Scotch-Irish Stillmen: The Ulster Men Who Carried the Worm Across the Water
How did Ulster Scots bring copper stills, the worm, and their whiskey-making to America? Dr. G. G. Wilkins traces it from the five ships that reached Boston in 1718 to the Londonderry, New Hampshire settlement and on to the Whiskey Rebellion, while his pet bear Barnaby rattles his chain outside the cabin. Along the way you get Scotch-Irish moonshine legends, an old Ulster rye-and-barley double run, and the truth about the blue-flame test.
In this episode
- Scotch-Irish history: Ulster Presbyterians, the 1718 Boston ships, and Londonderry NH
- How Ulster Scots carried the copper pot still and the worm to America
- Rye whiskey, the Great Wagon Road, and why backcountry farmers distilled their grain
- The 1791 whiskey excise, the tarring and feathering of tax collector Robert Johnson, and the Whiskey Rebellion
- Wilkins' first arrest and the deputy who knew a family whiskey recipe by taste alone
- Wilkes County moonshine legends: a warning ballad, a still cap packed in oatmeal, communion token tallies
- Old Ulster rye-and-barley double distillation walkthrough
- Hickory ash vs red oak shavings, and why the blue-flame proof test is a myth
Dr. Wilkins tells how the Ulster Scots came to America, starting with the five ships that reached Boston in 1718 and the Londonderry settlement only a day's ride from Pittsfield, and following them to the Whiskey Rebellion. On the way he admits that the deputy at his first arrest named the whiskey's family recipe by taste alone. Wilkes County runner Junior Vance tells new stories of a ballad sung as a warning, a still cap brought from Ulster packed in oatmeal, and Presbyterian communion tokens used to keep a tally of jugs. Wilkins then walks through an old Ulster rye-and-barley double run, answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller's question about hickory ash and red oak shavings, and debunks the blue-flame test.
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Full episode transcript
♦ Audible wax cylinder surface crackle, slow drip of clear distillate into a glass jar
♦ Barnaby the black bear grunting and chain clinking outside log cabin window
Wilkins: Barnaby! Settle that carcass down. You're rattling that chain like a deacon shaking the collection box at a funeral where nobody liked the dead man. Lie down. If you're peckish there's a deputy's boot under the woodpile with some of the deputy still in it. Go and gnaw on that and let a Christian talk.
♦ Bear grunt, a long, wet snuffle, chain settling in the mud
Wilkins: That's better, you hairy sin.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, wayfarers, sinners, and you three Concord lawyers listening in so you'll have something to confess. This is 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 am Dr. George G. Wilkins: dentist, blacksmith, inventor, and stamper of the Republic's small change, twice arrested and never once ashamed of it.
Wilkins: Tonight is a family history, the family that taught this continent to make whiskey. I mean the Scotch-Irish: Ulster Presbyterians, sons of the Lowlands, the hardest-headed, hardest-drinking, psalm-singing people ever to step off a ship and pick a fight with a mountain. They brought the copper, the worm, and the stubbornness, and the gauger came over on the next boat.
Wilkins: First, a word from the people who keep my lamp lit.
Announcer: Friends, a quick word! Fine copper makes a fine still, and the finest is the Flame-Flow still, protected under United States Patent 10,561,960 and handcrafted from heavy-gauge pure copper. See it at moonshinestill.com, that's moonshinestill.com!
♪ Short banjo sting
♪ Fiddle bridge, slow and mournful, like a ship leaving harbor
Wilkins: SEGMENT ONE. The Ulster Men Come Over the Water.
Wilkins: The story starts in 1609. King James, who wanted a Protestant Ireland the way a farmer wants a cow that milks itself, opened the north of Ireland, the province of Ulster, to settlers. Lowland Scots crossed the narrow sea by the thousand: Presbyterians, flax-growers, weavers. They brought oats, barley, and the copper pot their grandfathers had used to boil barley into uisge beatha, which is old Gaelic for water of life. A Scotsman will tell you that name proves God approves of whiskey, and a Methodist will tell you it proves the Devil is good at languages.
Wilkins: Scot and Irish lived side by side in Ulster for a hundred years, and they learned two things from each other. One was how to make poitin, the little-pot spirit of the Irish hills. The other was how to hate the gauger. Gauger is the old-country name for the exciseman, so called because he gauged your casks with a measuring rod and then gauged your purse with his fingers.
♦ Wax crackle, chair creak, a jar lid unscrewed
Wilkins: Then the trouble came. Landlords racked up the rents every time a lease ran out. The Test Act of 1704 shut Presbyterians out of public office, as if they were too sinful to be trusted, by the very Church that would sell you an indulgence at a discount. Then came drought, sheep rot, and failed flax. So in the summer of 1718 five ships sailed from Ulster into Boston harbor, full of hungry Presbyterians with hard hands and harder opinions.
