The Day Barnaby the Bear Chased Merrimack Deputies into the Suncook River
Dr. G. G. Wilkins recounts the legendary day in 1861 when his 400-pound chained black bear Barnaby sent four Merrimack County revenue deputies fleeing into the cold Suncook River, their search warrants lost in the mud. Retired Wilkes County bootleg runner Junior Vance joins to swap tales of outrunning the law, and Deputy Tim Bradley of Bristol, VA phones in with a warning about lead solder and salvaged radiators. The episode is strictly educational and historical, with no instructions for home distilling.
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Full episode transcript
♦ Audible wax cylinder surface crackle, slow drip of clear distillate into a glass jar
♦ Barnaby the black bear grunting and chain clinking outside log cabin window
Wilkins: Easy, Barnaby. Easy now, old son. Settle down. It is only the phonograph horn, and it has not come to arrest anybody. Lie down and chew your ham bone.
♦ Heavy bear sigh, chain dragging across packed dirt
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Moonshine Radio Hour. I am your host, Dr. Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, broadcasting from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. The wax is warm, the anvil is cold, and the bear is fed, which means we may proceed in safety.
Wilkins: A word before we begin, as a matter of law and good conscience. Making spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of these United States, and it remains so. Whatever we say tonight about stills and copper is history and education, and nothing more. I will give no man a recipe, and I will give no man a receipt for trouble. Now, to business.
Wilkins: Tonight is Fort Wilkins lore, and I will tell you the tale most asked about in all of Merrimack County. It is the story of the day my bear Barnaby chased four revenue deputies into the Suncook River.
♪ Fiddle sting, then fades under
Wilkins: Segment One. History of the matter.
Wilkins: To understand why four grown men with warrants in their pockets ran from a chained animal, you must understand the times. The year is 1861. The war has come. The Union needs money the way a dry well needs rain, and the Congress means to raise it by taxing nearly everything that moves, sits, or ferments. The excise on distilled spirits climbs, and it climbs again in 1862 to two dollars the gallon. Two dollars! A farmer in the Suncook Valley who once sold a jug of cider brandy to his neighbor for pocket change now finds the government sitting at his table asking for a share.
Wilkins: Now New Hampshire folk have a long memory for taxes. Our grandfathers made cider brandy in this very valley in colonial days, and they made it in the open, and no man thought less of them for it. Apple orchards ran up and down these hills. Cider was currency, medicine, and Sunday supper all in one barrel. So when the revenue men started riding the turnpike with their ledgers, you may imagine the warmth of the welcome.
Wilkins: The Suncook Valley Turnpike runs right past my door, and that was no accident. A man in my line of work likes to see who is coming from a good long way off. Teamsters, drovers, mill hands from the Suncook mills, the occasional preacher, and now and again a deputy. A deputy has a way of riding that gives him away. He sits too straight and looks at every barn like it owes him money.
Wilkins: And that brings me to the morning in question. Hold that thought while the fiddle plays us into the next part.
♪ Banjo and fiddle bridge, brief
Wilkins: Segment Two. Legends, outlaws, and runners.
Wilkins: It was a raw morning in the autumn of 1861. Mist lay on the Suncook River like a wet sheet on a clothesline. I was at my anvil, the way an honest man is at his anvil, working a bit of copper and minding my own affairs. I was counterstamping a few large cents with my punch, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., and I will tell you that a cent with my name on it holds its value better than a cent without it, for the simple reason that nobody will spend it.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Four horses came up the turnpike. Four men. Four sets of boots that had never seen a day of honest mud. They wore the look of men who have been told that a New Hampshire dentist is a soft target, and I will say right now that whoever told them so never pulled a tooth in his life.
Wilkins: Now Barnaby is a gentle soul. Barnaby is a four-hundred-pound black bear who has opinions about strangers, and his opinion of strangers is that they smell like trouble and not enough like ham. He was chained outside my still-house window, as he always is, taking the morning air and a dandelion or two.
Wilkins: The deputies dismounted. The lead one, a long-faced fellow with a tin star polished like a Sunday spoon, unrolled a warrant and began to read in a voice like a church bell. He got as far as the words in the name of the County of Merrimack when Barnaby, who had been lying in the shadow of the woodpile looking like a heap of old blanket, stood up.
♦ Heavy bear grunt, chain clinking, stands up
Wilkins: A bear standing up is a thing that changes a man's opinion of the law. The reading stopped. I will not say the deputy screamed, for I would not slander a county official. I will say that he made a noise like a rusty gate in a high wind.
♦ Distant shouting, boots running, horses whinnying
Wilkins: Now here is where the science of the thing comes in. A chain is a chain, and mine is a good one, forged at my own anvil. Barnaby cannot go past the length of it. But a frightened man does not do arithmetic. He does not stop to measure the length of the chain. He looks at four hundred pounds of bear and he assumes it has no limits. So those four men ran. They ran down the slope behind the fort, past the stone wall, through the alders, and straight into the Suncook River.
