The Ferryman of the Merrimack: Night Crossings and the Price of Silence
Dr. G. G. Wilkins tells the history of the Merrimack River ferries: posted tolls paid in ninepence and fourpence-ha'penny, flat-bottomed scows, reaction rope ferries, and the spring freshet. He also tells how a rival ferryman tried to sell him to the deputies and ended up sharing his scow with Barnaby the bear, while his own toll box filled with Wilkins-stamped coppers that gave him away. Master coppersmith Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister tells three new stories: a ferryman's copper signal horn and its code, a scow bow his father riveted that survived a freshet, and a 'tattletale' copper toll box. In the call-in segment, Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, then strikes the blue-flame myth dead on his anvil.
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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 great black carcass down. That jar is not for you, the river is not for you, and the Widow Tilton's laundry line is most certainly not for you. Rattle that chain once more while I am addressing the Republic, and I will sell your hide to a Concord carriage-maker for a lap robe and keep your teeth for my denture trade.
♦ Low, resentful bear grumble; chain slides and goes still
Wilkins: There. He has laid down. He sulks like a widow at the reading of a will who has just learned the parrot got the house.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, friends, neighbors, and you sorry revenue men squinting at the window. This is Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, broadcasting from the log walls of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I am your host, Doctor George G. Wilkins: tooth-puller, blacksmith, inventor, counterstamper of coin, and a man twice escorted to the county lockup and twice escorted back out again, with my hat on and my dignity in my pocket.
Wilkins: Tonight's sermon is called The Ferryman of the Merrimack: Night Crossings and the Price of Silence. We are going down to the river, friends, where a man with a flat-bottomed scow and a long pole knew more about this county's business than the sheriff, the minister, and the tax assessor put together, and charged by the trip to forget it.
Wilkins: Before we push off, my standing word to the wise: making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of the United States. Everything told on this program is history, instruction, and lies of the tall-tale variety, for your education and amusement only.
♪ Brief banjo flourish
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♪ Fiddle sting
♦ Wax cylinder crackle; distant river current, oarlocks creaking
Wilkins: Segment the first: the ferries of the Merrimack, and what they cost.
Wilkins: Now, the Merrimack River is the great vein of this state. She comes down out of the lakes at Franklin, pours past Concord, takes a bad tumble at Hooksett and a worse one at Amoskeag Falls by the Manchester mills, and runs on to Massachusetts and the sea. And our own Suncook River, which runs past this very fort, slides down through Epsom and Allenstown and empties into her at Suncook village, between Pembroke and Allenstown. So whatever a Pittsfield man makes, whether shingles, cider, or certain clear medicinal articles, sooner or later has to get across the Merrimack to reach a buyer.
Wilkins: Before the bridges, and at a hundred quiet places since, a man crossed that river on a ferry. And understand this, friends: a ferry was not some fellow with a rowboat and an opinion. A ferry was licensed. The town or the old General Court granted the privilege, fixed the tolls by law, and the ferryman had to post them on a board and carry all comers at those rates, rain or shine, sheriff or sinner.
Wilkins: I have seen those boards with my own eyes, painted on pine and weathered gray. Let me give you an honest rate card from my youth, as near as memory serves. Foot passenger, two cents. Man and horse, a fourpence ha'penny. Horse and chaise, a ninepence. Ox team and loaded cart, a quarter dollar. Sheep and swine, half a cent a head.
Wilkins: You young folks are scratching your heads over a fourpence ha'penny. Listen close. For the better part of a century, the silver in a Yankee's pocket was Spanish: pieces of eight, cut and whole. The Spanish real was twelve and a half cents, and every New Englander called it a ninepence. The half-real was six and a quarter cents, and that was your fourpence ha'penny. We kept counting in shillings and pence fifty years after we had whipped King George for the privilege of counting in dollars. Then Congress, in February of 1857, took away the legal tender of those Spanish coins, and they drained out of circulation like dishwater out a cracked basin. But the old ferrymen went on calling their rates in ninepences until they died, out of pure Yankee spite.
Wilkins: Mind you, the posted toll for swine was half a cent a head, which is still more than I would pay to ferry most of the Pembroke selectmen.
♦ Wilkins chuckling; pipe tapped against the anvil horn
Wilkins: Now, the boat. A ferry on the Merrimack was a scow: flat-bottomed, square at both ends, broad as a barn door and about as graceful, planked in pine or oak and caulked with oakum and pitch. Flat bottom so she would sit on a sandbar without tipping over, and so you could drive a team straight on over a plank ramp called the apron. The ferryman pushed her with a setting pole, a long ash pole with an iron shoe, or rowed her with sweeps as long as a church pew.
Wilkins: At the cleverer crossings they rigged what is called a rope ferry, or reaction ferry. You stretch a stout rope, or later an iron cable, bank to bank, and run the scow along it on a pulley block. Angle her just so, and the river current itself pushes against the hull and walks her across. The river does the work and the ferryman takes the money. Show me a better arrangement in all of commerce.
Wilkins: The ferries were never the only thing on the water, either. In my boyhood the Merrimack carried flat-bottomed freight boats, poled and sailed and hauled from Concord clear down to Boston by way of the Middlesex Canal. They carried lumber and granite down and rum, molasses, and dry goods up. The boatmen were a hard, loud, beautiful breed who could curse a mule into a trance. Then the iron horse came. The Concord Railroad opened in 1842 and the canal died in a few short years after, by about '51 or '53. Those boatmen went to the mills or the bottle or the West, and some of the cleverest kept a ferry and a short memory.
Wilkins: And here is the meat of it, friends. A ferryman knew everything. He knew whose wife crossed to Bow on Tuesdays when her husband was at Concord court. He knew which deacon carried two jugs over and came back with none. He knew the revenue men by their boots, their horses, and the way they pretended to admire the scenery. A ferryman is a priest with a pole: he hears every confession on the Merrimack, he charges for each one, and he forgives nobody.
Wilkins: So there were two rate cards. One hung on the post in daylight. The other lived in the ferryman's head and came out after dark. For a keg crossed at night, no lantern, no questions: a dollar. If the moon was full, a dollar and a half, on account of the danger of being seen. If the river was up in spring, name your price and say your prayers.
♦ Rushing high water, ice cakes knocking
Wilkins: Which brings me to the spring freshet. Every April the snow comes off the White Mountains all at once, and the Merrimack rises brown and ugly, full of drift ice, uprooted elms, drowned sheep, and the loose logs of the spring drive coming down to the mills, with the river drivers hopping across them in spiked boots like devils on a griddle. A ferryman had to slack his rope or take it down entirely, or the first big pine that hit it would part it like a fiddle string, and away went the scow with whoever was aboard.
Wilkins: The honest traffic stopped in a freshet. The other traffic paid triple. That, my friends, is the price of silence, and the price of a good drowning, all in one fare.
♪ Banjo bridge, minor key
♦ Wax crackle; bear chain clinks once outside
Wilkins: Segment the second: Outlaws and Runners. Tonight, the night Ephraim Gorse tried to sell me down the river, and the river declined to buy.
Wilkins: There were two crossings I used below Concord in those years. The upper one belonged to a decent old wet-whiskered fellow I shall not name, since his grandchildren are Congregationalists and easily embarrassed. The lower one belonged to Ephraim Gorse. Gorse had a face like a boiled ham somebody had sat on, and the personality of the chair. He ran a scow that leaked like a Concord lawyer's promises, and he ran it without any license I ever saw. His night rates were a scandal. He charged me a dollar a keg and a ninepence extra for, as he put it, the wear upon his conscience. The man had no conscience to wear. I would have sooner found a tooth in a hen.
Wilkins: Now, I paid Gorse the way I paid everybody in the war years, in good copper cents, each one punched on my anvil with my mark.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. Every one. I have stamped my name on more coppers than the Mint stamped Liberty's. Remember that, friends. It comes back around.
