Tooth Pulling Tales: The Worst Molar, the Biggest Farmer, and the Whiskey Bill
Dr. G. G. Wilkins tells how he wrestled a rotten, hook-rooted molar out of Absalom Thorne, the biggest farmer in the Suncook Valley. The job broke a chair, split a ceiling beam and ended with a whiskey bill fifteen times the fee for the tooth. Master coppersmith Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister tells new stories about a copper spit basin that rang for every tooth, a fraud traveling tooth-drawer and his bending forceps, and a scalding foot bath. Before the sign-off, Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC, about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, and knocks down the old 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. Barnaby! Settle down, you four-hundred-pound sack of bad intentions. That isn't supper you smell. It's a molar, pickled in a jar on my shelf, and it is not for bears.
♦ Bear huffs, chain drags across frozen gravel, a low rumbling groan
Wilkins: He's been snuffling at that window since Tuesday. Bears can smell a rotten tooth across a county line, and I've pulled enough of them to keep Barnaby in a permanent state of hope.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, you lovely, crooked, gap-toothed sinners, and welcome to Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, broadcasting from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I am your host, your dentist and your blacksmith, and twice now, according to the county, your most notorious prisoner. Tonight's subject is Tooth Pulling Tales: the worst molar I ever met, the biggest farmer I ever wrestled, and the whiskey bill that came after, which hurt him worse than the forceps did. First, though, a word from the folks who keep my joints tight.
♪ Banjo vamps quietly under
Announcer: A quick word, friends! A leaky fitting is a rotten tooth in your still. It aches, it stinks, and it only gets worse! Heavy-Duty Sanitary Tri-Clamp Ferrules and Gaskets from Moonshine Stills seal tight and stay tight. See the whole line at moonshinestill.com!
♪ Theme resolves on a fiddle flourish
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
♪ Slow, mournful fiddle bridge
Wilkins: Segment the first: Rotten Teeth in Cider Country. Before we pull anything, you have to understand how New England's mouths got into such a state. Our great-grandfathers drank cider at breakfast, cider at dinner and cider at supper, and they gave it to the children by the dipper. They sweetened their porridge with West India molasses and washed it down with molasses rum. Put sugar and acid in a man's mouth three times a day for sixty years and you get a jaw like a burnt-over sugar bush: black stumps, pockets of rot, and one lonesome eyetooth standing guard over the ruins.
Wilkins: And when the cider wasn't strong enough, our forefathers jacked it. You set a barrel out in a January cold snap, the water freezes into a crust, you chip the ice off, and what's left in the middle is strong and mean. Now here is the alchemy of it. When you jack cider, you throw nothing away. A distiller at his still separates the good from the bad and gets rid of the bad. Freeze it and the bad stays right in the cup with the good. My grandfather drank jacked cider every winter of his life, and he woke up every morning feeling like a mule had kicked in his skull and then gone back for his hat. They called it the apple palsy. I call it bookkeeping. Nature always collects.
♦ Wilkins sets down a tin cup, wooden chair creaks
Wilkins: Now, teeth. In this country a tooth is worth something. Every one of you knows about Waterloo teeth. After Old Boney was beaten in 1815, scavengers went over that Belgian field with pliers and sacks, prying the front teeth out of dead men, and the London dentists set them in ivory plates for fine gentlemen. And I'll tell you what's whispered in the dental trade this very year. Barrels of teeth from the Virginia battlefields have gone across the water the same way. So somewhere in London a gentleman is chewing his mutton with a Maine boy's incisors and complaining about the gravy.
Wilkins: The war made teeth matter on this side of the ocean too. The Union examining surgeons would send a recruit home if he didn't have enough front teeth meeting to tear a paper cartridge, because a soldier who can't bite his powder open can't load his musket. In sixty-three two strapping Barnstead lads came to my door and asked me to pull their front teeth so they'd fail the examination. I charged them double and told them a coward's grin costs extra. They went home with all their teeth and an earful, and one of them came back from Petersburg a sergeant. I'll take a small part of the credit and all of the double fee.
Wilkins: And what about the pain, you ask? A Vermont-born man named Horace Wells, a dentist down in Hartford, Connecticut, had his own tooth drawn under laughing gas in 1844 and didn't feel a thing. So he went up to Boston in 1845 to show the great surgeons. His patient hollered at the wrong moment, the students hissed, and somebody shouted humbug. Poor Wells never got over it. Now a fellow named Colton has brought the gas back in New York, and they tell me he pulls teeth by the thousand with the patient grinning like a parson at a barn raising. I have no laughing gas at Fort Wilkins. I have laughing whiskey, and it works mainly on the dentist.
