Fort Wilkins and the Union Quartermaster
Dr. G. G. Wilkins tells how, in the summer of 1863, a Union Army purchasing captain came up the Suncook Valley Turnpike and nearly signed Fort Wilkins to a contract for six hundred copper camp kettles and hospital spirits. The deal was nearly wrecked by a crooked Manchester tin-man, a clerk with a kickback scheme and Barnaby the bear, and was finally killed when Washington mailed the approval to the other Fort Wilkins, an empty post on Lake Superior. Master coppersmith Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister tells how the Army tested his kettles and how his father worked Lake Superior copper. In the mailbag, Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC asks about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, and Wilkins knocks down the old bead-test myth over his anvil.
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Full episode transcript
♦ Audible wax cylinder surface crackle, slow drip of clear distillate into a glass jar
♦ Barnaby the black bear grunting and chain clinking outside log cabin window
Wilkins: Barnaby! Barnaby, settle your hairy carcass. That's no deputy. That's the wind in the hemlocks, and if it WERE a deputy you'd have him half-swallowed by now. Lie DOWN, you four-hundred-pound chamber pot. Down. There. He's gnawing the window sash again, friends. That's eleven dollars of window glass that bear has eaten since Thanksgiving, and not one pane of it passed easy. I heard him out in the alders a week ago, groaning like a church organ with the croup.
♦ Bear grunt, chain settling into the dirt
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swells and settles
Wilkins: Good evening, and welcome to 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'm Dr. George G. Wilkins: dentist, blacksmith, inventor, and the man Merrimack County's sheriff checks on first whenever a jar goes missing. Tonight's tale is one I have kept corked a good while. In the summer of 1863 the United States Army came up this Turnpike with a contract in its saddlebag. For about six weeks that paper nearly made me a rich man and a federal man. It came near to making me a dead man too, and it ended with a porcupine on Lake Superior. Before we get to it, a quick word.
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, brisk shuffle of paper
Announcer: Friends! A quick word from Moonshine Stills, maker of the Flame-Flow Still, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960. It's heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper, hand-built to be handsome and true. See it at moonshinestill.com, or in person at the Fort Wilkins showroom on Route 28!
♪ Short fiddle sting
Wilkins: Federal law forbids distilling spirits for drinking without a permit, and everything on this program is history and education, so pour yourself a cup of cider, legal and honest, and lean in.
♪ Banjo bridge, a slow minor-key roll
Wilkins: Segment the first: the Union Quartermaster, the greatest shopper God ever loosed upon this continent. When the war broke out in '61, the Army of the United States was a few thousand men guarding forts out West. Within a year it was hundreds of thousands, and every one of them needed a coat, a blanket, a tent, a tin cup, a canteen, a pair of shoes and a kettle to boil his coffee in. The man in charge of buying it all was Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs. He was stern, gray-bearded and honest, and he had the hardest job in Washington. The Quartermaster's Department bought on a scale no American government had ever tried: wagons by the thousand, mules by the tens of thousands, and camp kettles by the cartload.
♦ Wax crackle; Wilkins sets down a tin cup
Wilkins: Now, where there's a government with an open purse, there's a contractor with an open mouth. The Quartermaster's office had more contractors buzzing around it than a dead mule in July, and about the same quality of character. You've heard the word 'shoddy.' Before this war it meant one particular cheap cloth. A man would take old rags, shred them to fluff, press the fluff back together with a little glue and a prayer, and sell it as wool. The Union bought acres of the stuff in '61. Boys marched off in shoddy coats, and the first hard rain turned them back into the rags they came from. Men stood in formation with their elbows out and their blankets running down their legs like oatmeal. A shoddy blanket was the only thing in the Union Army that surrendered faster than General Pope. By '62 'shoddy' meant any rotten goods sold to the government, and the men who sold them were 'the shoddy aristocracy.' They rode around New York in carriages paid for with soldiers' frostbite.
Wilkins: And copper! Copper was the blood of that war. The Union got nearly all its copper from Lake Superior, from the Keweenaw Peninsula of Michigan. The copper up there comes out of the ground already pure, in masses so big the miners had to cut them apart with hammer and chisel like a butcher working a frozen ox. That copper went into bronze cannon, percussion caps, ship fittings and boiler pipes. Every cap that went off on every musket at Antietam carried a pinch of Lake Superior in it.