Wilkins: Well, the spring of the year after Gettysburg, the freshet was running high and I had eleven kegs of very fine double-distilled spirits of rye that needed to be on the Manchester side by dawn. The upper ferryman had his rope down for the flood. So I went to Gorse. And Gorse, unbeknownst to me, had gone to the Merrimack County deputies the day before and offered to deliver Doctor Wilkins, his eleven kegs, and his wagon to the far landing for the reward. Five dollars. Five dollars, friends! That tells you the going rate for a Judas has dropped considerably since the original.
Wilkins: What Gorse did not know was that I was bringing a passenger. Barnaby had been off his feed and moaning, and the only cure I know for a melancholy bear is a change of scenery. So I loaded him in the wagon bed under a tarpaulin, chained to the kegs, and fed him half a bucket of sour mash leavings to keep him docile. That was a mistake, though not my worst of the night.
♦ Wagon wheels on planks; scow creaking; river roaring
Wilkins: We rolled onto Gorse's scow at about midnight. No moon. The river was brown and loud and going by so fast that the ice cakes hissed against the hull. Gorse poled us out, grinning in the dark like a crack in a privy door, and I could hear on the far bank, faint, the jingle of bridle chains. Horses where no horses ought to be. A dentist knows the sound of a man trying to keep quiet. I have heard it from the chair a thousand times.
Wilkins: And then the scow pitched, and a log the size of a church steeple came out of the dark and struck us square on the bow. The kegs shifted. The tarpaulin slid. And Barnaby, four hundred pounds of bear full of sour mash and river-sickness, sat up in the wagon bed and looked Ephraim Gorse dead in the face.
♦ Enormous bear roar; man screaming; splintering wood
Wilkins: Friends, I have never heard a grown man make that particular note. It was halfway between a church organ and a steam whistle with a cat caught in it. Gorse dropped his pole. Barnaby lunged, the chain tore the tailboard clean off my wagon, the whole load went to the low side, and that scow tipped up like a dinner plate on a drunk man's knee. The river came over the rail.
Wilkins: I went in. Gorse went in. Barnaby went in. Six of my eleven kegs went in and floated away toward Massachusetts like good Christian souls departing for a better country. And in that roaring cold, a bear swims a great deal better than a ferryman does. Barnaby struck out for the far bank and Gorse grabbed hold of the first solid thing in reach, which was Barnaby. So Barnaby came up out of the Merrimack wearing Gorse like a horse blanket.
Wilkins: Now picture the far landing. Three Merrimack County deputies with their lanterns hooded and their warrants buttoned in their coats, waiting for Doctor Wilkins to step ashore into their arms. What came ashore first was a bear, black as the inside of a coffin, steaming in the lantern light, with a screaming ferryman on its back. Before anybody could say Merrimack County, Barnaby gave a great heave of his belly and put a gallon and a half of warm sour mash down Gorse's shirt front, with a whole yellow perch in it, still flapping. Gorse has not eaten fish since.
Wilkins: Then Barnaby shook him off and turned round on him, the way he turns on a cord of wood he has decided to disassemble. He took the sleeve of Gorse's coat in his teeth, and the shirt under it, and a long strip of the forearm under that, and peeled it back the way you peel birch bark for a canoe. There was a wet tearing sound like a boot coming out of a bog, and blood steaming on the cold stones, and Gorse lay there hollering for his mother, his minister, and his money, in that order. I have pulled four thousand teeth and I tell you that bear has better instincts for the soft spot than any surgeon in Boston. I stitched that arm myself the next morning, nineteen stitches with waxed silk, and charged Gorse nothing. It was the most satisfying needlework of my life.
Wilkins: The deputies? The first one's horse showed more good judgment than the deputy. It left first, and it took the deputy along by one boot, through forty yards of blackberry canes, so that he came home looking like he had been courting a porcupine. The second one fired his pistol at the sky, which has never once been guilty of anything in this county. The third, a sensible young fellow named Pillsbury, simply sat down on a rock and waited for the bear to finish his business.
Wilkins: And when things had quieted, Pillsbury, being thorough, went and looked into Gorse's toll box, a tin cashbox under the ferry bench. He found a hundred and twelve copper cents in it, and every last one was stamped G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: A hundred and twelve, friends! That was eleven years of night fares at the price of silence, and Gorse never once read his own pennies. Gorse took my coppers for eleven years without reading a one, which makes him the only man in New Hampshire I have ever been grateful to for not knowing his letters. Pillsbury did the arithmetic in front of everybody. Here was a man running a night ferry with no license, at rates far above anything posted, carrying a known article for years and pocketing the profit. The sheriff fined Gorse for keeping an unlicensed ferry and taking illegal tolls. Me, they could not touch. My kegs were bound for Massachusetts and my wagon was at the bottom of the Merrimack. The evidence had all floated away except the bear, and nobody was going to swear in the bear.
Wilkins: The moral, friends: a ferryman who talks is like a tooth with a hole in it. Sooner or later something gets in, and somebody has to come at him with the forceps.
♪ Fiddle reel, brief
Wilkins: Now, I have a man here tonight who knows the river trade through the metal that floated on it. He is the master coppersmith of the Fort Wilkins foundry, and he will hammer a pot so true you could ring it for vespers. Silas Hacksaw McAllister, pull up the nail keg and welcome.
Silas: Evening, Doctor. Evening, folks. I'll say first, Doctor, I helped you haul that wagon out of the river the next August when the water dropped. The iron tires were rusted through. The copper fittings on the dash rail were bright as the day I made them.
Wilkins: Copper does not drown, Silas. It is the only honest metal in Merrimack County. Now, tell the listeners. Did a coppersmith have any business with ferrymen?
Silas: More than you'd think. A ferry is a working machine, the same as a still. There's chain, pulley blocks, pole shoes, lanterns, toll boxes, and signals. The first ferry work I ever did on my own account was a horn.
Wilkins: A horn. Explain the horn.
Silas: On a wide river the ferry sits on one bank, and when you come to the other side and want it, you blow a horn or ring a bell that hangs on a post at the landing. Old Asa, who kept a crossing up near the Hooksett falls, he wanted a horn that would carry over the noise of the falls. Tin horns go flat and mournful in wet weather. So I raised him one out of sixteen-ounce copper, a long cone, seamed, with a flared bell I spun out on a wooden form. I spent a full week getting the taper right. Too quick a flare and she brays like a mule. Too slow and she whispers.
Wilkins: And did she carry?
Silas: You could hear her in Pembroke. But the thing about Asa's horn was the code. One long blast meant an honest traveler: a peddler, a doctor, somebody's aunt. Two short blasts meant a wet cargo, and Asa would come over without his lantern and charge accordingly.
Wilkins: Ha! The second rate card.
Silas: Yes, sir. Well, a deputy out of Concord got wind of it, and one night he came to the far post and blew two short, thinking to catch whoever came for the delivery. Asa knew the man's breath. He said every man blows a horn as particular as he signs his name, and this one blew like he had a cold in his soul. So Asa poled over smiling, took the deputy aboard and his fourpence ha'penny with him, and halfway across he grounded her on that low gravel island in the middle. He said she was stuck fast and he would have to wait for daylight, and he set the deputy on the island to lighten her.
Wilkins: And then the scow came unstuck.
Silas: Directly, sir. Asa was home in his bed inside a quarter hour. The deputy spent the whole July night on that island with the Merrimack mosquitoes. They found him at sunup sitting in the water up to his neck. He swore the mosquitoes took a pint of him apiece.
Wilkins: A deputy who learns the ferryman's horn code deserves exactly one night on an island with the Merrimack mosquitoes. What else have you got, Silas? Something from your family.
Silas: My father's story, from the old days when there were still shad in the river.
Wilkins: Ah. Before the dam.
Silas: Before the dam. You'll remember, Doctor, the shad used to run up the Merrimack every spring so thick a man could near walk across on their backs. Then the great dam went in at Lawrence, finished in '48, and that was the end of them above it. But before that, there was a ferryman below Concord who kept an old scow with a cracked bow plank. My father told him for two years to replace it, and the fellow said he would, next spring. Every spring was next spring.
Wilkins: The motto of every man who ever let a bad tooth go.
Silas: So my father finally went down one week in March and, without being asked, cut sheets of copper and riveted them over the whole bow, inside and out, with copper rivets clinched over roves. That's a little copper washer you peen the rivet down on, so it can't draw through the wood. He rapped every rivet tight. Charged the man nothing. Told him he'd send a bill when the man could afford good sense.
Silas: The very next week the freshet came. The ferryman went across with a farmer and two cows, the rope parted, and the scow took off down the river in the ice. They went over the rips, struck ice cakes the size of a wagon bed, one after another, bang, bang, bang, all down the river toward Amoskeag. Any other plank bow would have been stove in at the first one. That copper bow took every blow. My father said afterward you could read the trip on it like a ledger, dent by dent.
Wilkins: Where did they fetch up?
Silas: On a bar above the falls, in a willow thicket. The farmer, the ferryman, and both cows were alive, though one cow never gave milk again and the farmer took up religion. And from that year until the dam stopped the run, that ferryman left a bushel of fresh shad on my father's step every spring, with no note. That was the bill paid.
Wilkins: Now that is a man who understood the price of a good rivet. Silas, there's one more. I've heard you tell about a box.
Silas: The tattletale box. Yes, sir. There was a ferryman, and I'll spare his name, who took fares at night and could never see what he'd been paid. Men would slip him a worn button or a lead slug in the dark and call it a cent.
Wilkins: A sin I have committed against no ferryman, owing to my professional pride in a stamped copper.
Silas: So he asked me for a toll box he could count by ear. I made it of heavy copper with a brass slot, and inside I set two little tongues of spring brass at different heights, tuned like a music box. A silver coin, being harder and thinner, would strike the upper tongue and ring high and clear, like a teaspoon on a goblet. A copper cent, being heavier, would fall past it to the lower tongue and give a dull, round bong. A lead slug just thudded, the way a lie does.
Wilkins: Genius. And did it work?
Silas: Too well. His cabin was right by the landing. His wife sat in her kitchen at night with her knitting, and she learned the notes. Ting meant silver, bong meant copper, thud meant a cheat. She kept a tally on a slate by the stove. When he came in at two in the morning smelling of somebody's free sample and said it had been a slow night, he'd find the slate on the table: six ting, eleven bong, two thud, and where is the rest of it?
Wilkins: Ha! The poor devil.
Silas: He came to me to take the tongues out. His wife came to me the next day to leave them in, and she paid better. They stayed in. He told me it was the only honest bookkeeper in Hooksett, and he'd have divorced it if the church allowed.
Wilkins: That toll box was the only honest bookkeeper in Hooksett, and his wife married it in all but name. Silas, a pleasure. Stay on the keg. I'll need your eye in a minute.
Silas: I'll stay, Doctor.
♪ Banjo transition, bright and brassy
♦ Wax crackle; a brass handbell rings three times
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♦ Handbell rings once
♪ Fiddle sting
♦ Wax crackle; low fire popping under a pot; slow drip into a jar
Wilkins: Segment the third: Copper and the Craft. Silas, you're still on that keg?
Silas: Still here, Doctor.
Wilkins: Good. Correct me if I lie, which I will, but not about this. Friends, a still run is a river crossing. You push off from one bank full of water and promise, and you mean to land on the far side with nothing but good spirit in your scow and every bad passenger thrown overboard along the way. Let me walk you across, the way I'd teach it to an apprentice, for history and education.
Wilkins: First, the wash. You do not distill grain or fruit. You distill what the yeast has made of them. For rye, I take cracked rye and some malted barley, cook the rye in hot water until it goes to porridge, let it cool until you can hold your hand in it, stir in the malt to turn the starch to sugar, cool it further, and pitch in good yeast. In a warm, airy room it works for several days, bubbling like a deacon's conscience, until it settles and goes sour and still. Now you have a wash: beer, a few parts in a hundred alcohol, and nothing more.
