The Bounty System
Dr. G. G. Wilkins explains the Civil War bounty system: the 1863 Enrollment Act, the $300 commutation fee, town quotas, substitute brokers, and the bounty jumpers who enlisted and deserted again and again under new names. He also tells how drafted men begged him to pull their front teeth to escape service. Master coppersmith Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister tells new family stories about a substitute broker who paid in gilded copper coins, a jumper's sack of regimental cap numbers, and the bounty money that bought the McAllister anvil. In the call-in segment Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's voicemail about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, then strikes down the shake-test bead myth at 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 great hairy carcass down. That's a squirrel on the woodpile, not a recruiting sergeant, and even if it were a recruiting sergeant, nobody pays a bounty for eating one. I checked with the selectmen. Lie down, you four-hundred-pound sack of bad intentions. Lie DOWN.
♦ Bear huffs, chain drops in the dirt, a low disappointed groan
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, you sinners and saints of the Suncook Valley, and to every farmer, mill hand, and fugitive tooth patient within the sound of my voice. This is Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, broadcasting from Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. I am your host, your dentist, your blacksmith, and on two occasions the Merrimack County sheriff's favorite overnight guest.
Wilkins: Tonight's subject is the Bounty System. The war is over and the boys are coming home, the ones that are coming, and somebody ought to tell the truth about how Washington, the State House at Concord, and every town meeting from here to Coos got into the business of buying men by the head like spring shoats. They waved cash under the noses of honest plowboys and turned some of them into the slipperiest liars ever to wear blue wool. It ruined good men and bankrupted good towns, and it made rich a breed of parasite called the substitute broker, who I would not feed to Barnaby for fear of poisoning the bear.
Wilkins: But first, a quick word from the fellow who pays for the lamp oil.
Announcer: Friends, a quick word! The Flame-Flow still, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960, is handcrafted from heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper. It's honest metal for honest work. See it at moonshinestill.com, or at the Fort Wilkins showroom on Route 28!
♪ Short fiddle sting
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: SEGMENT ONE. Buying Men by the Head.
Wilkins: Cast your mind back to the spring of '61. Sumter falls, and every young buck in the Suncook Valley trips over his own feet to sign the roll. He goes for the flag, for his mother's tears, and for the girl at the Baptist social who said she admired a man in uniform. The government paid him thirteen dollars a month for a private's work, and he thought himself rich. Nobody had to bribe him. He'd have paid them.
Wilkins: Then came Bull Run, the Peninsula, and Fredericksburg. Letters came home with black borders, and boys came home with one leg, or in a pine box packed with charcoal. By the winter of '62 the volunteering had dried up like a cow in a drought. So in March of 1863 Congress passed the Enrollment Act, the first federal draft this Union ever saw. Every able-bodied male citizen from twenty to forty-five went on the rolls, along with every immigrant who had sworn he meant to become one. Their names went into the wheel, and the wheel at the provost marshal's office spun like a roulette table on a Mississippi riverboat. The difference was that on the riverboat you could leave when you lost.
Wilkins: Now here is where the rot gets into the timber. The Act let a drafted man escape in two ways. He could hire a substitute to go in his place, or he could pay the government three hundred dollars, which they called commutation. Three hundred dollars, neighbors! That's a year's wages for a man running a loom in the Pittsfield mills. The banker's son paid it out of his waistcoat and went back to his oysters. The mill hand's son paid it in blood. They called it a rich man's war and a poor man's fight, and nobody who said so was wrong. Three hundred dollars bought a rich man out of the war. Three dollars bought a poor man out of a tavern, and that was the only discount the war ever offered him.
Wilkins: Congress got shamed into repealing commutation for most men in the summer of '64. But substitutes stayed legal to the very end, and the price of a man went up like the price of a good molar at a dance.
Wilkins: Here is the real machinery of ruin. Every town got a quota. Washington would tell Pittsfield to deliver so many men, and if the town couldn't fill the quota with volunteers, the wheel would take its sons by lottery. So the towns did the Yankee thing. They bought their way out. Town meeting after town meeting voted bounties. The federal government was already paying three hundred and two dollars to a fresh recruit and four hundred and two to a veteran who'd sign on again. Then the state laid its share on top, and the town laid on more, until by '64 a likely young plowboy standing in Pittsfield town hall was worth more than the town hall, and he had better plumbing. In some places a recruit's bounties added up to more than a thousand dollars.
