At that time, about a century after tobacco had first been exported from America, smoking was on the way to becoming a worldwide social habit. When Christopher Columbus’ sailors first beheld the tobacco-smoking Carib Indians, they were amazed and fascinated. No such practice existed anywhere in the Old World. It had never occurred to medieval Europeans that one could pleasurably ingest certain kinds of smoke. Early explorers therefore likened native Americans to furnaces and chimneys. They encountered tobacco among the Indians everywhere, finding not only pipes, but cigars, perfumed cane cigarettes, chewing tobacco, and snuff. "Drinking smoke," Indians told them, keeps the body warm and healthy. The whites needed no further encouragement. Here is an early (1567) description of its effects on Europeans: "Sucking in as much smoke as they can, they say that their hunger and thirst are allayed, their strength is restored, and their spirits are refreshed; they are lulled by a joyous intoxication as the smoke fills the chambers of the brain with a sort of vaporous fragrance."

Medical men were soon prescribing tobacco as a wonder drug, and they continued to do so until well in the 1700's. (Tobacco was not finally dropped from the U.S. Pharmacopoeia until 1886.) In the early days, "tobacconists" (pro-tobacco people) were a majority of the medical profession, prescribing nicotine — applied in a poultice, to be taken in pill form, chewed and swallowed, smoked, sniffed, or drunk as a tea, according to the case — for all manner of aches and pains, swellings, snakebite, gunshot wounds, bad breath.

A minority disagreed. Tobacco was no panacea, they declared; if anything, it was a poison. King James himself wrote an anti-tobacco tract in which he told of the autopsy of a chain smoker whose body was found to contain a bushel of soot. Samuel de Champlain, the explorer, had a further unpleasantness to relate: "Its smoke dulleth the senses, and mounting up to the brains, hindereth the functions of Venus." Not only impotence, but sterility, brain damage, and blindness are blamed on tobacco in this contemporary quatrain:

Tobacco, that outlandish weed,
It spends the brain and spoils the seed:
It dulls the sprite, it dims the sight,
It robs a woman of her right.

There was doubtless more fancy than fact on both sides of the debate.

Meanwhile, traders succeeded in attracting increasing numbers of customers belonging to every race on earth, including the only New World people who had not previously used tobacco — the Eskimos. During the century after the introduction in the Orient of tobacco-smoking gear, opium, hashish, and marijuana pipes came into existence. Arabs were among the first to welcome tobacco as a new way to get high. In fact, the Arabic word tabaq, "euphoria-producing herb," is now thought to be the source of the word "tobacco." To this day it is the custom in some Arab countries to smoke marijuana blended with the strong, dark caporal tobacco leaf. Closer to home, the smoking of tobacco runs deep in the American grain. It is, in fact, the source of our oldest custom as people. As a sigh of hospitality and brotherhood, Indians shared peace pipes with the first European settlers. The custom of offering visitors a friendly smoke grew out of that and has been with us ever since.

The aborigines of America valued thousand of plants for their medicinal and supernatural properties, but from time out of mind they held tobacco in special reverence. Here is a myth linking the very origin of man with that of the leaf:

When the Great Spirit made the spirits of nature and the spirit ancestors of birds and animals, he conferred upon each a special power. Man he created last of all, but then found he had already given away every power, and there was nothing left to bestow upon this miserably weak, unendowed creature. So for man, the Great Spirit made a special plant: tobacco. At the first smell of it, the other spirits were filled with an insatiable craving for its fragrance. One by one, each petitioned to exchange his power for that of the new plant. The Great Spirit refused them all, saying that he too craved it, but that the gift was man’s, and he was henceforth free to share the plant with other spirits or to withhold it from them as he chose. And so, ever since, humans have appeased the spirits and obtained their help by leaving offerings of the leaf buried in the ground, by casting it in the air or into lakes and rivers, and most important, by burning it in the ceremonial pipe bowl. (Some modern Indians liken the smoke from tobacco smoked in council to a telephone connecting the people with the spirit world.)

The peace pipe was thus a kind of censer at which alliances and contracts were made, friendships sworn, good traveling weather secured, and the like. The pipe had a stone bowl carved in any of a great variety of bird and animal shapes, and a cane stem decorated with feathers in almost every color save red. (Red feathers were reserved for war pipes.) When smoking these pipes (also called calumets) together, Indians commonly invoked the sun and sky, then blew smoke toward the four world quarters and the earth. In the Virginia of Powhatan’s day, personal pipes often bore a design of concentric rectangles, symbolizing the cosmos. In some parts of America, smoking was for men only; in others, the teeth of men, women, and children were browned with tobacco juice.

The weed is even the source of our expression "Indian summer," which arose in Revolutionary times from the following native story:

In September and October the god of the north world quarter grows pleasantly drowsy as he watches the people feasting after harvest. Often the first frost rouses him just enough to enjoy a leisurely smoke before his annual hibernation. When this happens, there is a spell of smoky, mellow weather till the god dozes off contentedly and winter begins.