Wilkins: And then there was whiskey. Mind you, the regular Army's daily spirit ration was abolished in 1832. They replaced it with coffee and sugar, which is how you get an army that is wide awake and miserable about it. But in this war a commander could still order a whiskey issue for men who'd been worn down by heavy fatigue duty or exposure. I have seen the letters home. Every regiment in the Army of the Potomac was exposed, and it was mighty fatigued, and it said so loudly at the sutler's tent.
Wilkins: The Medical Department bought spirits too, by the barrel. Whiskey and brandy were 'stimulants' for the sick and wounded, poured into hospital patients for fever, for shock and for a leg sawed off below the knee. Much of what the contractors sold the hospitals was poison. It was cut with water, burnt sugar and pepper, and some of it was raw corn spirit dyed brown. So in 1863 the Surgeon General, William Hammond, set up the Army's own laboratories in Philadelphia and in Astoria, New York, to make its own medicines, so the wounded would stop being finished off by the very men paid to heal them.
Wilkins: That was the world in the spring of '63. The Army was desperate for honest copper and honest spirits, and fat with men selling neither. So I sat down at that table yonder with a quill, a candle and a jar of my best for inspiration. I wrote to the Office of the Quartermaster General in Washington City, offering six hundred hand-hammered copper camp kettles, double-riveted and tin-lined, from the Fort Wilkins foundry. At the bottom I added a postscript, polite as a parson, offering 'such medicinal stimulant as the hospitals of the Republic might require, of a purity unknown south of Concord.' I signed it 'G. G. Wilkins, Fort Wilkins,' and I sealed it with a counterstamped large cent pressed into the wax. I'd say that was the cleverest thing I ever did, and maybe also the stupidest.
♪ Fiddle sting, low and ominous
♦ Wax crackle; horse hooves on a dirt road, approaching
Wilkins: Segment the second: outlaws and runners, though tonight the outlaws wore Union blue and the runner was me. Six weeks after that letter, on a hot June afternoon, dust rose down by the Suncook bridge. Up the Turnpike rode a captain of the Quartermaster's Department, Captain Ambrose Pettibone, on a sorrel horse, with a clerk on a mule behind him. Pettibone had a mustache so waxed you could have cut foreshots with it, and a soul about as clean as the foreshots. He climbed down, looked up at these log walls, and said, 'This is FORT Wilkins? I expected a garrison.' I said, 'Captain, the garrison is chained by the window. Kindly don't step in his breakfast.'
♦ Bear grunt, low and interested; chain drag
Wilkins: Barnaby took one sniff of the man and showed him a mouthful of yellow teeth the size of hog's knuckles. Pettibone went the color of skimmed milk. I liked the Captain a little better after that. Fear makes a man honest for about a quarter of an hour.
Wilkins: He had come to inspect. He wanted to see the foundry, see a sample kettle, and taste the 'medicinal stimulant.' He tasted it, too, three times, for thoroughness, and then a fourth time to make sure the first three were accurate. Meanwhile there was a second rider on the road. Hiram Crouch was a tin-man out of Manchester who'd got wind of the contract and come to undercut me. He sold kettles the way a widow-hunting preacher sells salvation: shiny on the front, rusted through on the bottom, and payment in advance. His kettles were sheet iron washed with a skin of brass so thin you could have peeled it off with a thumbnail and read a newspaper through it. He had the gall to set one on my own chopping block and call mine 'old-fashioned.'
Wilkins: Crouch made one mistake. To get the Captain alone, he went around the back of the still-house, and he stepped over Barnaby's chain. Not around it. Over it. Now, a bear has a certain courtesy. He gives you one grunt as a warning. Crouch didn't speak bear. Barnaby came off that log like a cannonball off a frigate, hooked one claw in Crouch's coat-tails and pulled. I tell you, friends, that bear opened Hiram Crouch from the coat-tails to the boot-tops like a man filleting a codfish. Wool, linen, drawers, and a good hand's width of Crouch's own hide came off in one long ribbon, with a sound like a wet bedsheet tearing in a gale. Crouch let out a squeal. I've pulled four hundred teeth, and I never heard a sound like it. It started as a man and ended as a teakettle.
