How to Read a Revenue Man's Boots
Dr. Alchemist G. G. Wilkins gives his field guide to spotting a federal revenue deputy on the Suncook Valley Turnpike: the boots, the mud on them, the hired horse, the hydrometer in his coat, and his sudden interest in apples. That interest makes sense once Wilkins explains how cider brandy was taxed under the Revenue Act of 1862. Retired Wilkes County runner Junior Vance tells new stories about catching revenue men in the Brushy Mountains, including a fake apple buyer, an aunt who could read a stranger's shoe soles, a deputy with creases in his new overalls, and a hound that barked at shoe polish. In the mailbag, Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's question about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg by explaining the difference between white oak and red oak and how wood ash turns into lye. He also strikes coins on his anvil while he knocks down the old gunpowder proof 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 down, you great black sack of grievances. That is the mail rider from Barnstead, not a federal man. He has nothing in his satchel but the Concord paper and a letter from my cousin begging money. You may eat the letter. Leave the rider. ... There. He has rolled over on the woodpile, belly to the sky, and he is scratching himself in a place no Christian creature ought to scratch in front of company.
♦ Bear grunt, chain settles
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swelling then falling under
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, sinners, and the two or three of you who are both. 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 am your host. I pull teeth, I shoe horses, I invent things the Patent Office is afraid of, and now and then I make a little medicinal tincture that the federal government would very much like a piece of.
Wilkins: Tonight's lesson is about survival. It is called How to Read a Revenue Man's Boots. Every man in this valley ought to know how to spot a federal deputy coming up his lane before the deputy knows which barn to look in. I will teach you to read his mud, his horse, his coat, and that sudden, unnatural, lovesick interest in apples that comes over a government man the minute he crosses the Merrimack County line.
Wilkins: First, a quick word from the folks who keep my joints tight.
♪ Brief jaunty banjo sting
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♪ Sting out
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: Segment the first. A little history, so you know who you are up against.
Wilkins: In the summer of 1862, Mr. Lincoln signed the Revenue Act to pay for the war. You know about the tax. Everybody in this valley has cussed it in his sleep, so I won't wear out the subject. What I want to tell you about is the men the Act sent. The law cut the whole country into collection districts. Each district got an assessor and a collector, and those two gentlemen hired assistant assessors and deputies to go into the hills and count our jugs. The first Commissioner over all of it was George S. Boutwell of Massachusetts. A Massachusetts man in charge of counting New Hampshire's liquor is like putting a fox in charge of counting hens.
Wilkins: Now, a lot of those deputy jobs went out by patronage. That means a man got the post because he voted right and shook the right hands, not because he knew a still from a sap kettle. Mr. Lincoln's collectors were picked for loyalty, not brains, and I am pleased to say the Union got exactly what it paid for. That is good news for us, neighbors, because a man who doesn't know his business can't hide his business either. And it all starts at his feet.
♦ Heavy boot set down on a plank table
Wilkins: Lesson one. The boot. I have one here on my table, and I'll tell you how I came by it later, so hold your water. Look at it. Black calfskin, blacked within an inch of its life. The sole is fastened with little wooden pegs in neat rows, the uppers are stitched tight and even by machine, and the heel is still square. That boot came off a bench in Lynn, Massachusetts, where they make more shoes than the Lord made feet. A Suncook Valley farmer wears his boots till the toes laugh at him. He mends them himself with a bit of harness leather and a cobbler's awl, and the heel goes round as a pumpkin from walking stone walls. When a man comes up your lane in boots so shiny I could pull a molar by their reflection, he did not buy them selling eggs.
Wilkins: There's a second kind of boot to watch for, and it's sadder. The army brogan. The Union called it the Jefferson bootee, laced at the ankle, rough side out, and thousands of boys came home from Virginia still wearing them. Most of those boys are honest farmers again, God keep them. But a few of them came home, found the farm gone to burdock, and took a government post because it paid in silver. So when you see brogans, don't spit. Look at the man's eyes. If he looks at your apple trees like a hungry man, he's a neighbor. If he looks at your woodshed like a tax ledger, he's a deputy.
Wilkins: Lesson two. The mud. You can read mud like a Bible if you were raised on it. The Concord road leaves a reddish-brown crust on a man that dries up like scabs. Down by the Suncook mill dams the muck is black and stinks of rotten leaves and fish. Up the flanks of Catamount Mountain the clay is gray and greasy and sticks to your heel like a debt. So if a man rides in claiming he's come up from Barnstead to buy a heifer, and he's got Concord red on his boots and not a speck of Barnstead anything, he is a liar. And a man who lies about his mud will lie about his whole business.
Wilkins: Lesson three. The horse. A government man doesn't own a horse. He hires one from a Concord livery, and a livery horse gives itself away. Its shoes are new and ring on the turnpike like church bells, because the stable keeps them shod to be paid for. It's fat from oats nobody had to work for. It has softer feet than a Portsmouth banker and a shorter temper than his wife. And the second it gets wind of Barnaby, a livery horse rears, squeals, and tries to climb into the rider's lap. A Pittsfield horse has smelled Barnaby since it was a foal. It just sighs and goes on chewing.
Wilkins: Lesson four, the one that matters most. The apples. Neighbors, a revenue man has a nose for apples the way a parson has a nose for a widow's pie safe: sudden, devoted, and fooling nobody. He'll ride forty miles to ask about your Baldwins, and he couldn't tell a Baldwin from a Baptist. That's a good apple, by the way, the Baldwin. It came out of Wilmington in Massachusetts and was named for Colonel Loammi Baldwin. And the old Roxbury Russet is one of the oldest named apples in this country. Every farm in New England has had a cider press since the Pilgrims got thirsty. Cider has been the Yankee table drink longer than coffee or tea. A man may press his cider and drink it hard, and the government barely blinks. But run that cider through a copper worm and turn it into apple brandy, and the federal law calls it distilled spirits, taxed by the gallon. So when a stranger in Lynn boots leans on your fence and asks, so friendly, how many bushels you pressed this fall, he isn't asking for his health. He wants to know how many gallons of brandy he can bill you for.
Wilkins: One more tell. Watch his coat. A gauger carries a hydrometer, a glass float with a scale inside, for measuring the strength of spirits. It rides in his inside pocket wrapped in flannel so it won't break. A revenue man with a hydrometer in his coat walks like a fellow hiding a second wife in the woodshed. He's stiff on the left side, keeps a hand on his chest, and won't sit down hard.
Wilkins: Now, about this boot on my table. Two autumns back a gauger came up from Nashua. A long, damp, sniffing sort of fellow named Thrupp, with whiskers like a wet squirrel. His boots were so black you could see the sky in them. He tied his livery horse to my rail, and the horse took one look at Barnaby and rolled its eyes back so far I believe it saw its own breakfast. Thrupp, being a city man, thought a chain meant safety. He stepped right up to look in my still-house window and planted his left boot one inch inside Barnaby's circle.
♦ Bear grunt, low and rising
Wilkins: Barnaby didn't roar. A bear that means business never roars. He just reached out lazy, the way you'd reach for a biscuit, hooked that boot heel in his teeth, and leaned back. I heard the leather stretch first, a long creak like a barn door in January. Then Thrupp screamed, high and thin like a teakettle. Then the boot came off his foot with a pop like the cork coming out of a jug of cordial, and the gray wool sock came after it like a widow following a hearse. Thrupp went over backward into the burdock with one bare white foot waving in the air, and it had the longest, yellowest, most neglected toenails I have seen on a living man. Sharp as a cooper's draw-knife and curled like ram's horns. Barnaby saw that foot, got one good whiff of it, and dropped the boot. I am not making this up. He backed off to the end of his chain and gagged. Gagged, neighbors. A bear that eats skunk cabbage and dead woodchucks and once ate half a horse blanket. He sat down and wiped his tongue on the grass for a quarter of an hour.
Wilkins: Thrupp limped back to Concord on one boot, swearing and dragging his foot through the turnpike mud. And I kept the boot as an exhibit. It is the only honest thing that man ever brought into Merrimack County, and it's only honest because nobody paid it to lie.
♪ Short fiddle bridge
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: Segment the second. Legends, outlaws, and runners. You all know the county sheriff has walked me into the Merrimack courthouse twice for selling spirits. I've told those stories till the clerk could recite them to his grandchildren, so I'll leave them be. The way I see it, the sheriff never caught me. I got tired of watching him look in the wrong places and showed him the right one out of pity. Each time I walked out lighter in the purse and heavier in reputation, and in this valley that's a fair trade.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: You heard that. That's my punch on a copper cent, stamping G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. right across Lady Liberty's forehead. Here's my custom. Every revenue man who leaves Fort Wilkins with both boots still on his feet gets a stamped cent as a souvenir of his good luck. I've saved a great deal of copper that way over the years.
Wilkins: Now, my guest tonight comes from a country where revenue men breed as thick as ticks and outlaws stack up like cordwood. He's come up out of the Brushy Mountains of Wilkes County, North Carolina. He hauled the mountain product down to the flat country, and he's spent a lifetime telling a federal man from a farmer at forty paces. Junior Vance, welcome to Fort Wilkins. Mind the bear.
Junior: Thank you, Doc. I've been around a few bears. Never one that sat outside a window like he was waitin' on the preacher. He looked at me comin' up the lane like I owed him money.
Wilkins: He looks at everybody that way. He's the most suspicious creature in New Hampshire, excepting my mother-in-law. So, Junior, I've spent half an hour on boots and mud. Down in your mountains, how did you know you had a federal man in the neighborhood?
Junior: Apples, Doc. You hit it square. Wilkes County is apple country. The Brushies are covered with orchards. And every fall, sure as frost, some feller would show up in a clean hat calling himself an apple buyer. One year we had one up at old Mister Absher's orchard. Mister Absher grew Limbertwigs and Winesaps and a few Rusty Coats. This buyer walks the rows with a little notebook, and he points at a tree and says, real loud, 'Fine crop of Lumbertwigs you have.' Lumbertwigs.
Wilkins: Lumbertwigs! Like it was a sawmill!
Junior: Mister Absher didn't even blink. Then this buyer reaches up, pulls a Winesap off the limb, and bites it. In August. Doc, a Winesap in August is hard as a doorknob and sour as a widow at a wedding. His whole face folded up like a pocketbook. His eyes watered, his mouth puckered, and he spat it out in the grass and tried to play it off like he'd swallowed a bee. Any apple man in the world knows you don't eat a Winesap till the frost has kissed it. Mister Absher smiled real sweet and said, 'Son, the man you want to see about a big order lives up yonder hollow, past the second branch.' There wasn't nothin' up that hollow but rattlesnakes, briars, and a hog that'd been mean since Hoover. That buyer came back down two days later with his britches tore out and his notebook gone.
Wilkins: Sent him up the wrong hollow. That's the oldest courtesy in mountain country, and the kindest one a federal man ever gets. Now, you said heels. Tell me about heels.
Junior: That was my Aunt Pearlie. Aunt Pearlie could read a man's heel like you read a rotten tooth, Doc. One look and she had the whole sorry history. A stranger came up on her porch one summer asking directions, and she offered him a seat, 'cause she was raised right. He sat in the rocker and crossed his legs, and that put the bottom of his shoe right up in the light. Aunt Pearlie looked at that heel and saw it was worn flat and even all the way across. No wear on the outside edge.
Wilkins: No hill wear.
Junior: No hill wear. A man that walks a mountain wears the outside of his heel down crooked, 'cause he's always sidehilling. That feller had never walked anything steeper than a courthouse step. So Aunt Pearlie poured him a big glass of buttermilk, the thick kind with the butter flecks in it, and told him a story about her cousin's goiter that lasted the better part of an hour. While she talked, my cousin Dwight slipped out the back and went up the ridge to let everybody know. By the time she ran out of goiter, every still within three miles had turned into a woodpile. Then she sent him off down the short road. The short road out, I mean. Not the road where anybody lived.
Wilkins: Junior, your aunt is the finest instrument of intelligence the South ever produced, and I include General Lee. A woman who can stall a federal man for an hour with a goiter could hold Richmond with a sewing basket. And I'll tell you, buttermilk is a revenue man's weakness. They're raised soft. They drink milk past the age of reason.
Junior: Then there was Creases.
Wilkins: Creases? Is that a Christian name?
Junior: It is now. We had a federal man who decided he was going to blend in. So he went to the dry goods store in town and bought himself a brand-new pair of bib overalls. But Doc, he never washed 'em. He wore 'em right off the shelf, with the store folds still pressed in 'em sharp enough to slice bread. A big square crease across each knee and another one down the bib. And the paper tag was still hangin' off the bib button, flappin' in the wind like a little flag of surrender.
Wilkins: Ha! He came dressed as a farmer the way a choirboy comes dressed as a pirate!
Junior: And he walked so stiff in 'em, Doc, 'cause new denim is like wearin' a stovepipe. Every step he took went 'shick, shick, shick.' You could hear him comin' a quarter mile off. The young'uns followed him down the road hollerin' 'Creases! Creases!' He didn't catch a soul. He got transferred to someplace flat that spring, and I hear he still had them overalls, and they were still creased.
Wilkins: Creases in a man's overalls are like a Methodist in a tavern: plain to everybody in the room except himself. Now Junior, I've got Barnaby. Everybody's got to have a sentry. What did your family keep?
Junior: Sudie. Bluetick hound. Prettiest dog in Wilkes County, speckled blue like a robin's egg that got rained on. Sudie never barked at anybody from the mountains. Neighbors, kinfolk, peddlers, preachers, she'd just lift one ear and go back to sleep. But let a man come up the lane with boot blacking on his shoes, and Doc, that dog would sit straight up and howl like the Judgment. Something about the smell of shoe polish. She hated it like sin. Daddy said she was the best deputy detector in the state of North Carolina. And she never asked for a dime.
Wilkins: A hound that howls at boot blacking is worth more to an honest blockader than a lawyer, and she costs less and smells about the same. Did Sudie ever get her teeth into one?
Junior: Just once. A man reached down to pat her and she took the shine right off his shoe. Licked it down to the bare leather and then threw up on the other one. He left. Didn't even write it down.
Wilkins: Ha! That beats my bear for style, and Barnaby will be hearing about it. Junior Vance, stay right there by the stove. Don't touch the jar on the left. That's tooth tincture, and it's for a patient.
Junior: Which patient?
Wilkins: Whichever one gets to it first.
♪ Banjo bridge into ad break
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
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♪ Ad sting, fiddle flourish
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, slow drip into a glass jar
Wilkins: Segment the third. Copper and the craft. We've spent the night talking about what a revenue man looks like. Now let's talk about what he sniffs for. A gauger with a good nose can smell sour mash from a cart path. So I'll walk you through the work in order, from the meal sack to the jar, and I'll tell you where a careless man gives himself away and where a careless man kills himself. Remember, neighbors: making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of these United States. Everything on this program is for history and education.
Wilkins: First, the mash. Corn doesn't want to be whiskey. Corn is starch, and yeast can't eat starch any more than Barnaby can eat a church pew, though he has tried. You need malt. That's barley sprouted and dried, or corn sprouted in a warm wet sack till the little tails poke out, then dried and ground. Malt carries the ferments that turn starch into sugar. My way is this. Cook the cracked corn meal in water to a thick porridge. Let it cool till you can hold your hand in it without cussing. Then stir in the ground malt and keep it warm while it sweetens. Cool it again to blood-warm, pitch your yeast, and cover it against flies.
Wilkins: Now the old trick from the Southern mountains, which Junior here will swear by. The sour mash. You keep back part of the soured slop left in the pot from the last run, the backset, and stir it into the next batch. It sours the new mash just enough that the yeast are happy and the wild beasties are not, and each batch tastes like the last. That sour smell is exactly what a gauger's nose is hunting for, so a wise man never dumps his slop in the brook where the deputy waters his livery horse. Give it a few days, three or four or five, depending on the warmth. When the bubbling quits and the cap of grain on top falls and sinks, your wash is ready. It's weak stuff, no stronger than hard cider.
Junior: Doc, my granddaddy said when the cap falls, you got about a day before the vinegar flies find you.
Wilkins: Your granddaddy was a sound chemist. Now, the still. Strain your wash and charge the pot, and do NOT fill it to the brim. Leave a good hand's width of headroom, more if your wash is foamy. A pot filled too full will boil up and puke foam right into the vapor line, and then you've got hot mash blocking your worm and pressure building in the pot with nowhere to go.
Wilkins: About copper. You've heard me say a hundred times that copper sweetens the spirit by grabbing the sulfur stink out of it. Tonight I'll tell you where the copper does the work. It's in the vapor. In the cap, the arm, and the worm, the hot vapor rubs against bright metal, and the sulfur gets caught there. The old-timers knew it. Some men who couldn't afford an all-copper pot built the pot of something else and still made the cap and the worm of copper, because that's where the vapor runs.
Wilkins: Now the heat. Heat low and slow. A drunk man and a hot fire both make the same mistake: they hurry. Pure spirit boils at about a hundred and seventy-three degrees by Fahrenheit's thermometer, and water at two hundred and twelve. So your still gives you its strongest spirit first and gets weaker as it goes.
Wilkins: And the cuts, neighbors. The cuts are your conscience. The first little dribble is the foreshots. It's sharp and stinks like a lamp, and it's poison. Throw it out. Not in the cat's dish, not in the deputy's canteen, though I've been tempted. Pour it out on the ground. Next come the heads, smelling of varnish and glue and headaches. Those go out too, or into a jar marked for burning, never for drinking. Then come the hearts, sweet and clean. That's your spirit. And at the end come the tails, oily and wet-dog smelling. Set those aside.
Wilkins: Here's my trick for honest cuts. Catch your run in a long row of little jars, numbered, one after another. Don't pour it all into one big crock. When the run is done, sniff each jar and rub a drop between your palms. Then you can see plainly where the heads quit and the hearts begin, and where the hearts go sour into tails. One bad jar ruins one jar, not the whole batch.
Wilkins: Last of all, fire. A still-house burns hotter than a widow's temper. Spirit vapor is heavier than air. Ethanol vapor sinks to the floor like a deputy's dignity and is twice as likely to catch fire. A leak doesn't float up where you'd smell it. It creeps along the floorboards to your firebox and goes up all at once. So keep good air moving, keep open flame away from the collecting end, keep the spirit jars far from the fire, keep a barrel of water and a wet blanket at hand, and never, ever walk away from a running still to go see a man about a horse.
Junior: I knew a man who walked away from his still to go see a man about a horse.
Wilkins: What happened?
Junior: Never did see the horse. Or the still. Or his eyebrows, for about a month.
Wilkins: There you have it. Science, gospel, and a hairless face all in one sermon.
♪ Fiddle bridge
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: Segment the fourth. Myths, slang, and the mailbag. The Barnstead stage brought us a message, recorded on a cylinder, from a long way off. Let's hear it.
♦ Cylinder machine whirring, hiss and pop of a recorded message
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?
♦ Recording clicks off
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina! Junior, that's practically your next-door neighbor.
Junior: I know some Millers, Doc. If he's the one I'm thinking of, his uncle also swears a mule can predict rain.
Wilkins: Well, a mule can, if you count the times it lies down in the mud. Rabbit, let's take your uncle's medicine one ingredient at a time. I'll mark each truth with the anvil.
Wilkins: Red oak shavings first. Ask any cooper in New England why he makes his liquor barrels of white oak and never red. White oak's pores are plugged up inside with little growths, so the wood holds liquid tight. Red oak's pores are open from end to end. A cooper who tries a red oak barrel will watch it weep like a Baptist at a funeral. You could blow pipe smoke through a red oak stave. So, Rabbit, red oak shavings in a thump keg will lend your spirit a little woody color and a tannin bite, the way a cup of oak-bark tea would. But they won't clean a single bad drop of heads. Your uncle's red oak shavings would leak out of a barrel faster than gossip out of a sewing circle.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Now the hickory ash. Every farm wife in New Hampshire knows what you get when you run water through hardwood ashes. You get lye. She leaches it in an ash hopper behind the house and boils it with grease to make soap. And for generations New England farmers boiled their ash down to potash and sold it by the barrel. So, Rabbit, dump hickory ash in a hot thump keg and you're not brewing medicine. You're starting a soap works. The ash makes the water bitter and slick and alkaline. It doesn't catch the bad heads and it doesn't pull out the poison. Hickory ash in a thump keg doesn't make whiskey, Rabbit. It makes soap, and I know some deputies who could use the soap.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Your uncle's medicine and every other swamp cure come down to one rule. You can't put something into the keg to take the bad out. You take the bad out by the cuts. Throw out the foreshots, throw out the heads, keep the hearts, and set the tails aside. There's no ash, shaving, root, or prayer that will do it for you. Rabbit, thank you for writing, and give your uncle a friendly slap on the back from Fort Wilkins. He keeps the old stories going, and that's worth something, even when the chemistry ain't.
Wilkins: Since we've got the anvil hot, let me knock down one more old myth that belongs to the revenue man's own trade. The gunpowder proof. You've heard that in the old days a man poured spirit on a pinch of gunpowder and put a match to it. If the powder still caught fire, the liquor was 'proved,' and that's where we get the word proof. That part's true enough. The British did it for many years. But here's the myth part: some fellows think it was an exact test and still swear by it. It wasn't. Weak spirit soaked the powder and it wouldn't light. Strong spirit let it light. Everything in between depended on how much spirit you poured, how coarse the powder was, and whether it was a damp day. Why do you think the British threw it out in 1816 and made the Sikes hydrometer the law? It's that same glass float our revenue man carries wrapped in flannel against his heart. The gunpowder proof is the only test in America where a failing grade leaves you with no eyebrows.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Some slang for your trouble, while the anvil cools. A 'gauger' is the man who measures your spirit and bills you for it. Junior, what do you call a moonshiner where you come from?
Junior: Blockader, Doc. Running the blockade, same as in the war. And the other side we call revenooers. Most of the time without the 'Mister.'
Wilkins: Blockader! A fine word, and a proud one. Up here we have no such romance. Up here a man who makes spirits is called 'that fellow up the hill,' and the man who taxes him is called a fool.
♪ Brief banjo sting
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♪ Sting out, theme begins under
Wilkins: Junior Vance, you've been the finest company Fort Wilkins has had since the sheriff's horse took up residence in my hay. Thank you for coming all this way up from the Brushies.
Junior: Thank you, Doc. And tell that bear I said no hard feelings.
Wilkins: Barnaby has nothing but hard feelings. It's his whole religion. Now neighbors, if tonight left you itching to learn the craft the honest way, with clean copper, true cuts, and a safe fire, sign up for the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. It's every lesson I've learned at this anvil and this pot, laid out from mash to jar, so you'll understand the work, respect the law, and keep your eyebrows. Ask at the showroom here at Fort Wilkins on Route 28, or by post through moonshinestill.com.
Wilkins: And next time a stranger in shiny Lynn boots leans on your fence with Concord mud on his heels and a hydrometer stiffening up his coat and asks how your Baldwins did this year, you tell him they did fine. Then point him up the second hollow past the branch.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme swells and fades
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar