What Is a Cheroot? The Old West Cannabis Tradition

August 16, 2026 · 7 min read

A cheroot is a cigar with both ends cut off square instead of tapered — a plain, honest shape with no point and no wrapper flourish. At Peace Pipe Cannabis in Tatum, New Mexico, a Cheroot is our house version of that idea: a King Palm Rollie 16-pack packed with a quarter ounce — seven grams — of our own indoor flower, grown at our facility on West Broadway, for $45. Sixteen wraps, seven grams, one pack, rolled by your own hand.

Where the word comes from

The word arrived in English around 1660 by way of Portuguese charuto, from the Tamil curuṭṭu — a roll of tobacco (Wiktionary; Dictionary.com). Cheroots were traditional in Burma and southern India long before any of it reached the American West, and what made one a cheroot rather than a cigar was purely the shape: filterless, cylindrical, both ends clipped in manufacture rather than rolled to a point (Wikipedia).

Because a cheroot doesn't taper, it's simple to roll and cheap to make. That's the whole reason it spread. It was never the gentleman's cigar. It was the one a working man could afford to keep in his coat.

How the cheroot got to the frontier

Here is the part we like. The American word for a cheroot is stogie — and stogie is a shortening of Conestoga. Both the cigar and the heavy boot picked up the name because they were favored by the drivers of the Conestoga covered wagons out of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. The cigar sense is attested by 1861, the adjective sense — rough, heavy, coarse — by 1835 (Etymonline).

So the straight-cut cigar became American on a wagon box. Teamsters smoked them because they were cheap, they lasted, and they didn't need coddling — you could carry one for three hundred miles and it would still light. That's the object our product is named after: not the fine cigar in the humidor, but the plain one in the driver's pocket, on the road, working.

By the time the shape reached the mythology — the lawmen and card players and the man with no name — it had picked up its romance. But the romance came from the road, and the road came first.

Why we named ours the Cheroot

Tatum sits on the Llano Estacado in Lea County, and the town exists because a man filed a homestead here and opened a store. That's the register we build in: frontier general store, not saloon theater. A cheroot is the right object for it because a cheroot is honest about what it is. Straight cut, no taper, nothing hidden at either end.

We're a vertically integrated microbusiness, which means we grow the flower, cure it, and pack it ourselves, and then sell it at our own counter a few blocks away. There's no outside processor in the middle. The Cheroot is the product where that shows most plainly, so it carries the name.

What's actually in a Peace Pipe Cheroot

Two things, and nothing else:

• Seven grams — a quarter ounce — of our own indoor flower. Grown at our cultivation facility at 708 West Broadway in Tatum.
• A King Palm 16-pack, Rollie size. Sixteen natural leaf wraps. A Rollie holds about half a gram (King Palm specifications), so seven grams fills all sixteen with a little room to spare. How you divide it is your business.

The flower in a Cheroot is the same flower we sell in our jars — smaller buds. We want to be exact about that, because the phrase "smaller buds" gets used in this industry to mean "worse." It doesn't mean that here. Bud size is a matter of where on the plant it grew and how it dried. It's cosmetic. Same rooms, same cultivars, same cure, same hands. The big showy nugs go in the $30 jars because people want to look at them, and that's a fair thing to want. What goes in a Cheroot is the same plant.

Why King Palm

King Palm wraps are made from the leaf of the Cordia tree — a member of the borage family — grown on farms in Southeast Asia and hand-plucked and hand-rolled (King Palm). They're tobacco-free and contain no nicotine, no glue, no artificial flavoring, and no preservatives, and they come with a corn husk filter tip (GHODT).

Two reasons we chose them. First, tobacco-free matters: a traditional blunt wrap is a tobacco product, and we didn't want to sell one. Second, a natural leaf is flavor-neutral and burns slow. If we're going to grow flower for nine weeks and cure it properly, we're not going to wrap it in something that argues with it.

What a Cheroot costs, and what everything else costs

We'd rather print the whole menu than make a claim about one item. Here is every way to buy our in-house flower and what it works out to per gram:

Read that honestly and you'll notice something we're not going to hide: the $5 pre-roll is the cheapest flower per gram in the store. Same smaller buds, already rolled, five dollars. If the only thing you're solving for is cost per gram, buy those, and we'll tell you so at the counter.

The Cheroot isn't the cheapest thing on the shelf and we've never wanted it to be. It's the pack you buy when you'd rather roll your own — sixteen times, out of one tin, from a quarter ounce that came off our own bench. Nobody has ever bought a Cheroot to save money. They buy it because doing a thing with your hands is worth something, and because it makes a good gift, and because it looks like what it is.

Prices above are shelf prices before tax. In-store specials and our Peace Pipe Posse loyalty program can land below them, so ask.

Where to find them

Peace Pipe Cannabis & Trading Post, 22 East Broadway, Tatum, New Mexico 88267. Open 8am to 9pm. Call (575) 704-5260 to ask what's on the shelf before you drive — we're a small operation on a perpetual harvest, so which cultivars are packed as Cheroots changes through the season, and we won't promise you a strain we don't have.

We're about seventy-five miles west of Lubbock on US-380, which is roughly an hour and fifteen minutes. If you're coming from Texas, read our guide for Texas residents first — you can buy here legally as an adult twenty-one or over, but carrying cannabis back across the state line is a federal crime, and we won't pretend otherwise. See also the drive from Lubbock and the story of Tatum itself.

Sources

• Cheroot — Wikipedia
• cheroot — Wiktionary
• Cheroot — Dictionary.com
• Stogie — Online Etymology Dictionary
• About King Palm
• King Palm product specifications — GHODT

For adults twenty-one and over. Prices and availability are subject to change and are not a guarantee of stock. Cannabis purchased in New Mexico must remain in New Mexico; transporting it across state lines is a federal crime. This article is about product and history, not medical guidance.