On the frontier, men drank hard liquor and smoked rough tobacco because they were in pain. All the time. Felling trees, splitting wood, plowing, planting, weeding, harvesting (if you were lucky) and constantly digging up rocks. The white guys showed up in my neck of the woods in the mid 1600’s. The ancient loose rock walls that wend through our woods stand as testament to the back breaking labor they endured clearing the land and making it tillable. If you didn’t work, there would be no food. Prople starved and froze to death over winter.
It was just that simple.
Most people wouldn’t dare spend cash on tobacco. They needed that money for things that they couldn’t grow or make themselves. They might barter for it, but it was easy enough to grow it yourself, so they did. To this day, many Amish maintain a tobacco plot for rolling their own cigars. That might be as close as you can get to what the early frontiersmen “enjoyed”.
