The Sanbornton Bridge Ambush That Never Happened
Every tavern on the Winnipesaukee River swears revenue deputies ambushed a moonshine runner inside the Sanbornton Bridge covered bridge in 1863. Alchemist G. G. Wilkins checks the Concord newspapers and the court record, finds nothing, and explains how Civil War era bootleggers planted false tips and paid sworn witnesses to pull federal agents off the real roads. Master coppersmith Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister looks at a tavern's 'bullet-shot' copper kettle and shows it was beaten with a hammer, while Barnaby the bear keeps watch over Fort Wilkins in Pittsfield, New Hampshire.
In this episode
- Sanbornton Bridge covered bridge ambush tale checked against 1860s court records and the Concord newspapers
- Revenue Act of 1862, federal collection districts, and the informer's moiety reward behind moonshine tips
- How moonshine runners planted false warnings to send revenue men to the wrong roads
- Why a rumor needs a sworn witness: Moses Gile of Loudon and the craft of the planted lie
- Coppersmith Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister shows a 'bullet-shot' copper kettle was hammered, not shot
- Decoy kegs, a drumming bridge plank, and other tricks bootleggers used on the Winnipesaukee River
- Listener question: hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg (doubler) during distilling
- The shake-test bead myth for moonshine proof, and why it doesn't hold up
Wilkins takes apart a tall tale every tavern on the Winnipesaukee River swears by: a deputy ambush at the covered bridge in Sanbornton Bridge village. He checks the rumor against the record and explains how runners planted false warnings to pull revenue men off the real roads, and why a good lie needs a witness who will swear to it. Master coppersmith Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister proves a tavern's 'bullet-shot' kettle was beaten with a hammer and tells of decoy kegs and a drumming bridge plank. Wilkins also answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC, about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, and knocks down the shake-test bead myth.
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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: Barnaby! Barnaby, settle your carcass. You've already eaten a sack of meal, a ham hock, and the left boot of a Gilmanton peddler, and you're still bawling at that window like a choir boy with the colic. If you rattle that chain one more time I'll sell you to a Concord minister as a fur coat that comes with its own sermon. Lie DOWN.
♦ Bear huffs, chain drags across frozen dirt, a heavy body thumps to the ground
Wilkins: There. Four hundred pounds of resentment, napping.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, rising then settling under the voice
Wilkins: Good evening, friends, neighbors, sinners, and any revenue man listening at the keyhole. This is Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, coming to you from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I'm your host, Dr. George G. Wilkins: tooth-puller, blacksmith, inventor, stamper of coins, and the man the Merrimack County sheriff has twice had the pleasure of arresting and twice had the displeasure of feeding.
Wilkins: Tonight we're opening up a corpse of a story, and I mean to cut it open the way I'd open an abscess, slow and deep, with a bucket handy. They call it the Sanbornton Bridge Ambush. You've heard it. Every tavern from Franklin Falls to Meredith Bridge has told it to you, and every one of them told it wrong. Tonight we sort the rumor from the record.
♪ Theme fades under a crackle
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Before the Doctor gets to his dissecting, remember the Flame-Flow Still, protected by United States Patent 10,561,960 and handcrafted from pure copper. See it at moonshinestill.com or at the Fort Wilkins showroom on Route 28!
♦ Wax cylinder crackle; a log shifts in the stove
♪ Short fiddle sting, minor key
Wilkins: Segment the first. History, and the geography of a lie.
Wilkins: First you need to know the ground. Sanbornton Bridge is a mill village on the Winnipesaukee River. That river is what the big lake lets out of its mouth. It comes down through Laconia, tumbles through the mill dams at Sanbornton Bridge, and runs on to Franklin, where it meets the Pemigewasset and they become the Merrimack together, like two drunks leaning on each other the whole way to the sea. On the far bank is Northfield. In between is a covered bridge, dark as a coal cellar at noon, its planks loose enough to rattle your back teeth.
Wilkins: Since the Boston, Concord and Montreal rails came through around 1848, Sanbornton Bridge has had the telegraph, the newspapers, and a station platform full of strangers. That means news travels faster there than anywhere else in this part of the state. Lies do too, and they go further, because a lie doesn't have to stop at every depot to unload the truth.
