Just ask a Laredoan of a certain age about peyote.
Of a certain age, you know, the fixed-income Boomers who can hum “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” or remember what classroom they were in when they heard that Kennedy had been shot, the kind of people you might be careful about not to get started if you are on a schedule.
After stories of those ranches east of town where you can still find peyote growing and hair-raising tales of people who tried it for better or worse, odds are you’ll end up hearing about a curandera down at the end of the street used it or an abuela who rubbed some on her hands for arthritis.
That’s because women have always played big roles in the Laredo peyote story.
Coahuiltecan women managed the harvesting and drying of the cactus. They were the ones who organized its trade at the river ford known to 18th century Mexican colonists as El Paso del Indio. For ages, since long before there even was a Laredo, it was Native American women who had been drying peyote buttons for storage and transport.
For ages? Yes.
The Witte Museum in San Antonio has peyote buttons collected by archaeologists in Shumla Cave #5 before it was inundated by the Amistad Dam’s reservoir. Radiocarbon dating indicates that the plants they were harvested from lived 5700 years ago.
Quanah Parker, the Comanche leader who was the most important early apostle of the Peyote Religion among Native Americans living on reservations, had his Road to Damascus revelation near Laredo when a curandera saved his life with peyote medicine.
In the psychedelic 60s, six millennia after the Shumla cave dwellers near Del Rio, Elsie Moore (whoever she was) was shipping mail-order peyote from Laredo to beatniks, poets, and folk musicians around the country. Like Helen’s face, her product launched a thousand trips.
The famous peyotera Amada Cárdenas of Mirando City was a helpful friend for decades to members of the Native American Church until her death in 2005 at age 100. In many believers’ eyes, she was a patron saint.
On the other hand, that old, un-woke machista Carlos Castañeda enjoyed wealth and notoriety with his 1968 best-seller The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, a fabrication posing as fact that included zero women characters.
But the Laredo peyote story has women in the foreground of every chapter.
In the Laredo Times, February 20, 1929 Washington’s Birthday Celebration edition, there is a brief notice on the society page:
Looking back to the time of the last cactus interest some 20 or 30 years ago, the name of an old Laredo resident stands out very prominently, the late Mrs. Anna B. Nickels. According to friends who remember her, Mrs. Nickels was famed for shipping rare Mexican and Laredo’s native cacti for exhibition at the World’s Fair, Chicago. From this rare collection exhibited she received many orders, the sale of which netted her a small fortune.
In what is still lamentably typical Laredo amnesia, just 25 years after she put Laredo on the map with an internationally known business, the cactus expert Anna B. Nickels, founder of the famous Arcadia Gardens on Matamoros Street, was only remembered by a few friends. Over a century later, the names Anna B. Nickels and the Arcadia Gardens are now empty terms with no reference.
Ask people in Laredo today if they know who Don Trino was, the great local culinary artist of the lonche or Señor Zamarripa of the raspa. You get blank stares. The once legendary Dr. Zekow, or “The Jet” (also known as El Jilguero), and Luciano Duarte of “Serenata Nocturna” on KVOZ have been almost completely forgotten, kept alive by a couple of Laredo nostalgia groups on Facebook.
These colorful characters will bring a nostalgic smile of recognition to Laredoans born before 1956. But with our generation’s growing memory issues, soon even these names will be washed from memory by the muddy flow to the sea of the Rio Bravo. Holding back the inexorable tide of forgetting, the work of feminist historians has only recently revived for local memory the heroic Jovita Idar, whose achievements as an activist and journalist in the early 20th century should never have slipped into oblivion in the first place.
The Greeks’ river of forgetfulness was called the Lethe. Its other name was the Ameles Potamos, the river of unmindfulness. It is not an accident that the Greek word for truth, aletheia, originally meant “un-forgetting.” Literally, truth was pulling up submerged memories from the river Lethe.
There is always so much work left to do in history’s un-forgetting the past.
In more down-to-earth language, the maxim “you can’t tell where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been” probably accounts for Laredo’s decades of aimless wandering in the desert.
During the 20 years between 1885 and 1905 when she lived in Laredo, Nickels was an active discoverer of new species and collector of cactuses. (Since I’m writing English, I’ll avoid the pedantic Latin plural cacti).
Her first cactus exhibit swept all the prizes at the San Antonio Fair in 1888.
