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By 1941, the company had expanded into culinary herb blends, selling “aromatic botanicals for the kitchen” that would seem at home in today’s trendy gourmet kitchen stores—gravy herbs, curry powders, flavored vinegars, ketchup spices, and savory seed blends. By then it was also selling herb-related books, including a new one called Back to Eden by Jethro Kloss, which first appeared in 1939 and is still in print.

The almanacs

Perhaps the Meyers didn’t need to put their names on the almanacs because the men were well-known to customers and readers. In 1932, Joseph writes: “It has been my life work to investigate by direct personal study and inquiry to compare and to learn the best and most efficient of the herbs and roots used by more than a score of Indian Medicine Men whose friendship and confidence I have won.”

The Herbalist Almanac was not only a marketing tool for the sale of herb products, but also a soapbox. “You can save yourself much suffering and a great deal of money by turning your back to man-made dangerous and poisonous chemicals and going back to nature,” it states.

The booklets contain many such hints of dissatisfaction with the “progress” of conventional medicine and nostalgia for the good old days. One news article quotes a Dr. Griffith’s plea for a return to grandmother’s medicine chest and the accusation that physicians who relied on more modern vaccines and drugs had “neglected” sage, chamomile, boneset, and other botanicals that had stood the test of time.

During the Depression years, self-­doctoring was a way of life. The Indiana almanacs contain treatment regimes for ailments ranging from baldness to bowel problems, as well as features on individual herbs of garden, field, and forest—not only the natives but even plants such as ma huang and yerba maté that must have seemed exotic. One story describes a man named Li Chung-Yun who, at the age of 252, had outlived twenty-three wives and was then living in China with his twenty-fourth; Li had taken ginseng daily for more than 200 years.

Glowing letters from readers abound. Listen to Mrs. H.D.B. of Oakfield, New York: “My husband had a very severe case of Gangrene, and in all, five doctors cared for it. All of them said that the only hope was to amputate next to the body, because his whole foot was affected. I sent for a bottle of Mentholine, priced $1.00, after three toes had already dropped off; I began using it and in three days’ time I saw an improvement. I kept on until I had used four bottles, and today his foot is cured.”

All the herbs and preparations mentioned could be ordered from whatever herb company had its imprint on the almanac, all of which were agents for the Indiana Botanic Gardens product line.

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