Wilkins: Now, the war. In 1862 Congress passed the Revenue Act and split the country into collection districts, every one with its own federal assessor and collector. I won't recite the gallon rate again; my listeners know it, and my liver knows it better. What matters tonight is how those revenue men found a still. They didn't find it with a divining rod. They found it with tips.
Wilkins: The law sweetened the pot for tipsters. An informer could collect a share of the fines and the seized goods. They called it the moiety. Think about what that does to a county. The day that law took hold, every jealous husband in Merrimack County discovered a patriotic interest in his neighbor's woodshed. Every man who'd lost a horse trade, every widow cut out of a will, every deacon with a grudge suddenly loved the Union like a son.
♦ Wilkins spits into a tin can
Wilkins: So here's the tale as the Crown and Anchor crowd tells it. In the fall of 1863 a runner was bringing a wagonload of cider brandy down from Gilmanton way and had to cross the Winnipesaukee at Sanbornton Bridge. Inside that covered bridge, in the pitch black, three deputies were waiting with muskets. The runner saw a pipe glowing, whipped up his team, and went through that bridge so fast the planks caught fire. One deputy got knocked into the river. Another fired and put a ball clean through a copper kettle in the wagon. The runner got away and was never seen again.
Wilkins: Fine story. Go to the next tavern, though, and there were six deputies. At the one after that it was a revenue collector from Concord himself, in a stovepipe hat, hanging from the rafters like a bat. By the time it got to Meredith there were twelve deputies and a brass band, all hiding in a bridge that couldn't hold four cows. One fellow in Franklin told me the runner was a woman dressed as a Baptist. Another swore it was a ghost. A third swore it was his cousin, and the cousin was buying.
Wilkins: The only thing every telling agreed on was that the teller's cousin was there and the teller was the hero.
Wilkins: So I did what any dentist does with a man who swears his tooth doesn't hurt. I went looking where it hurts. I read the Concord papers, the Patriot and the Independent Democrat, for that whole autumn and the next. They print every court case, every horse thief, every man fined for beating his mule on the Sabbath. If there'd been an armed ambush of county deputies on a public bridge, with a man in the river and shots fired, there'd have been ink spilled all over it. There wasn't a line. I asked the clerk of court, whom I've come to know better than I'd like. No warrant, no arrest, no seizure, no inquest. No deputy drew pay for night work at that bridge.
Wilkins: You know what I did find? That same week, half the sheriff's men in the county were at a fiddle dance in Northfield, and two of them got into a fistfight over a schoolteacher. That's on the record, because one of them sued the other over a coat.
Wilkins: So the ambush never happened. The question worth your evening is why the whole river valley wanted to believe it did. After this, I'll tell you, and I'll tell you what part I had in it.
♪ Banjo bridge, quick and sly
♦ Wax cylinder crackle; chain clinks outside
Wilkins: Segment the second. Runners, outlaws, and the craft of the planted lie.
Wilkins: Here's the secret every good runner in New Hampshire knew. Revenue men are like trout. You don't chase a trout. You put something shiny in the wrong part of the stream and let him chase it.
Wilkins: A runner who meant to move a load down the Sanbornton road on Tuesday would make sure that on Saturday a story went around the taproom: deputies are watching the covered bridge. Some would hear it and keep off the bridge. Most important, it got back to the deputies, because every taproom has a man who drinks with both sides. Now the revenue men think the runners are scared of the bridge. So they watch the ford. Or they decide the bridge story is a trick and watch the bridge after all. Either way, the runner has made them choose. While they're choosing, he goes by the third road, the logging track through the pines nobody mentioned.
Wilkins: But a planted rumor by itself is weak tea. Here's the law of it, and you can carve it over your door. A rumor without a witness is gossip. A rumor with a witness is intelligence. A rumor with a witness and a Bible is federal business.
Wilkins: You need a man who'll stand up and say, I was there, I saw it, I'll swear to it. For that, my friends, there was old Moses Gile of Loudon. Moses would swear to anything for a plug of tobacco, and for two plugs he'd weep while he did it. Moses swore he saw the deputies' pipe glow in that bridge. He swore he heard the musket. By the third telling Moses swore he'd pulled the deputy out of the river by his collar and got bit for his trouble. He showed people the bite. It was from his own dog.
♦ Wilkins chuckles, low and wicked
Wilkins: Now I'll confess, since the statute is a poor sleepy thing and the sheriff already knows my face. I paid for one of those plugs. Not to start the tale. The tale was already loose. But I had a load of my own rye going out the Suncook way that week, and anything that kept the county's eyes fixed on the Winnipesaukee was worth a nickel of Virginia leaf to me. Moses got his tobacco. I got a clear road. Everyone was happy except the truth, and the truth has never once bought me a drink.
Wilkins: The moiety cut both ways, though. Some of the men selling tips were selling them with no more truth in them than Moses. One such was a Gilmanton fellow, Horace Twombly, who smelled reward money the way a fly smells a privy. Horace decided Fort Wilkins was hiding a hundred barrels, and he came one night to count them.
♦ Bear grunts, low, as if he remembers
Wilkins: Yes, Barnaby, you remember Horace. Horace came over my back fence just after moonrise. He didn't know about the chain, and he certainly didn't know the chain was twelve feet long and he'd landed at eleven. Barnaby got up off the ground the way a bad decision gets up off a barroom floor, slow and then all at once. He took the seat clean off Horace's trousers, plus a respectable portion of what was in them. It sounded like a wet bedsheet tearing in a high wind, and then like a hog getting news it didn't care for. Horace went back over that fence without touching it. He left a strip of good gray wool on the rail, one shoe in the yard, and a trail down the turnpike you could have followed by lantern-light without the lantern.
Wilkins: I stitched him up myself the next morning in this very chair. He bit a leather strap clean through while I worked. Horace ate standing up until Thanksgiving, and he took his Christmas dinner off the mantelpiece like a horse at a feed trough. He never filed his claim. A man can't swear to the number of barrels he saw when everything he saw was the inside of his own trousers going the wrong direction.
Wilkins: I've been arrested twice, as all of you know, and both times the county got less out of me than I got out of the ride. That's all I'll say on that tonight. Instead let me bring in a man who's handled more evidence from this tale than any judge. He's hammering copper at the Fort Wilkins foundry this very week, and his forearms are bigger than my opinions. Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister. Pull up the stool, Silas, and mind the spittoon. It bites.
♦ Heavy boots on plank floor, a stool scrapes
Silas: Evening, Doctor. Evening, everybody listening. I'll mind it, though I've seen you miss it more than any man alive.
Wilkins: Silas, you've seen the famous kettle. The one that took the deputy's musket ball in the ambush that never was.
Silas: I have, Doctor. I've held it. The man who keeps the tavern down at Sanbornton Bridge has it hung over his bar with a card on it: shot through at the ambush. Last spring he brought it to me to fix a split seam at the bail. He wanted the seam mended and the bullet hole left alone, he said, for history.
Wilkins: And what did the copper tell you?
Silas: Copper always tells the truth, Doctor. It's the most honest thing in this valley after a good saw blade. When a musket ball hits a sheet of copper, it stretches the metal into a crater before it tears. The edges are thin and ragged, the lip is cracked like ice on a puddle, and there's gray lead smeared down inside, because a ball is soft and leaves a bit of itself behind. That kettle had none of that. It had a dozen round, even dimples, all the same size, all overlapping a little, the way they do when a man swings a ball-peen hammer in a steady rhythm. Some fool had even started on the inside and switched to the outside halfway, as if he'd had a drink between.
Wilkins: So someone beat it on purpose.
Silas: Someone was paid to. I asked the tavern-keeper, and he went red as a radish and allowed he'd paid a smith in Franklin a dollar to work it over. He said the story brought in more custom than his pickled eggs.
Wilkins: That tavern-keeper paid a dollar to have his kettle beaten and has earned eleven dollars a year since on the story, which is a better return than any bank in Concord ever paid. Did you mend the seam?
Silas: I mended the seam with good silver solder. I left the dents too. I'm not in the business of ruining a man's living. I just won't swear they're bullet holes.
Wilkins: Ha! Spoken like a coppersmith with a conscience, which is about as rare as a sober Fourth of July. Now Silas, your family had a hand in the planted-lie trade, as I understand.
Silas: My father did, back in the forties, before the war. Before the revenue men, the trouble was the county and the temperance crowd. A Gilmanton cider man came to Father and asked for a set of kegs that sounded full but were empty.
Wilkins: A hollow keg that sounds full. That's a temperance lecturer in wood.