Wilkins: Second, the stripping run. Charge the pot with the strained wash, never more than about three-quarters full, so she has room to roll. Bring her up slow and run her briskly to pull most of the spirit out. What you get is called low wines: cloudy, weak, and coarse. That is the ferry taking your load out to midriver. You are not across yet.
Silas: And Doctor, the pot gets a wash and a scrub between runs. Every time.
Wilkins: Every time. Third, the spirit run. Charge the pot with your low wines, and this time you go slow, slow as a funeral in mud season. Ethanol boils at about a hundred and seventy-three degrees by the Fahrenheit thermometer, and water at two hundred and twelve, here at sea level. So as the run goes on and the light stuff leaves, the vapor in the head grows hotter, and what comes off the worm grows weaker. Watch that thermometer and you will read the whole run.
Wilkins: Fourth, and pay attention to this, the cuts. Do not run into one big crock. Run into many small jars, a row of them, numbered, like teeth in a jaw. The first jars are the foreshots and heads: sharp, solventy, smelling of varnish and glue. Those go out. Not into the bottle, not into the cough syrup, not into your brother-in-law. Out. Then the hearts, sweet and clean, are your keep. Then the tails come on, oily, wet-dog and cardboard, and they get set aside for the next run.
Wilkins: And here is a point few men know. Grain mash makes very little methanol. Fruit is a different animal. Your apples, pears, and peaches have pectin in their skins and pulp, and pectin breaks down to methanol. So the man running apple brandy, our old New England trade, has the most cause of anybody on earth to cut his heads wide and generous. Do not get greedy at the front of a fruit run. Making your cuts is like pulling a tooth: you do not stop halfway because the patient looks sad.
Silas: May I add the bit about proof, Doctor?
Wilkins: Go on, Silas.
Silas: The old word proof, folks, comes from the British way of testing. You'd soak a pinch of gunpowder in the spirit and touch a flame to it. If the powder still burned, the spirit was proved. If it was too watery, the powder fizzled and you'd been cheated. These days a proper man uses a hydrometer, a little glass float that sinks deeper the stronger the spirit, and the reading is honest. In our country a hundred proof is half alcohol by volume.
Wilkins: Proof used to mean the gunpowder still burned. Nowadays it means the deputy still can't prove anything.
Wilkins: Fifth: fire and pressure, and I mean this soberly. Keep your fire low and steady and never leave a running still alone, not to fetch wood, not to court a widow, not for anything. Spirit vapor is fierce flammable, and a leak at a joint beside an open flame will turn your still-house into a bonfire and you into a cautionary sermon. And never seal a still or let her clog. If the vapor path or the worm gets blocked, by mash foaming up or a kinked line, the pressure builds with nowhere to go and the pot can burst. Then you have scalding wash and burning vapor all over the room. A still must always breathe out the end of the worm, the same way a ferry rope must always have slack in a freshet.
Silas: That's why I hammer the cap seat and lyne arm wide and smooth, Doctor. Nothing to catch, nothing to choke. And the copper's got to stay bright inside, or she won't do her work on the vapor.
Wilkins: Copper, friends, is the alchemist's honest servant. The old adepts called her Venus, the metal of the morning star, and she takes the stink out of a run so you don't have to. Polish her, respect her, and keep her clean. Silas, thank you, sir.
Silas: Pleasure, Doctor. Folks, look after your welds.
♪ Banjo bridge
♦ Wax crackle; click and hiss of a call-in recording cylinder starting
Wilkins: Segment the fourth: Myths, Slang, and the Call-In Line. We have a voice tonight from way down in North Carolina, so put your ear to the horn.
♦ Recorded voice, tinny and distant
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?