Wilkins: And in the cold current of that river, in the early autumn, up to their belts, they stood there looking back up the hill, the warrants floating off their hands and into the mud and the reeds. Four warrants. Not one of them ever served. I found two the following spring, pressed flat as autumn leaves in the clay, the ink run to nothing. Fine paper. Poor swimmers.
Wilkins: I walked down to the riverbank with my hat in my hand, as a man should who respects the dignity of the law, and I asked the lead deputy whether he would care for a hot drink and a dry blanket. He said he would not. I said the offer would stand till noon. He stood in that river a good deal longer than that, and in the end he took the blanket.
Wilkins: Now, I promised you a guest, and I mean to deliver him. A man who knows a good deal about running from the law, though in his case it was on four wheels and not four hooves. He drove modified Ford coupes out of the Brushy Mountains of North Wilkes County, North Carolina, down to Charlotte. Please welcome Mr. Junior Vance.
♪ Banjo sting, applause fades
Junior: Thank you kindly, Doctor. Glad to be here. Though I have to say, I never in my life was chased by a bear. Chased by a few sheriffs, a couple of revenue men, and one very angry mother-in-law, but never a bear.
Wilkins: Mr. Vance, you will find the bear has better manners than the mother-in-law. Tell my listeners who you are.
Junior: Name's Junior Vance. Born and raised in North Wilkesboro. I drove a modified 1940 Ford coupe and later a 1950 Ford, hauled liquor down off the mountain to Charlotte. Did it for years. Lived to tell about it, which is more than a lot of fellers can say.
Wilkins: And you survived three car chases, I am told.
Junior: Three that counted. Plenty that didn't. First time, I was nineteen years old and dumb as a fence post. Revenue car come up behind me on a mountain road at night, lights off, and I never saw him till he lit me up. I just put my foot in it and prayed. Lost him on a switchback by running with my lights out. Don't recommend it.
Wilkins: That is a feat of nerve, sir. Now I understand you invented something. A leaf-spring equalizer.
Junior: Yes sir. See, when you're hauling a load of jars, the back end of that car sits low. Too low, and the law sees it from a mile off. Too heavy on one side, the thing handles like a drunk mule. So I worked out a way to even out the leaf springs so the car sat level and rode true, loaded or empty. Looked like an honest car. Drove like a scalded cat.
Wilkins: You made the car lie about its own burden.
Junior: That's about the size of it. Car looked empty, ran full.
Wilkins: There is a grand principle in that, Mr. Vance. I have long held that the best deception is a plain one. Now, my own method of dealing with revenue men is somewhat less mechanical. It involves a bear.
Junior: I heard about that. Four of 'em in the river?
Wilkins: Four. Cold as a banker's heart.
Junior: Well, Doc, I'll tell you, I'd have paid good money to see that. We never had a bear. We had dogs sometimes, but a dog will bark at a rabbit. A bear don't waste time on notice.
Wilkins: A bear is the most honest sentinel there is. He does not take bribes, and he does not take sides. He takes whatever is nearest.
Junior: Now I'll tell you what scared me worse than any chase. It wasn't the law. It was the fellows who cut corners. Folks who didn't care what went into the thing as long as it ran. I knew men who used old car radiators, junk parts, whatever was lying around, and some of 'em got sick, and a couple of 'em didn't get better.
Wilkins: You speak of a matter I will address directly before the program is out, for we have a caller on that very subject. But tell me, Mr. Vance, what is the closest you ever came to being caught?
Junior: Closest I came was outside Statesville. Roadblock. Two cars across the road, men with lanterns. I had a load aboard and a mile of straight road behind me and nowhere to go. So I did the only thing I could. I put the car in the ditch, drove down it a hundred yards along the creek bed, and came up out the other side onto a farm lane. The revenue men stood at that roadblock for an hour waiting on a car that was already three miles gone.
Wilkins: You drove through a creek.
Junior: Drove through a creek. Doc, the car smelled like a wet dog for a month.
Wilkins: A man cannot ask a finer end to a chase than that. Mr. Vance, I salute your nerve, and I suggest we leave the details of the load to the historians.
Junior: Yes sir. I'm retired now. Mostly I fish.
Wilkins: A sound occupation. The fish do not carry warrants. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Junior Vance of North Wilkesboro. We will return after a word from our sponsor.
♪ Parlor banjo bridge, then fades
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♪ Banjo and fiddle sting
Wilkins: Segment Three. Copper and the Craft.
Wilkins: Now I will speak of the metal itself, for a man who stamps copper at his anvil has a right to opinions about it. And I will speak in general terms, as history and learning, and no man should take it for instruction.
Wilkins: Copper is the old servant of the distiller, and there is a reason it has kept that post for centuries. It conducts heat evenly, it is workable under the hammer, and it has a most useful chemical habit. In the old understanding of the craft, the vapor passing over hot copper surrenders certain sulfur compounds that would otherwise foul the character of the finished spirit. The old hands did not have the chemistry words for it. They knew only that a clean copper vessel made a cleaner product and a blackened, neglected one made a worse. The metal does a kind of quiet work, and the alchemists of my trade understood the effect long before the chemists named the cause.
