The Peyote Chronicles: Part I – While “The Gateway City” got a bad rap in literature and song, Elsie Moore’s Orchid Farm in Laredo earned acclaim for 100 peyote buttons for $8

Laredo and Nuevo Laredo aren’t the two cities of Dickens’ tale.

Paris and London may have the Seine and the Thames, but do either of those rivers have even one International Bridge, much less three of them?

In spite of all our great stories about The Glass Kitchen, Dr. Zekow, air-conditioned matinees at the Plaza, and courtship under the stars at Lake Casa Blanca, Laredo must admit that it has more bridges than there are novels written about it. Besides, if you only knew the city from the way it’s described in books, you’d have an ugly, distorted image.

Since “The Gateway to Mexico” has fallen on hard times, it is more likely to appear in a reality TV show like Borderwars or New York Times COVID statistics than in fiction. With its rarity, when you see the word Laredo on a page in a novel, it just pops out from the rest of the text.

Regrettably, it’s mostly in ignominy.

Take Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, for instance:

“And now we were ready for the last hundred and fifty miles to the magic border. We leaped into the car and off. I was so exhausted by now I slept all the way through Dilley and Encinal to Laredo and didn’t wake up till they were parking the car in front of a lunchroom at two o’clock in the morning.”

Right off you can tell that the Beat icon was passed out in the back seat of Dean Moriarty’s ’37 Ford sedan heading south on old U.S. 81. By the time he got around to typing the novel on that single 120-ft.-long paper roll in 1953, he was probably consulting an old gas station road map. If he’d been awake to notice the two settlements, Kerouac would never have put Dilley and Encinal into the same sentence as Laredo. That’s the equivalent of “Franklin Pierce and John Kennedy were young Presidents,” or “Guests were served SPAM and carne asada at the wedding dinner party.”

Kerouac may have thought the Mexican border town was going to be magic, but all he got when he woke up and looked around was depressed.

“Laredo was a sinister town. It was the bottom and dregs of America where all the heavy villains sink, where disoriented people have to go to be near a specific elsewhere they can slip into unnoticed.”

Laredo in 1950… sinister?

Jack, ¡por favor!

We Baby Boomers didn’t grow up in the dregs of America, mucking about in the slime of heavy villains. Our families did not sink to Laredo. No way was it a city whose only distinction was to be near an elsewhere for disoriented people?

Nuevo Laredo, el otro lado, was far from being an elsewhere — unless you were a disoriented hophead from Lowell, Massachusetts. In any case, our younger sibling city across the river was hardly Laredo’s raison d’être.

Kerouac’s Laredo is unrecognizable. Plus, it’s a blow right to the solar plexus of your civic pride.

You wouldn’t ever find this passage in a Chamber of Commerce brochure, would you?

Graham Greene is no better. Laredo shows up in the first paragraphs of his highly fictionalized Mexico travelogue of 1939, The Lawless Roads.

“The money-changers’ booths in Laredo formed a whole street, running downhill to the international bridge, then they ran uphill on the other side into Mexico, just the same but a little shabbier. I had imagined a steady stream of tourist cars going across from America on this side into Mexico over there, but there wasn’t one. Life seemed to pile up like old cans and boots against a breakwater, you were part of the silt yourself.”

You have to wince at Greene’s allusion to the Gospel episode of the money changers in the Temple, the sacrilegious merchants Christ drove out with a whip of cords.

I’ll let pass the shabby adjective, but not the mistaken geography.

There were indeed money exchange shops down near the bridge on Convent, but not a whole street of them. Convent Avenue runs downhill to the International Bridge only for its last fifty yards, and there is no slope at all on the Nuevo Laredo side. Any photo of the 1954 flood will show Greene’s error.

Excuse us Laredo readers if we resent being called life’s throwaways and flotsam washed up on the banks of the Rio Grande.

After reading libels like these in famous books, it’s hard to imagine a movie scene in which brave Rick looks into heartbroken Ilsa’s teary eyes and says, “We’ll always have Laredo.”

Any catalogue of Laredo defamations has to include the dreadful popular song about our city streets. To say that our city has been unfortunate in song would be quite an understatement. We can thrill to no song like Boston’s Standells’ “Dirty Water” or classics like “Sweet Home Chicago,” “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” and “L.A. Woman.” Charlie Pride’s “Is Anybody Goin’ to San Antone?” dazzles with lines worthy of Shakespeare: “Sleepin’ under a table in a roadside park / A man could wake up dead.” Compared to the sublimities of other cities’ song lyrics, Laredo’s loser cowboy wrapped in white linen is a sentimental disaster, a musical version of a cheap praline at a convenience store cash register, grainy with too much sugar.

There must be something about the towns on the border that derails an otherwise competent songwriter like Sir Doug into verse train wrecks like his 1970 flop “Nuevo Laredo:

Smoke and drink the night away

In a dimly lit café.

Long hairs were a novelty to the people that were on the scene.

We picked the blues ’til early dawn.

Everybody sang along.

We had such a ball in Nuevo Laredo.

 Perhaps this is all just playfully ironic.