Wilkins: There's oil of cloves, which numbs the gum a little and does nothing about the rot, like a kind word to a drowning man. And if you lose the whole set, there are vulcanite plates now, rubber cooked hard and pink as a ham. But the Goodyear dental company holds the patents, and their agents are riding around demanding a license fee on every set of false teeth. A royalty on a man's mouth. A man can't even smile at his wife now without paying a Connecticut lawyer.
♪ Banjo picks up a jaunty, sinister walking tune
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: Segment the second: Legends, Outlaws and the Worst Molar in Merrimack County. Listen close, because I've told this story at three funerals and it's improved every time.
Wilkins: In the mud season of fifty-nine an oxcart pulled up to my door, and on it, filling it the way a ham fills a dinner pail, sat Absalom Thorne of Gilmanton Iron Works. Six foot seven. Three hundred and thirty pounds. Hands like coal shovels. I once saw that man lift a yearling heifer clear over a stone wall because he couldn't be bothered to walk to the gate. And his left cheek was swollen out like he was keeping a hen's egg in there for later.
Wilkins: He'd tried everything. String tied to the doorknob, and he pulled the door off its hinges. The harness maker's pliers, and he bent the pliers. A Barnstead blacksmith, and the blacksmith went home with two loose teeth of his own. The rot was in the lower back molar, an abscess full of poison, and his breath smelled like a woodchuck that died in July and got buried in a cabbage patch by a man who hated him. Barnaby smelled it from his chain and stood straight up on his hind legs. A bear, stunned with admiration.
Wilkins: I sat him in my surgery chair and the chair burst like a rotten apple crate. So I laid him on the floorboards. Silas McAllister's father took one arm, my hired man took the other, and Enoch the miller sat square on his chest like a man sitting on a lid to keep the cider from working out. Then came the whiskey. First quart for courage. Second quart for the pain. Third quart because he'd watched me drink the first.
Wilkins: I got the forceps on, and the crown crumbled like rotten maple. Gone. Nothing left but two roots, and they were hooked like a grappling iron, wrapped around that jawbone like a drunk around a lamppost. I went in after them. I braced my boot on his collarbone and pulled, and Absalom let out a bellow that made the cows in Loudon stop giving milk for a week. Then I felt it give. That root came out with the sound of a fence post pulled out of April mud, a wet suck and then a pop, like the Lord Himself uncorking a bad idea. Behind it came a gout of yellow corruption that went clean across the room and hit my Farmer's Almanac right in the month of June. I've never been able to read that June since, and neither has anybody else.
Wilkins: Absalom sat bolt upright, spat a mouthful of blood and whiskey into the ash bucket, shouted Glory, stood up to his full height, and cracked his skull on my ceiling beam so hard it split the oak. He went down like a felled pine. It was the only anesthetic all day that worked. And while he lay there snoring, Barnaby got his paw through the window bars and hooked the bloody rag bucket, and I'll spare you the noises, except to say he licked it so clean I used it for oats the next morning.
♦ Bear grunts contentedly outside window, chain clinks
Wilkins: Now here's the whiskey bill. The tooth cost twenty-five cents. The whiskey cost three dollars and seventy-five. Add a broken chair and a split beam, and I am less a dentist than a tavern with forceps. Absalom paid me in a firkin of butter and a promise. The butter's long gone. The promise is still out there with Absalom, getting fat.
Wilkins: And since we're telling outlaw tales, here's one for the revenue men listening, because I know you are, boys. I can hear you breathing. In sixty-four a pale gentleman in a Concord coat came to my door holding his jaw and moaning about his tooth. I sat him down, and when I pried his mouth open, what did I find in his cheek? A walnut. A whole walnut in the shell. He'd stuffed it in there to fake a swelling so he could get into the surgery and have a look at my back room. I said, sir, that is the healthiest walnut I have ever examined. He bolted out the back door, right past Barnaby's chain. Barnaby took the seat of his trousers the way a parson takes the collection, all at once and without a word of thanks, and a fair handful of what was inside them besides. It sounded like a wet flour sack tearing down the middle. That man rode all the way back to Concord standing in his stirrups like he was saluting a flag only he could see.
♦ Wooden door creaks open, heavy boots on plank floor
Wilkins: Now let me bring in a man whose family has been hammering copper at Fort Wilkins longer than I've been pulling teeth: the master coppersmith of the Suncook Valley, Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister. Sit down, Silas, and mind the chair. It's new.