Wilkins: There is also the matter of what a distiller learns to separate. In the old days men spoke of the run in parts, the earliest portion, the heads, the heart, and the tails. The early portion carried the harshest and most dangerous of what came off, and a careful hand knew to set it apart and have no dealings with it. I will go no further than that, for here the line between history and recipe grows thin, and I will not be the man who crosses it on the public air. I will say only this. The craft is old, it is exacting, and it punishes carelessness. A man who treats it like a child's game will pay for it, and sometimes with more than money.
Wilkins: A dentist knows something about this. When I pull a tooth, I do not do it hastily, and I do not do it blind. There is a right way and a wrong way, and the difference is the difference between a grateful patient and a very loud one. The still is no different. The metal rewards respect. It does not forgive vanity.
Wilkins: And that, friends, leads me to our listener postcard. We have a call-in tape tonight, and I mean to play it.
♪ Fiddle bridge, brief
Wilkins: Segment Four. Myths, slang, and the listener line.
Wilkins: Our call-in tape this evening comes from a gentleman who wears a badge. A Deputy Tim Bradley of Bristol, Virginia. Now I will confess, a badge on a call-in tape makes my bear nervous, but I have taken the precaution of giving Barnaby an extra ham bone. Let us hear the deputy.
♦ Telephone line hiss and crackle, tape begins
Deputy Tim: Mr. Wilkins, tell these young folks listening about why anyone who uses a salvaged car radiator or lead solder should be run out of town. We found an abandoned site last year with lead solder that would have put a man in the hospital.
♦ Tape click and hiss
Wilkins: Deputy Bradley, I thank you for that tape, and I will say at the outset that it is the most sensible thing a man in your line of work has put to me in a long while. Now to your question.
Wilkins: Lead is a poison. That is the whole of it, and everything else is commentary. Lead does not announce itself. It does not smell, it does not taste, it does not blister, and it does not warn. It works in the body slowly. It settles in the bones and the blood and the brain, and it does its damage in the quiet of a man's own frame. I have seen, in my own chair, the gray gums and the trembling hand of a man who spent his days around the stuff. The cure for lead is to never meet it.
Wilkins: Now consider the matter of the salvaged radiator. A radiator is built for a different purpose entirely. It is built to hold coolant, and it is joined and sealed with metals chosen for that task, and often with solder that carries lead. Run hot spirit vapor through such a thing and you are asking the metal to give up its contents into what a man will drink. You cannot see it done. You cannot smell it done. You will only know when the man begins to sicken. A radiator is for cooling an engine, and it was never meant to touch a thing a person swallows.
Wilkins: The same holds for lead solder on any joint where the vapor passes. Honest builders in my time use clean joints and sound metal, and they know the difference between a vessel made for the purpose and a scrap of salvage thrown together by a man in a hurry. The man in a hurry is the man who ends up in the hospital, Deputy. And you are right that such a fellow ought to be run out of town, though I would add that it is kinder to run him out before he poisons a neighbor than after.
Wilkins: There is an old myth about this, and I will take the opportunity to bury it. Some fellows used to claim a test with a flame or with a shaken bead of bubbles that would tell a man whether his product was safe. Do not believe it. No bubble and no flame will tell you whether lead has gotten into a thing. The only safe course is to keep the poison out in the first place, and that is a matter of clean metal and honest construction, and above all of staying within the law.
Wilkins: I am obliged to you, Deputy Bradley, and I send my compliments to the fine people of Bristol, Virginia. You do good work. Tell the young folks that a clean conscience and a sound vessel are worth more than any shortcut.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: There. I have struck a cent in honor of the deputy. It will carry my name and a little of his good sense into the world.
Wilkins: Mr. Vance, you nodded at the part about radiators.
Junior: I did, Doc. I've known fellers who got hurt that way, and it wasn't the law that did it. That's the part folks forget. The danger ain't the sheriff. The danger's what you put in the jar.
Wilkins: Wise words from a man who has seen it. Friends, I will leave you with the bear's own view on the subject. Barnaby does not care for lead, and he does not care for deputies, and in the Suncook River in the autumn of 1861 he proved that a good animal can settle a dispute that the whole Merrimack County bar could not.
♪ Banjo and fiddle bridge
Wilkins: Segment Five. Sign-off.
Wilkins: My thanks to Mr. Junior Vance of North Wilkesboro for his company and his creek-bed courage.
Junior: Pleasure's mine, Doc. And keep an eye on that bear.
Wilkins: I keep both eyes on him. It is the only safe practice.
Wilkins: Friends, if the history of the old craft interests you, and if you wish to learn the principles of metal, fire, and the law as they stood in my day and stand in yours, I invite you to inquire about the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course, offered from Fort Wilkins on Route 28 in Pittsfield. It is a course of study in the history and science of the art, and it is taught with a proper regard for the statutes of the United States. Come learn from a man who has pulled more teeth and struck more coins than any fellow in Merrimack County.
Wilkins: Till next time. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ Parlor banjo and fiddle theme fades out with wax cylinder crackle