The Peyote Chronicles IV: Agent “Pussyfoot” Johnson comes to Laredo; sworn enemy of booze and peyote takes on merchants Villegas and Wormser, suppliers of sacred plant for Native American religious ceremonies

Laredo has seen its share of lunatics, mentecatos, and oddballs. Some were born here. Petra la Loca and “The Jet” are as Laredo as a sunny 108° day in August.

Others were just passing through. Timothy Leary and Charles Manson came and went. Certified wackos.

And you were expecting me to add Tom DeLay to the list of native nuts from Laredo. Yes, the wild-n-crazy politico did germinate among us in 1947, and yes, thirty years later, he did have an Austin bachelor pad he called “Macho Manor.” But no, not Laredo enough: the DeLay’s decamped to a South American oilpatch when little Tommy was seven years old.

Pd peyoteowell St. John, the late-lamented musician who wrote songs for the 13^th Floor Elevators and founded the San Francisco hippy group Mother Earth in the Summer of Love, is pure Laredo, in spite of his Houston birth. The “Sultan of Psychedelia” had extensive experience with chemically induced mental derangement on all those LSD trips in Austin and San Francisco, but unlike his friend Roky Erikson of the Elevators or Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd, Powell always managed to find his way home.

What follows is a Laredo story whose bizarre protagonist spent a couple of days in town. As with many other outsiders who’ve wanted to change things here, this visitor just didn’t understand Laredo.

It’s late April 1909, and a passenger steps off the afternoon International-Great Northern train from San Antonio. The heavy stranger hires an open cab at the depot and rides it down Matamoros St. toward the still only three-story Hamilton Hotel. As he passes St. Peter’s Plaza, he looks over at the recently built palaces of Laredo’s prosperous merchant and landowner gentry.

Whether it’s the glare of the 3 o’ clock sun or his myopia, the traveler squints at the conspicuously expensive homes through thick wire-rim glasses. He muses, “Everything smells like booze. All these drinkers. Park benches full of drunkards. People on the sidewalks just stumbled out of saloons. Oh, the Lord’s wrath is coming.”

It’s springtime in Laredo, and that’s not a song. Just another hot April day, already in the mid-90s. The traveler is wearing a baggy sack suit and vest cut from dark, heavy tweed, an outfit better suited to keeping a man from freezing in a Midwest late-winter blizzard. As he mops the perspiration from his brow, you can see he’s a no-nonsense kind of fellow, not the kind to be caught in a dandy’s light-weight summer suit sipping champagne at society functions where fops wore such frivolities.

The stranger, William E. Johnson, of Lincoln, Nebraska, arrived with a regional reputation for being the sworn enemy of brewers and saloon owners. Among the both the wets and the drys, he was known as “Pussyfoot” Johnson.

Pussyfoot Johnson

The unaffectionate nickname referred to his signature enforcement technique of tiptoeing into speakeasies late at night and arresting everyone, from owners, bartenders, and boozers to the barflies. By slipping through illegal breweries’ unguarded back doors, Pussyfoot had put hundreds of lucrative hooch enterprises in Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa out of business; hence, the price on his head.

For his entire adult life, Johnson had devoted himself to anti-liquor activism, first in journalism. He’d edited a series of newspapers, from the New York Voice, an organ of the temperance party, to the Manila Freedom in the Philippines.

In 1903, Johnson, back in the US on the anti-alcohol bandwagon, ran on the Prohibition Party ticket for the Maryland House of Delegates and the next year, for U.S. Congress in the ironically numbered Fifth District of Maryland. Neither campaign was successful.

Anti-liquor activism was fervent across America, especially in the Midwest.

The brutal round-up and enclosure of almost all Native American tribes in reservations there was complete by 1890, and alcoholism had quickly become an devastating problem for the internees. Well-intentioned officials at the Bureau of Indian Affairs lobbied legislatures and federal agencies to ban alcohol on tribal lands, and Prohibitionists like Johnson were natural allies in their cause.

Pussyfoot once dumped 25,000 bottles of liquor confiscated at a reservation into the Arkansas River —which must have been an ecological disaster for the river’s aquatic life.

Zealots like William Johnson focused a monomaniacal fury on liquor. An even more famous zealot was Carrie Nation, the itinerant, self-styled “Hatchet Granny,” who invaded drinking establishments with her, shall we say, ample, uncorseted figure, hatchet in hand to stave in the offending beer kegs. Not at all ashamed by the metaphor, Ms. Nation said of herself that she was “a bulldog running along at the feet of Jesus, barking at what He doesn’t like.” No doubt if she invaded your saloon and destroyed it, her bite was even worse than her bark.

On that April day, however, Pussyfoot Johnson came to Laredo in pursuit of a different intoxicant.

Peyote.

As it always has, Laredo and Nuevo Laredo had a flourishing saloon and cantina scene. The gun battle of the 1886 Election Day Riot between the Botas and Guaraches parties, which left thirty dead and forty-five wounded, was fought among borrachos bien pedos. In 1909, it was enough to motivate the founding of a local Anti-Saloon League chapter that held meetings at the First Baptist Church. On this visit, however, Laredo’s free-flowing booze was not Johnson’s official concern.

Back in Nebraska, Pussyfoot had followed the news stories in the local papers about the sudden growth of the new “Peyote Religion” among the tribes confined to reservations in the Great Plains states.

With the help of Teddy Roosevelt, Johnson had finagled an appointment four years earlier as an Agent for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. His mission was to infiltrate and shut down drinking parties on the reservations, and he got results, with over 4,000 arrests. As one B.I.A. official said, “Christmas 1906 was the driest the Indian Territory had seen since white people had first begun to make their homes there.”

Nevertheless, the superintendents and missionaries on the reservations were not content to sober up the tribes by banning the sale and consumption of alcohol. They had become obsessed with the sudden rise in Native American religious ceremonies that used peyote. At that point, reservation officials urged Johnson to build on his success against alcohol and develop a similar campaign to stop this new enemy of sobriety. Missionaries at the reservations were especially concerned about peyote’s use in tribal religious ceremonies whose rituals had at best an ambiguous relationship to worship at the Presbyterian church in town.

Just as he had in fighting the beer trade, Pussyfoot Johnson ignored demand and attacked supply. Inevitably, this approach would lead him to Laredo, the shipping source for all the peyote being sold to the Native American internees.

It took no particular investigative skill or effort to find out where the Native Americans were getting what some of the Indian agents were mistakenly calling “mescal beans.” Everyone on the reservations in Oklahoma and Iowa knew that peyote abounded on the Bordas Escarpment. The names Los Ojuelos and Aguilares were legendary. Like their more famous predecessor, Quanah Parker, for decades enterprising Native American men had been making the illegal 600-mile trip to the hills 30 miles east of Laredo on horseback to harvest peyote. After the railroad from San Antonio and the Texas-Mexican line from Corpus Christi reached Laredo in 1881, the young men in search of peyote traveled south to Laredo and then east to Aguilares by train.

George Díaz has told the story in his authoritative history, Border Contraband: A History of Smuggling Across the Rio Grande (University of Texas Press, 2015), of how Laredo merchants have always had a keen eye for new business opportunities, even borderline illegal ones. Entrepreneurs in the Laredo of 1900 had recognized a new market selling nearby peyote when they saw one.

Leopoldo Villegas

Soon two merchant houses, Wormser Bros. and Leopoldo Villegas & Co., were buying dried peyote from the peyoteros in Los Ojuelos and shipping them to Laredo on the Tex-Mex Railroad. There they packed them in cartons to ship to the reservations north of the Red River. Large empty cartons with shipping labels from Wormser’s or Villegas were discarded in middens along with empty whiskey bottles and were common litter on tribal lands where peyote was used in religious ceremonies.

For some unexplained reason, the Laredo businesses labeled the peyote shipments as “Japanese Buttons.” It couldn’t have been an innocent mistake. Who in Laredo would have confused peyote buttons with anything from Japan? The fraudulent labels are instead more likely an indication of the sense that the contents were not completely legitimate.

As he rode down the street contemplating the border town’s wickedness, Pussyfoot Johnson knew exactly where the two businesses that were monopolizing the American peyote trade did business: L. Villegas & Son on the corner of Flores and Farragut, and Wormser Brothers several blocks down toward the bridge, on Convent.

Lest anyone be lured into the anachronism of thinking that these businessmen were drug dealers, remember that it is 1909, and there no such thing as what we would call a ‘drug trade.’ Narcotráfico was still five decades into the future.