Or maybe it was all those L.S.D. trips in San Francisco, but whatever, the Sir Douglas Quintet’s “Nuevo Laredo” is less forgettable than you might wish. The silly line “Long hairs were a novelty to the people that were on the scene” packs a load of unscannable nonsense into 13 words worthy of a middle school English composition. No wonder the song didn’t sell.

Since we’re already dallying in Boys’ Town with Doug Sahm, I might as well mention Ovid Demaris’ lurid account of drug smuggling and prostitution, Poso del Mundo, whose translated title, “Dregs of the World,” echoes Kerouac’s slur. The pulp paperback with the suggestive cover tells many sordid stories about both Laredos’ vices.

Not to be outdone, Tom Miller’s On the Border, which appeared ten years later, appeals to the voyeur’s sensibility with leering accounts of the old Marabú and Papagayo, writing that winks at louche readers from behind the pasties and a g-string of the travel writing genre.

Laredo is not unknown in less meretricious non-fiction. García Márquez has nothing good to say about Laredo, Texas, but he did love the caldo de res served him and his family in 1961 at the Café Alicia in Nuevo Laredo. Although he wrote a novel called Streets of Laredo, Larry McMurtry has more to say about Alice, Texas than Laredo in his travel essay “A Look at the Lost Frontier” from In a Narrow Grave.

And then there are those other times, when you see the word Laredo in a book, and it’s the beginning of a quest.

That’s what happened to me a couple of years ago as I flipped through a library copy of Baby, Let Me Follow You Down, Eric von Schmidt’s memoir of the Boston folk music scene in the late 50s and early 60s. Even though some of the musicians’ names were familiar enough, folk artists like Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, the topic wasn’t that interesting, and I was about to put the book down.

That’s when I my eye landed on a randomly open page with this: “I met this couple, Peter and Jean Krohn, and their three kids. They were peyote people. It was even legal then. You just sent five bucks to Moore’s Orchid Farm in Laredo, Texas, and they sent you back anywhere from fifty to one-hundred-and-fifty buttons. It had some kind of government agricultural stamp right on the box.”

Twenty years later, looking back through the purple haze of decades of psychedelics, Von Schmidt had no doubt about ordering from Moore’s Orchid Farm in Laredo, Texas. All those peyote buttons and astral projection, and he still has a crystal-clear memory of the Laredo mail-order supplier’s name.

I blurted out way too loud for a library, “Moore’s Orchid Farm? What the…?” The librarian looked my way and hissed, “Shhhh!”

So much for thinking I knew all about the Laredo we grew up in. That moment in the county library was the first time I’d ever heard of the Laredo peyote business masquerading as an orchid nursery. Sure, like everyone else in town, I knew about Snake Johnson and his reptiles and Margaret Jones at the Cactus Gardens Café, but Moore’s Orchid Farm? What was that?

Here Laredo was prominent on the psychedelic drugs map a decade before the Timothy Leary Trial of 1966 —and I had no idea!

The postman always rings twice, and sure enough, I stumbled across the same Laredo peyote connection for the second time not long after. It was in Joe Boyd’s memoir of the 60s in Boston and London, White Bicycles: “The first man I knew to take hallucinogens was Eric Von Schmidt. Mail order packages of peyote buds from Moore’s Orchid Farm in Texas arrived periodically at the Von Schmidt apartment near Harvard Square. He would cook them up in a pot and invite friends over to drink the soup.”

Moore’s Orchid Farm and peyote, hmmm.

I called friends, —at least those who were still compos mentis and would answer a call with my name on their phones’ caller ID — expecting to find out about the unheard-of Moore’s Orchid Farm and peyote. Surprisingly, my usually in-the-know sources hadn’t heard of it either.

Nothing.

Well, except for the hours of first-, second-, and third-hand peyote stories. If you want to bust your phone plan, just call a Laredoan born between 1946 and 1954 and ask, “Know anything about peyote?” Oh, the stories you’ll hear!

On our calls we remembered the cars with out-of-state plates from the reservations in Oklahoma, Minnesota, and Arizona crossing town and heading over to Mirando City on 359. Yarns of good and bad trips fifty years ago were embellished. We reminisced about all the successful and unsuccessful, with permission and without peyote hunts on ranches east of Laredo.

Over the years since the 60s, we’ve all read the never-ending stream of articles in magazines and newspapers about the longtime peyotera Amada Cárdenas and later about Salvador Johnson, and the environmental threats to the local peyote habitat.

I’m still laughing as I remember how once around 1970 or ’71, my friend Chiqui paid his overdue rent in Austin by selling a “Peyote Gardens” map. His hand drawn chart showed the area southeast of Laredo on the old Loop 20 and the El Rancho Drive-In Theater. He scrawled an X on a random spot there. Who knows? There may actually have been a peyote plant or two growing on the other side of the ranch’s barbed wire fence.

The fifty photocopies at $1.50 apiece sold out in twenty minutes on The Drag in front of the University Co-op store, and Chiqui satisfied his landlord.