Five years later at the much larger and more prestigious 1893 Columbian World Exposition in Chicago, Nickels’ award-winning display of cactus plants she’d collected in South Texas and Northern Mexico was widely acclaimed. Journalists described her collection in admiring detail in newspaper articles and trade magazines from across the country and Europe.
Mrs. Nickels, called in one wire service headline “The Queen of Cacti” was an important businesswoman in the suddenly bustling Laredo of the early 1890s, when the arrival of railroads from San Antonio and Monterrey made Laredo a border trading center.
The Laredo Times considered her newsworthy. Parties and soirées at the Nickels’ included matrons and daughters of Laredo’s prominent families. These fêtes were regularly covered in the newspaper’s society pages.
In May 1893, the Times reported the big event of the 61-yr.-old grandmother’s departure bound for Chicago on the International & Great Northern with a special boxcar of her own loaded with the nearly 300 mature cactus specimens she would be showing. One imagines the hectic scene at the old depot at the end of Farragut Street with Nickels supervising the crew stabilizing enormous pots of tall Cereus and squat barrels of Echinocactus specimens. That the boxcar also carried an inconspicuous couple of large peyotes went unremarked.
Her expertise about South Texas and northern Mexican species had come at the cresting wave of one of the first international cactus-collecting fads. In the 1890s Anna B. Nickels was a horticultural rock star.
Once the eye-popping cactus exhibit from Laredo was set up in Chicago, one reporter gushed, with careless unconcern for accuracy:
“In the south wing of the Horticultural Building Mrs. Anna B. Nickels, of Laredo, Texas, has a large and excellent exhibit of cacti. Two hundred and eight-seven species were brought to the Fair… Mrs. Nickels has been interested in cacti most of her life, and for about 20 years has collected them for sale. Some 17 years ago she issued a pricelist, which was the first catalogue of cacti published in this country. Mrs. Nickels has collected cacti over a wide range of country in many journeys, in one season gathering with her own hands 60,000 specimens within 2 months’ time. All the plants in her collection at the Fair are wild specimens, freshly transferred from their native soil, the purpose being to show the species in their indigenous forms.”
Apparently, Anna Nickels had a level of physical energy that was as prodigious as her collector’s passion. Sixty thousand individual cactuses collected in two months divided out to a thousand plants a day –and Mrs. Nickels was working alone! Without a backhoe.
Who was this Laredo plantswoman anyway?
It hasn’t been hard to piece together some basic biographical information.
Anna Buck Snell was born in Ohio in 1832. By 1850 she had moved west with her family to a farm in west-central Illinois. At 22, she married David Ells, a native of Vermont, who farmed near the town of Altona, and they had a son Benjamin, born in 1855, and a daughter Irene two years later.
During the Civil War the Ells moved to Brownsville or Matamoros where David Ells died in 1866. Three years later, Mrs. Ells married the Brownsville lawyer Peter Nickels, previously Sheriff of Cameron County, who had also been associated with the Texas Rangers during the First Cortina War. Nickels died, and the twice-widowed Mrs. Anna B. Nickels kept her husband’s name and moved to Laredo sometime before 1888.
Once in Laredo, Nickels turned her decades of interest in Texas cactus into a new business next to the house at 918 Matamoros Street where she supported her 30-yr.-old widowed daughter Irene Ells de Vera and her granddaughters Anita and Elvira Vera. The garden shop on the corner of Matamoros and San Agustin was called The Arcadia Garden.
It began with a large and varied inventory. One Laredo Times newspaper ad from 1890 offers an impressive list:
“Peach trees, bananas, figs, roses (100 varieties and all colors and sizes), calladiums, honeysuckles, violets, geraniums, vines of many kinds and any quantity, grape vines, one, two, and three years old in all of the choice varieties, hanging baskets filled to order. Floral decorations arranged at short notice for weddings, dinners, and funerals. Decorative plants always on hand. Fruit, ornamental, or shade trees not in stock will be furnished with dispatch. One hundred varieties of cacti on hand, large and small by the single plant or by the thousand.”
Soon the trade in the newly fashionable and therefore lucrative cactus specimens dominated sales at Arcadia Garden. After the publicity of the show at the Columbia Exposition in Chicago, the name Anna B. Nickels was well-known as a supplier to American botanical museum curators, plant retailers, and cactus aficionados.
Several of her catalogues are still preserved in botanical reference libraries.
One story that appeared in newspapers across America called her “The Queen of Cacti” in the headline and “the mother of cacti” in the text. Referring to her matter-of-factly as “the renowned expert on cactus,” the article claims Nickels had compiled a list of over 1000 distinct species during her years of collecting in both Texas and Mexico.
By the mid-90s Nickels was placing ads for her collection not only in the Laredo Times, but in national horticultural magazines like the prestigious Baltimore Cactus Journal.
The Arcadia Garden was no hobbyist’s pastime. Ten thousand plants on hand, a thousand enredadera mexicana vines sold by the hundred-count and six varieties of Mexican canna lilies, even a tree-size cultivar of the fragrant mignonette (Lagerstroemia indica) or, as it is called in Mexico, reseda! Nickels was running a wholesale nursery as a business professional.
Her exploits in el monte were legendary —perhaps a bit more legendary in some tellings than factual. Dressed in lace-up ladies’ boots and a long-sleeved, ankle-length dress, the strangely outfitted woman was far afield from a 70-year-old matron’s conventionally defined drawing-room element. Mrs. Nickels, according to one over-the-top newspaper account, “met many strange adventures and been a party to many thrilling experiences. She has been captured by Mexican bandits and robbed by American road agents, and rattlesnakes have bitten her.”
Nickels didn’t discourage her customers’ imagination when she wrote narratives like this one for the Baltimore Cactus Journal in 1895:
“On my last trip into Mexico collecting Cacti, I stopped at a small station on the railway, and hired from one of the natives, after much difficulty, three burros (donkeys) with pack saddles, and a man to take care of them, and another to do the heavy work. We started from the station at five o’clock in the morning, each one of us mounted on a donkey, arriving at the base of a large mountain range about half past eight o’clock, a distance of ten miles; we dismounted and started on foot to see what could be found. The Mexicans brought me samples of different cacti, and I started them collecting the varieties I desired…after instructing them to collect only perfect plants of each of the different varieties, I went on up the mountains prospecting for new varieties…
It began to get late in the afternoon by this time, I therefore called the men, and we collected about one hundred plants of this, to me, new and distinct Agave, after which the plants were packed in bags and baskets and loaded on the backs of the donkeys, and we started back to the station on foot, there being no chance to ride, as the animals were well loaded with cacti, the agaves being tied on on top of the loads to prevent the spines from being broken. Shortly after starting on our return it commenced to rain, keeping up, and as there was no shelter we plodded along in the rain and mud for nearly eight miles, arriving at the station at about eight o’clock at night, soaking wet and muddy from head to foot, nearly chilled through with cold, and oh, so weary, but I would have undergone the same work and discomfort over again to have procured the agave alone, not to count the many other plants I secured.”
The new agave she found on that Mexican mountain that afternoon was a sub-species of the Agave victoriae-regina, which is now named after her, Agave victoriae-regina forma nickelsii.
Her reputation and the fame of her cactus collection at the Arcadia Garden made Nickels a Laredo attraction. In one article, it was reported that she was “visited every winter by scientists and tourists and curiosity collectors, who are interested in her cactus collection.”
Among the scientists who came to see Nickels and her Arcadia Garden business were the botanists W. E. Safford and David Griffiths of the US Department of Agriculture.
Safford admired her expertise and relied on her knowledge when he wrote a landmark article that surveyed the broad range of cactus varieties in the Southwest:
“Mrs. Nickels has contributed much to our knowledge of Cactaceae and other xerophytes of Texas and northern Mexico. Specimens collected by her are cited in all modern works on Cactaceae, and many of her notes on their properties, uses, and life history are quoted… Nearly every plant growing in her garden she had collected with her own hands. Many of them were from the valley of the Rio Grande, but for some she made extensive trips into Mexico, often finding it necessary to make long painful journeys on muleback, and climbing among sharp rocks and along the escarpment of steep mountains where no animal could find foothold.”
Like W.E. Safford, David Griffiths, the world’s foremost expert on grasses and Opuntia cactus for cattle grazing, was a friend who paid frequent visits on his research trips to south Texas. Griffiths’ photograph of Nickels in the Arcadia Garden, taken before she left Laredo in 1906, is the second of the two photos of her that we have.