Silas: Close enough. Father lined twelve oak kegs with thin copper sheet, tight to the staves, and left a dead-air space inside. Empty, they boomed like a drum. Rolled onto a wagon, they rang every time the wheels hit a rut. The driver was told to go across the covered bridge at Sanbornton at a trot, rattling all the way, and to look nervous, which wasn't hard for him. Half the county's watchmen heard that wagon come through and ran after it clear to Northfield. The real load, forty kegs of cider brandy, crossed by the ford below the mill dam at a walk, quiet as cream.
Wilkins: And when they caught the decoy?
Silas: They pried every bung and found air. The driver told them he was taking empties to a cooper. He was too. Father was the cooper.
Wilkins: [laughing] The Lord loves a true alibi. Now tell me about the drumming plank. I've only heard half of it.
Silas: That was my grandfather, and that's a warning, not a lie. At the Northfield end of one of the old covered bridges there was a loose plank the town never fixed. Grandfather crawled under it at night and nailed a thin sheet of copper to the stringers, just under the plank, with a little gap. A man on foot or a light buggy, nothing. But a heavy wagon, the kind a sheriff's posse brings to haul away barrels, would press that plank down onto the copper and it went BOOM, like a church bell dropped down a well. Every house on the riverbank knew the sound. A cow crossing never did it. A loaded wagon always did.
Wilkins: A burglar alarm made of copper and Yankee spite. Did the sheriff ever find it?
Silas: Twenty years later, when they replanked the bridge. The carpenter brought the sheet to Grandfather and asked what it was for. Grandfather said it was a sounding board for the choir.
Wilkins: Now Silas, here's the one I most want to hear. A man once asked you to be the sworn witness.
Silas: He did, Doctor. A runner, I won't give his name since he's still upright, asked me to tell the deputies I'd seen a party of men waiting at the bridge. He offered me a good pair of tin snips. And I said no. I don't swear to what I didn't see. It's like a weld: if it isn't sound, I don't put my mark on it.
Wilkins: So you sent him off with nothing.
Silas: I sent him off. Then the next morning three deputies came round to the shop asking if I'd seen anything. And I told them the plain truth, every bit of it. A man came and asked me to lie to you. He wanted me to say there were men at the bridge. He's taking his load by the Belmont road at four o'clock, because that's what he told me, and he's driving a sorrel mare with one white sock. I gave it to them that exact.
Wilkins: And?
Silas: They looked at each other and decided I was the liar. Nobody, they said, tells it that plain unless he's covering something. They went off to Belmont looking for a man they figured didn't exist, so as to prove me a fool. He was taking the Belmont road all along. They passed him. They tipped their hats to him. They were too busy looking for my lie to see his truth.
Wilkins: There it is, friends. The truth told plain enough sounds like the biggest lie in New Hampshire, and Silas proved it by sending three deputies to Belmont looking for a man who was right in front of them. Silas, you'll stay for the copper talk?
Silas: Wouldn't miss it, Doctor. I want to hear you get the metallurgy wrong so I can correct you.
Wilkins: He's a cruel man, folks. I love him like the son I'd have had if I'd had a son who argued with me.
♪ Banjo and fiddle swell into a patent-medicine fanfare
♦ A drum roll on a washtub, wax crackle
Announcer: Step right up, friends of Fort Wilkins, step up and lend me your ears! Are you tired of cheap tin, patched kettles, and pots soldered with who-knows-what? Then hear this! If you appreciate authentic American craftsmanship, look no further than Moonshine Stills, proud home of the Flame-Flow Still, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960! Handcrafted of heavy-gauge, high-purity electrolytic copper, the very metal Silas McAllister swears by, with precision CNC-machined brass unions that seal tight and true! The Flame-Flow is engineered to maximize convective circulation, rolling the heat evenly through the pot for unmatched purity in essential oils, herbal tinctures, and traditional distillation demonstrations! Copper in the vapor's road, friends, where it does its finest work! And the price? Just eight hundred ninety-nine dollars for a flagship still built to be handed down to your grandchildren! Don't take a tavern rumor's word for it. Come see the copper with your own eyes at the Fort Wilkins showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, where Barnaby himself stands guard! Or order direct at moonshinestill.com, that's https://moonshinestill.com/products/flame-flow-copper-still! Once more, friends: moonshinestill.com, for the Flame-Flow Still! Order today!
♦ Bear grunts approvingly; drum roll ends with a cymbal tap on a pot lid
♪ Fanfare resolves into the theme, then out
♦ Wax cylinder crackle; drip into glass jar
Wilkins: Segment the third. Copper and the craft.
Wilkins: Before I say one word about the still, the plain truth, which I'll swear to without tobacco: making distilled spirits to drink without a federal permit is against United States law, and everything on this program is history and education. I've been arrested twice. You needn't make it a family tradition.
Wilkins: Now. Silas, you said copper always tells the truth. Tell the people where it does its best truth-telling.
Silas: In the vapor, Doctor. Folks think it's the pot that matters most, but the copper does its cleaning where the hot vapor rubs against it: the helmet up top, the swan neck, and the worm in the cooling tub. The vapor is where the stink rides. A copper pot with a tin neck is a pastor who preaches Sunday and gambles Monday. I'd rather a man had copper above the boil than below it, if he can't have both.
Wilkins: Hear him. Copper in the vapor's road. Now the cuts, and here's where tonight's topic comes back round. A run comes out of the worm in a particular order, and it comes out like news on the Winnipesaukee. First come the foreshots and heads, the light, sharp, volatile stuff. Heads are like rumors: first out the spout, loudest smell in the room, and they'll give you a headache by morning if you swallow them. They carry the poisonous light spirits, and they go to the ground or the lamp, never to the mouth. Not the first jar, not the second, not as a toothwash. I'm a dentist and I'm telling you.
Wilkins: Then the hearts, the honest middle of the run: clean, sweet, steady. Then the tails, oily and dull and smelling like a wet dog that's been to a funeral. Those you set aside to run again another day.
Wilkins: So how does a man know where one ends and the next begins? Here's the method, step by step, the way I taught it in this workshop.
Wilkins: One. Line up a row of small clean jars, many more than you think you'll need, and number them on a scrap of paper pasted to each. Don't catch the run in one big crock. One big crock is how a man drinks his heads by accident.
Wilkins: Two. Bring your fire up gentle. A man who runs his still on a roaring fire is like a dentist in a hurry: he gets the whole thing out at once, roots, gum, and a piece of the patient. A slow, steady fire separates the cuts cleanly. A fierce one smears them together so they can't be parted.
Wilkins: Three. Throw away the first runnings, the foreshots, and be generous about it, not stingy. A careful man throws away more than he must. A dead man threw away less.
Wilkins: Four. Let the jars fill in order and set them aside to breathe. Then go down the row with your nose. The early jars smell sharp and solventy, like varnish or nail-polish remover. That's heads, and it goes. When the sharpness falls away and the smell turns clean and sweet with the grain, you're in the hearts. When it goes flat, cardboardy, and slick between your fingers, you're into tails. The jars tell you where to cut. A man's guess doesn't.
Wilkins: Five. Never walk away from a running still. Not for a privy trip, not for a pretty neighbor, not for a sheriff at the door. Alcohol vapor near an open flame will burn a still-house to the stone, and I've seen the black square in the snow where a good man's barn used to be.
Silas: And Doctor, I'll add the smith's part. Every joint on that still has to be tight and made of honest metal. A weeping joint near the fire is a fuse.
Wilkins: Right as rain. Now the mash, for the history of it. Through this valley in the sixties, a good number of men ran a mixed grain mash, mostly cracked corn with a portion of rye or barley for spice, cooked, cooled to blood-warm, and set with yeast in an open tub covered with a cloth, in a place that stays warm and gets fresh air. It works a few days, foaming and muttering like a congregation that's heard the collection's going up, and when it goes quiet and tastes sour rather than sweet, it's a wash, ready for the still. Every bit of skill I just described comes after that. The mash makes the flavor. The cuts decide whether it's fit for a decent man or a wake.
♪ Brief fiddle passage
♦ Wax cylinder crackle; anvil set rings faintly as Wilkins sets a coin
Wilkins: Segment the fourth. Myths, slang, and the mailbag. Tonight we've got a talking cylinder in the post, all the way from Wilkesboro, North Carolina, packed in sawdust and smelling faintly of tobacco. Let's put it on the machine.
