Hippies of the 19th Century Part 1 - William James Experiments with Government Distributed Peyote
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In 1896, the philosopher William James sat in a house in the White Mountains, holding a small piece of cactus that had been sent to him through the mail. He had been told it could produce visions.
He swallowed it, waited, and within hours became violently ill. He would later write that he had been sick for nearly a full day, with nothing to show for it but nausea and a lingering headache. “I will take the visions on trust,” he told his brother. He never took peyote again. But many other people would, because it was being distributed by the United States government.
Two years earlier, in 1894, an ethnologist named James Mooney was traveling through the American Southwest, documenting the religious practices of Native American tribes. Among the Kiowa and Comanche, he encountered a ritual centered on peyota. Participants consumed it during all-night ceremonies, reporting visions, emotional transformations, and a sense of contact with something beyond themselves. So Mooney collected the cactus in large quantities and shipped it back to Washington, to the Bureau of American Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution.
In Washington, the Bureau assigned its study to two physicians, Daniel Prentiss and Francis P. Morgan, who began testing its effects. At the same time, samples were sent across the city to the laboratory of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, where chemists under Harvey Washington Wiley began analyzing the plant’s active compounds. In one account, Mooney personally delivered specimens to E. E. Ewell, who worked under Wiley and began breaking the cactus down into its chemical components.
The cactus moved through Washington as if it were any other material of interest—catalogued, distributed, analyzed. It began to travel outward to a small network of physicians and intellectuals.
One of them was S. Weir Mitchell in Philadelphia. Mitchell was a prominent figure, known for his work on nervous disorders and for treating patients with what he called the “rest cure.” He obtained a portion of the peyote extract—likely through the same network of researchers working with Prentiss and Morgan—and decided to experiment on himself. He reported vivid experiences, describing a kind of entry into “fairyland,” a phrase that would later be repeated in correspondence. Then Mitchell forwarded some of the substance to William James.
James was a professor at Harvard, already known for his work in psychology and philosophy. When he received the peyote, he understood that it was not a curiosity picked up on the frontier. He wrote explicitly that the U.S. government had distributed it to certain medical men, including Mitchell. The experiment he conducted in his home was the final step in a chain that began with federal fieldwork, passed through Washington laboratories, and moved along professional networks of elite physicians.
At the same time, as peyote became more visible, missionaries and reformers began to object to its use among Native American communities. Reports circulated in Washington describing its effects. There began a sustained and decades-long effort to suppress its use by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
The result was a strange contradiction. On one side, one part of the government was suppressing the substance in the populations that had used it for generations. On the other, another part of the government was quietly enabling its study among a small group of educated men—chemists, physicians, and philosophers—who could experiment with it under controlled conditions.
The network expanded. In Washington, chemists reduced the plant to measurable components. In Philadelphia, physicians tested its effects and described them in clinical terms. And in Cambridge and the White Mountains, a philosopher tried to understand what those effects might mean.
Many other scientists and intellectuals were interested too, and began to write about these states. Prentiss and Morgan described the experience in clinical, medicalized terms. James Mooney published studies of its use in Native religious ceremonies and explored its connection to the divine. And Havelock Ellis reported on its effects on sensory perception.
But James’s own experience with peyote had been a disappointment. But he had already begun to take seriously the possibility that altered states of consciousness could reveal something fundamental about the mind. He had experimented earlier with nitrous oxide, filling pages with insights that seemed profound in the moment and meaningless afterward. He was interested not in the substances themselves, but in the states they produced.
And he wondered, What could those states reveal about the nature of human reality?
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