This fellow, described in Down in Texas Scrub, ‘Peyoteros’ Stalk Their Elusive Prey, certainly sounds like a peyotero:
Slicing through the mesquite and bramble-ridden Texas chaparral, Mr. Johnson, 55 years old, intently searched a rocky outcropping for the small, hallucinogenic Lophophora williamsii cactus buttons that to the unpracticed eye look like round, greenish stones. “You have to let him talk to you,” he said. “If you find one, he’ll take you where you want to go.”
Mr. Johnson is one of “four registered peyote distributors left in Texas, down from nine a decade ago”:
For 44 years, Mr. Johnson, who sports a white paintbrush mustache and gray ponytail, has been gathering peyote, which is used by about 250,000 indigenous members of the Native American Church, as the main sacrament in their religious ceremonies. A 1994 law makes it legal, as long as the user comes from a federally recognized tribe.
It doesn’t sound particularly lucrative:
In three hours his two brothers gathered about five potato sacks, some 4,000 buttons in all.Mr. Johnson pays his eight brothers and nephews $50 per 1,000 buttons they collect. After cleaning and sometimes sun-drying the buttons, Mr. Johnson sells them for about $200 per 1,000. He pays local ranchers about $1,500 to $2,000 a month to lease their lands.
Peyote goes way, way back — but much of its popularity doesn’t go back long at all:
Archaeologists have found evidence of peyote’s use in indigenous rituals dating back 10,000 years. “Those who eat or drink it see visions either frightful or laughable,” wrote Fray Bernardino de Sahagun, a 16th-century chronicler. Spanish priests, for the most part, tried to stamp out its use. Mexican colonial records yield as many as 90 cases where the Spanish Inquisition brought charges ranging from heresy to witchcraft against peyote users.As early as the 17th century, Apaches spread the use of peyote north of the Rio Grande. Peyote really took off with indigenous Americans in the U.S. during the late 1870s. Then, the visions afforded by the sacred cactus gave solace to indigenous Americans, who, defeated and humiliated by the U.S. Army, were forced into reservations across the West.
In the U.S., Christian missionaries also tried to stamp out peyote. But in 1918, indigenous Americans, with the help of ethnographers from Washington’s Smithsonian Institution, organized the Native American Church, obtaining legal status for the peyote ritual. Today, the Native American Church has members from more than 40 tribes in the U.S. and Canada.
Peyote really took off with indigenous Americans in the U.S. during the late 1870s.