♦ Click of a cylinder mount, needle drop, a second layer of crackle
Cletus: Alchemist, my uncle swears old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Is there any truth to that, or was he just making swamp medicine?
♦ Needle lifts
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller, of Wilkesboro! A fine question from a fine part of the world. Your mountains have turned out more good runners than ours have turned out good sermons. Let's take your uncle's remedy apart one piece at a time.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: First, the hickory ash. What is wood ash? It's potash and lime, mostly. Alkaline. It's the same ash every grandmother in New England poured water through in an ash-hopper to make lye for soft soap. Throw it into a hot thump keg and you aren't cleaning your spirit. You're starting to make soap of it. The alkali works on the oils and the sour notes and leaves a slick, bitter, washday taste and a cloudy jar. Rabbit, your uncle's hickory ash is fine for making soap, so if he wants his whiskey to taste like Monday washday, he's on the right road.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Second, the red oak. Here your uncle is half right, and I'll give him credit where it's earned. Oak in a hot doubler does give something: tannin, a bit of color, a woody taste. Some distillers put wood or even fruit in the thump keg on purpose, as a flavoring trick. But mark me. Flavoring isn't cleaning. And red oak in particular is the wrong oak. Its pores run open like a sieve, which is why no cooper worth his adze makes a spirit barrel from it. He uses white oak, whose pores are plugged up natural and tight. Red oak in a thump keg is like a Boston lawyer in a church: it gives the room some color, but it won't save a single soul.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Third, the bad heads, which is the real meat of your question. Nothing you drop into a pot or a thump keg pulls the heads out. Not ash, not shavings, not a rabbit's foot, not a prayer read backwards. The heads come out the spout early, and the only cure is to catch them in their own jars and throw them away. Same as I said in the copper talk: the jars and your nose decide. Your uncle's ashes are a tale told in a tavern, Rabbit, and tonight we've learned what a tale is worth without a record behind it.
Wilkins: Now while my punch is hot, one more myth to strike. The shake test. A man shakes a jar, watches the bubbles, the bead, and says, big beads that hang, that's good liquor, safe liquor. Half true and half deadly. The bead gives a rough idea of how strong the jar is, and that's all. It can't tell you a thing about poison, about lead from a bad joint, or about heads a fool didn't cut. A jar that would blind you can bead as pretty as a parson's daughter at a harvest dance. That bead can tell you roughly how strong the jar is and can't tell you whether the jar will kill you, which is like a horse trader telling you the color of the horse and keeping quiet about its legs.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, then the coin is flicked and spins on the anvil
Wilkins: There. One fresh copper, stamped G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., and I'm mailing it to Wilkesboro. Rabbit Miller, this one's for you. Give your uncle my regards, tell him to use his ashes for soap and his oak for barrels, white oak only, and tell him the Doctor says he's a good storyteller and a poor chemist, which is the best kind of uncle to have.
♦ Bear grunts, chain clinks
Wilkins: Barnaby agrees. He's eaten soap before, and it went no better for him than it will for the whiskey.
♪ Theme returns, gentle and slow
Wilkins: That brings us to the end of the road, friends. My thanks to Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister, who's proved tonight that copper and an honest man will both tell you the truth if you know how to listen.
Silas: Thank you, Doctor. And folks, if a tavern-keeper shows you a bullet hole, ask to see the lead.
Wilkins: Hear, hear. Now, if you want to learn this craft properly, the history, the metal, the cuts, the fire, and how not to end up a tavern story yourself, enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I'll teach you to read a run like I read a jaw, one tooth at a time, and I'll teach you the law along with it, which is more than the sheriff ever did for me.
Announcer: One more quick word, friends! Silas works the copper and the Doctor swears by it: the Flame-Flow Still, U.S. Patent 10,561,960, handcrafted pure copper. Order it at moonshinestill.com, or come see it at Fort Wilkins on Route 28!
Wilkins: And remember the lesson of the Sanbornton Bridge. Every tavern had a version, every version had a witness, and not one had a record. When a story comes to you with a hero, a cousin, and a sworn man with a plug of tobacco in his cheek, go to the papers, go to the clerk, and go look at the copper. And when you hear a story that's too plain to be a lie, follow it to Belmont.
Wilkins: 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 mountain fiddle theme fades into wax cylinder crackle
♦ Wax cylinder runs out, needle hiss, silence