♦ Distant fabric rip, a high squeal, bear grunt of satisfaction
Wilkins: Then Crouch went down the Turnpike at a dead run, both hands clamped over his hindquarters. He was bleeding like a stuck shoat and showing all of Pittsfield a full moon at two o'clock in the afternoon. The Widow Tilton was hanging wash by the road, and she said it was the most honest thing that ever came out of Manchester. Barnaby sat there and ate the coat-tails. Took him the best part of an hour. Brass buttons and all. I found the buttons a few days later, and I won't say where, but they were polished.
Wilkins: I bandaged Crouch's backside for him, I'll say that for myself. I'm a doctor of the teeth, but I know which end is which, and I charged him a dollar for the linen. As for Captain Pettibone, he was laid up with a molar rotted black as a stovepipe, so I pulled it for two dollars. That tooth was the only thing the United States government ever got out of Fort Wilkins on time. Now, to tell you about the kettles, here's the man who hammered them. He has come in from the foundry tonight with soot in his ears and a burn on his wrist the shape of the state of Delaware: master coppersmith Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister. Silas, sit down before Barnaby smells the copper on you and takes you for a pot.
♦ Chair scraping on plank floor; a heavy leather apron set down
Silas: Evening, Doctor. Evening, all. I'll sit, but I'll keep my back to that window, if it's the same to you.
Wilkins: Silas, tell the folks how the Captain judged your kettle.
Silas: Well. The Captain didn't know copper from a cow-pie, and he knew it, and that's half the battle with a man. He drew his saber halfway and rapped my sample kettle on the rim with the brass hilt. It rang. It rang for a good long time, Doctor, a long sweet note like a bell at a wedding, because that was sound copper, hammered even all the way around with no thin spots and no cold seams. He liked that. So I told him, 'Now go and strike Mr. Crouch's.'
Wilkins: And Crouch's?
Silas: It went thunk. Like a cowbell somebody had packed with mud. Iron under a brass wash has no song in it. It's dead metal pretending. The Captain struck it twice more to be certain, and on the third blow the brass wash flaked off on his boot. I told him, 'Captain, put a kettle like that on a campfire in Virginia and in two weeks it'll be a sieve, and in three your men'll be drinking rust.' He wrote that down, and I was proud of that. A man ought to know what he's buying when it's boys on the other end of it.
Wilkins: Tell them about the rim on that sample kettle.
Silas: That rim's a story. My father bought a lot of Lake Superior mass copper the spring before. It came down by lake boat and rail to Concord, and we carted it out by ox. It's native copper, pure as it comes out of the rock, so the miners up there cut it apart with chisels. One of the lumps that came to us had a miner's chisel point broken off and stuck right in it. The point was driven in about an inch, rusted and fused like it had grown there. My father looked at it a long while and said, 'Some fellow on Lake Superior swore a blue streak the day that broke.' He wouldn't cut it out. He forged that lump into the rim of the sample kettle and left the chisel tip showing like a nail head. We still call it the Chisel Kettle. It's out in the foundry this minute.
Wilkins: The very kettle that rang for the United States Army. Now, Silas, tell them about the clerk.
Silas: The Captain had a clerk riding with him on the mule. He was a pale little fellow with ink on his cuffs and a smile like a pickerel. On the second day he caught me alone at the quench tub and said, quiet as you like, 'Mr. McAllister, the contract is for six hundred kettles. Suppose you deliver four hundred fifty, and you and I both sign that we counted six hundred, and the price of the other hundred fifty finds its way to friends.'
Wilkins: The shoddy aristocracy, come to Pittsfield on a mule.
Silas: I didn't say a word to him. I took a number punch and struck a 1 into the bottom of the kettle in my hand, right there in front of him. I told him every kettle out of this foundry would carry its own count, punched in copper. 'If six hundred go to Washington,' I said, 'the last one will read 600, and if somebody signs for 600 and the bottom reads 450, the Army can read it as well as you can.' He went the color the Captain went when he met the bear. Ink doesn't hold up against a punch mark. My grandfather used to say a joint you can't show your mother is a joint you can't sell. I say the same about a count.