Wilkins: Boston didn't want them. The Puritans looked at those Ulster folk the way Barnaby looks at a turnip. So sixteen families came up into New Hampshire, to a tract called Nutfield, and in 1722 they renamed it Londonderry after the city their fathers had held through the great siege. That's about a day's hard ride from where I'm sitting. Those Londonderry folk are credited with the first potatoes planted in New England, they set up looms and wove linen fit for a bishop's bedsheet, and whatever any honest historian may say, there wasn't a cellar in the township without a pot and a worm in some corner of it.
Wilkins: Those people gave this state John Stark, who whipped the British at Bennington, and Matthew Thornton, an Irish-born doctor who signed the Declaration of Independence. A doctor signed it, mind you, not a dentist, which is why it has no teeth when the tax man comes. And I'll tell you my private opinion of the Scotch-Irish: they left Scotland for Ireland, left Ireland for America, and left Pennsylvania for the Carolinas, and the gauger found them every time. That proves a tax collector is the only creature on God's earth more faithful than a Presbyterian.
♦ Barnaby grunts, chain clinks
Wilkins: Hush, Barnaby, you're not Presbyterian. You're barely Episcopalian.
Wilkins: Most of the Ulster folk didn't come to us in New Hampshire, though. They landed at Philadelphia, by the shipload, year after year, and pushed west into the Pennsylvania hills. There the barley wouldn't take kindly to the ground, so they turned to rye, and rye whiskey became the coin of the Monongahela country. When they ran out of elbow room they went south down the Great Wagon Road, through the Shenandoah, into the Carolina backcountry, and down there they met Indian corn and married it.
Wilkins: Here's the arithmetic that made every one of them a distiller. A packhorse on a mountain trace can carry a few bushels of grain on his back, and by the time he's over the ridge that grain is worth less than the oats he ate on the trip. Turn that grain to spirit and the same horse carries the value of many times as many bushels in two little kegs slung over his withers. Out there whiskey wasn't a vice. It was a bank draft that sloshed. Preachers were paid in it, debts were settled in it, and more than one wedding was paid for in it, and the bride went cheap.
Wilkins: You can guess what happened next. In 1791 Mr. Alexander Hamilton, a West Indies fellow with a schoolmaster's face, put a federal excise on spirits, and the Scotch-Irish in western Pennsylvania took it the way a bobcat takes a bath. That September they caught the collector, a man named Robert Johnson, cut off his hair, stripped him, and gave him a full suit of hot tar and goose feathers. Let me give you the particulars, because they matter. Pine tar is cooked until it pours like molasses, and if it's brushed on too hot it raises blisters like a burnt pudding. Then the feathers go on in a cloud, and when the tar sets every one is locked in. Getting it off afterward with lard and turpentine pulls up skin and hair together. Johnson came out of it plucked like a Christmas goose and twice as pink.
Wilkins: In 1794 President Washington himself rode out with nearly thirteen thousand militia to put down the Whiskey Rebellion. The rebels went back into the hills like smoke into a chimney. They took twenty-odd prisoners, convicted two men of treason, and then Washington pardoned both of them. That's the most expensive way of doing nothing this republic ever tried, until Congress perfected it.
Wilkins: A Scotch-Irishman will argue predestination with you all night, and in the morning he'll tell you it was predestined that you'd pay for the jug. And don't think the old country was any gentler. The Scots poet Robert Burns took a job as an exciseman, and then he wrote a song called 'The Deil's Awa wi' th' Exciseman,' about the Devil dancing off to hell with a tax collector. That's the only case I know of a man writing his own job reference in hellfire.
♪ Fiddle plays four bars of a Scots reel, then fades
♪ Banjo bridge, quick and sly
Wilkins: SEGMENT TWO. Legends, Outlaws, and a Deputy Named McNeil.
Wilkins: I'll tell you a story about my own hide, and it's one I have never told on this program, because it embarrasses me. It concerns my first arrest. That day the Merrimack County sheriff sent along a young deputy named Hugh McNeil, a Scotch-Irishman whose people came up out of Londonderry. He had a nose like a ship's figurehead and ears that stuck out like jug handles, which I took for an omen.
Wilkins: The sheriff poured a tin cup of my rye as evidence and handed it to McNeil to swear to the contents. McNeil sniffed it, sipped it, and went white as a bleached molar. 'Sheriff,' he says, 'that's my great-grandmother's mash. Rye and barley malt, with a fistful of oats for the body. That's the Antrim way. Where in God's name did this dentist get my granny's recipe?'
Wilkins: Well, I got it off an old Londonderry peddler in 1849, in trade for pulling three of his teeth and leaving one in out of mercy. That makes McNeil the first and only Merrimack lawman ever to recognize a family by anything other than its debts.
♦ Barnaby grunts loudly, chain snaps taut
Wilkins: Now here's where Barnaby comes in. McNeil was so taken with his ancestry that he went poking round the still-house window to look for the copper his granny's spirit came out of. He stepped past the chalk line I'd drawn in the dirt. Barnaby doesn't read chalk, and he doesn't read the Bible either. He reached out one paw about the size of a church hymnal and hooked McNeil by the seat of his good wool breeches.
