Copper Prices Then and Now: What a Pound of the Red Metal Bought
How much was a pound of copper worth to a moonshiner in the 1860s? Alchemist G. G. Wilkins traces the price of copper from Paul Revere's rolling mill to the end of the large cent in 1857, then to 1864, when wartime prices made old copper pennies worth more melted down than spent. Blue Ridge herbalist Clara Higgins shares family stories about hiding a copper still from Confederate buyers, building a still from a ship's copper sheathing, and trading persimmon brandy for tinkers' copper by the pound.
In this episode
- Copper price history from Paul Revere's 1801 Canton rolling mill to Lake Superior native copper
- Why the large copper cent ended in 1857, and the 168-grain math of about 42 cents to the pound
- How Civil War demand pushed copper above 40 cents a pound in 1864, so melting pennies paid more than spending them
- The 1864 bronze cent and the two-cent piece, the first US coin with 'In God We Trust'
- How the county weighed Wilkins's confiscated moonshine still like scrap and sold it at auction
- Clara Higgins's Appalachian stories: a still hidden from Confederate copper buyers, a still made from ship sheathing, and persimmon brandy traded for copper
- Listener voicemail: hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg
- Busting the folk myth that a copper penny in a jar purifies moonshine
Wilkins follows the price of a pound of copper from Paul Revere's rolling mill, through the 1857 death of the big copper cent, to the wartime jump of 1864, when a pound of old large cents was worth more melted down than spent. He also tells how the county once weighed his confiscated still like scrap and sold it at auction. Blue Ridge herbalist Clara Higgins tells new stories: her great-great-grandmother hid the family still from Confederate copper buyers, a still was hammered out of a ship's old copper sheathing, and persimmon brandy was traded for tinkers' copper by the pound. In Segment 4 Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's voicemail about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, and he clears up the old belief that a copper cent dropped in a jar purifies the spirit.
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Full episode transcript
♦ Audible wax cylinder surface crackle, slow drip of clear distillate into a glass jar
♦ Barnaby the black bear grunting and chain clinking outside log cabin window
Wilkins: Barnaby. BARNABY. Settle your carcass, you four-hundred-pound sack of wet fleas. That sound is the drip, not the dinner bell. Lie down, or I'll sell you to the Concord tannery by the pound, and at today's rates for bear grease you'd fetch less than my copper worm.
♦ Bear huffs a long, offended breath; chain drags and drops in the dirt
Wilkins: That's better. He's sulking. A bear sulks with his whole backside, friends, and Barnaby's got more backside to sulk with than a Portsmouth harbor master.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, scoundrels, and you few honest folk who tuned in by mistake. Welcome to Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, broadcasting from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, here in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. I'm your host, Doctor George G. Wilkins: dentist, blacksmith, inventor, twice a guest of the Merrimack County sheriff, and the only man in this valley who can pull your molar, shoe your mare, and stamp his name on your pocket change before supper.
Wilkins: Tonight's sermon is copper. Copper prices, then and now. What a pound of the red metal bought your grandfather in Paul Revere's day, what it buys you in this year of our Lord eighteen sixty-five, and why a man who used to sit on his pennies ought now to sit on a pound of them and charge rent.
Wilkins: And the fine print, which I read out the way I pull a tooth, quick and without apology: 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. Mr. Lincoln's revenue men are listening, and I'd hate to make them work.
♦ Wax cylinder crackle swells briefly
Announcer: A QUICK WORD, friends! Is your still held together with flour paste and prayer? Stop the leaking and the cussing! Sanitary Tri-Clamp ferrules and gaskets from Moonshine Stills, just thirty-four dollars and ninety-five cents. Shop hardware at moonshinestill.com!
♪ Fiddle sting, then fades
♪ Slow banjo bed, low and warm
Wilkins: Now. Copper. Let me paint the picture back to my granddaddy's day. When this republic was young, if you wanted a sheet of copper fit for a kettle or a ship's bottom, you bought it from the English. Most of it came off the smelters around Swansea in Wales. We'd just fought a war to be shed of King George, and we were still buying his kettles. That's like divorcing your wife and then paying her to cook for you.
Wilkins: Then along comes Paul Revere. Yes, that Paul Revere, the midnight-ride fellow. In eighteen-oh-one he set up one of the first copper rolling mills in America, down at Canton, Massachusetts. Rolled sheet copper right here at home. He sheathed the hull of the frigate Constitution with it, and he put copper on the dome of the State House in Boston. A patriot by night and a merchant by morning, which is the whole Yankee character in one sentence.
Wilkins: Back then copper was dear, a luxury metal. A farmer who owned a copper kettle willed it to his eldest son, right after the farm and right before the wife. A still was often the dearest thing a country family owned besides the land, and smiths priced them the way a butcher prices a ham: by the pound of metal, plus the labor.
Wilkins: Then in eighteen forty-one, Douglass Houghton, the state geologist of Michigan, wrote up the copper country around Lake Superior, and the rush was on. Up there copper lies in the rock as pure native metal, great masses of it. Men hacked boulders of copper out of the ground so big they had to chisel them apart by hand like a frozen side of beef. By the fifties, Lake Superior copper led the whole country, and the price of a pound sat comfortably in the low twenties of cents.
Wilkins: So what did a pound buy, in the fat years before the war? I'll give you my own ledger and you can argue with it. By my figuring in those days, one pound of good sheet copper traded about even for a day and a half of hired farm labor, or a pair of plump hens, or one middling sermon from a preacher who was trying to get paid. A pound of copper used to buy a Christmas goose. These days it buys the goose, the stuffing, and the preacher to say grace over it.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Hear that? That's my punch on a big old copper cent. G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. Now here's the arithmetic that'll make a numismatist weep into his magnifying glass. From seventeen ninety-five to eighteen fifty-seven, the big copper cent weighed one hundred sixty-eight grains. A pound is seven thousand grains. Divide it out on your slate and you get about forty-one or forty-two large cents to the pound.
Wilkins: So long as copper sold for twenty-some cents a pound, Uncle Sam was coining copper and making a tidy profit on the bargain. But the price crept up, and the mint got tired of losing its shirt, and in eighteen fifty-seven Congress killed the big cent and the half cent stone dead. In their place came the little Flying Eagle, copper and nickel, no bigger than a lady's shirt button. People called it the nick. I called it an insult.
Wilkins: Then came the war. Cannon want bronze, cartridges and fittings want brass, and every percussion cap on every musket from here to Vicksburg wants a pinch of copper. The price went up like a Fourth of July rocket. By eighteen sixty-four, quoted in Mr. Chase's greenback paper, Lake copper in New York had climbed past forty cents a pound, about double what it fetched before the shooting started.
Wilkins: Now remember the big cent. Forty-two to the pound. When copper sells above forty-two cents, a pound of old big cents is worth more melted than spent. I'm not saying any man in Pittsfield fed his grandmother's penny jar to the furnace. I'm saying I knew a fellow who did, and he bought a new wagon wheel with the difference, and that fellow looks a great deal like me in a dim mirror.
Wilkins: And that same year, eighteen sixty-four, the government shrank the cent again. Out went the copper-nickel, in came a thin bronze cent of forty-eight grains, and a brand-new bronze two-cent piece with 'In God We Trust' stamped on it. That's the first coin in this nation to carry those words. They put God on the two-cent piece because by then it was the only thing in the country you couldn't tax.
♦ Barnaby grunts, chain rattles hard
Wilkins: Barnaby objects to theology. Speaking of copper and Barnaby, let me tell you about the Concord junk peddler. This was the fall the price got silly. Word went round that Wilkins had a copper worm in his still-house that weighed better than nine pounds, and nine pounds of copper at war prices is real money. So one moonless night this peddler, a long weasel of a man with a sack and a hacksaw, came creeping up the back path. Every thief in New Hampshire knows about Barnaby. This one figured Barnaby'd be asleep.
Wilkins: Bears don't sleep the way Christians do, friends. They doze with one ear cocked for sin. This peddler got one leg over the sill and Barnaby rose up out of the dark like a hairy chimney falling backwards. I heard it from my bed: first a squeak like a hinge, then a rip like a bedsheet torn in half, then a howl that brought the Hutchins dogs a mile off into full chorus. Barnaby got the seat of that man's trousers, and a good deal of what was in them. By lantern light next morning I found the hacksaw, the sack, one boot, and a piece of gray wool with a scrap of a man's hindquarter still clinging to it like bacon rind on a skillet.
Wilkins: The peddler went to Doctor Berry over in Barnstead, who stitched him with linen thread and told me later the man would whistle every time he sat down for the rest of his natural life. He came for my copper worm and left with half a pair of trousers and a whistle in his backside where none had been before. Barnaby doesn't know copper from cornbread, but he knows a thief by the smell of his fear, and fear smells like a privy in August.
♪ Banjo flourish, transition
Wilkins: Now to legends and outlaws. Since we're on the price of copper, I'll tell you the part of my first arrest that the newspapers left out, because the newspapers never print the part where I win.
Wilkins: The first time the sheriff took me, he carted off my still on a hay wagon as evidence. Twelve years I'd fed that kettle. And after the trial, the county didn't know what to do with it. They couldn't drink out of it, legally. So the board decided to sell it as scrap. They hauled my still to the feed store and weighed it on the grain scale, like a hog at the fair. I have never been so insulted on behalf of a kettle.
Wilkins: Then they posted it for auction, by the pound. Now, nobody in Pittsfield dared bid on Wilkins' still, partly from respect and partly because Barnaby has a long memory. So my cousin from Gilmanton stood up in his Sunday hat and bid eleven cents a pound, which was robbery even in a cheap year. The auctioneer looked around, saw nobody but a crowd of men staring hard at their own boots, and said, sold. That still came home to Fort Wilkins the very next week for less than I'd paid for the metal, and the county was proud of itself for turning a profit on me. That's what I call the county taxing itself and paying me the change.
Wilkins: Now I've got a guest tonight who knows a good deal about copper hidden from governments, and a good deal more about what mountain folk poured out of it. She's come up from the Blue Ridge of Virginia, an herbalist and a scholar of old-time mountain talk. Please welcome Miss Clara Higgins.
♦ Chair scrapes on plank floor, jar set down on table
Clara: Evenin', Doctor. I'll say this for New Hampshire: your bear is bigger than ours and your coffee's worse.
Wilkins: The coffee's half chicory and half spite, Miss Higgins. Welcome to Fort Wilkins. Now, tonight we're on copper and its price. Down South this war made copper scarcer than an honest auctioneer. What did that mean up in your hollers?
Clara: It meant the government came lookin' for our kettles, Doctor. In 'sixty-three the Confederate ordnance men were scrapin' the country for copper. Percussion caps, they said. They'd buy a still if you'd sell it, and if you wouldn't, well, some of 'em weren't too particular about asking twice. They'd lost the Ducktown mines over in Tennessee when the Union boys took that country, and after that every copper pot in Virginia had a price on its head.
Wilkins: So what did your people do?
Clara: My great-great-grandmother Tabitha heard the agents was two farms down the road. She had her boys pull that still off the furnace, still warm, and carry it to the hog wallow. They dug a hole in the muck, set the still in, covered it over, and then she drove all six hogs right back on top of it. Hogs set down in mud like they own it, Doctor. When those agents rode up, she met 'em at the gate with a tin washtub, all dented up, and swore on her mama's Bible that was the only metal on the place. They paid her a dollar for that washtub. A Confederate dollar, mind, which by then would barely buy the washtub's handle.
Wilkins: She sold the government a washtub and hid the treasure under the hogs. In New Hampshire we hide ours under the selectmen, and the smell is about the same.
Clara: Oh, it smelled worse than any selectman ever born, Doctor. When they dug that still up a month later, it had to be scrubbed with sand and lye ashes three days runnin', and Granny Tabitha said the first batch out of it tasted faintly of bacon. Folks came from two counties over to try the bacon whiskey.
Wilkins: Now that's a woman I'd have courted, and lost to, at cards. Tell me about ship copper. I've heard of Virginia stills made from things that floated.
Clara: You have, and it's true. There was a fella, a ship-breaker's son out of Norfolk, back before the war. When they tore apart the old sailing ships, the copper sheathing on the hull came off in big green sheets. That copper's what kept the worms and barnacles from eatin' the ship, you see. That's where 'copper-bottomed' comes from, meaning a thing's sound. Well, he hauled a wagonload of those sheets up the James River and over the mountains and hammered 'em into a still. And it still had barnacle scars on it, little white rings pocked all over the belly. And on one side you could read part of the ship's name, carved backward in the metal: N-A-N-C-Y. They called that still Nancy for fifty years.
Wilkins: A copper-bottomed ship and a copper-bottomed widow have this in common, Miss Higgins: both are sound, both are well-sheathed, and both will outlast the fool who chases them.
Clara: You hush, Doctor. Though I won't say you're wrong.
Wilkins: Now my topic tonight is what a pound of copper bought. You study the brandies. What did the mountain folk use for money when copper came calling?
Clara: Persimmon brandy, Doctor, and nothin' else. Before the war, when the tinkers came through with their packs of copper sheet and patches and rivets, the rate up our way was 'a pint a pound.' One pint of good persimmon brandy for one pound of copper. Everybody knew it, like you know the price of salt. Then the war run copper up, and the tinkers come through in 'sixty-two and said, 'Two pints a pound, ma'am.' My grandmama said she'd never been robbed so polite in her life.
Wilkins: Two pints a pound is robbery, but every tinker's a robber and every brandy-maker's a liar, so the books balance.
Clara: That's mountain bookkeepin' exactly. And my grandaddy, he had a trick for knowin' if a coppersmith had cheated you. He'd take a hickory nut and tap it on the side of a new still. Good sheet copper, all one piece, rings out like a little church bell, ting. Patched or cheap metal, it goes thunk, like knockin' on a gourd. He'd tap every still before he paid, and if it thunked, he'd hand the man his hat.
Wilkins: That's sound doctoring. A coppersmith who sells you patched sheet is like a dentist who leaves the root in: you won't know till Tuesday, and Tuesday will be the worst day of your life.
Clara: One more, and it's about pennies, since you're so fond of punchin' 'em. Down in Botetourt County there was a woman whose husband got fined for sellin' his brandy without the tax. Twelve dollars. She didn't have paper money and didn't trust it anyhow. So she filled her butter churn with copper pennies she'd been savin' since the old big cents, and hauled it to the courthouse on a mule. Poured 'em out on the clerk's table. That poor clerk counted till suppertime, and she stood there the whole while correctin' his arithmetic.
Wilkins: Ha! And with copper where it is now, she overpaid that court by a good margin in metal. That's the finest revenge a woman ever took on a government. Miss Clara Higgins, stay put, I want you for the slang later. Barnaby'll mind his manners.
♦ Barnaby grunts, low and suspicious
Clara: He's lookin' at me like I'm a ham.
Wilkins: To Barnaby, everyone is a ham. It's a compliment.
♪ Patent-medicine show calliope-style fiddle reel
Announcer: LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, distillers and dabblers, hear me now! What's the one sound that makes a stillman's blood run cold? Not the sheriff's knock. Not the bear's growl. It's the HISS. The hiss of vapor leaking from a joint you sealed with flour paste and good intentions! Leaking vapor is lost spirit, wasted fire, and danger to your whole still-house! Away with the paste! Away with the slipping hose clamp that creeps loose in the heat of the run!
Announcer: Behold the Heavy-Duty Sanitary Tri-Clamp Ferrules and Gaskets from Moonshine Stills! Heavy-gauge ferrules of precision three-oh-four stainless, mated to fittings of heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper! Food-grade PTFE gaskets that seal snug and clean! Quick-release stainless wing clamps that close by hand in one twist, with no wrench, no paste, and no cussing! Every piece is pressure-tested and precision-milled for a lifetime of airtight service!
Announcer: All this for just thirty-four dollars and ninety-five cents! Come see them gleam at the showroom at Fort Wilkins on Route 28 in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, or order them this very night at moonshinestill.com/products/tri-clamp-fittings. Once more, friends: shop hardware at moonshinestill.com/products/tri-clamp-fittings. Seal it tight and run it right!
♪ Reel ends with a fiddle flourish
♪ Low, contemplative banjo
Wilkins: Back at Fort Wilkins. Now to copper and the craft, the alchemy proper. The fine print again: this is history and learning, and the law says you need a federal permit. Now, with copper fetching what it does, a man wants to know just where he's getting his money's worth.
Wilkins: Here it is. Copper earns its keep wherever the vapor touches it. Copper takes up sulfur. The stinking compounds rising off a mash, the rotten-egg and cabbage-water smells, meet bright copper and stay behind on the metal. So the copper in your helmet, your vapor pipe, and your worm counts for more than the copper in your pot bottom. If a poor man can afford only so much copper, he puts it where the vapor runs, in the cap and the worm, and keeps the metal bright.
Wilkins: Now the mash. Here's how corn was done in this valley in my father's time. Crack your corn coarse, the way you'd crack it for hens. Bring it up in hot water and cook it a good while, stirring so it doesn't scorch, till it's a thick porridge. Then let it cool to where you can hold your hand in it, a warm-bath heat. That's when you stir in your malt, sprouted barley dried and ground. Malt carries a ferment in it that turns the starch of the corn to sugar. Without malt, your yeast stares at corn starch like a deputy staring at a law book: hungry and confused.
Wilkins: Once it's sweet, you cool it further, pitch your yeast, and let it work in a warm room with a cover that breathes. Three days, four, five, till the bubbling slows and it tastes sour-dry instead of sweet. That's your wash, weak stuff, a few parts in a hundred of spirit. The still's whole job is to raise it.
Wilkins: Now the run. Fire low. I say that every week and I'll say it on my deathbed. A hard fire pukes mash up into your vapor pipe and smears everything together, good and bad. A low fire lets the spirit come off in its proper order. And never, ever walk off from a lit still to piddle, flirt, or argue politics. Alcohol vapor is fire looking for a home. A leaky joint near a flame will burn your still-house to the sill and you along with it. Seal your joints tight and stay by your fire.
Wilkins: Then the cuts. First come the foreshots, a little thin stuff that comes off before anything else, sharp as turpentine. It carries the poison, the wood-spirit that blinds men, and it goes on the ground or in the lamp, never in a mouth. As a rough guide, for every twenty gallons of wash I throw away at least a pint or so, and more if my nose tells me to. Your nose outranks any number I give you.
Wilkins: After the foreshots come the heads. Heads smell like a varnish shop caught fire inside a lawyer's mouth. Solvent, glue, a headache in a cup. You catch the run in small jars, numbered in order, one, two, three, a whole row on the shelf like choirboys. You don't decide in the heat of the run. You let the jars air out, then you smell and taste each one carefully, with water, and you find where the varnish stops and the sweetness starts.
Wilkins: The hearts are your treasure: clean, sweet, the corn singing through. Then the tails creep in, oily and wet-dog, with a cloudy film when you add water. Set the tails aside for the next run. The heads and foreshots get thrown out, every time, no matter what copper costs or how thirsty your brother-in-law is.
Wilkins: And after the run, clean your copper. A warm rinse, a scrub, a bit of vinegar and salt on the dull spots, then a good rinse. You paid war prices for that metal. Treat it like a bride and not like a mule. My first wife said I loved my still more than her. I said that wasn't fair, the still never once asked where I'd been.
♦ Barnaby lets out a long, rumbling groan
Wilkins: Barnaby agrees with my first wife, which is the only thing they ever agreed on.
♪ Banjo turnaround, then a playful fiddle lick
Wilkins: Now to myths, slang, and the mailbag. We've got a call-in recording from down in North Carolina. Cue the cylinder.
♦ Cylinder needle drops, heavy crackle, faint hiss
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?
♦ Needle lifts, crackle cuts off
Wilkins: That's Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, and Rabbit, your uncle has got hold of two different pieces of wood and the wrong end of both of them. Let's split them like stovewood.
Wilkins: Hickory ash first. Hickory ash is full of potash. Every farm wife in America knows what that means: you pour water through hickory ash in a hopper and what drips out the bottom is lye. Lye makes soap. Lye turns corn into hominy. Lye takes the skin off your knuckles. Put hickory ash in your thump keg and you won't have whiskey, Rabbit. You'll have the world's most expensive bar of soap and a mouth like a washerwoman's knuckles. Lye has no business near a still. It's caustic, it foams, and it does nothing for the bad stuff.
Clara: Our mountain folk call that 'washday likker,' Doctor. Granny said you could tell a man who'd done it 'cause his whiskey'd shave you on the way down.
Wilkins: Washday likker! Then the red oak. Now oak and whiskey are old friends, but it's white oak, Rabbit. Every cooper in Christendom knows that white oak makes a tight barrel, because its pores are plugged up natural inside the wood. Red oak's pores are open like a drunkard's purse. You can blow through a stick of it. That's why coopers made red oak into slack barrels for flour and nails, and never into whiskey barrels. Toss red oak shavings in a thumper and maybe you get some color and a pucker of tannin, but you won't clean out a single bad head. Red oak shavings in a thumper are like a red-oak barrel: they leak flavor in, they leak good sense out, and every cooper in the county would laugh you off his porch.
Wilkins: Your thump keg is a second boiling, Rabbit. It strengthens the spirit, and some men flavor it, but it doesn't scrub anything. The only cure for bad heads is the one I gave you twenty minutes ago: cut them out, and throw away the foreshots and heads. Tell your uncle that Doctor Wilkins of Pittsfield sends his regards and a fresh-stamped cent for his trouble.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: There. G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. Rabbit Miller, that one's yours. Hang it on a string around your uncle's neck so he remembers.
Wilkins: And since that coin's still warm, let me kill another myth tonight, one that ties right into copper. I've seen men from here to the Connecticut River drop a copper cent into a fresh jar of spirit, swearing it purifies the liquor, sweetens it, draws out the poison. Some say if the penny turns green, the jar's poisoned, and if it stays bright, it's safe.
Clara: Oh, we had that one too. Mountain folks called it 'pennyin' the jar.'
Wilkins: Well, it's bunkum from crown to toenail. A copper still does its good work as vapor passes over hot, bright metal. A dirty penny sitting cold in a jar does no such thing. Spirit dissolves a little of the copper, and it dissolves every grain of grime off that penny too. Think where a penny's been: pockets, palms, privies, collection plates, a pig's mouth. If the jar takes on a greenish tint, that's dissolved copper you're about to drink, not a seal of quality. A green penny tells you nothing about poison, and a bright one promises nothing about safety. A man who drops a penny in his jar to clean it has paid a cent for the privilege of drinking a cent.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, ringing out
Wilkins: There, another myth flattened on the anvil. I've struck coins so thin with my punch that the Treasury could claim I was minting money and I could claim I was minting air.
Wilkins: Miss Higgins, before you go, give me one more piece of mountain slang tied to copper.
Clara: My grandaddy called a clean first run 'new-penny likker,' Doctor, because it ought to come out bright and honest as a fresh-minted cent. And a still that'd been patched and cheated on, he'd call it 'tin-hearted.' Worst thing you could say about a still or a man.
Wilkins: New-penny liquor and a tin heart. I'll steal both of those and never give you credit. Miss Clara Higgins of the Blue Ridge, thank you kindly.
Clara: Thank you, Doctor. And tell Barnaby I ain't a ham.
♦ Barnaby grunts, unconvinced
♪ Theme returns softly beneath
Announcer: ONE MORE QUICK WORD! Leaky joints waste spirit and court danger! Seal your still tight with Moonshine Stills Tri-Clamp ferrules, PTFE gaskets, and stainless wing clamps, just thirty-four ninety-five. Shop hardware at moonshinestill.com!
Wilkins: That's our show, neighbors. If tonight's talk of cuts, copper, and honest fire has you itching to learn properly, sign on for the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I'll teach you mash, malt, fire, cuts, and copper care from the ground up, the right way and the lawful way, with permits and paperwork, so you never meet my sheriff or my bear. Details through our friends at moonshinestill.com.
Wilkins: Remember, in this year of eighteen sixty-five, a pound of copper is worth more than a pound of most men in Merrimack County. The only thing hereabouts worth its weight in copper is me, and the county keeps trying to weigh me in a jail cell. Thank you to Clara Higgins, to Rabbit Miller in Wilkesboro, and to Barnaby, who did not eat anyone tonight, which is a small miracle.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ Banjo and fiddle theme swells and fades into wax cylinder crackle