The Shad Run and the Smuggler's Alibi: Fishing Weirs on the Merrimack
Dr. Wilkins explains how the spring shad and alewife runs filled the Merrimack's banks with nets, lanterns and wagons, and how that crowd gave runners cover to move kegs under salted fish while one fish-loving deputy ate well. Retired revenue officer Captain Donald Vance tells new stories about a fish hogshead that rang wrong when he knocked on it, an eel that went up his trouser leg at a weir, and a lead-poisoned fisherman whose gums gave him away. In the mailbag, Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina asks about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, and Wilkins takes apart the blue-flame test at the 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, you great walking haystack of fleas and bad intentions, settle down! The wind's out of the south off the Suncook, and he smells shad. He thinks the whole river was stocked for his personal supper by an act of the legislature. Lie down! Lie down, or I'll pull that black molar you've been favoring, and I'll do it with the blacksmith tongs, not the dental ones.
♦ Bear grunts, chain drags, a heavy body thumps down against log wall
Wilkins: That's better. He's laid out like a Methodist at a camp meeting, sweaty, groaning, and dreaming about something he oughtn't.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, sinners, and deputies pretending to be neither. This is Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins. I'm Dr. George G. Wilkins, tooth-puller, blacksmith, inventor, and a man the Merrimack County sheriff has known well enough to call by his first name twice. We're broadcasting from the log walls of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. Tonight it's springtime on the river. We're talking about the shad run, the alewives, the fishing weirs of the Merrimack, and how half the kegs in this county got to market under a blanket of salted fish while the law stood there licking its fingers.
♪ Theme fades under
Announcer: A quick word, friends! A man who respects the old copper craft knows quality when he sees it. The Flame-Flow Still, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960, is handcrafted from heavy-gauge pure copper. See it for yourself at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com!
♪ Short banjo sting
♦ Wax cylinder crackle; distant river rushing over stone
Wilkins: Segment the first, a little history. Every spring, when the ice goes out of the Merrimack and the river runs the color of strong coffee with the cream turned, the fish come up from the sea. The shad come first, the big silver ones fat with roe, and right behind them the alewives, the river herring, packed so thick in a good year that an old-timer in Bow told me he once crossed Garvins Falls on their backs and only got his boots wet to the ankle. He was a liar. But he was a liar standing on a true thing, because the alewives really did crowd up that thick.
Wilkins: Long before any Englishman stuck a fence post in this valley, the Pennacook people were fishing those falls. Amoskeag at Manchester was their great fishing ground, and the old name is said to mean the place of many fish. Up at the outlet of Lake Winnipesaukee the first colonists found stone-and-stake fish weirs the Indians had built, and that's why the spot is still called The Weirs. A weir, for any city folk listening from Portsmouth with your fingers in your ears, is a fence of stakes and brush set in the current. It funnels the fish into a pen where you scoop them out like coins from a collection plate, except the fish are more honest than the plate.
Wilkins: Now the shad. A shad is the finest-tasting fish God ever put in fresh water, and He built it as a joke. A shad is a fish designed by a committee of porcupines. It has more bones than a Concord graveyard and less respect for your gums. As a dentist I've pulled more shad bones out of the throats of Pittsfield than molars out of their mouths. I took one out of Widow Batchelder's tonsil with my long forceps, and she was so grateful she kissed me on the mouth, and I could taste the shad. It was a fine shad. The kiss I'll keep to myself.
♦ Bear grunt from outside, distant
Wilkins: Hush, Barnaby, you weren't invited to that part either.
Wilkins: Here's the sad turn. The mill men dammed this river. They put up the dams at Amoskeag and at Lowell, and in 1848 they finished the Great Stone Dam at Lawrence. The shad hit those dams like drunk men hitting a locked church door. They built fish ladders that the fish ignored, the way my patients ignore my advice about sugar. Mr. Thoreau of Concord, the Massachusetts one who lived in a shed and wrote it up like the Book of Exodus, paddled the Merrimack and wrote in 1849 about the poor shad shut out by the dams, asking who would speak for the fish. I'll speak for them. They were delicious. The mill owners dammed the river so thoroughly that the shad and the mill girls learned the same lesson: nobody gets upstream without the company's say-so.