Silas: Evening, Doctor. Evening, folks. I remember the old chair. My father brought home a splinter of it in his coat. He said it was the only furniture in Merrimack County ever to lose a fight with a farmer.
Wilkins: Your father held Absalom's right arm that day. What did he tell you about it?
Silas: He said it was like holding down a barn in a high wind. But what he talked about most was the spit basin. You remember, Doctor. He hammered it for you out of one sheet of copper. Deep bowl, rolled rim, sixteen inches across. He planished it a certain way so the metal was even all round, and the result was that it rang. Drop a tooth in there and it would sing out like a little church bell.
Wilkins: Ding. I can hear it now.
Silas: The lads at the tavern across the turnpike could hear it too, through the window in summer. They started taking wagers on how many dings a day. They kept tally marks on the door frame. The record was militia muster day, sixty-one: thirty-one teeth. Every farm boy in the valley wanted his toothache fixed before he marched.
Wilkins: Thirty-one teeth. The Republic was saved by men with the gums of a newborn.
Silas: My father always said a basin that rings true is the proof of honest work. A lazy smith leaves thin spots and lumps, and the metal just goes clunk. Copper tells you the truth if you listen to it.
Wilkins: Which brings us to a man who didn't. Tell them about Professor Ludlow.
Silas: [laughs] I was eleven. A painted wagon came through Suncook village: Professor Ludlow's Painless Extraction, with a brass band of two men, a cornet and a bass drum. The drummer took sick in Epsom, so the professor paid me a nickel to beat the drum. His instructions were plain. When the professor nodded, I struck the drum as hard as I could, as many times as I could.
Wilkins: To cover the screaming.
Silas: To cover the screaming. Painless, all right. All the pain was in the patient. But I was a smith's boy, and something else bothered me. His forceps were bright as silver, but when he set them down on the tailboard they rang wrong. Dull, short, no sustain. Pure silver or good steel sings. These went thunk, like a spoon in porridge. I told my father it was plated iron, and he said keep your mouth shut and watch.
Silas: Sure enough, up came a Loudon farmer with a jaw like a granite step. The professor nodded, I drummed, he heaved, and those forceps opened up like a wilted daisy. Bent clean out of true. The farmer still had his tooth, plus the professor's nickel plating on his molar, and he wanted his money back. Last I saw, Professor Ludlow was driving that painted wagon toward Chichester at a gallop, and I was standing in the road holding his drum.
Wilkins: Did you keep the drum?
Silas: Sold it to the Baptist picnic for a dollar. Best wage I made that year.
Wilkins: Now be honest with these good people, Silas. Tell them about the foot bath.
Silas: [sighs] Doctor, you swore this would never go out over the air.
Wilkins: I swear a great many things. Tell it.
Silas: The Doctor had a theory that if you warm a patient's feet, the blood runs down out of his head and the extraction bleeds less.
Wilkins: A perfectly sound alchemical principle. Blood is a fluid. Fluids seek warmth.
Silas: So he had me build a copper foot bath to sit under the chair. Brazed seams, rolled edge, two handles, a fine piece of work. He filled it from the kettle, steaming. The first patient to try it was a county deputy with a cracked eyetooth. The Doctor got the forceps on, the deputy kicked like a stabbed mule, the bath went over, and a gallon of near-boiling water went all down his shins and into his boots.
Wilkins: He was boiled pink to the knee, like a lobster at a Rye Beach clambake.
Silas: And the next day he filed a complaint with the sheriff accusing the foot bath of assault. Not the Doctor. The foot bath.
Wilkins: About the soundest legal reasoning ever to come out of the Merrimack County sheriff's office. It's the one complaint I'll grant had merit, too, because the bath did the deed and I was busy with his tooth.
Silas: There's one more, Doctor, and it's not as funny. A tinker came through last fall wanting to buy copper filings off my shop floor. He said he mixed them into amalgam to fill folks' teeth. Copper amalgam is a real thing, the dentists use it. But the sweepings off my floor have iron grit in them, and brass, and lord knows what my boots tracked in. I told him no. A man's mouth deserves clean metal as much as a still does. He called me a fussy old woman and went off to buy scrap in Concord.
Wilkins: And that, friends, is why I keep Silas in copper and Barnaby in ham bones. Both are particular about what goes into a mouth.