Wilkins: So, friends, we had a sound kettle, an honest count, a satisfied Captain with one fewer molar, and Crouch's hindquarters scattered from here to Barnstead. Pettibone rode out with my samples and a jar for his commanding officer, swore the contract would be approved inside the month, and shook my hand like a man who meant it. I bought a new bellows on credit. Silas laid out patterns.
Silas: In chalk, on the foundry floor. All six hundred kettles, every one, in rows like a cemetery.
Wilkins: And we waited. June went by. Vicksburg fell, and Gettysburg was fought. July went by. August. Not a word. Then in October the post rider handed me a letter that looked like it had crossed an ocean. It was water-stained, stamped six different times, and there was a hole chewed in one corner. Inside was the contract. APPROVED, signed and sealed by the Office of the Quartermaster General, for six hundred copper camp kettles and sundry hospital stores. It was addressed to G. G. Wilkins, Fort Wilkins, Copper Harbor, Michigan.
♦ Long wax crackle; a single bear grunt
Wilkins: Friends, there's another Fort Wilkins. On my mother's grave, there is. It's an Army post up at Copper Harbor on Lake Superior, built in 1844 to keep the peace in the copper rush, and named for William Wilkins, Secretary of War, no kin of mine and no credit to the name. When the copper fever cooled, the Army pulled the soldiers out, and that fort sat empty through most of the fifties and the whole war. Some clerk in Washington saw 'Fort Wilkins' and 'copper' on the same page and filed me under Michigan. The approved contract went a thousand miles to an empty stockade on Lake Superior. There it sat, I'm told, with the caretaker and the porcupines, until somebody thought to send it back. Look at that corner, Silas.
Silas: That's a porcupine bite. I'd know it anywhere. My cousin up in Coos County had one eat a whole axe handle for the salt in it.
Wilkins: Somewhere on the shore of Lake Superior a porcupine is sitting on a federal contract for six hundred copper kettles, and I hope he's getting better terms than I did. By the time it came back to Pittsfield, the Army had filled its kettle needs elsewhere, the season had turned, and a man at the Quartermaster's office wrote me that the contract was 'superseded by circumstance.' Superseded by a porcupine is what it was.
Silas: And the chalk patterns stayed on the floor, Doctor. We hadn't the heart to sweep them up. That winter a Shaker elder traveling up from Canterbury stopped in to buy a skillet. He looked at the floor a long while, all six hundred chalk circles in rows, and asked very kindly whether we were building a cathedral.
Wilkins: I told him yes: the Church of the Lost Contract, and the bear's the deacon. Silas, you are a credit to the anvil and a terror to clerks. Folks, Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister.
Silas: Thank you, Doctor. And folks, if you want to know a man's kettle, strike it. It'll tell you the truth even when he won't.
♪ Banjo flourish into ad break
♦ Wax crackle; a wooden crate slammed onto a counter
Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen! You've just heard how the Army of the United States struck a true copper kettle and heard it sing, and how it struck a shoddy one and heard it die! Now tell me, friend: which do YOU want in your workshop? Moonshine Stills proudly presents the Flame-Flow Still, its flagship, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960! It is built of heavy-gauge, high-purity electrolytic copper, the cleanest copper money can buy, with no shoddy, no brass wash and no humbug! It's fitted with precision machine-turned brass unions that seal tight and come apart clean, and it's shaped to drive a strong, rolling convective circulation through the pot for unmatched purity! Use it for essential oils, use it for herbal tinctures, use it for traditional distillation demonstrations that'll make your neighbors gather round like it's the county fair! Strike the Flame-Flow with your knuckle, friend, and it rings! It's American craftsmanship you can hear! The flagship Flame-Flow is eight hundred ninety-nine dollars, and it's an heirloom your grandchildren will polish. So don't wait on a porcupine! Visit moonshinestill.com this very day. That's https://moonshinestill.com/products/flame-flow-copper-still. Or come see it with your own two eyes at the Fort Wilkins showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire! Once more, that's https://moonshinestill.com/products/flame-flow-copper-still! The Flame-Flow Still from Moonshine Stills: real copper that rings true!
