Echinacea Before It Was a Cold Remedy

In the summer of 1987, an ethnobotanist named Kelly Kindscher noted that purple coneflower was still being dug at Rosebud, in South Dakota, for medicine. He was writing a survey of a plant that by then had become a fixture of American pharmacy shelves, and the point he was making was that its older life had never actually stopped.

Echinacea is one of the few plants where the ethnobotanical record is unusually rich and unusually specific. We know which nations used it, what they called it, and what they used it for, because two people wrote it down carefully. What follows comes from them rather than from the back of a box.

The plant, and the people who named it

The species at the center of the record is Echinacea angustifolia, the narrow-leaved purple coneflower of the dry shortgrass and mixed-grass plains. Not E. purpurea, the broader-leaved garden species that dominates the modern supplement aisle. That distinction matters, and it is one that even some federal health pages get loose about.

Melvin Gilmore, working for the Bureau of American Ethnology, published his survey of plant use along the Missouri River in 1919. He recorded the Dakota name ichaȟpe-hu, the whip plant. The Omaha-Ponca called it mika-hi, the comb plant, after the bristling seed head. The Pawnee had the name saparidu kahts, mushroom medicine.

Gilmore's assessment of it was blunt. "Echinacea," he wrote, "seems to have been used as a remedy for more ailments than any other plant."

Kelly Kindscher, writing seventy years later in Economic Botany, reached the same conclusion from a wider base of sources: purple coneflower "was the most widely used medicinal plant of the Plains Indians."

Twelve nations, not one

"Native Americans used echinacea" is the sentence you will find almost everywhere, and it is the least useful thing anyone can say about it. The record is far more specific than that, and the specificity is the interesting part.

Kindscher's 1989 survey documents distinct, separately recorded uses among the Dakota, Lakota, Omaha, Ponca, Pawnee, Winnebago, Kiowa, Cheyenne, Crow, Hidatsa, Comanche and Fox. Twelve nations, with different preparations and different purposes.

Some of the detail is wonderfully concrete. The Omaha recognized two kinds of the plant and named them separately, nuga and miga, male and female. Hidatsa warriors chewed the root as a stimulant when they were travelling through the night. Kiowa households in the 1930s were using the dried seed head as a comb and a brush, which is where the Omaha-Ponca name came from in the first place. Gilmore recorded the root being used for toothache, a piece held against the sore tooth until it eased.

Gilmore also wrote that the plant was "universally used as an antidote for snake bite and other venomous bites and stings." That was the ethnobotanical record as he found it in 1919, and it is quoted here as history rather than as a recommendation. Nothing in this article is advice about what to do for a snakebite.

How it got from the prairie into a bottle

The commercial story starts with one man and it is less flattering than the brochures suggest.

In 1871, H. C. F. Meyer, of Pawnee City, Nebraska, began selling a secret remedy he called Meyer's Blood Purifier. The purple coneflower tincture in it was almost certainly something he had learned about from Native neighbors or from settlers who had. Meyer was a patent medicine salesman, and the product was sold the way patent medicines were sold, which is to say extravagantly.

He tried to get it taken seriously. He sent samples to Dr. John King, who had written the American Eclectic Dispensatory, and to John Uri Lloyd, the Cincinnati pharmacist whose firm supplied the Eclectic physicians. King would not endorse a secret formula. Lloyd wanted to know what the plant actually was. Meyer eventually sent the whole dried plant, and it was Curtis Gates Lloyd who identified it as Echinacea angustifolia.

From there it moved fast. By 1917, John Uri Lloyd could write that echinacea had become "a therapeutic favorite with many thousand American physicians."

And then it was pushed back out again. In 1909 the American Medical Association's Council on Pharmacy and Chemistry had already delivered its verdict in JAMA: "In view of the lack of scientific scrutiny of the claims made for it, echinacea is deemed unworthy of further consideration until more reliable evidence is presented in its favor."

That is the actual arc. A plant with a deep and specific Indigenous record, picked up by a patent medicine man, legitimized through the Eclectic pharmacists, then dismissed by organized medicine for a lack of evidence that nobody had yet tried to gather.

Where the modern evidence sits

Evidence did eventually get gathered, and the honest summary is that it is mixed.

The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, which is the part of the National Institutes of Health that looks at this category, puts it carefully. Taking echinacea, it says, "may slightly reduce your chances of catching a cold." On whether it shortens one: "It's still unclear whether echinacea can shorten the length of a cold."

That is a long way from either the patent medicine claims or the AMA's dismissal, and it is roughly where a hundred and fifty years of argument has landed. Worth noting too that most modern trials use E. purpurea, the garden species, rather than the E. angustifolia that the Plains record is actually about. The plant in the studies and the plant in the history are not quite the same plant.

We do not sell echinacea, and this is not a product article. It is here because the history is genuinely good and because the way this plant moved from the prairie into American pharmacy is the same pattern we find interesting across a lot of what we do make. If you want the longer version of that argument, we wrote about it in the history of herbal tinctures, in wild bergamot and the four names the Pawnee gave it, and in the agronomy of the Three Sisters.

Common questions

Which echinacea species did Plains nations actually use?
Predominantly Echinacea angustifolia, the narrow-leaved species. Gilmore records only that one. One eastern use, among the Fox, was probably E. pallida.

Is that the same species in most supplements today?
Usually not. Most commercial echinacea is E. purpurea, which is easier to cultivate. It is a different species with a different chemistry.

Who was H. C. F. Meyer?
A patent medicine seller in Pawnee City, Nebraska, who began marketing echinacea tincture in 1871. His own labels styled him M.D. The ethnobotanical literature describes him as a salesman, so we have not called him a physician here.

Why does the plant have a comb name?
The dried seed head is stiff and bristled. The Omaha-Ponca name mika-hi means comb plant, and Kiowa households were still using the heads as hairbrushes in the 1930s.

Is echinacea still used traditionally?
Yes. Kindscher recorded it being harvested at Rosebud for medicine in 1987, and describes the practice as ongoing rather than historical.

Does echinacea prevent colds?
NCCIH's position is that it may slightly reduce the chance of catching one, and that whether it shortens a cold is still unclear. That is the most accurate thing anyone can currently say.

Sources

Gilmore, Melvin R. Uses of Plants by the Indians of the Missouri River Region. Thirty-third Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1919, pp. 131 to 132. View source

Kindscher, Kelly. Ethnobotany of Purple Coneflower (Echinacea angustifolia, Asteraceae) and Other Echinacea Species. Economic Botany, vol. 43, no. 4, 1989, pp. 498 to 507. View source

National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, National Institutes of Health. Echinacea: Usefulness and Safety. Updated November 2024. View source

Kindscher, Kelly. Medicinal Wild Plants of the Prairie: An Ethnobotanical Guide. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992. View source

These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This article is historical and educational and is not medical advice. Nothing here is intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Always consult a licensed healthcare professional before using any herb or dietary supplement.