♪ Brisk banjo sting, then a brass-and-drum patent medicine fanfare
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, hear me well! What is the most dangerous thing in any still-house? A vapor leak! It's a hiss in the dark, a stink in the rafters, a cloud of spirit creeping along the floor toward your fire! And still men by the hundred are trusting their lives to flour paste that cracks and hose clamps that slip. No more, friends, no more! Moonshine Stills presents the Heavy-Duty Sanitary Tri-Clamp Ferrules and Gaskets. These are heavy-gauge ferrules, precision-milled and pressure-tested, with food-grade PTFE gaskets and quick-release stainless wing clamps, fitted to joints of heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper. They make a seal that stays airtight run after run, year after year, for a lifetime! Snap it on, clamp it down, and sleep sound! All this for just thirty-four dollars and ninety-five cents! Come see them with your own eyes at the showroom at Fort Wilkins, on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, or visit moonshinestill.com/products/tri-clamp-fittings. That's moonshinestill.com/products/tri-clamp-fittings! Shop Hardware at moonshinestill.com, and never trust your still to paste and prayer again!
♪ Fanfare ends with a cymbal crash
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, slow drip into jar
♪ Low, ringing fiddle drone
Wilkins: Segment the third: Copper and the Craft. Silas, stay where you are, I need your ears. Friends, before we go a step further: making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of these United States, and everything I say here is for history and education only. Now. Do you know what Absalom Thorne's breath and a badly made jar of spirit have in common?
Silas: The stink.
Wilkins: The same stink, in fact! A rotten tooth gives off sulfur vapors, the rotten-egg kind and the boiled-cabbage kind, and those are close cousins of the foul sulfur vapors that come up out of a fermented mash. In a pot, bright copper grabs those sulfur vapors and holds them on its own skin, so they never reach the jar. Put a sheet of clean copper in Absalom's mouth and he might have married. That's the alchemy of copper. It's the dentist of the vapor.
Silas: That's only half the reason, though, Doctor. The other half is heat. Copper carries heat about five times better than iron. Lay a fire under an iron pot and you get a hot spot right over the flame, the mash sticks, it scorches, and you taste burnt bread in everything. Copper spreads that heat clean across the bottom, like butter on a warm griddle.
Wilkins: And she won't melt on you.
Silas: Not in this world. Copper doesn't melt until near two thousand degrees. No still fire comes close. The metal isn't what burns your still-house down. It's the vapor.
Wilkins: Then let's walk the people through a run, step by step, and do it honest. First, the wash. You ferment it fully before it ever sees the still, until the bubbling stops and it tastes sour and dry, not sweet. Strain it well, because solids scorch. Fill your pot no more than three-quarters, so it has room to foam without spitting mash up into the swan neck.
Silas: And look over every joint before you light the fire. If you can smell spirit at a seam, you've got a leak, and you don't run until it's fixed.
Wilkins: Second, the fire. Low and patient. A still is like a tooth: rush it and you'll be picking pieces off the floor. Bring her up slow. And here's the thing a lot of men don't know, so listen. Spirit vapor is heavier than air. It doesn't float up and away like smoke. It creeps along the floor like a cat looking for trouble, and it'll travel across a room to an open flame or a pipe ember and light. Keep the fire and anything burning well away from the condenser outlet and the collecting jars. Keep the still-house aired out. Keep a bucket of sand handy. And never walk away from a running still, not even to visit the privy.
Silas: My uncle's neighbor left his to go feed the hogs. He came back to a chimney and a cellar hole.
Wilkins: Third, the cuts, and this is the heart of the gospel. Things boil off in order. Methanol, the wood spirit, boils at about a hundred forty-eight degrees. Our good grain spirit, ethanol, at about a hundred seventy-three. Water at two hundred twelve. So the first drips out of the worm are the foreshots, the sharpest, most volatile poison in the pot. Smells like a glue pot and a cobbler's bench. Every drop of it gets thrown out. Not saved for liniment, not given to the hired man, not poured for the deputy, however tempting. Out.
Wilkins: Next come the heads. Still sharp, solvent-smelling, the stuff that gives you a skull-splitting morning. You collect those in small jars, one after another, and you set them aside. You don't drink them. Then the smell softens, turns sweet and clean and smooth, and those are the hearts, the only part worth keeping. Collect them in small jars too, so you can be choosy. And at the end the run goes flat, oily and cloudy, and smells like wet cardboard and dog. Those are the tails. Set them aside and stop the run.
Silas: Small jars, Doctor. Tell them that twice.
