacco among modern non-Indian Montanans is observed by me every day, as I work at the Capitol and walk from here to there around the complex. Because no one can smoke inside public buildings, I see the many members of the BTC (Bureaucratic Tobacco Clan) engaging in their addiction; poor souls all, but admirable in their determination. In the swelter of a summer day, when sucking overheated gases down a parched esophagus does not seem advisable - there they are. In the frigid blasts of a winter day, when simply standing still in the wind chill does not seem advisable -there they are. Self-exiled, intently delivering “ol’ nic” to their bloodstreams, they offer a demeanor to passers-by at once both defiant and forbearing. I should give them each some kinnikinnick some day. It may help make a sad public ceremony a bit more interesting.