♦ Cylinder clicks off
Wilkins: Cletus Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina! Rabbit, I salute you, I salute the Yadkin River, and I salute your uncle, who sounds like a man who has never been short of an opinion or a fistful of ash.
Wilkins: Let's take it in two halves, like a split molar. First, the hickory ashes. Rabbit, what is wood ash? Pour water through it in a hopper and what drips out the bottom is lye. Potash, the old folks call it. That is what your grandmother boiled with grease to make soap, and what the corn-hominy folks soak their kernels in. It is caustic. It eats hide. Dump it into a hot thump keg or a boiling charge and the first thing you will likely get is a foam-up and a puke-over, and if you're unlucky a scorched pot. It does not clean out bad heads, because heads are not dirt. They are part of the spirit itself, and they come off the worm whatever you put in the keg. The only way to lose them is to catch them in their jars at the start of the run and throw them out.
Wilkins: Lye in your liquor makes you lean in body and soul. It takes the lining of your gullet and the faith out of your prayers in one swallow.
Wilkins: Now the red oak shavings, and here your uncle is a half-inch nearer to the truth. Oak gives spirit tannin, color, and that woody, vanilla-ish flavor. That's the whole reason whiskey is kept in oak barrels. A handful of shavings in a thump keg, with hot vapor bubbling through, would pull out a little of that color and taste. And I'll grant him this: old-timers down your way did charge their thump kegs with peaches or apples or other flavorings, to perfume the spirit going through. So oak in the thumper is seasoning, Rabbit. It is not medicine. It will make bad liquor taste woody, the way a nice coat makes a scoundrel look like a deacon.
Wilkins: Rabbit, a fistful of hickory ash in a thump keg is like a shave from a blind barber. You are going to bleed, and you are not going to look any better for it. Give your uncle my compliments, and tell him to make his cuts in little jars like a Christian. Cletus Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, you are a credit to the Old North State, and there's a stamped copper on this anvil with your name on the back of it.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Now, while the anvil's warm, tonight's myth. The blue flame.
Wilkins: Every tavern philosopher from Pittsfield to Portsmouth will tell you: pour a spoonful in a saucer, put a match to it, and if she burns blue, she is safe to drink. They say red flame means poison and yellow flame means trouble.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Bunk. Methanol, the poison that blinds and kills, burns with a pale blue flame, so faint you can scarcely see it in daylight. Good ethanol burns blue as well. Both blue! The saucer cannot tell your honest hearts from your blinding foreshots. It tells you only that something in the spoon will burn, which every man who ever lit his own whiskers already knew.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: If blue flame meant safe liquor, every Concord gas lamp would be a temperance lecturer. There is no parlor trick, no saucer, no spoon, no ash, and no prayer that can do the work of proper cuts. Throw out your foreshots and heads. That's all there is to it.
♪ Fiddle reel, rising
Announcer: One more quick word, friends! Whether you're rendering lavender oil or teaching the old ways to the young folks, the Flame-Flow Still, United States Patent 10,561,960, is handcrafted pure copper made to last a lifetime. Order today at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com!
♪ Banjo flourish
♦ Wax crackle; fire banked low; river sounds fading
Wilkins: Well, friends, the scow is grinding up on the far bank, and it's time to step off. Before you go: if tonight has given you an itch to understand the craft rightly, the science and the history and the honest cuts, send for the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I teach copper, mash, fire, and judgment, in plain Yankee English, with no lye, no saucer tricks, and no ferrymen. Ask for it by name at the Fort Wilkins showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield, or at moonshinestill.com.
Wilkins: My thanks to Silas Hacksaw McAllister, who hammers copper like other men say grace. My thanks to Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, and my apologies to his uncle. My thanks to young Deputy Pillsbury, wherever he sits on his rock. And no thanks at all to Ephraim Gorse, who I hear has taken up shoemaking, with a sleeve sewn short.
Wilkins: Remember, friends, every ferryman on every river has his price. The only one I ever trusted is the copper, because it can't talk, and if you ask Silas, it can't lie either.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, fading under wax cylinder crackle