Wilkins: And where there is a pile of money with nobody watching it, there is a broker. The substitute broker was a man who would sell his mother to the Army, then go back and collect a finder's fee from the Navy. He'd find some drunk off a Portsmouth wharf, or a farm boy with a sick father and a mortgage, and promise him the moon. Then he'd swear the poor devil in and pocket half the bounty, sometimes more, before the boy had sobered up enough to count his fingers.
Wilkins: Worst of all were the bounty jumpers. A jumper enlisted under one name, collected his cash, deserted at the first dark railroad siding, walked to the next county, enlisted under another name, and collected again. A bounty jumper is the only man in America who has served in nine regiments and never once heard a shot fired. Here in New Hampshire we sent regiments substitutes by the trainload in '63 and '64, and some of those regiments watched them melt away by the score before they ever smelled Virginia mud.
Wilkins: The Army lost its patience. In August of '63, in Virginia, they took five substitute deserters, tied them before open graves, and lined up a whole army corps to watch. I had it from a Concord man who stood in the ranks. The volley went off like a barn door slamming, and the five of them pitched backward. One of them was not quite done, so the provost guard had to step up and finish the job at arm's length while the whole corps watched. My Concord man said the smell of powder and of what a man's bowels do at the last hung over that field till sundown. He said not one soldier ate supper that night, and that's the only time in recorded history the Army got a man to refuse a meal.
Wilkins: The honest ones got ruined too. A plain boy took his four hundred dollars, and the broker took two hundred of it. The tavern took another fifty. A Washington sharper took the rest with a deck of marked cards. He came home with one arm and owed money to a man he'd never met. Meanwhile the towns borrowed and bonded and mortgaged. I'll lay you odds our selectmen will be paying interest on boys who never got farther south than Manchester until my bear's grandchildren are grey.
♦ Barnaby grunts outside the window
Wilkins: Barnaby agrees. Barnaby has strong views on public debt.
♪ Banjo bridge, two bars
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: SEGMENT TWO. Jumpers, Dodgers, and the Dentist of Last Resort.
Wilkins: Now I'll tell you how the draft came to my dentist's chair, because it did, and I'm not proud of all of it. You see, the Army examining surgeon will reject a man who lacks his front teeth. A soldier loads his musket by tearing open a paper cartridge with his teeth. No front teeth, no tearing, no soldier. Word of that got around Merrimack County faster than a rumor about the minister's wife.
Wilkins: So in the summer of '63 a fellow I'll call Asa came up the turnpike with a jug in one hand and two silver dollars in the other. He was a big hay-shouldered lad from out toward Barnstead. He sat in my chair and asked me plain to have his patriotism removed by the roots. He wanted four front teeth gone, top and bottom, so he could tear no cartridge for Mr. Lincoln.
Wilkins: I told him I don't pull sound teeth. He drank half the jug in three swallows and told me he'd go to the blacksmith in Epsom if I wouldn't, and the Epsom smith pulls teeth with the same tongs he shoes mules with. So, God forgive me, I did it. I did it clean, which is more than he'd have got in Epsom. Those upper incisors had roots like fence posts. I rocked the first one with the forceps, and it gave a wet crack like a green branch breaking under snow. Asa let out a holler that set Barnaby moaning in sympathy. The blood came down his chin and onto his shirt, and he spat it into my brass basin, and he said, and I quote him exactly, 'Is that one of them, or my whole skull?' Four teeth, a pint of rye, and a towel I had to burn afterward.
Wilkins: And here's the moral. One month later the town voted a bounty of four hundred dollars on top of the federal money, and that same Asa marched down to Concord and enlisted as a volunteer. He'd bought himself out of the draft with his teeth, then sold himself back into the Army for cash. He gummed his cartridges like a widow eating corn on the cob, and they kept him anyway. The Army was not choosy in '64. He came home last spring without a scratch, smiling at me with a hole in his face you could post a letter through, and he still owes me the second silver dollar.