Selling peyote in Laredo was a low-volume, harmless trade that satisfied the small demand for a succulent that grew in abundance nearby. Laredoans, if they knew anything at all about the cactus, knew peyote as an everyday folk remedy, a poultice to rub on arthritic hands or a tea to relieve stomach pains, the sort of thing local curanderas dispensed.

Twenty years earlier, in her correspondence with a pharmaceutical company in Detroit, Laredo’s internationally known cactus expert and plantswoman Anna B. Nickels wrote that she had 3000 peyote plants growing at her Arcadia Garden shop. In her words, “The Mexicans here in Laredo buy them off me for 5 cents each, 1 or 2 at a time to make a drink (they say for a headache). They pound fresh ones and soak them in water, then strain and drink the water. They use the pulp left to bind on any sort of sores.”

If the missionaries were panicked that Native Americans were using peyote in religious rituals, it was a faraway concern, irrelevant to life in the two Laredos. Gunrunning and smuggling across the river in both directions to circumvent the import-export duties of Mexico and the United States were the lucrative white-collar crimes of the day.

Because of the insignificance of peyote for most Laredoans, the 1909 city baseball team, which played in an amateur league with teams from Corpus Christi, Cotulla, Eagle Pass, and San Antonio, called itself the “Peyoteros.” The name was taken as intended, as light-hearted fun, nothing at all like calling a Laredo team today the “Narcos” in our murderous age of warring cartels and Mexican Army crackdowns.

One can imagine Agent Johnson sending messages to Villegas and the Wormser’s at their stores summoning them to a meeting at the Hamilton Hotel.

Since Johnson had only the vaguest legal authority to suppress the peyote trade, his plan was to strong-arm the two prosperous merchants by threatening to use the courts to interfere with their highly profitable dry goods and grocery businesses.

The threat of litigation was Pussyfoot Johnson’s most effective weapon. Although there was no legal basis for interpreting an amendment banning the sale of “intoxicants” to Native Americas in the 1897 Indian Appropriations Act as including peyote along with liquor and beer, Johnson had been using the statute to frighten businessmen involved in the trade. Little did it matter that the Acting Commissioner of Indian Affairs, R. G. Valentine, had written Congress admitting that “it is doubtful whether there is any Federal or state law under which the sale of peyote to any Indians can be prevented.”

But Johnson had an intoxicant to suppress and no care for such legal niceties.

The month before arriving in Laredo, Agent Johnson had pressured the superintendent of the Wells Fargo Express office in Houston to refuse all shipments of peyote from South Texas. Johnson bluffed that, otherwise, he would file charges.

If you weren’t from Laredo where business partnerships and friendships often cross linguistic, cultural, religious, and ethnic lines, Leopoldo Villegas and Ferdinand Wormser might seem an odd pair.

Ferdinand Wormser

Both had come to Laredo via Corpus Christi, but their families had come from very different parts of Europe.

Leopoldo Villegas’ grandparents, Lorenzo Bustillo Villegas and Vicenta Francisca Ivañez Pacheco were from Spain. Their ancestral home was the northern seacoast province Santander, with its own Laredo. This was the province whose native son José de Escandón colonized south Texas in the 1750s and christened it “Nuevo Santander”. The Villegas were part of the wave of Spanish emigrants who left the political instability and economic collapse of Spain after the Napoleonic occupation and the loss of its American colonies. Mid-19^th century Spanish émigrés mostly sailed to Argentina, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and, like Villegas, to Cuba.

However, unlike Fidel Castro’s father, Ángel Castro Argiz, another Spaniard emigrant, the sons of Lorenzo Villegas did not stay in Cuba. First Joaquín and then Quintín, moved from Havana to Corpus Christi, where they established a mercantile business. By 1875, Joaquín was married to Valeria Rubio, a citizen of Mexico, and they had a son Leopoldo.

Not long after, the Villegas brothers’ partnership J. Villegas & Bro. was chartered in Texas and Mexico. The partnership owned profitable stores that specialized in Mexican agricultural produce in both Laredos. The business also exported manufactured items from the U.S. and imported raw materials like hides from Mexico.

When the railroads arrived, the Villegas brothers’ trade exploded, and they became two of the wealthiest men in town. Together they owned the 10,000-acre Villegas Ranch east of Laredo, which not coincidentally was in the middle of the peyote fields near the Bordas Escarpement. Quintín was a director of the Milmo National Bank and with his brother Joaquín held significant banking and mining interests in Mexico.

By 1900, the Villegas were Laredo city fathers. Quintín was President of the Laredo Businessmen’s Club. The Botas political party nominated him to run for Mayor against the Guarache candidate Andrew Thaison.

Quintín’s only surviving child was a daughter named Herminia. Her cousin, Joaquín’s son, Leopoldo, studied law at New York University and worked in the District Attorney’s office in New York City before returning to Laredo to take over the family business, which he renamed L. Villegas & Co.

Ferdinand Wormser and his wife Henrietta, left a very different birthplace, Landau-an-der-Isar in southern Bavaria, in the 1880s. Ferdinand joined his older brother Julius in Corpus Christi and established a dry goods business. Ferdinand and Julius moved the business to Laredo, where it was incorporated as Wormser Brothers. The Wormsers would be pillars of the Laredo’s growing early 20^th century Jewish community.

There was no surprise when Villegas and Wormser received Pussyfoot Johnson’s summons to the hotel interrogation. They had heard from their network of customers on the reservations and from shipping agents about the new campaign against peyote by the agent with the silly name.

As they walked up Convent Avenue through the noisy traffic of pedestrians, chiveras, peddlers, farm carts, and over-loaded burros, Villegas reminded Wormser that there was no valid law outlawing peyote. But the lawyer was worried about the expense of defending themselves against trumped-up charges before distant grand juries.

Wormser had little interest, financial or otherwise, in peyote. It was an insignificant agricultural niche product in his large inventory of electric appliances like fans and toasters destined for export to Mexico.

“The hell with the peyote. It’s giving me a headache already. I’d get rid of the stuff, but I paid the pickers in Aguilares a hundred dollars for five barrels. I’m not going to throw away money. That’s a great way to go broke.”

Villegas sympathized. “De acuerdo, Fernando. We’ve got that much or more. All paid for. I don’t throw away money either.”

“So what do we do?”

Villegas sketches out a plan.

“Okay, they say this Pata de Gato is a fanfarrón. He wants to be in the newspapers as the hero who took peyote away from the Indians. Mira no más, compadre, I’ll feed Penn at the Times a story about how Johnson has forced us to stop shipping peyote. He’ll come out as the outsider who cleans up the sinful streets of Laredo. Then Pussyfoot, jajajá, ¡qué apodo! will buy a stack of copies and send a clipping to everyone in the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Oklahoma Legislature, de veras, even to Congress.”

“But our inventory?”

“Fíjate, Fernando, once Patitas thinks he’s getting credit for shutting down peyote from Laredo, he’ll be so puffed up that he’ll pay us for what he have.”

“He would pay us for peyote?”

“Yes, he’s a four-flusher, a loco, not a businessman. Cada quien con su locura, we’ll go along with him, and watch, he’ll end up paying us for our stock, probably to burn it.”

Villegas laughed. “Just like Torquemada in Spain.”

Wormser scowled. He didn’t find the Inquisition or bonfires funny.

Villegas and Wormser entered the room at the old Hamilton. Johnson didn’t stand and motioned them toward chairs on the other side of a table. It was obvious that this was to be a quasi-legal encounter with the two Laredoans cast as accused felons.

As Villegas predicted, Johnson’s opening gambit was the irrelevant 1897 federal law. He told the businessmen right off that he was in Laredo to shut down their businesses and send them to prison for their peyote trade with the Native Americans.

Villegas looked skeptical behind his own thick round glasses.

“I see. So, you’re saying the sale of peyote is illegal?”

“As illegal as selling whiskey on the reservations. You’ll get two years in federal prison.”

Villegas knew that Johnson was gaslighting, even though the term would have to wait over a century to be invented. He had checked and knew that the 1897 law had already been ruled as inapplicable to peyote.

Wormser glanced over at his friend to see where Villegas would take the confrontation.

“You mean, grand juries? Out of state venues?”

“Yup, anyone who persists in this trade is going to have to defend himself in every state where there is an Indian reservation. He better be able to afford some damn good lawyers.”

Villegas looks across at Wormser. Their eyes acknowledged the conversation on the way to the meeting. The 50-cent margins on peyote at $2.50 a thousand FOB in Los Ojuelos that they shipped north for $3 were chicken-feed.

Shoulders shrugged.

Both were thinking, “¿Para qué? Why fight this loco? For what? Besides, this Johnson fellow will be long gone and far away in a couple of days.”

They were from Laredo, after all, and hardly naïve about extortion.

