For Bert Crow-lance and Homer Buffalo, we maintain, judged from the vantage-point of any other culture than their own, would remain enigmas or examples of inexplicably bizarre behavior if we did not fall back on history—on the decadent pattern of the vision-quest, and on patterns now almost vanished of prestige and power-seeking, etc. But the problem of the ethnologist as we see it is not the reporting of the outlandish and the picturesque; it is the discovery of plausible motivations in terms of native meanings, the discovery of the essentially humane in its to us often disguised manifestations. In practice, then, _we can never know enough history_ either biographical or cultural, in explaining a present culture as it functions in individuals acting in such and such a (historically-conditioned) way. We feel the more free, therefore, to trace in the next section the history of a pre-peyote Plains narcotic used ritually, inasmuch as it affords an insight into the historical problem. FOOTNOTES: [1] _Peyote as Used in Religious Worship_, 11, lent through the courtesy of Alfred Wilson (Cheyenne). [2] Letter of Mack Haag (Cheyenne), Calumet, Oklahoma, to Dr. R. W. Miles, San Francisco, California, Sept. 16, 1925, and reply Oct. 2, 1925. What unfriendliness the writer met was largely the projection of individual suspiciousness, e.g., that of a Caddo who concocted a preposterous story out of his own imagination. When I returned to Anadarko in 1936 with a White companion who remained for several weeks, this man circulated the story that James Mooney’s son and the son of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs had arrived to make a thorough check-up on peyote, that to obtain an “absolute lowdown” we had a man stationed on every corner in the town to check up on every Indian who took a drink of beer in a saloon, picked up a woman, or was overheard swearing—in any of a dozen Indian languages! [3] Parsons, _Taos Pueblo_, 66-68. [4] Datura or Jimsonweed was also greatly feared; it killed or drove crazy anyone who touched it. Only shamans armed with the more powerful peyote dared uproot it. Bakánori was used by runners to rub on their legs or to carry in the girdle to counteract witchcraft in the ritual races; but if kept too long this plant also would drive a man crazy or kill him. See Bennett and Zingg, _The Tarahumara_, 136-38, 292, 338, 347; Lumholtz, _Unknown Mexico_, 1:359-60, 372-74; also Mooney, _Tarumari-Guayachic_. [5] Opler, _The Use of Peyote_; _Lipan Apache Field Notes_; Hoebel, _Northern Cheyenne Field Notes_; Petrullo, _The Diabolic Root_, 71. [6] Can this be a reflex of an older pattern? Spier (_The Sun Dance_, 473) lists as a part of the Sun Dance of the Arapaho, Kiowa and Southern Cheyenne a prepared drink and the induction of vomiting. Kozad (Kiowa) believed peyote had a good effect whether vomited or not—the virtue being in the quantity eaten. Cf. the emetic rites in connection with the “black drink.”