Nickels was a member of the National Science Club of Washington, D.C. and corresponded with botanists across the country who couldn’t make the trip to Laredo. The eminent American botanist John M. Coulter wrote the book on cactus, literally, and referred to Nickels frequently as an authority in ground-breaking publications that clarified the relations among species of the Cactaceae. The great collector of western American flora, Mary Katharine Layne Brandegee, founder of the California Academy of Sciences’ herbarium in Berkeley, was another frequent correspondent. It was Brandegee who named the Corypanthus nickelsiae after her friend, the Laredo cactus expert.
I am not a historian of science, but as far as I know, Anna B. Nickels was the first Laredoan to be an important contributor to any scientific project. Few citizens since then have attained the reputation for authority Nickels enjoyed during the twenty years of her work in and around Laredo. Although the Arcadia Garden is long forgotten, in its brief moment of international fame, the business on Matamoros and San Agustin was world-class.
But what about peyote, Lophophora williamsii?
Of course, a Laredo cactus collector and horticulturalist could hardly not be involved in the species that used to grow so prolifically in the “Peyote Garden” along the Bordas Escarpment and the “Lomitas de Peyote” southeast of town.
The quantities of peyote buttons harvested by peyoteros in the caliche slopes near Oilton, Los Ojuelos, and Mirando City were enormous.
The notorious agent of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Chief Special Officer W. E. “Pussyfoot” Johnson, came to Laredo in 1909 hoping to kill the peyote trade with Native Americans north of the Red River at its source. There was deep inventory for sale. In two days, Johnson bought the entire stock of peyote from sellers in Los Ojuelos and Laredo, 153,000 buttons. His cost? $384, or 4 buttons for a penny. Before leaving town, he had them destroyed. For a Prohibitionist like Johnson, it was an investment in protecting Indians from their vices, but it looks now more like an incident of minority cultural vandalism.
By the late 1880s, “Peyote Religion,” before it was established legally as the Native American Church in 1918, had grown into a widely practiced worship ceremony on reservations from Oklahoma to Minnesota. This was long before there were hippies or New Age psychonauts buying peyote: the busy trade centered in Laredo was exclusively with Native Americans from the north.
Nickels was not part of this commercial network, although she was well aware of peyote’s role in Native American life in the reservations to the north. She replied to a question once about whether or not the pieces of dried cactus that Native Americans were consuming in their ceremonies was peyote: “I am certain the Mescal buttons [note: Piote, Pellote, Mescal, and Muscale were all commonly used names and spellings for peyote] are the real ones used by the Indians as a drink because the same man that goes with me collecting them gathered 30,000 of the same last fall for a Mexican Merchant of this place and he sliced and dried them here in Laredo and shipped them to some [reservation] Agency. I am also sure ‘tis Anhalonium williamsii [note: confusingly, one of the older botanical names for peyote, later revised to Lophophora williamsii].”
In contrast to the peyoteros loading barrels of dried peyote buttons on the Tex-Mex rail cars bound for Laredo and the merchants who marketed them, Nickels was focused on harvesting whole plants for transplanting at the Arcadia Garden. Her catalogues were circulated widely in the U.S. and abroad. European collectors became customers after seeing the large exhibit of cactuses she supplied for the Mexico Pavilion at the 1900 Paris Exposition.
In response to an 1888 letter inquiring about the supply of peyote buttons from a Detroit pharmaceutical company, she said she had “3000 plants growing in my garden and can collect all I can find sale for.”
It wasn’t long before Arcadia Gardens was the preferred supplier of peyote for the new international scientific interest in its potential medicinal and pharmacological properties. Unlike the mountebank W.E. Paffrath who demanded payment in advance and delivered both short and late, and the Laredo merchants Villegas and Wormser, Nickels was interested in scientific research. She did not ship peyote to scientists for just commercial motives.
It was her specimens that found their way to botanical garden collections, from the landmark Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis to the Gray Herbarium at Harvard. Peyote shipped by Nickels to Harvard’s botanist, Sereno Watson, was forwarded to the laboratory of Louis Lewin at the University of Berlin where the psycho-active alkaloids of the cactus were first analyzed and described for the international audience of researchers. Hence peyote’s temporary scientific name, Anhalonium lewinii, used along with Anhalonium williamsii, and Lophophora williamsii, until John Coulter’s definitive judgment in favor of the latter.
Living and working among Tejanos (and one guesses more specifically, among Tejanas) in Laredo, Nickels was well acquainted with peyote’s medicinal and therapeutic applications.
She wrote to her clients at Parke Pharmaceutical in Detroit, ”The Mexicans here in Laredo buy them (peyote buttons) off me at 5 cents each, 1 or 2 at a time to make a drink (they say for headache). They pound fresh ones and soak them in water. The use the pulp left to bind on any sort of sores.”
In the 1908 Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution, published not long after the 76-year-old grandmother had closed the Arcadia Garden cactus business and moved to San Luis Potosí to live with her son Benjamin Ells, the botanist William Safford praised her contribution to the scientific study of peyote:
“…the most interesting cactus of her collection was the narcotic mescal button (Lophophora williamsii), which she was among the first to bring to the notice of medical men. For many years Mrs. Nickels sent valuable consignments of medicinal and other plants of the Mexican boundary region to chemists, manufacturers of drugs, florists, and botanists, both in the United States and Europe.”
One can only speculate about the reasons for closing the Arcadia Gardens and leaving Laredo. Nickels had lived a life of great stamina and physical strength, but she was approaching eighty. The cactus fad waned and wouldn’t wax again until the 1930s. The impulse to restrict the consumption of intoxicants was growing, and prohibitionist drive against drugs like peyote as well as gin was growing. There could have been other personal or family reasons, no one knows enough to suggest.
After several years in San Luis Potosí with her son Benjamin, Anna B. Nickels died of old age in Corpus Christi January 3, 1917. She was 84 years old.
Her daughter Irene Vera died in Kansas City in 1935, and her namesake granddaughter Anita married Leonard Dumas in Dallas. My research turned up no family who might remember the woman who was once The Queen of Cacti.
The “Golden Age” of Laredo was from the end of World War II until sometime in the mid-1970s – at least as it is nostalgically recalled by those of us who lived those years as happy children. Those were idyllic decades of the Bordertown Drivein, long before Border Wars or a Border Wall, and the nightmares of raw sewerage in the river, cartels, ICE, and COVID-19.
It was a very happy time, a wonderful time to be a child. But it was also a time of vast historical amnesia.
We grew up blissfully ignorant of most history, getting through Texas history at Lamar Jr. High with no hint of slavery’s role in the Texas independence rebellion, no mention of the Cortina War, the Plan de San Diego, or the grisly oppression of Tejanos by the Rinches. For all we knew, events at the Alamo in 1836 happened just as they did in the John Wayne movie. For us, time began with the end of World War II. Before that there were cowboys and Indians, the Grito de Dolores, George and Martha Washington in silly knee pants and big skirts with powdered hair, and Noah’s Ark.
The most disheartening question faced by every storyteller is “so what?” It means your story hasn’t been worth your reader’s time and attention.
My answer is: Nickels’ achievements were an honor to Laredo, something worth remembering with pride.
I’ll up the ante with my own double question for Laredo readers: “why was Nickels forgotten? Was the river we drank from a Texas-Mexican Lethe, a River of Unmindfulness, a long draught of oblivion?”
It’s hard to imagine an answer to be proud of.
SOURCES
George A. Bender, “Rough and Ready Research ― 1887 Style,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences (23: April 1968), 159-66.
Larry W. Mitich, “Anna B. Nickels. Pioneer Texas Cactophile,” Cactus and Succulent Journal [U.S.] (XLIII, 1971), 209-227 and 259-263.
George Morgan and Omer Stewart, “Peyote Trade in South Texas,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly (87: January 1984), 269-296.
Anna B. Nickels, “A Cactus Mound,” Sharon’s Cactus Guide (February 1897), 6.
Mrs. Anna B. Nickels, Cactus and rare Texas and Mexican plants: wholesale prices to the trade only for 1896 to 1897, online: https://archive.org/details/CAT31282637
Anna B. Nickels, “Some Experiences of a Cacti Collector,” Baltimore Cactus Journal (1: January 1895), 1-2.
Anna B. Nickels, Wholesale Pricelist of Cactus Species, online: https://archive.org/details/CAT31282640
The Laredo Times, issues archived online from the years 1888, 1893, 1898, 1899, 1905, 1908 in www.newspaperarchive.com
Peyote at the Big O Ranch, circa 1976, in memory of Paul Woodward
So pleased that this sparked a memory, Janelle. And you sparked one in me: it’s been over 50 years since anyone has mentioned the Big O to me. Thanks. DC