Patent Medicine Swindlers: The Professor Who Watered the Doctor's Whiskey
Wilkins covers the patent-medicine racket of the 1860s: bitters bottles that were mostly alcohol, the 1862 stamp tax on proprietary remedies, and the medicine-show 'Professor' who watered down Fort Wilkins spirit, sold it as a cure-all, and got his comeuppance at the Barnstead muster field. Blue Ridge herbalist and slang historian Clara Higgins brings new stories of mountain medicine-show frauds and how granny-women caught them. Wilkins also answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's voicemail about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, and shoots down the blue-flame test.
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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! Settle yourself, you overgrown hearth rug. That tin peddler is not a ham, however much he smells like one. Sit down before you pull the window frame clean off its pegs.
♦ Bear huffs, chain settles
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, friends, neighbors, sinners, and any revenue man listening with his hat over his heart and his hand in somebody else's pocket. This is Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, broadcasting from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. Tonight's subject is near and dear to my wallet: patent medicine swindlers. Snake-oil men. Professors of nothing. And one particular scoundrel who bought my good spirit, drowned it in the Suncook, and sold it back to my own neighbors as a cure for everything from gout to widowhood. Stay by your set, because I got my revenge, and Barnaby got his supper.
♪ Theme fades
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Every honest craftsman needs honest copper, and the Flame-Flow still, United States Patent 10,561,960, brings Fort Wilkins heat mastery to your bench. See it for yourself at moonshinestill.com. That's moonshinestill.com!
♦ Wax crackle
Wilkins: Segment the first. Let me paint you the medicine-show trade as it stands in this year of our Lord eighteen hundred and sixty-five. A wagon rolls into Pittsfield painted red and gold like a circus that went to seminary. On the side it says DOCTOR SO-AND-SO'S VEGETABLE PANACEA, CURES CONSUMPTION, DROPSY, FITS, FEVERS, AND FEMALE COMPLAINTS. A banjo player draws a crowd, a fellow in a stovepipe hat bites a live frog or eats fire, and then out comes the Professor with a crate of brown bottles.
Wilkins: Now here is the first secret, friends. You call it patent medicine, but hardly a one of them is patented. To get a true patent you have to tell the government what is in the bottle, and the last thing a swindler wants is for anybody to know what is in the bottle. So they protect the name and the label and keep the guts of it secret. A patent medicine is a bottle that cures everything except the poverty of the man who bought it.
Wilkins: Second secret. Lift the cork on the popular bitters of this age, the ones the soldiers carried in their haversacks and the temperance ladies take by the spoonful for their nerves, and you will find more alcohol in that bottle than in a jug of hard cider. The good Methodist sisters of Merrimack County are drinking stronger stuff than I sell, and calling it stomach medicine, and their husbands are wondering why Sunday dinner got so cheerful.
Wilkins: Worse yet, a good many of those soothing syrups and cure-alls hide opium or morphine. No law in this Republic makes a man print what is in his bottle, not one line, so a mother can spoon poppy juice into a squalling child and never know it. That one is not funny, friends, and I will not make it funny. A swindler who doses babies ought to be fed to something larger than Barnaby.
Wilkins: Now, Washington did take an interest, though not the right one. Under Mr. Lincoln's Revenue Act of 1862, Schedule C, every proprietary medicine has to carry a revenue stamp. The big bitters houses have their own private stamps engraved with their names in fancy curlicues. So Uncle Sam does not ask what is in your bottle. He only asks for his penny on it. That is government for you: he does not care if you poison the patient, so long as the poison is properly licensed.
♦ Wax crackle, distant fiddle sting
Wilkins: Segment the second, and this is the one I have waited all week to tell. Two summers past, a fellow rolled up Route 28 calling himself Professor Thaddeus Pomfrey of the Philadelphia College of Vital Sciences. There is no such college, and there may be no such Philadelphia. He had a beard like a burst mattress and a vocabulary bought by the pound from a Boston auctioneer. He came to my door polite as a deacon and bought four kegs of my best double-run rye, cash money, no haggling. I should have known then. An honest man haggles.
Wilkins: Three weeks later my cousin in Epsom sends word that the Professor is selling Dr. Wilkins' Granite Mountain Elixir, with MY NAME on it, out of the back of his wagon at a dollar a bottle. Restores lost vigor, it said. Cures the ague. Makes the bald man hairy and the hairy man handsome. So I rode down to have a taste. Friends, he had watered my whiskey so thin a minnow could have filed a complaint about the current. He had stretched four kegs into forty, colored it with burnt sugar and a pinch of red pepper so it would bite the tongue and fool you into thinking it was strong.
Wilkins: Now, I pull teeth for a living, so I know a liar's mouth when I see one. It is the one that is always open. I said nothing. I went home. I got my hydrometer, the little glass float the excise men use, which rides low in strong spirit and high in water. I got my anvil punch. And I got Barnaby.
♦ Bear grunt, chain rattle
Wilkins: The Professor was booked to play the Barnstead muster field on the Fourth. So I set up my own wagon not forty feet from his. When he hollered about the miraculous strength of the Granite Mountain Elixir, I hollered back, Professor, let us test that strength before the whole town! I bought one of his bottles with a copper cent I had stamped fresh that morning, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., so there would be no question whose money paid for the evidence.
♦ steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: I poured his elixir into a tall glass and dropped in the hydrometer. That float sat up out of the liquor like a bishop in a bathtub. Then I poured a glass of my own true rye beside it and the float sank to its proper mark. The whole muster field leaned in to look. Old Mrs. Tilton, who had bought six bottles for her lumbago, read it aloud and said a word I did not know Freewill Baptists were allowed to own.
Wilkins: The Professor tried to bluster. Said the instrument was a Yankee trick. And right then Barnaby, whom I had tethered behind my wagon with a ham bone and strict instructions, caught the smell of the burnt sugar and molasses in the Professor's crate. Friends, a bear will cross a county for molasses. Barnaby snapped that rope like a garter, ambled over at his leisure, put one great paw through the Professor's canvas, and started licking the crate open bottle by bottle, like a deacon at a church supper.
Wilkins: The Professor promised his tonic would restore lost vigor, and the only vigor I saw restored that day was his own, going straight up a sugar maple in his shirt-tails. He hung up there with his trousers caught on a branch, flapping like a wet nightshirt on a line, wailing for the constable. The constable was in the crowd, and he was laughing so hard he had to be helped to a hay bale. Barnaby finished the crate, belched in a way that frightened a team of oxen, and lay down under that maple for a nap. The Professor stayed up there till sundown. He left Merrimack County the next morning and, I'm told, set up in Vermont, which is punishment enough for any man.
Wilkins: Barnaby has more education than the Professor. Barnaby at least knows which end of a ham is the good one. And I want it on the record that the bear was no hero. He was a thief who happened to rob a worse thief. A wild animal near a crowd is a danger to everybody in it, and I was lucky that day, not wise. Do not take your bear to a muster.
♪ Short banjo sting
Wilkins: Now I have a guest who has studied the medicine-show swindle from the other end of the country, down in the Blue Ridge of Virginia. She is a mountain herbalist and knows more words for bad whiskey than a Concord judge knows excuses. Welcome to Fort Wilkins, Miss Clara Higgins.
Clara: Well, thank you, Doctor. I rode a long way, and I can tell you your turnpike is rougher than a cob in a corn crib. I'm sore in places a lady don't name on the air.
Wilkins: Then you have had a true Pittsfield welcome. Now tell me, did your mountains suffer these Professors same as we do?
Clara: Lord, Doctor, worse. Every holler in Floyd County has been visited by some gentleman with a painted wagon and a beard he bought off a goat. My great-grandmother caught one of them in the dead of January. He was selling Seven Hills Panacea, swore it was so strong it would raise the dead, two bits a bottle. Well, it was a bitter cold week, and she walked by his wagon one morning and saw every bottle in the bed froze solid as a creek rock, corks popped clean out.
Wilkins: Ha! Strong spirit does not freeze in a Virginia January.
Clara: No, sir, it does not. A good whiskey'll laugh at a hard frost. She picked one up, held it over his head like a preacher with a Bible, and she said, Sir, if this here raises the dead, it'll have to thaw them out first. Turned out it was creek water, burnt sugar, and a spoon of something to make it bitter. He was gone before the ice melted.
Wilkins: Your great-grandmother sounds like the kind of woman who would pull her own tooth and hand you the bill.
Clara: She'd have charged you for the string. Now, the granny-women up our way, the herb doctors, they took those men personal, 'cause the swindlers were stealing their trade and poisoning their patients. There was a drummer come through Wytheville with Thunder Root Restorative. A granny-woman named Aunt Delphy bought one bottle, sniffed it, and said, That ain't a root, that's ditch water, cayenne, and a splash of turpentine.
Wilkins: Turpentine! The man wants to cure you and varnish you in one go.
Clara: Well, Aunt Delphy, she stood in the middle of the general store and told him if it was such a fine restorative, he could restore himself right there. Whole store watching. He drank the bottle down, all of it, tears running into that beard. About four minutes later he was running for the privy behind the livery, and folks said they heard him over the hammering at the blacksmith's. He didn't come back for his wagon till after dark.
Wilkins: That is the finest clinical trial I ever heard of, and cheaper than anything they do in Boston. Now, you collect the old words. What do your mountain people call watered or poisoned swill?
Clara: Oh, we've got a whole Bible of them. My grandfather taught me tanglefoot, for liquor that ties your legs in knots. Popskull, for the kind that feels like somebody's knocking a nail out of your head the morning after. And bust-head, which is popskull's meaner brother.
Wilkins: Tanglefoot. I like that.
Clara: And the name came true once, Doctor. A tanglefoot salesman come to the Galax church picnic with a sample case full of his Elixir of Long Life, and as he stepped up on the wagon to start his pitch, he caught his boot on his own case and went over backwards. Went right down into the fried chicken. The preacher looked down at him and said, Brother, your product's working already.
Wilkins: Ha! I would have paid a dollar a bottle just for the show. Any more of these frauds caught by the very folks who preach against the jug?
Clara: There was a Baptist deacon down near Hillsville, an awful temperance man. He bought a whole crate of Temperance Bitters for the congregation, to give the brethren something healthful instead of the jug. Then the schoolteacher, a sharp girl, set a spoonful of it afire on the church steps, and it burned like a lamp. Stronger than the whiskey he'd been preaching against for twenty years.
Wilkins: And did he burn the crate?
Clara: No, sir. He said the Lord moves in mysterious ways, and he kept that crate in his barn for his rheumatism. His rheumatism got real regular after that. Every evening, right about supper.
Wilkins: Temperance Bitters is a fine name. It is like calling a sheriff Honest Abner: it tells you exactly what you are not getting. Clara Higgins, you are welcome at Fort Wilkins any time, and Barnaby says the same, though he says it with his mouth full.
Clara: Tell that bear to keep his paws off my saddlebag. I've got sassafras in there and I can see him eyeing it.
♦ Bear grunt, chain clink
♪ Banjo bridge into commercial
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♪ Fiddle flourish
♦ Wax crackle
Wilkins: Segment the third: copper and the craft. Since the Professor sinned against the spirit, let us talk about how honest spirit gets made, and why copper is the metal for it.
Wilkins: Copper melts at nearly two thousand degrees by the Fahrenheit scale, so it holds up fine over a fire, and it carries heat across a kettle smoothly instead of scorching one spot. When I raise a pot on the anvil, the hammering makes the copper hard and brittle, so every so often I heat it and quench it in the water trough. Smiths call that annealing, and it softens the metal again so it can take more shaping without cracking. Skip it and your pot splits like a Concord lawyer's alibi.
Wilkins: A still does not make alcohol, friends. The yeast does that in the mash barrel, turning grain or fruit sugar into a weak beer. The still only separates it, by heat. And here is the alchemy that matters most for your health. Methanol, the wood spirit that blinds and kills, boils at about one hundred forty-eight degrees. Good ethanol boils at about one hundred seventy-three. So the poisonous light stuff comes over first.
Wilkins: That is why an honest distiller never runs his spirit into one big jug. He catches it in a long row of small jars so he can judge each one alone. The first, the foreshots, go straight out, never drunk, never sold, never poured into a patient's mouth. Then come the heads, sharp and solvent-smelling, and those are set aside too. Then the hearts, sweet and clean, which are the reason for the whole business. Then the tails, oily and dull, smelling like a wet dog, which go aside. You make those cuts by nose and patience. You do not guess, and you do not get greedy. A greedy man saves the heads to stretch his batch, and a greedy man is how a family ends up at a funeral.
Wilkins: As for the copper, it works on the vapor, catching the sulfur stink before it reaches your jar, and the helmet and neck where the vapor rises do most of that work. Keep that metal bright and scrubbed, keep the joints silver-soldered and never lead, and keep your fire low and steady. Alcohol vapor near an open flame will light a still-house up like the Fourth of July, and I have buried a neighbor's barn that way. Ventilate, watch your fire, and keep a bucket of sand and a wet blanket by the door.
♦ Wax crackle
Wilkins: Segment the fourth: myths and the mailbag. We have a voicemail cylinder from down South. Let us crank her up.
♦ Phonograph crank, scratchy playback hiss
Wilkins: This here's from Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina. 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?
♦ Playback hiss ends
Wilkins: Rabbit, God bless you and your uncle both. Here is what wood ash does. Pour water through hickory ash and you get lye, the same lye your grandmother boils with tallow to make soap. Throw that into a thump keg and you get a slippery, foaming mess, and a keg that smells like washday. Rabbit, a thump keg full of lye is not a cleanser, it is a laundry, and your uncle could wash his Sunday shirt in it but not his sins.
Wilkins: As for red oak shavings, they will give the liquor a little color and a woody taste, which is half of why the old-timers swore by them. Brown liquor looks aged, and aged looks honest. But the poison in a bad head is the methanol, and it comes over early because it boils low, whatever wood you float in the keg. The only cure is to throw out your foreshots and heads, every time. I knew a Gilmanton man who threw a whole hickory log into his doubler, swore it was medicine, and the only thing it cured was his supply of hickory. So Rabbit, a hearty Fort Wilkins hello to you and all of Wilkesboro. Write me again, and give your uncle my regards and a bar of soap.
♦ steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: That is a fresh-stamped Wilkins cent for Rabbit's mantel. Now, a myth to bury alongside it: the blue flame. Folks will pour spirit in a spoon, light it, and swear a blue flame means it is safe to drink. Friends, methanol, the very poison we fear, burns with a pale blue flame you can barely see in daylight. So the blue flame tells you there is alcohol in the spoon. It does not tell you which alcohol, and it cannot tell you a good cut from a deadly one. All it proves is that your eyebrows are about to leave the county.
♦ steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: And that is two coins struck for the truth tonight, which is two more than the Professor ever struck in his life.
♪ Soft banjo and fiddle return
Announcer: One more quick word, friends! Master the heat like a Fort Wilkins coppersmith with the Flame-Flow still, United States Patent 10,561,960. Visit moonshinestill.com today. That's moonshinestill.com!
Wilkins: Before I let you go, if you would rather learn the craft from a man who has been arrested twice and still has all his fingers, enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. You will learn copper, cuts, and fire safety from the anvil up. I have been arrested twice, and both times the sheriff's coffee was worse than anything I ever got blamed for selling. Remember, friends, making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of these United States, and everything on this program is for history and education only. And if a man with a painted wagon offers you a bottle that cures everything, ask him to drink it first, the way Aunt Delphy did.
Wilkins: My thanks to Miss Clara Higgins of the Blue Ridge, to Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, and to Barnaby, who is snoring like a sawmill under the window. 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