♦ Barnaby grunts, chain rattles
Wilkins: Then there was the jumper Barnaby caught. One February night in '64 I heard the chain sing out and the bear make a sound like a man trying to start a fight with a cider press. I went out with my lantern and found a fellow flattened against my still-house wall. He was wearing three uniforms, one over the other, like a Bible with three testaments, and not one of them belonged to him. He was a Vermont regiment on the outside, a Massachusetts in the middle, and our own New Hampshire next to his skin. He'd collected three bounties and was cutting across my land in the dark to go for a fourth in Maine.
Wilkins: He picked the wrong shortcut. Barnaby had him by the outer trousers. You never heard wool tear like that. It sounded like a sail splitting in a gale. Then the bear got the middle trousers, and with them a little of the man underneath, enough that the jumper sang high C like a Concord choir boy. Barnaby left him the inner pair out of Christian charity. I've never seen a bear show more mercy, or a man show less dignity. I handed the fellow a blanket and sent him down the road toward the provost marshal with the bear's compliments. The marshal came by the next week to thank me. Then he asked what I had brewing in the shed, which shows you there's no gratitude in the federal service. I'd been arrested twice by then and I wasn't about to make it three for a jumper in his drawers, so I told him it was tooth tincture and offered him a seat in my chair. He left without asking again. A man faced with my forceps finds he has nothing more to ask about.
♪ Fiddle flourish
Wilkins: Now I have a guest in the shop tonight, a man who knows metal better than I know mischief, and that's saying something. He's a third-generation coppersmith who works the foundry here at Fort Wilkins. He's the steadiest hand with a planishing hammer in the Suncook Valley. Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister, welcome to the broadcast.
Silas: Evening, Doctor. Evening, folks. Barnaby's in a mood tonight.
Wilkins: Barnaby's always in a mood. Tonight it's just audible. Silas, your people were hammering copper in this county all through the war. Did the bounty business ever come through the McAllister shop door?
Silas: It came through the door, the window, and once down the chimney, near enough. I'll start with my grandfather and the broker. This was the fall of '64. A broker came up from Manchester. He had a fine coat and a finer mustache, and his boots had never touched a field. He ordered a big copper wash boiler. He claimed it was for his sister's laundry, though he was buying about eleven sisters' worth of copper. When it was done he paid in gold. Five gold eagles laid out on the bench, bright as a bride's ring.
Wilkins: Gold, in '64? Nobody had gold in '64. Gold was hiding under every mattress in New England.
Silas: That's what Grandfather thought. So he did what a smith does. He picked one up and dropped it on the anvil face. Real gold rings soft and deep, like a church bell a long way off. This coin went 'tunk,' like a dropped spoon. He put a file to the edge and pink came up under the yellow. It was copper, Doctor. Gilded copper. The man had paid a coppersmith in copper and thought he wouldn't notice. That's like paying a dentist in teeth.
Wilkins: I've been paid in teeth. It's a poor living. What did your grandfather do to him?
Silas: Nothing violent. My grandfather was a deacon. He kept the boiler, kept four of the coins as scrap, and took the fifth and nailed it to the shop door with a horseshoe nail, right through the eagle's eye. Then he told the broker every coppersmith from here to Dover would hear what that coin was by Sunday. The broker left that afternoon. The coin stayed on our door eleven years. It stayed in New Hampshire a good deal longer than the broker did.
Wilkins: That's how you deal with a counterfeiter: shame, and a good nail. What else did the war bring through your door?
Silas: A jumper came in during the winter of '65. He was a polite young fellow with a gunny sack, and he wanted Grandfather to file down a brass cap number. You know the brass numerals soldiers wore on their kepis, telling what regiment they were in. He said it was the wrong regiment and he'd been transferred. Grandfather said all right and reached for the file. Then the fellow set the sack on the floor and it tipped over. Out spilled brass numbers, Doctor, from seven different regiments. A Twelfth, a Fifth, a Fourteenth, something from Rhode Island, and a Maine regiment. He'd been collecting them the way a boy collects arrowheads.
Wilkins: A man carrying seven regiments in a sack is either a hero or a liar, and heroes don't usually ask for a file.
Silas: Grandfather said nearly the same, only shorter. He said, 'Son, which one of these are you?' The jumper looked at that pile and said, honest as a bell, 'Mister, I've plumb forgot.' Then he ran out without the sack. We melted the brass down into a pair of hinges for the meetinghouse door. Grandfather said if it couldn't serve the Union, it could at least keep the Lord's wind out.