Taken from Reader’s Digest American Folklore and Legend. Pleasantville, New York: Reader’s Digest Associate, 1978, pp. 36-37.

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Tobacco — An annual plant of the nightshade family, genus Nicotiana, native to the New World: originally cultivated or gathered wild and used for smoking, chewing, snuffing, or as an offering by the majority of the North American Indians, and unknown outside of the New World until the time of the Discovery. Tobacco may not have been used by the Indians in the extreme north of the North American continent, and was unknown to the Eskimo until introduced by the whites after the Discovery. The word tobacco derives from Spanish tobaco, Carib tabaco, the name for the pipe in which tobacco was smoked.

Among the North American Indians, particularly those of the Easter Woodlands and Southeast, tobacco of the Nicotiana rustica species was cultivated in small plots and regarded as something of a sacred plant. Nearly all eastern tribes have an origin story for tobacco; the Yuchi of the Southeast, for example, say that tobacco originated from drops of semen; in mythical times it was named by a boy and distributed among the people for their use. The Fox of the Woodlands area tell the tale of a man to whom the Great Spirit spoke telling him to go north and find a plant under a certain tree, to tend this plant carefully, and raise other plants from its seeds. This the man did; when he had many tobacco plants he called the old men of the tribe and gave each of them some plants of the sacred tobacco; this tobacco is the sacred tobacco used as an offering to Wisaka, the culture hero, and to the Thunders by the Fox. Other Woodlands tribes have similar tales accounting for the origin of their sacred tobacco, and rules for the actual raising of the plant; it must be grown in a secluded spot, menstruating women must never approach the spot, etc.

In the Great Plains area, tobacco was cultivated by the eastern agricultural Plains people, but only one nomadic Plains tribe, the Crow of Montana, raised the plant. The species of tobacco planted ceremonially (N. multivalvis) by members of the Crow Tobacco Society was not the species anciently smoked; this latter (N. quadrivalvis) was derived from the Hidatsa, linguistic relatives of the Crow who lived on the upper Missouri in North Dakota. The Crow considered N. multivalvis holy, and identified it mystically with the stars. In one version of the Crow creation story the Transformer, while walking about the newly shaped earth, catches sight of a person whom he identifies as one of the Stars from above. As he approaches this star-person, the latter transforms himself into a plant, Tobacco. The Transformer decrees that the Crow shall plant this tobacco in the spring and dance with it; it shall be their "means of living," their mainstay. The sun, chief Crow deity, adopts a poor fasting boy and starts the Tobacco order or society, to which both men and women belong. The society’s ritual is concerned with the initiation of members into the society (usually husbands and wives together), planting of the tobacco, harvesting of the tobacco. The seeds only are preserved at the harvesting, the leaves and stems of the plant being chopped up and thrown into the river. See Robert H. Lowie, The Crow Indians (New York, 1935), pp. 274-96, for an extended description based on his own field material of the Crow Tobacco Society.

In the Pueblos, tobacco is used ritually either as an offering or smoked in corn-husk cigarettes; it is also used as payment. The Hopi do not cultivate tobacco, but gather a wild species, N. attenuata, which is also used at Zuņi and by the Tewa, who formerly cultivated the same species. At Santa Ana today, however N. rustica is cultivated for ritual use; this is the eastern species that was cultivated by the Iroquois and Algonquian tribes, and by the Southeastern tribes; how it got into the Southwest is not Known (E.C. Parsons, Pueblo Indian Religion, 2 vols. Chicago, 1959, vol. 1 p. 18 n; see also Index, vol. 2, p. 1268). In California most of the tribes gathered wild tobacco plants, either N. attenuata or N. bigelovii, dried them, and smoked them; a few Central California tribes pulverized tobacco, mixed it with lime, and "chewed" it. The Yurok and their neighbors to the north and south in Oregon and northern California cultivated the plant, the one plant which all these non-agricultural groups raised. They smoked the native tobacco and used it as an article of trade; apparently there was not, as among the non-agricultural Crow of the Plains region, much ceremony attached to Yurok tobacco-raising. The native California tobaccos have been characterized as "rank, pungent, and heady"; they were smoked in moderation, often at bedtime. An indication of the strength of native tobacco is given in Yurok mythology: Downstream Sharp, a grave, unconquerable character in Yurok mythology who smoked tobacco but never ate, destroyed several monstrous beings with their own devices, including those beings who killed people with overstrong tobacco.

Tobacco was smoked by South American Indians more for magic purposes than for enjoyment. Even those who used it in ordinary life expected to benefit from it in various ways. In a great many Amazonian and Guiana tribes, only shamans smoked cigars. Tobacco smoke provoked a mild state of stupor during which they were able to converse with spirits. It also gave more strength to their breath and facilitated the extraction of magic missiles from their patients’ bodies.

Tobacco juice was drunk by candidates to the shamanistic profession. It plunged those who took it into a state of trance favorable for dreams and visions. Moreover the drug was valued for its imputative purifying virtues.