Wilkins: But the runs below the dams kept coming, and the old men upriver remember the fat years, and this very season the legislature in Concord has named fish commissioners to see about bringing the shad and salmon back. Massachusetts is doing the same. That's the first time I've seen two state legislatures agree on anything, and it took a fish to do it.
Wilkins: So what did folks do with the catch? You fried shad and planked shad and baked it, and the roe you fried in butter till it popped like musket caps. What you couldn't eat you salted down in barrels: a layer of fish, a layer of coarse salt, a layer of fish, pressed under a head and sealed. The alewives you salted or smoked, and the ones too many to eat went onto the fields, one or two fish in every hill of corn, the way the old Plymouth farmers learned it. On a warm May afternoon a New Hampshire cornfield smells like the Devil's own chowder pot. And mark that, because salted fish in barrels is the whole secret of tonight's show.
♪ Fiddle bridge, rollicking
♦ Wax cylinder crackle; wagon wheels creaking on a rutted road, horses snorting
Wilkins: Segment the second, runners and outlaws. Picture a May night at Hooksett Falls. There are lanterns strung along the bank like a necklace on a fat woman. Seines are going out on poles, and men stand thigh-deep in water so cold it'd shrink a Baptist's vices to the size of a grape. A hundred wagons stand up on the bank, boys sleep under the axles, and somebody's fiddling. Every farmer from Epsom to Chichester to Allenstown has come down Route 28 and over to the river with barrels and salt, because shad is food for the hard months and nobody in this county is too proud for free supper.
Wilkins: And in all that crowd, who's going to notice a few kegs? A keg at a fishing party is as natural as a Baptist at a free supper. Nobody asks how he got there, only how much he means to take home. Every fishing party brought a jug for the cold water, and so did every Methodist who swore he didn't. So if a runner came down the Suncook road with kegs under his seat and lanterns burning at midnight, no man raised an eyebrow, because every man was out at midnight with lanterns. The shad run is the only time of year an honest farmer looks exactly like a smuggler, and that suited the smugglers right down to the ground.
Wilkins: Now here's the alibi part, and it's as pretty as a pulled tooth with all three roots on. An empty wagon draws more questions than a full one. You think on it. An empty wagon rides high and rattles like a deacon's conscience, and every deputy in the county wants to know what it's rattling about. Where's he going empty at dawn? What did he drop off? What's he fetching? But a wagon heavy with salted fish? Its springs sag, which explains why it's heavy. It stinks, which explains why nobody wants to stand near it. And it's going exactly where every other fish wagon is going, home from the river.
Wilkins: The runners packed their barrels like a dentist packs a cavity. They'd take a fish barrel and set a smaller keg inside it, then pack alewives and salt all around and on top, a foot of brine-soaked fish between the keg and the daylight. Some built a false head halfway down, fish above and spirits below. A deputy would pry the lid, see a hundred dead eyes staring up at him out of the brine, smell that smell, and hammer the lid back down faster than he'd opened it. Nobody ever wanted to search a barrel of salted alewives elbow-deep. A deputy's curiosity ends right where the brine starts.
Wilkins: And that brings me to Deputy Asa Thurlow, God rest his digestion, who is in no danger of reading this transcript because he never learned to read past the word 'free.' Asa loved fried shad the way some men love their wives, which is to say more than he loved his wife. He'd stop a fish wagon on the turnpike with great ceremony, march around it twice, and say, 'I'll need to inspect a sample for evidence.' Then he'd walk off with the two fattest roe shad on top, and that evidence went to the tavern in Suncook village and into the skillet with a slab of pork fat.
Wilkins: Now the runners weren't fools. They learned to put the plumpest, roe-heaviest shad right on top of every barrel, a sort of tithe to the church of Asa's belly. By the end of May, Thurlow inspected so many shad for evidence that his belt had more holes than the county treasury. I once saw him eat eleven fried shad at one sitting. He picked the bones out of his teeth with a bone, and by the eleventh fish he was sweating oil like a lamp wick. He'd come to me afterwards with shad bones jammed in his gums like a pincushion, and I'd charge him a quarter apiece to pull them, and I'd take my payment in the knowledge that I was the only honest man at that table. He was the best-fed man in Merrimack County and the worst-informed. He ate so much fried shad that he grew scales on his conscience and swam upstream every time somebody mentioned a warrant.
♦ Bear grunt, low and interested
Wilkins: Barnaby knows this next story, because he's in it, and it's his favorite. One spring a fish peddler named Elihu Snell, a weasel-faced informer out of Concord with a voice like a rusty pump, got it in his head to sniff around Fort Wilkins and sell what he found to the revenue men. He came up the turnpike with a cart of salted herring for a disguise and pockets stuffed with more of it for snacks. Now, you don't walk past a four-hundred-pound bear in May with a cart of fish. He'd been asleep all winter, so he was hungrier than a preacher's widow.
Wilkins: Barnaby came off that chain line like a cannonball off a parapet. He knocked Snell flat on his back in the road, put one paw on his chest, and started licking the brine off his face with a tongue like a wet wood rasp. You could hear it from the forge, a sound like somebody sanding a wet saddle. Snell was squealing like a gate hinge. Then Barnaby smelled the herring in his coat pockets and peeled that coat off him the way you'd husk an ear of corn. The seams popped one after another like fiddle strings. He ate the herring, pockets and all, and then he started on the britches, because the man had sat on a barrel of brine the whole ride and was seasoned like a ham.
Wilkins: I came out with a ham bone, a broom, and a powerful lack of hurry. By the time I got Barnaby off him, that bear had taken a bite out of the seat of Snell's britches and a little of what was in them, a mouthful about the size of a biscuit. The tooth marks came up in the shape of a letter W, which I consider a signature, and it's the only autograph I ever gave a Concord man for free. Snell walked all the way to Concord with no seat in his britches, and the breeze off the Merrimack introduced itself to parts of him his wife had only heard rumored. He never informed on anybody again. He took up preaching, and I'm told he never sits down for any part of it.
Wilkins: Now I've got a guest in the parlor tonight who spent long years on the other side of all this. He's a revenue officer out of Manchester who has walked more riverbanks than a lovesick heron. He's not a friend of the trade, but he's an honest enemy of it, which is rarer than a straight shad bone. Pull your chair up to the stove and don't sit near the window, because Barnaby has views on federal men. Captain Donald Vance!
♦ Chair scrapes on wooden floor; a heavy man settles
Captain: Evening, Doctor. Evening, Barnaby, through the glass. I'll keep my pockets empty of fish, thank you.
Wilkins: Smartest thing a revenue man ever said in this house. Captain, I've been bragging on the cleverness of the fish wagon. Tell me true: did the fish barrel trick work on you?
Captain: For a season, it did. I'll confess that much. Then an old cooper taught me something. A barrel packed solid with salted fish answers you dull when you knock on it, like knocking on a stump. I went down to a landing at Hooksett one May with a stack of alewife hogsheads, oh, maybe thirty of them, and I walked the row knocking with my knuckles. Thud, thud, thud. Twenty-two barrels of thud. And then one went slosh, with a sort of hollow ring under it, like a church bell with a head cold.
Wilkins: The singing barrel.
Captain: The singing barrel. I pried the head, dug down through about a foot of the foulest fish God ever made, and there sat a ten-gallon keg nested in the alewives as snug as a babe in the cradle. The owner was standing right there, and he looked me in the eye and said, 'That's pickled spring water, Captain. For the comfort of the fish.'
Wilkins: For the comfort of the fish! The fish were dead and salted, Captain!
Captain: That's what I told him. He said, 'Well, they're comfortable now, ain't they?' I'll give the man that, Doctor. I couldn't argue it.
Wilkins: You must have smelled like Judgment Day.
Captain: Worse. I spent a week on those landings, knocking and digging. When I came home to Manchester, my wife met me at the door with a lantern, sniffed once, and pointed me to the woodshed. I slept out there four nights. The neighbor's cats held a vigil under the woodshed window, singing hymns to me all night long.
Wilkins: A woodshed is where a revenue man's wife sends him when he comes home smelling like the evidence. Now tell me about the weirs, Captain. I hear men hung their goods right in the river.
Captain: They did. There was a weir keeper below Franklin, where the Pemigewasset and the Winnipesaukee come together to make the Merrimack. Clever man. He drove his weir stakes in the spring like everybody else, but he tied stone jugs to the bottoms of the stakes on short lines, down in the current where the cold water kept them cool and nobody could see them. When a buyer came along, the keeper waded out to 'check his fish' and came back with a jug under his oilcloth.
Wilkins: And you went wading after him.
Captain: I went wading after him, in May, in that river, which is about as warm as a tax collector's welcome. I was up to my belt, feeling along the stakes for those lines, when something long and cold and slippery came in at my boot top and went straight up the inside of my trouser leg.
Wilkins: An eel!
Captain: An eel, Doctor, as long as my arm and as determined as a Baptist missionary. I came out of that river doing a dance I hadn't done since my wedding, slapping at my own britches. The keeper was on the bank laughing so hard he fell in his own weir pen. I've searched a thousand wagons in my life, and that was the most intimate search of my career, and I was the one being searched.
Wilkins: Did you get the jugs?
Captain: Got the jugs, got the keeper, and the eel got away clean, which is more than I can say for my dignity. The keeper's fine was paid, and he asked if he could keep the eel's share.
Wilkins: The Captain says the eel searched him more thoroughly than he ever searched a smuggler, and he never got a warrant for it either. Now, Captain, I know your reputation. They say you had no great quarrel with a man who ran a clean copper pot, but you came down like a falling chimney on the bad outfits. Was there one of those on the river?
Captain: There was, Doctor, and this one's no laughing story. There was a fisherman outside Concord who ran his outfit off a little landing. He got his fish trade money, and he got greedy and cheap. He'd made his worm, the coil, out of old lead pipe he'd pulled from a mill drain, and his fermenter was a fish-pickling tub with the seams sealed up in lead solder. He ran the spirit through all that lead.
Wilkins: God help whoever drank it.
Captain: God help him first. When I went to arrest him he gave me a big grin, and right along his gums, at the edge of the teeth, was a blue-gray line, like somebody'd drawn it on with a slate pencil.
Wilkins: The lead line. Doctor Burton's line, they call it in the medical books. Captain, I've seen that in my own chair, and it chills me worse than the river. When a man has that line on his gums, the lead is in him deep. It's in his blood and his bones, and it's in the gut cramps and the shaking hands and the slow wits that come after.
Captain: That's it exactly. I smashed that worm with an axe, staved in the tub, and poured his whole run onto the riverbank. Then I took him to a physician instead of a jail, because he'd poisoned himself worse than any customer. I never was sorry for that one. The man had lead in his worm, lead in his solder, and lead in his gums.
Wilkins: And the only place he didn't have any was his pencil. Captain, you're the only federal man ever to make me laugh and then make me want to wash my copper twice. Stay by the stove a spell.
Captain: I'll stay, Doctor, so long as that bear stays on his side of the glass.
♦ Bear grunt, unconvinced
Wilkins: He makes no promises. Neither do I.