Wilkins: That's the most honest service any of those regiments got out of him. Now Silas, I know you've got one closer to home.
Silas: My great-uncle Ike. Ike was a good man, not a clever one. When the town voted its bounty in '63, he took it fair and square, no jumping, and went south with a New Hampshire regiment. He came back in '65 missing the top half of his left ear. He said a Rebel ball took it off clean at Cold Harbor, and he heard it go by, which he said was a strange thing to hear with the ear it was taking.
Wilkins: There's a riddle for the philosophers.
Silas: He'd sent the bounty money home to his sister with a letter that said only, 'Do not let Father drink this.' When he got back, the first thing he did with it was buy an anvil. A two-hundred-weight English anvil with a hardened face. Every pot, swan neck, and thumper the McAllisters have hammered since was hammered on it. It's sitting forty feet from this microphone right now.
Wilkins: Uncle Ike traded half an ear for an anvil, which is the best bargain anybody in Merrimack County got out of that war.
Silas: We call it the only bounty money in the county still earning its keep. Every town that paid a bounty is still paying it off. That one's paying us.
Wilkins: And did your grandfather keep any account of these sharpers? A smith sees everybody come through.
Silas: He kept a little ledger in the back of his order book. He called it the bounty ledger. It held every fellow who came in with money he didn't trust: fresh greenbacks in strange denominations, gilt coins, and once a draft on a Boston bank that didn't exist. He wrote down every name they gave. Years later I went through it. There are twenty-two names, Doctor, all different, and in at least six of the signatures the handwriting is the same. It's the same crooked capital S every time. The same man came in six times as six different men, and my grandfather never caught it.
Wilkins: That's six bounties, and probably six desertions, and he never once paid his bill under the same name twice. I almost admire it. Silas, stay right where you are, because after this word from our sponsor we're going to talk copper, and you're going to keep me honest.
Silas: Somebody has to.
♪ Banjo stinger
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Announcer: Friends! Neighbors! Gentlemen of discernment and ladies of good sense! Is your old pot leaking like a bounty jumper's alibi? Did you buy cheap tin from a smooth-talking broker that turned green and gave up the ghost in a month? Then gather close and hear the good news! Moonshine Stills is the proud home of the Flame-Flow still, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960! If you appreciate authentic American craftsmanship, look no further! The Flame-Flow is engineered from heavy-gauge, high-purity electrolytic copper, with no salvaged scrap and no mystery metal. It has precision CNC-machined brass unions that seal tight and true. It is designed to maximize convective circulation, rolling heat evenly through the pot and delivering unmatched purity for essential oils, herbal tinctures, and traditional distillation demonstrations! It's handcrafted and pure copper, for just eight hundred ninety-nine dollars, and worth every penny the good Doctor ever stamped on his anvil! Order direct at moonshinestill.com, at moonshinestill.com slash products slash flame-flow-copper-still. Or come see it with your own eyes at the showroom at Fort Wilkins on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. Once more, that's moonshinestill.com! The Flame-Flow still. Unlike a bounty jumper, it'll still be there in the morning!
♪ Brass-band flourish, then fade
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: SEGMENT THREE. Copper and the Craft: No Bounty for the Heads.
Wilkins: Now, before I say a word about mash and cuts, here's the law, plain as a church door. Making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is illegal under United States law. Everything on this program is for history and education only. I've been arrested twice, and I don't recommend the accommodations. The county's biscuits would break a molar, and I'd know.
Wilkins: Here's the alchemy, step by step. You start with your mash. For a corn whiskey of the old style, take cracked corn, about a bushel for every ten or twelve gallons of water, and cook it until it gels. Stir it, because if it scorches to the bottom you'll taste burnt porridge in every jar. Let it cool to blood-warm. You can test it with a clean finger. If it's too hot for your finger, it's too hot for your yeast. Many of the old boys add a peck of malted barley or rye at that point, because the malt carries the ferment that turns the corn starch to sugar. Then pitch your yeast, cover it loose against flies, and let it work in a warm room with the door cracked for air, four or five days, until the bubbling quiets and the cap falls. What you have then is your wash, a sour beer of a few percent strength. A still doesn't make spirit. It only gathers what the yeast already made.