♪ Fiddle sting, cheerful
♦ Wax crackle; slow drip into jar resumes
Wilkins: Segment the third: copper and the craft. Since we spent all evening on kettles, let me tell you why a cooking kettle and a still are cousins but not twins. The Army's copper kettles had to be lined with tin inside, and so does your grandmother's preserving kettle. Boil sauerkraut, vinegar, apples or anything sour in bare copper, and the acid pulls copper into the food, and the whole company is green-faced and squatting in the bushes by morning. A still is left bare copper inside on purpose. You want the vapor rubbing against naked copper all the way up the pot, through the helmet and along the neck. That's the alchemy. The copper grabs the sulfurous stink out of the rising vapor and keeps it on the metal, which is why bright copper matters.
Wilkins: Here's a thing few men tell you: the copper pays for it. Every run spends a little of the metal. Over the years the shoulders and helmet and neck of an old pot grow thinner and thinner, worn out like a stair step under a thousand boots, until one day you put your thumb through it. So inspect your copper. Tap it, look at it in good light, feel for soft places at the shoulder. When it's thin, Silas or a smith like him puts in new metal. You don't patch it with lead solder and you don't pray over it.
Wilkins: Now the mash, step by step, the way it was done in this valley. Take cracked corn and cook it in water. Stir it in a little at a time to keep the lumps down, the way you'd stir hasty pudding, and keep it hot and stirring until it goes thick as wallpaper paste. Then let it cool to about a hundred and fifty degrees by the thermometer. Old-timers would say it's right when you can hold your finger in it to a slow count of three and no longer. Stir in crushed malted barley, maybe one part to four of corn. The malt carries the virtue that turns the corn starch to sugar. Cover it and let it rest an hour or more while that change works, and taste it. It'll go sweet as a schoolgirl's lie. Then let it cool to about eighty degrees, near blood-warm, and pitch your yeast. Cover it loosely and keep it somewhere warm with the air moving, because a working mash breathes out a gas that will smother a man in a closed room. Five days to ten, and when the bubbling quiets and the cap falls, you've got your wash. It's a sour, beery mess of only a few percent spirit, and the still's job is to gather that up.
Wilkins: The run. Strain your wash into the pot and keep your fire LOW. A still in a hurry is a still that pukes, foams over, and sends raw mash into your worm. Bring it up slow, and when the first drops come, here is the law, and I'll say it slow. The first that runs are the foreshots. Throw them out. A good cupful for every five gallons of wash, and be generous, because more is safer. That's where the wood alcohol runs, and it blinds men and it kills men. You don't drink it, you don't rub it on a sore tooth, and you don't give it to your brother-in-law even if he deserves it.
Wilkins: After the foreshots come the heads. They're sharp and solvent-smelling, like the inside of a varnish can, and they get set aside. Then the hearts, clean and sweet, the part you came for. Then the tails, oily, smelling of wet dog and boiled grain, which are set aside for a later run. The honest way to do it is to catch the run in a row of small jars, number them, and smell them one by one in daylight. Don't run it all into one bucket and guess. The jars tell you where the cuts fall, and a man who won't make them is a man who'll poison someone.
Wilkins: Two more things. First, measure your strength with a proof hydrometer, not by squinting. In America 'proof' is twice the spirit by volume, so a hundred proof is half alcohol. Second, fire. Alcohol vapor is invisible and heavier than air. It creeps along a floor and finds a lamp or a stove door, and then it goes WHOOMF, and your eyebrows are in Gilmanton. Keep every open flame well away from the collecting jar and from any joint that weeps. Check your joints before the fire's lit. And once more: the law of these United States forbids distilling spirits for drinking without a permit, and all I've told you is history and learning.
♪ Banjo bridge, lighter
♦ Wax crackle; click and whir of a call-in cylinder being set on the machine
Wilkins: Segment the fourth: myths, slang and the mailbag. We've a cylinder come up from the Carolina mountains, from a fellow who sounds like he's calling from the bottom of a well. Let's hear him.