Wilkins: Small jars! I'll say it a third time if it saves a man's eyes. One big bucket mixes the bad in with the good, and then you have jacked cider all over again. Fourth and last, when the pot's cool, clean your copper. A scrub of vinegar and salt brings the bright metal back up and takes off the green, and then you rinse and rinse until there's no salt or sour left on it. Bright copper does its work. Crusted copper is just a kettle with ambitions.
Silas: And joints that stay honest. That's what the whole run depends on.
Wilkins: Well said, Silas. Folks, Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister. Thank you, my friend. Mind Barnaby on your way out. He's been looking at your shins ever since the foot bath came up.
Silas: Goodnight, Doctor. Goodnight, all.
♦ Door creaks, boots crunch on frozen gravel, bear grunts curiously, chain clinks
♪ Jaunty banjo breakdown
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: Segment the fourth: Myths, Slang and the Listener Line. Tonight we've got a voice that came all the way up from the Carolina hills. Let's spin it.
♦ Faint mechanical whir, hiss 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! Wilkes County and G. G. Wilkins share half a name and the whole of a bad reputation, so you're practically kin. Rabbit, let's take your uncle's remedy apart one piece at a time, the way I'd take apart a jaw.
Wilkins: Red oak shavings first. Ask any cooper in the Suncook Valley why he won't make a barrel from red oak. He'll tell you red oak has open pores running the length of the grain. You can put one end of a red oak stick in a dish of soapy water, blow in the other end, and make bubbles. White oak has its pores stopped up by little natural plugs, and that's why it holds liquor. Red oak in a thump keg holds whiskey about as well as a deputy holds a secret. It'll give you some woody taste and a lot of leaking.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: That one's for the red oak. Now the hickory ashes. Every farm wife in New England knows what wood ash is good for. You leach it with water and get lye. Our grandfathers boiled that lye down into potash and shipped it to Boston by the wagonload, and their wives mixed it with fat and made soap. Ash is an alkali, Rabbit. Throw it in your thump keg and you'll make soap, which is fine for washing your sins but no good for drinking them. It won't clean the bad heads out of anything. The only thing that does that is the man at the worm with his small jars, making his cuts and throwing out what's poison.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Now, in fairness to your uncle, and I always respect a man who swears by something: old-timers did put things in the thump keg. Some put apples in, or peaches, so the vapor would pick up the fruit as it bubbled through. That's flavor, Rabbit, honest flavor. I'd guess somewhere down the generations a man watched his granddaddy drop peaches in the keg, misremembered it as ashes, and a legend was born. So your uncle isn't a liar. He's a historian with a bad memory, which describes most historians.
Wilkins: And while I've got the punch in my hand, let's bury one more myth. You've all seen it at some barn dance. A fellow pours a spoonful of shine, puts a match to it, and declares that a blue flame means it's safe and pure. And there's the old rhyme: lead burns red and makes you dead. Friends, that test is about as useful as judging a dentist by the color of his waistcoat. Wood spirit, the poison that blinds men, burns with a blue flame much like good grain spirit, and a spoonful of fire can't reliably tell you whether there's lead in your jar. A blue flame tells you that it burns. That's all. If you want safe spirit, you make it with clean metal and honest cuts, and you never trust a match to do a distiller's job.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, coin skitters across the anvil
Wilkins: There. Three stamps, three truths. That one says G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., and it's going in the post to Wilkesboro, North Carolina, for Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller. Rabbit, give your uncle my respects and tell him to keep the peaches and sweep out the ashes. Thank you for calling the Radio Moonshine line, son.
♪ Banjo and fiddle swell into closing theme
Announcer: One more quick word, friends! Don't let your fittings fail you on the last run of the night. Heavy-Duty Sanitary Tri-Clamp Ferrules and Gaskets, just thirty-four ninety-five, from Moonshine Stills. Shop Hardware today at moonshinestill.com!
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: And that is our show, friends. If tonight's talk of cuts and copper has you hungry to learn the craft properly, the history and the metallurgy and the honest method, sign up for the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I'll teach you to read your copper, judge your cuts by your nose, and keep your fire where it belongs. Every lesson is for history and education, and every student goes home with all the teeth he arrived with. Most of them, anyway.
Wilkins: My thanks to Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister and his singing basin, to Rabbit Miller down in Wilkesboro, and to Absalom Thorne, wherever he is, who still owes me three dollars and seventy-five cents. I'm keeping his molar in a jar on the shelf until he pays. Barnaby keeps an eye on it for me.
♦ Bear grunts low outside window, chain clinks once
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♪ Theme fades out with antique warmth
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar