Ah yes. That's mullein. There's a lot of those. The dead give away, which you can't tell from the photo, is that there's a central flower cluster. It really does look like tobacco.
That doesn't actually look at all like mullein - or at least not the familiar Verbascum thapsus, or the varieties native to North America that I could find, all of which have the characteristic dense, close-set spikes of *yellow* flowers that give common or wooly mullein (V. thapsus) such English folk names as "Hag's (hedge's) taper/candle" and "Aaron's rod". Now, my training in herbalism is chiefly focused on plants that are native to, or at least that I can grow, in a relatively mild Northern European climate, so it is possible that there's a North American subspecies that differs wildly from the other Verbascum spp....
As for the "ancient tobacco" - regrettably the legend, and the seeds for sale attached to it, are *still* going around. Technically, this is what, in academic-land, we call "hooey". While it is just possible that, under the right circumstances - desert, permafrost, *cold* desert, unusually-sealed pots, whatever - a tobacco seed *could* survive and be germinated after a thousand years or more...they got a Judean date palm seed ca. 2000 years old to sprout and grow (which I would find highly exciting, were I a Christian)...It is *not* possible that such a thing could have happened without being *extensively documented* in the archaeological literature. Sometimes plants really are more unpredictable than people, and that is the case here. It would have been a huge find, a cause of massive excitement...not a totally undocumented attribution to different digs.
A right bummer, because on first running into the legend, I was all, "Got to get me some of this stuff!" And then I tried to track the details down, because germinating a seed that age would have left a splashy trail all through the worlds of ethnobotany and archaeology in general. There would be comparisons to the nicotine content, etc., of modern varieties of N. rust. and the cultivated tobaccos; there would be efforts made to sequence the DNA of the revived plant and see if it could be used to track trade routes and the like through the pre-Columbian Americas...such a find would be immensely useful in a number of ways.
The total absence of any literature where there should be masses says only one thing. Hooey.
I haven't tried the alleged "ancient tobacco", as I fear that no curing or aromatic smoking could rid it of the implied aroma of cattle manure. I'm growing a few "Midewivian (Midewiwan?) Sacred" plants this year, since I wanted to have a go at a rustica myself - the "sacred" part of the strain name may be what some people are calling "cultural appropriation" these days, and certainly not approved by the Cherokee Centre for Plants on the ground that if it's being offered for sale, it's not something that should be called "sacred" (
http://www.southernexposure.com/tobacco-midewiwan-ceremonial-mapucho-wild-tobacco-012-g-p-768.html); but at least it's a slightly more well-meaning and considerably less deceptive name and claim than the "ancient tobacco".