Wilkins: Next is the stripping run. You run the wash through fast to pull out everything that will boil. That gives you low wines, cloudy and rough. Then comes the spirit run, slow and careful, and that's where a distiller earns his name or loses his eyesight.
Wilkins: Silas, tell them where the copper does its real work, because people get it wrong.
Silas: Folks think it's the pot that matters most, Doctor. It isn't. The sulfur stink in a wash, the rotten egg and boiled cabbage smell, comes off with the vapor. Copper scrubs it best right where that vapor rides: the helmet, the shoulder, the swan neck, and the lyne arm running to the worm. That's where the copper sulfide forms as the vapor passes, and that's why I hammer those parts heaviest and keep them bright. A copper pot with a cheap tin neck is like a fine coat with no buttons. It's all show where it doesn't count.
Wilkins: Tell them about joints.
Silas: Silver solder, or a proper tight union. Nothing else goes in my work. And one more thing, which a smith will tell you even if a distiller forgets. Never seal a still tight. If heat goes into a closed vessel, it builds pressure until something gives, and it'll give in your face. The vapor path has to run open all the way to the condenser. I've seen a riveted cap blow off a kettle and go through a shed roof like a cannonball. The man was lucky it went up and not sideways.
Wilkins: Amen. Now the cuts. Listen close. The first liquid off the worm is the foreshots. It smells sweet and sharp, like a varnish shop, and it carries the methanol that blinds a man and stops his heart. It goes on the ground. Every drop. Take more than you think you need and throw it away. If you mourn it, you're a fool, and a short-lived one. Then come the heads, harsh and hot, smelling of solvent. Those you collect apart. And here's the sensible man's trick: don't run your spirit into one big jug. Run it into a long line of small jars and number them, one, two, three, on down the bench. Let them sit and breathe overnight, then judge them one by one in daylight. Smell them. A small dab rubbed between your palms tells you plenty. The heads jars go out. The hearts are the clean, sweet middle of the run, and those are your keepers. Then the tails come on, oily, smelling of wet cardboard and dog. Set those aside to go back into a later run.
Wilkins: You can think of it like the bounty system. The first jar of a run is like the first promise of a bounty broker. It smells sweet, it burns hot, and it'll blind you if you swallow it. Only the honest middle is worth keeping. Nobody ever paid a bounty for the heads.
Silas: My grandfather used to say the hearts are the only part of the run that shows up for roll call.
Wilkins: And the fire. Alcohol vapor burns, and it burns invisible in daylight. Keep a pail of sand and a pail of water by the still, and keep your lamp up high and away from any joint that might weep. Never leave a run alone to go see a man about a horse, because the still won't wait for you to come back. I have seen a still-house in Gilmanton burn to the sills in the time it took the owner to visit the necessary. He came back buttoning his trousers to find the roof was gone, and so were his eyebrows, and he never did grow the left one back.
Wilkins: Silas, you've been a gentleman and a scholar, which is more than the county will say of me. Thank you for coming in.
Silas: Thank you, Doctor. Keep that bear away from my hinges.
♦ Barnaby grunts
Wilkins: No promises.
♪ Fiddle bridge
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Wilkins: SEGMENT FOUR. Myths, Mail, and the Anvil of Truth.
Wilkins: We've had a message come all the way up from the hill country of North Carolina, recorded on the cylinder at the depot office and shipped north in a crate of turpentine, by the smell of it. Let's hear it.
♦ Cylinder needle drop, thinner crackle, distant hiss
Wilkins: Here's the tape. Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro asks: 'Alchemist, my uncle swears old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Is there any truth to that, or was he just making swamp medicine?'
♦ Cylinder needle lifts
Wilkins: Rabbit! Greetings to you and all of Wilkes County from the granite hills. I'll be fair to your uncle, because there's a grain of something real buried in his swamp medicine, like a gold filling in a rotten molar.
