NW Indians grew and used tobacco long before Europeans arrived

Credit: University of Washington Libraries

In this image from around 1861 Nez Perce Chief Lawyer holds an elbow

pipe that was commonly used after trade tobacco spread across the Pacific

Northwest. Washington State University researchers have found tobacco

use among the Nez Perce goes way back, with nicotine in pipes 1,200

years old creating "the longest continuous biomolecular record of ancient

tobacco smoking from a single region anywhere in the world."

As this bit of research from Washington State University shows that tobacco was long a major trade item between the bands and tribes of American Indians living in the Pacific Northwest.  These researchers determined that the Nez Perce of today's eastern Washington and Idaho grew and smoked tobacco at least 1,200 years ago, long before the arrival of traders and settlers from the eastern United States. Their finding upends a long-held view that indigenous people in this area of the interior Pacific Northwest smoked only kinnikinnick or bearberry before traders brought tobacco starting around 1790.

Indeed, writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers say their dating of various materials reveals "the longest continuous biomolecular record of ancient tobacco smoking from a single region anywhere in the world."

Indigenous tobacco is scarce in the cool climate of the northwest. Coyote tobacco, or Nicotiana attenuata, is found mostly on sandy river bars, while the natural range of N. quadrivalvus lies south of southwestern Oregon.

Meanwhile, the more potent dried trade tobacco was easy to transport in bundles, or "twists," and Hudson's Bay Company explorers, fur traders and the Lewis and Clark expedition found an eager audience for it as they came through the region in the 1700 and 1800s.

"This occurred so rapidly and so early in the historic record that a complete understanding of in situ pre-contact smoking practices has been obscured," Tushingham and Gang write in their paper.

In the 1930s, anthropologist Alfred Kroeber oversaw a survey of more than 200 tribes and bands west of the Rocky Mountains. In one of the ensuing monographs, "Salt, Dogs, Tobacco," he reported that the smoking of non-tobacco products was "more universal," with planting confined to a "long irregular area" from the Oregon coast into south-central California. An accompanying map, however, shows three spots in the Columbia River basin where tobacco could have been mixed with kinnikinnick.

The researchers did detect nicotine in pipes from both after and well before Euro-American contact. None appeared to contain arbutin, a compound associated with kinnikinnick.

Because tobacco in the interior northwest needed to be planted, researchers said their finding offers a new view of native interactions with the landscape. Indigenous people have often been thought of as "passive consumers of the environment," yet they managed camas and even grew clams on the coast, she said.

"I think it's a very reasonable proposition that people were cultivating tobacco," ShannonTushingham, lead author of the report said. "This is just another sign of the sophistication of cultures in this area and how they managed plants and animals."

Story Source:  Materials provided by Washington State University, original by Eric Sorensen.  Shannon Tushingham, Charles M. Snyder, Korey J. Brownstein, William J. Damitio, David R. Gang. Biomolecular archaeology reveals ancient origins of indigenous tobacco smoking in North American Plateau. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2018.