♪ Banjo flourish into ad break
♦ Wax cylinder crackle; a tin bell clangs like a medicine-show wagon
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♦ Tin bell clangs twice
♪ Fiddle sting
♦ Wax cylinder crackle; fire crackling under a copper pot, gentle simmer
Wilkins: Segment the third, copper and the craft. Before I say a word, I'll say this plain, the way I'd tell a patient a tooth has to come out. Making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of the United States, and everything on this program is for history and education. I've been arrested twice, and I don't recommend it as a hobby. It doesn't pay, and the cells smell like the Captain after a week of alewives.
Captain: I'll vouch for the smell.
Wilkins: Now. We've talked all night about fish, so let me start there: keep the fish out of the still-house. A good distiller is particular about his water. You never draw your mash water below a fish weir, below a mill, or below a barn. Take it from a clean spring upstream of everything, and if the water smells, the spirit will remember it. You can't distill the stink of a rotten alewife out of a run. The stink rides along.
Wilkins: Your wash, the fermented mash, is only a few parts in a hundred alcohol. The still's job is to separate what you want from what'll kill you, and copper's job is to clean up the sulfur along the way. I've preached on copper before and I'll not wear out the pulpit. Keep it bright and scrubbed. But here's something new for you alchemists. Not every mash is equal in its poison. A grain mash, corn or rye, makes very little methanol, the wood spirit. Mash from fruit pomace, the crushed skins and pulp of apples or pears, makes a good deal more, because the pectin that sets the jelly in your grandmother's preserves breaks down into methanol. So a man running apple pomace has to be twice as stern about his cuts as a man running corn.
Wilkins: Now the cuts, in order. Methanol boils at about one hundred forty-eight degrees by Fahrenheit's thermometer and good ethyl spirit at about one hundred seventy-three, so the methanol and the sharp, volatile trash come over mostly at the front of the run. Don't fool yourself that it all comes at the very first drop, because some of it trails along. You run the still slow and low, and you catch that first spirit in small jars, never one big crock.
Wilkins: First come the foreshots. They smell like varnish and the glue pot, sharp enough to bring a tear to your eye. You throw them out every time, a gill and a half or more for every five gallons of wash, and more if you have any doubt. Then come the heads, still harsh, solvent-smelling, a headache in a bottle. Those go out too, or into the lamp, never down a throat. Then the hearts come, sweet and clean on the nose and soft on the tongue, and you keep those. Then the tails, oily and flat, smelling like a wet dog that rolled in the cellar, which you set aside to run again. You judge by nose and taste of a drop on the finger, jar by jar, and you write it down. Pulling heads off a run is like pulling a rotten molar: it hurts to throw it away, and it hurts a good deal worse to keep it.
Wilkins: Fire. I've seen a still-house in Barnstead go up like a hayrick on the Fourth of July. Here's what most men don't know. The vapor of spirit is heavier than air. It doesn't rise politely up the chimney like a Christian soul. It rolls along the floor and gathers in the low places like a snake looking for a boot. So you keep open flame away from the condenser outlet and the collecting jars, you check every joint for leaks before you light, you keep the place aired out, and you never, ever walk away from a running still, not for supper, not for a woman, not for a fish fry.
Wilkins: And the metal. You heard the Captain: no lead in the worm, no lead in the solder, no salvaged scrap of unknown parentage. Proper copper, silver solder or sound mechanical unions, and keep it clean. That's the craft. It's simple and unforgiving, like a New Hampshire winter or a Pittsfield widow.
♪ Banjo bridge
♦ Wax cylinder crackle; telegraph-office click and the hiss of a recorded cylinder starting
Wilkins: Segment the fourth, myths and the mailbag. Our call-in cylinder has come all the way from North Carolina, where they make spirit in the hollows and lie about it in the churches. Roll the tape, boy.
♦ Recorded cylinder hiss and pop
Wilkins: Here's what Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina left on our line. He says, '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: Rabbit! A fine name for a Wilkesboro man. I'll bet you got it outrunning somebody's daddy. I'll take your uncle's two cures one at a time, like two bad teeth.
Wilkins: The red oak shavings first. Ask any cooper in Concord which oak makes a whiskey barrel, and he'll spit and say white oak, never red. Here's why. Red oak is so open in its grain that you can put your lips to one end of a stave and blow your breath clean through to the other end. I've done it at a cooperage on a bet, and blew pipe smoke out the far end of a three-foot stave into the face of a deacon. White oak has its pores plugged up by nature, so it holds liquor tight. So red oak can't hold whiskey worth a damn, and it won't fix it either. Rabbit, red oak shavings in a thump keg do about as much good as a red oak barrel does holding whiskey: everything worthwhile runs out the sides. At most you'll get some wood color and a raw, tannic, puckery taste like licking a fence post.
Wilkins: Now the hickory ashes. Wood ash is the very thing your grandmother leached to make lye for her soap kettle. It's alkaline and caustic, and dumped in a still it'll give the run a soapy, slick, bitter taste, and in quantity it'll burn your gullet. Hickory ashes in a thump keg will give you soap, and a man who drinks soap at least dies with a clean throat. What it will not do is take out the bad heads. The methanol and the harsh stuff come over at the front of the run, and the only way to get rid of them is to catch those early jars and throw them out. No ash, no shaving, no charm, and no prayer will do that work for you. The cut is the cure, Rabbit. Your uncle wasn't a liar, mind. He was an honest man repeating an honest mistake, which is how most of New England's religion got started.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: There. That's a fresh-stamped large cent, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., and it's going in the post to Wilkesboro for Rabbit Miller. Hang it on your uncle's thump keg, Rabbit, so he'll have at least one thing in there that's worth something.
Wilkins: And since I've got the hammer warm, let's knock down an old myth. The blue flame. Every jug-lover from here to Wilkesboro will tell you: pour a spoonful in a dish, set a match to it, and if it burns a clean blue flame, it's safe. And there's an old rhyme that goes, 'Lead burns red and makes you dead.' Well, neighbors, the blue flame is the most honest-looking liar in New England, and I've been to three town meetings and a church supper. Wood alcohol, the methanol that blinds a man and kills him, burns with a pale blue flame too, so faint in daylight you can scarcely see it. The flame can't tell good spirit from poison any better than Deputy Thurlow can tell a shad from an alibi.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: The blue flame test is dead. The bead in the shaken jar tells you something about strength and nothing about safety. Safety is in the cuts you made at the still and the metal you made them in, and nothing you do with a match afterwards will make a poison run safe. If you take wisdom from your uncle's swamp medicine, take wisdom from my forceps too: both come out of a dark hole and leave you poorer.
♦ Bear grunt of apparent agreement
Wilkins: Barnaby agrees. Barnaby has never trusted a flame in his life, and he's lived longer than most men who did.
♪ Fiddle sting
Announcer: Before we bid you goodnight, a quick word! The Flame-Flow Still, United States Patent 10,561,960, is handcrafted heavy-gauge electrolytic copper built to last a lifetime. See it at the showroom at Fort Wilkins on Route 28, or order direct at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com!
♪ Parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme returns softly
♦ Wax cylinder crackle; fire burning low
Wilkins: That's the river run for another year, neighbors. My thanks to Captain Donald Vance, who's going home tonight smelling only of my stove smoke, so his wife may let him in the house.
Captain: I'm obliged, Doctor. Mind the bear, mind your copper, and mind your cuts. I've seen what happens when men don't.
Wilkins: Well said, for a federal man. Now, if you want to learn the old craft properly, with history, metallurgy, the honest cuts, and the safe way of doing things, enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I'll teach you to tell heads from hearts by your nose, to keep copper bright as a bridegroom's buttons, and to know the law well enough to stay on the right side of it, which is a lesson I learned the expensive way, twice. Enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course, and come visit Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield. Bring a shad for Barnaby, not for the deputy.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ Theme swells and fades into wax cylinder crackle