Picking up the thread, Wormser asked, “Okay, you’re right, Mr. Johnson. What do we have to do?”

Johnson smiles the ugly grimace of the fanatic who thinks he’s just won a fight.

“Good. This is the Lord God Almighty’s fight. Maybe you tequila drinkers in Laredo think the peyote business is okay, but it’s Satan’s spawn. You must stop selling those mescal beans or whatever you call them to the ignorant Indians right now.”

Johnson pauses for emphasis, “Permanently!”

Wormser and Villegas let him rave on.

“Now I’m a fair man. I don’t want to ruin your business. Tell you what, since you admit this cactus is being used by the Indians to get drunk when they can’t buy whiskey, I’ll buy your entire inventory of peyote at the market rate. How’s that? But no more peyote. Ever again.”

Villegas and Wormser suffered through the harangue and were delighted to concede what they had agreed they could give up before the meeting. Heads nodded and hands were shaken.

In three days, Patitas de Gato had purchased the entire peyote inventories of Villegas & Sons and Wormser Bros. They amounted to 176,400 peyote buttons, for which they were paid $443.

The next day, the ton of peyote buttons had all been burned in a large bonfire at the quemadora.

While Johnson remained, shipments from Laredo to the reservations ceased.

In order to speed the obsessive agent’s way out of town and their hair, Villegas and Wormser turned over their customer lists, promising in addition to forward copies of their letters of refusal on future peyote orders. It would soon be back to business as usual.

As one last deterrent, Pussyfoot insisted that a special Deputy Agent be named to supervise the businesses in Laredo and enforce the ban.

Here’s how the Laredo Times tells it: Johnson “then issued an order to everyone handling the so called Japanese Button or peyote, that it must stop as after this the Federal government will prosecute anyone found handling the peyote and under the federal law the result will be about two years in the penitentiary and he appointed Chas. Dalrymple of this city as his deputy in this city to see that his order is enforced.”

¡Pen**jo, Patitas de Gato!

You didn’t check the credentials of the Deputy Agent recommended by Villegas. You never found out that you’d just sworn in Carlos Dalrymple, a trusted, long-time employee of Villegas and Sons, and the best man at Leopoldo’s niece Herminia’s wedding.

As planned, the lurid story planted by Villegas in the Laredo Times on May 9 gushed:

“Following the course of the peyote as a good bloodhound trails the path taken of one having committed an evil act when it is given the scent, Mr. William E. Johnson, chief special officer of the U.S. Indian Service with headquarters in Salt Lake City, arrived in this city a day or so ago and began to complete his investigations of the source of supply of the peyote which he had traced as coming from Laredo. He quietly began his work and after a short study of the situation found that L. Villegas and Co. and Wormser Bros., were the sole distributing agents of the mescal bean as it is known in the north, in fact he discovered that they had the monopoly of the world’s market on this popular intoxicant and they were distributing it to agents under the name of Japanese buttons, who in turn sold it to the Indians, who in turn had from the Hon. Japanese Button, a heap hilarious time with plenty much jag, and dream of great happy Hunting Ground.”

The insulting, condescending humor of the newspaper story was sufficient to flatter Johnson, but it would not be the final chapter in the Laredo peyote story.

Within weeks of Pussyfoot’s return to Salt Lake City with a suitcase full of Laredo Times, pharmacists with an eye to a quick buck were placing orders again for peyote. This time it was under the pretense of using the cactus buttons for wink-wink ‘medicinal purposes.’

Pussyfoot Johnson wasn’t having any of it. His reply to Wormser’s inquiry about the permissibility of shipping peyote to druggists was curt:

“I have to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of May 5 stating that certain druggists have written to you stating that they wish to purchase the peyotes to manufacture into a medicine. The peyotes have no medicinal qualities whatsoever. Outside a few ignorant Mexicans along the border, there is absolutely no demand for these articles except from Indians who want it for a dope. It is a cinch, therefore, that any druggist who claims to want to manufacture a medicine if faking and that he really wants them to an illicit traffic.”

But give Wormser credit for checking the applicability to peyote of the 1897 alcohol prohibition law. He wrote the Secretary of the Interior in Washington inquiring about Johnson’s use of the regulation. In his reply, Wormser was assured that the 1897 regulation applied only to alcohol, and not to peyote.

Before there was time to resume the rail shipments north, Johnson got wind of the correspondence and wrote to his compromised deputy, Dalrymple.

