In this space last week we talked with H.H. Wright, who told of finding several hundred old snuff bottles near the site of the ghost town of McMillan. He noted that the number of dots on the bottom of a snuff bottle indicated its strength, with “four dot” snuff being the strongest. It turned out to be just one of many relics of what might be called a lost snuff culture.
The old hardcore snuff users were not dippers, as users of such brand names as Copenhagen and Skoal might be referred to today. The earliest users sniffed the stuff like it was nasal spray. That sniffing snuff was a finely powdered form of tobacco and much drier than the wet stuff, or “snoose” so prevalent on the current market.
The tobacco habit seems to have its origins in France, though the discovery of tobacco is generally credited to two of Christopher Columbus’ crewmen who discovered it in 1492, the same year that Columbus “sailed the ocean blue.”
Early explorers of North America noted Indians smoking the stuff ceremonially. The Indians believed tobacco was good for you, though they also used it as a narcotic. In early American life, snuff was part and parcel of many a folk remedy. For instance, it was used to draw out the poison of a bee sting.
A man by the name of Jean Nicot is credited with introducing the weed to Europe. For this feat he had a toxin - nicotine - named in his honor. Tobacco users would say this only proves that no good deed goes unpunished.
For whatever reason, sniffing was the accepted form of snuff use for centuries, including the first century or so of this country’s existence.
John Graves, one Texas writer wise in nearly all ways of rural Texas, has written about snuff in his book “From a Limestone Ledge.” Graves points out that nasal snuffing fell from style in this country before the Civil War and has never enjoyed a resurgence.
Graves is a purist in all matters pertaining to country living. He refers to the newer form of snuff as really a form of chewing tobacco and not really deserving to be called snuff.
While he may be a purist, Graves is not a snob. He admits to having sniffed his share of snuff in his day and, commenting on its proposed health benefits, writes, “My own experience indicates that it does help sinus trouble but on the other hand intensifies hay fever.”
Henry Buttes, in a 1559 paper, touted tobacco as a cure–all for whatever ails you. Tobacco “cureth any griefs, dolour, opilation, impostume or obstruction,” he wrote, and we can only assume that readers of his day had a better idea of what he was talking about than we do.
Sir Walter Raleigh popularized smoking in England, a fact that did not make him universally loved. The Church of England associated tobacco with heathen rituals of magic, calling it “a custome loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black stinking fume thereof, neerest resembling the horrible stygian smoake of the pit that is bottomlesse.”
This sounds a little bit like the famous Surgeon General’s report on smoking, but with a much more liberal use of the letter “e.”
By the time people figured out conclusively that tobacco isn’t much of a medicine, it was too late. People had decided they liked it, couldn’t live without it.
For a long time, the primary addiction to tobacco came in the form of snuff. That changed as time went by, maybe because snuff came to be considered a little too rural for an increasingly urban population.
On snuff’s fall from popularity, Graves wrote: “In some part, I suspect, it’s based on an old urban tendency to look down on specifically rural ways, and partly to a spookiness about their origins in many ex–rural townsmen who are trying hard to be ‘nice’ themselves.”
“But it would be very rash to get over sociological about all this and to gloss over the hard central fact, lamentable but known to all with eyes, that an occasional carefree dipper can be a truly gross and repellant sight.”
S’nuff said.
ccoppedge@temple-telegram.com