Wilkins: Start with the ashes. Hardwood ash is potash. Every New England farmer's grandfather knew that. In the old days they leached ash in a barrel, boiled the lye down in big iron kettles, and sold the potash in Boston for good money, for soap and glass and gunpowder. That potash is an alkali, and a strong one. It'll take the skin off your knuckles if you handle it wet. So when an old-timer threw ash in his doubler, it did do something. It knocked down some of the sour, vinegary acids in a soured wash, and the run came off smelling softer. He smelled the difference, called it clean, and told his nephews for forty years.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: But it does NOTHING to the methanol, Rabbit. Not a thing. Ash in the thump keg is like a deputy at a church supper: he changes how everybody acts, and nothing about who they are. The poison still comes off first, and the only thing that saves a man is throwing those first jars on the ground. And don't go flinging raw lye ash into anything you mean to drink. Caustic is caustic.
Wilkins: Now the red oak shavings. Oak soaked in hot spirit gives up its tannin, its color, and a woody, vanilla-sort of flavor, the same as a barrel does over years. So your uncle's spirit came out tasting older and darker and more respectable. Rabbit, your uncle's red oak shavings make the spirit taste older, the way a powdered wig makes a judge look wiser. Neither one improves what's underneath. It's flavoring, not purification. A bad cut that's been oaked is still a bad cut, only now it's wearing a Sunday coat.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: So your uncle's not a liar, Rabbit. He's a man who noticed something true and explained it wrong, which puts him in the company of half the doctors in New England, including at least one you're listening to. Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, here's a hearty Suncook Valley salute to you, your uncle, and every hollow in Wilkes County. I'm stamping a large cent for you right now.
♦ Coin set on anvil, steel punch raised, a ringing CLANG on copper coin
Wilkins: There. 'G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H.' struck square across Liberty's forehead. She looks surprised, which is how most people look after meeting me.
Wilkins: Now one more myth, since the anvil's warm. It's the bead test. A man shakes his jar, watches the bubbles, and says, 'Big beads, gone quick, that's strong. Little beads, hanging on, that's weak.' And he'll swear on his mother's grave that it tells him the proof AND that it's safe to drink.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Half of that's a rough guess and the other half is dangerous nonsense. The bead does shift with strength. Big quick beads mean the spirit is up there, and an old hand can guess within a fair margin. But it's a guess. And the bead says nothing at all about methanol or harsh heads. A jar of pure poison can bead as handsome as a debutante's necklace. A man who reads a jar by the bead is like a man who reads a woman's heart by her bonnet: confident, often wrong, and occasionally in for a terrible surprise.
Wilkins: If you want truth, use a hydrometer. It's a little glass float with a scale inside. You drop it in the spirit, it sinks according to how heavy the liquid is, you correct for warmth, and it tells you the strength by honest arithmetic. That's what the federal gaugers carry when they come to tax you. A gauger with a hydrometer is a revenue man with arithmetic, the most dangerous animal in New England after Barnaby.
♦ Final steel punch clang on copper coin, a long ring fading
Wilkins: I struck that one so hard that Liberty's eyebrows went up. Even she doesn't believe in the bead test.
♪ Banjo bridge
♦ Wax cylinder crackle
Announcer: One more quick word! When you're ready for copper that does honest work, ask for the Flame-Flow still, U.S. Patent 10,561,960, in heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper. Visit moonshinestill.com today, or call at the Fort Wilkins showroom on Route 28 in Pittsfield!
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme returns softly
Wilkins: That's our evening, neighbors. We've covered the bounty system: the three-hundred-dollar ticket out of the war for the rich, and four hundred dollars and a lie for the jumper. We've had the broker in his fine mustache, Asa and his four lost teeth, and the jumper Barnaby relieved of two pairs of trousers. Our thanks to Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister for the gilded eagle on the door, the sack of seven regiments, and Uncle Ike's half-ear anvil. And thanks to Rabbit Miller down in Wilkesboro for keeping his uncle honest.
Wilkins: If you want to learn this craft right, the history, the metallurgy, the mash, and above all the cuts, sign up for the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. It's taught the way I'd teach my own apprentice, if I could find one who'd stay past the first bear encounter. You'll learn what copper does and why, how to tell heads from hearts, and how to keep your fire where it belongs and your eyebrows where God put them. And you'll learn the law, so you don't end up like me, a two-time guest of the Merrimack County sheriff with a bear for a lawyer.
Wilkins: To every man who went south for the flag and came home poorer, to every town still paying its bounty debt, and to every honest boy a broker swindled: you deserved better than the bargain they gave you.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ Theme swells, then fades into wax cylinder crackle and silence
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