Say I was a cowboy in the Southwestern US, circa 1880s. I am sitting around a campfire with my fellow cowpokes. Could we have been passing around a joint or would it have been unheard of? Would it be known to and used Mexican cowboys but not known or ignored by white and black cowboys?
I know that it was used in cough syrums and such. Is there any evidence that smoking it was common in the western US before the early 20th century?
Any credible sources I've read regarding the matter make it seem like it just suddenly appeared in smokable form in the US after the turn of the century, and mostly in the hands of Mexicans, becoming demonized shortly after. Given both the proximity to, and overlap of, the cultures of northern Mexico and the southwestern US, I find it improbable that the recreational use of cannabis just appeared in such a manner, but that is what historical sources seem to imply.
If anyone has any input or can suggest further reading on the subject, I'd appreciate it. Thanks!
The drug seems to have been known mostly under the name 'hashish' back then, more often eaten rather than smoked at least in the mid-1800s, and more often consumed in dedicated 'hashish parlors' rather than enjoyed on the open road.
This fascinating 1874 New York Times article about intoxicants around the world appears to be the first reference to smoked marijuana on the American continent, referring to it as a habit common to those in the mountain regions of Western Mexico. Due to this, and because 'marijuana' is the Mexican Spanish word for the substance, I suspect that the habit of smoking marijuana was imported into the States from Mexico some time after the Civil War. This is right around the correct time and place for the habit to have spread to American cowboys, since the height of the cattle drive was between 1866 and 1886, and occurred between Texas and Chicago. But I can find no primary source specifically attesting to marijuana, hemp cigarette, or hashish use among cowboys with a cursory search.
Fitz Hugh Ludlow (1836-1870) published his popular The Hashish Eater in 1857 at the age of 21. Ludlow spent a considerable amount of time touring the American West and lecturing on the virtues of drug use (he appeared in Virginia City, Nevada, for example, in 1863 and met Mark Twain there, while that writer was just getting his start). As /r/toptomcat indicates, the drug was eaten more than smoked. That is certainly what Ludlow was advocating with the title of his book.
I offer the following not as an answer to the question, but as a way of showing that the question is well-founded (that is, possible):
Here is a page from a personal journal of George Washington which describes the best way to grow hemp:
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=mgw1&fileName=mgw1b/gwpage651.db&recNum=22
Item 7 from the above source, mentions that he harvested a plant too early, before flowering; which could be either indicative of use as a pleasure substance, or as the optimal time to harvest for use as a fiber, or both.
Drafts of the Constitution of the United States of America are written on hemp, and Benjamin Franklin owned a hemp paper mill. They believed a sovereign hemp production for paper was a key national interest, as at the time, they could only get parchment from England.
So, we can at least document and establish that in the 1880s, cannabis (at least for non-pleasure uses) was a known flora, and a cultivated crop. As to 'out West', I don't know.
BTW, I am not a representative of NORML, or some marijuana advocate. I learned about this topic from a completely different angle.