“Wormser Bros. promised to ‘cut this business out’ and if I find that they have not ‘cut it out,’ I will dig up all the old cases I can find against them and present them to grand juries in several different states. I am tired of this ‘monkey business’ on the part of Wormser Bros. They seem to have no regard for their promise.”

Not realizing that Dalrymple was not going to do anything to damage the interests of his patron and employer Leopoldo Villegas, Johnson was tricked into believing that the threat had succeeded. He reported to the Bureau of Indian Affairs in November that “this bluffed the Wormser people out and they still have the peyotes. I anticipate, however, that sooner or later they will break loose again somewhere.”

At the same time, however, attitudes among reservation wardens were changing. A series of reports were published explaining that Peyote Religion was not a threat to Native American sobriety as alcohol had been, and that the spiritual practices involving peyote were not only completely peaceful, but even an antidote to reservation alcoholism. As time passed, lawyers for Native Americans successfully challenged the legality of the old peyote regulations, and Johnson’s most powerful legal threat was publicly repudiated.

Two years after the Laredo meeting, Pussyfoot Johnson’s anti-peyote campaign was in retreat. When he received reports that the Wormser’s were shipping peyote again, he complained, “I have no funds available to assist in this matter.”

Johnson resigned as Agent of the Bureau of Indian Affairs to rejoin the executive arm of the American Anti-Saloon League.

Wormser and Villegas’ trade in peyote ended as well, when Native American’s sacramental use of peyote was recognized as a religious right, and the tribes took over for themselves its harvest and transport. The turn-of-the-century business ended, but peyote would be harvested continuously on the slopes east of Laredo by Native Americans to the present day.

After his Laredo exploit, Johnson took the Anti-Saloon League message to hard-drinking Europeans. In London, he was appointed director of the World Anti-Alcoholism League. His speeches on the evils of Demon Rum drew large crowds to rallies in European capitals, and his temperance demagoguery was received, if not enthusiastically, at least courteously, in Paris, Rome, and Berlin.

The English, on the other hand, were less kindly disposed toward someone who threatened to take away their pubs and pints. In November 1919, Johnson was mobbed in an anti-alcohol parade by a drunken rabble of medical students from the University of Essex. As they pelted their sober nemesis with stones and rotten vegetables, a glass bottle thrown at Johnson hit him in the face and shattered. Even the sober physicians at the hospital couldn’t repair the damage and Pussyfoot lost his right eye.

William Johnson’s trip to Laredo was not unlike other occasions of our history when someone from elsewhere arrived with a Big Idea, passionately held, but that turned out to be incompatible with the way we are.

It reminds me of the end of the movie Chinatown. In the last line of the film, Detective Walsh restrains the impulsive Jack Nicholson character saying, “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”

Looking back at William Johnson’s trip to end the peyote trade in 1909, I hear, “Forget it, Pussyfoot. It’s Laredo.”

The long co-existence of the two Laredos on either side of the Rio Grande/Río Bravo del Norte, makes the Spanish saying about unique things, Como Laredo, no hay dos, a delightful paradox.

(The dialogues above are invented, of course, but the events to the story are not.)

Sources:

For the Anna Nickels letter: George A. Bender, “Rough and Ready Research – 1887 Style,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 23 (1968), p. 164.

Quintín and Leopoldo Villegas, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/villegas-quintin

And https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/villegas-leopoldo

Ferdinand, Alfonse, and Julius Wormser in Encyclopedia of Southern Jewish Communities, https://www.isjl.org/texas-laredo-encyclopedia.html

Johnson, “History, Use, and Effects of Peyote, Article I” and “Article Two,” Indian School Journal, XII (May 1912), pp. 239-45 and (June, 1912) pp 289-93.

George R. Morgan and Omer C. Stewart, “Peyote Trade in South Texas,” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly 87 (Jan. 1984), pp. 269-96.

Omer C. Stewart, “Early Efforts to Suppress Peyote, chapter 6,” in Peyote Religion: A History (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987) pp. 128-47.

Agent Wm. E. Johnson’s 1909 peyote hunting trip to Laredo, Laredo Weekly Times, May 2, 1909, p. 8.

William “Pussyfoot” Johnson, westervillelibrary.org/antisaloon-william-johns

On the Peyoteros baseball team, Laredo Weekly Times, May 16, 1909, p. 4