♦ Hiss and pop of recorded cylinder playback
Cletus: Alchemist, this is Cletus Miller, folks call me Rabbit, down in Wilkesboro, North Carolina. 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 ends with a click
Wilkins: Rabbit! Thank you for the cylinder, and greetings to Wilkesboro and everybody on the Yadkin. Your uncle sounds like a man who tells a good story with a straight face, and I respect that, because I've built a whole career on it. But let's take his two remedies one at a time, starting with the red oak. Rabbit, red oak holds whiskey the way a Concord alderman holds a secret: everything leaks out the pores by morning. Red oak is full of open pores, little tubes running the length of the grain. You can put one end of a red oak stick in a glass of water and blow bubbles out the other end. That's why no cooper alive makes a whiskey barrel of it. They use white oak, whose pores are plugged up natural and tight. Shavings in a hot keg will give you some color and some bitter tannin, so your spirit comes out looking older and tasting like a fence post. Brown isn't clean, Rabbit. Brown is just brown.
Wilkins: Now the hickory ashes. Every farm wife in America knows what you get when you run water through wood ash: lye. That's what she makes soap with. Dump ashes into a hot thump keg and you're making your whiskey into a weak batch of soap. Ash in a thump keg turns your whiskey into soap, and then you can wash your mouth out and get drunk in one honest motion. Here's what I'll grant your uncle. The old thumper men down your way did charge the doubler with things, fresh mash mostly, or peaches or apples, for flavor and a little strength. Somewhere along the way the story got mixed up, and fruit turned into ashes and flavor turned into cleaning. A thump keg makes the spirit stronger and can make it tastier, but it can't save a bad run. The only medicine for bad heads is the cut. So tell your uncle the Alchemist salutes his storytelling and recommends he keep the ashes for the soap kettle, where they'll do some good.
♦ Wilkins picks up hammer; steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: And while we're knocking down myths, here's tonight's coin for the anvil. It's an 1857 large cent, and it gets the G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. treatment in honor of the bead test. You've all seen a fellow do it. He shakes his jar hard and squints at the bubbles. Big bubbles that sit up proud and slow mean strong spirit, he says, and little ones that vanish quick mean weak. Well, there's a grain of truth in it. The bead does tell you roughly how strong the spirit is, and some old hands could guess within a few points. But here's the myth that has killed men. The bead tells you NOTHING about whether it's safe. Wood alcohol beads up as pretty as anything you ever saw. A jar full of foreshots will bead like a bride's pearls. And lead from a soldered joint has no bead at all.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, second strike
Wilkins: A man who judges his liquor by the bead is like a man who judges his bride by her bonnet: fine-looking in the jar, and a terrible surprise come morning. For strength, use a proof hydrometer. For safety, make your cuts. That coin's going in a little envelope for Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, along with the last button Barnaby passed from Hiram Crouch's coat. It's boiled, Rabbit, don't worry. It's boiled twice.
♦ Bear grunt, as if offended
Wilkins: Oh, hush. You've gone over to the Union side for good, Barnaby, ever since you ate the only thing the Confederacy ever sent north of Concord, which was a Richmond newspaper wrapped round a ham.
♪ Fiddle sting
♦ Wax crackle
Announcer: One more quick word, friends! Strike it and hear it ring true: the Flame-Flow Still, United States Patent 10,561,960, heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper from Moonshine Stills. Order direct at moonshinestill.com, or call in at the Fort Wilkins showroom on Route 28, Pittsfield!
♪ Banjo and fiddle theme returns softly underneath
Wilkins: That's our show, friends. If tonight's tale gave you a taste for the real craft, the copper, the mash and the cuts done right and safe, sign up for the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I'll teach you to read a run the way I read a jaw: carefully, honestly, and without flinching. You'll learn mash, copper care, fire safety, and how to make cuts by jar and by nose, all inside the law and the bounds of good sense. My thanks to Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister and his Chisel Kettle, to Rabbit Miller and his storytelling uncle down in Wilkesboro, and to Captain Ambrose Pettibone, wherever he is. I hope your new teeth are holding up, Captain. And a special thanks to the porcupine of Copper Harbor, Michigan, who holds the only federal contract ever awarded to Fort Wilkins and has never delivered a single kettle. He's a true government man.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ Theme rises and fades into wax cylinder crackle