The poor South Laredo rancher, however, had a heck of a time with the plague of hippies who suddenly descended and scrambled over his property, eyes to the ground, looking for the little psychedelic cactus knobs under the mesquite. Odds are the gullible heads stumbled across more rattlesnakes than Lophophora williamsii. Poor stoners, they had to drive back to Austin for the Shiva’s Headband concert at the Vulcan Gas Company empty-handed —and equally empty-headed. Fortunately for Chiqui, with courses to pass and burgers to flip at Les Amis, none of his cognitively-impaired victims ever recognized him on Guadalupe as the phony peyote map guy.

The map scam worked so well because the association of Laredo with peyote had been appearing for years in newspaper and magazine stories and in the books students were reading in Austin, Madison, Berkeley, and Cambridge.

Whenever peyote came up, could Laredo be far behind?

Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion is typical.

“It couldn’t possibly be as terrible as that jolt of peyote she’d ordered from Laredo (‘Eat eight, mate, and you got an Electra-Jet to Heaven’).

One of the most famous introductions to psychedelics for American readers of all ages, after Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception (1954), was Gordon Wasson’s long photo essay “Seeking the Magic Mushroom” in a 1957 Life Magazine.

A couple of weeks after Wasson’s story, this response appeared in the magazine as a Letter to the Editor:

I’ve been having hallucinatory visions accompanied by space suspension and time destruction in my New York City apartment for the past three years.

My visions are produced by eating American-grown peyote cactus plants.

I got my peyote from a company in Texas which makes C.O.D. shipments to people all over the country for $8.00 per hundred “buttons.” It usually takes about 4 “buttons” for one person to have visions.

Jane Ross

New York, NY

Visions with space suspension and time destruction in an apartment! Sounds like The Great Quarantine of 2020.

In 1960 FDA enforcement agents busted The Dollar Sign Café in the East Village for selling the neighborhood bohemian crowd peyote shipped from, you guessed it, “a company in Laredo.” UPI picked up the story, and it appeared in newspapers across the country with headlines like, “Lay Off Peyote, Beatniks warned.”

Was this peyote harvested in Mirando City and marketed by Moore’s Orchid Farm?

I didn’t know, so I kept looking.

Although Moore is a well-known surname in Laredo, no one in that family is remembered to have been in the orchid or cactus business.

Omniscient Google knew a couple of things, though. A quick search pulled up an ad in a 1959 Cactus and Succulents Journal:

1959 is about the right time, so at least Von Schmidt and Boyd weren’t hallucinating the business name in full Technicolor.

An ad in a 1965 Natural Gardening magazine gave me a name: Elsie Moore.

“ELSIE” MOORE’S ORCHIDS, Box 2166, Hialeah, Florida. Formerly Laredo, Texas. 12 Varieties blooming size. Botanicals $15.00 Listing of Botanicals, Miniatures and Hybrid seedlings available.

A Facebook friend with a copy of the 1960 Laredo telephone directory found “Elsie S” with an address on the San Antonio highway:

In August 1960 Moore’s Orchids placed a For Rent classified ad in the Laredo Times for an apartment with garage 1-1/2 miles north of town on Highway 81. Later that year, Elsie S. Moore registered a new ’61 Chevrolet purchased at Gateway Chevrolet. That’s the last time Elsie Moore and Moore’s Orchid Farm appear in Laredo newspapers.

But the shipment of mail order peyote continued. A 1964 FDA Enforcement & Compliance Bulletin records that a box containing 100 peyote buttons shipped by Moore’s Orchid Farm to Miami was confiscated and destroyed because it was mislabeled as “Orchid Plants – Perishable.” Shipping peyote was legal, but the parcel was required to bear two labels, one with an accurate itemization of its contents and another “Warning—may be habit forming.”

The 1965 ad from Natural Gardening indicates that by the mid-60s, Moore had abandoned Laredo and moved the business to Florida. The last trace I’ve found is an entry for Moore’s Orchids, Orlando in the 1975 Florida Department of Agriculture’s List of Certified Nurseries, Stock Dealers, and Agents.

The pursuit was fun, but I never did uncover the whole Elsie Moore story. No doubt hers would be an interesting one, but stories disappear with people.

In another dead-end narrative, no one knows what happened to Ambrose Bierce in Mexico during the Revolution. He was last seen in Laredo trying to cross the International Bridge where he had been turned back by the Huerta forces in Nuevo Laredo. He must have gone back to San Antonio and caught the Southern Pacific to El Paso, where he crossed to Ciudad Juárez. The famous American writer was never seen or heard from again.

An unfinished narrative can jump start a novelist’s imagination.

Carlos Fuentes spent twenty years developing a novel that would complete Bierce’s untold story. It became his best-selling novel El gringo Viejo. Contrary to the saying “the rest is history,” the rest was fiction.

Elsie Moore awaits her Carlos Fuentes.

I can already see her in the movie adaptation. Elsie, the defiant plantswoman and peyote wholesaler, making her way upstream against the current of mid-century Laredo machismo, would be played by Salma Hayek.

She wouldn’t drive a ’61 Chevy though.

Only a ’61 Cadillac convertible would do.