Wilkins: You have never heard a sound like it, neighbors. First came a rip like a sail splitting in a gale, then a long howl, and McNeil went up the woodpile like a squirrel with the gout. Barnaby sat in the mud chewing on a mouthful of blue county broadcloth with half a suspender button hanging off his lip, looking as pleased as a bishop at a bake sale. McNeil was showing the moon at two o'clock in the afternoon. For a week every child in Pittsfield knew the color of the county's justice, and I'll tell you it was pinker than you'd hope.
♦ Wilkins laughs, wheezing, a slap on the table
Wilkins: I paid my fine and sewed up McNeil's breeches myself, with dental silk, and he bought a jug off me every Christmas until he moved to Manchester. There's affection under every roast, neighbors.
Wilkins: Speaking of Ulster blood running thick in the mountains, my guest tonight comes from the far end of the Great Wagon Road. He's a Wilkes County man out of North Wilkesboro, North Carolina, raised in the Brushy Mountains among folk whose great-grandsires came down that same road with copper on the wagon. Welcome to Fort Wilkins, Junior Vance.
Junior: Doc, much obliged. I've been in a lot of strange places but this is the first time I ever sat across from a man with a bear for a doorbell.
Wilkins: He's a doorbell and a door, Junior, and when he's in a mood he's the undertaker too. Now tell me. The folk in your hollers, were they Ulster stock?
Junior: Lord, Doc, you couldn't throw a rock in Wilkes County without hitting a McNeill, a Ferguson, a Cleary, or a Presbyterian, and most times all four in the same man. And they kept the old ways. I'll give you one. My great-aunt Ossie lived on the ridge above three still-houses. She'd sit on the porch working the churn dasher and sing 'Barbara Allen,' that old Scots ballad, every blessed verse of it, slow and pretty.
Wilkins: A fine ballad. Sad as a cracked bell.
Junior: Sad and useful. If she saw a strange car coming up the county road, or a fellow in a hat that was too clean, she'd jump straight from the first verse to the one where Barbara Allen dies and they bury her in the old churchyard. Every man in that holler knew it. You heard Barbara die early and you threw creek water on your fire, kicked leaves over the coals, and went to setting rabbit snares like a choirboy.
Wilkins: Ha! So your great-aunt killed Barbara Allen twice a week for forty years and never once spent a night in jail for it.
Junior: Never did. One revenue man stopped and told her it was the prettiest singing he'd heard in the Brushies. She thanked him kindly and sang him the rest of it. By the time she was done, him standing there with his hat off, there wasn't a warm stone left in that hollow.
♦ Wax crackle, Barnaby snuffles
Wilkins: That's craft, Junior, real craft. Tell me about the copper. Did your people bring any from the old country?
Junior: There's a story in my family, Doc, and I'll swear to it on Ossie's churn. Way back, a granddaddy of mine came over from County Antrim with a sea chest. Inside it was a copper still cap, the domed head, hammered by his own daddy, and he packed it in oatmeal so it wouldn't rattle and give him away to the ship's master. Well, the voyage ran long. They were weeks out and short of rations, so the family ate the packing.
Wilkins: They ate the oatmeal round the contraband!
Junior: Spoonful by spoonful, Doc, till they struck copper at the bottom of the chest. Once they could see the shine of that cap there was nothing left to eat for the last week but salt pork and prayer. Granddaddy said it was worth it. He said you can find oats on any farm in America but a good cap takes a lifetime.
Wilkins: He was right, Junior. A man can eat his way to a fortune if he eats in the right direction.
Junior: And here's another. My granddaddy was the slowest man I ever knew, and I was the fastest, so we didn't always see eye to eye. He wouldn't run a barrel of mash until it was finished working. He had an old cow horn, hollowed out and polished, and he'd stick the small end on the barrel stave and his ear on the big end, like a doctor with a sick man's chest.
Wilkins: A stethoscope for sour mash. Laennec would weep.
Junior: He'd say, 'Hear that, boy? It's frying like bacon. Leave it be.' When the frying quit and the cap fell, he'd say, 'Now she's done talking.' He taught me patience, Doc. It's the only patience I ever had, and I used every bit of it on that barrel and none of it on the road.
Wilkins: The only patience I ever learned was from a barrel of mash and a dentist's waiting room, and the mash was better company. One more, Junior, if you've got it in you.
Junior: I got a good one, about church money. Up in the Brushies there was an old Presbyterian elder, white beard down to his belt buckle. In the old Scotch churches they handed out communion tokens, little lead coins about the size of your thumbnail, stamped with the church's mark, to show you were fit for the Lord's Supper. This elder had a coffee can full of them left over from a church that had closed down.
Wilkins: I can feel it coming like a bad molar.
Junior: He used them for IOUs, Doc. A man came short on a jug, the elder gave the jug and kept the token on a nail behind the door. When that man came round to settle up, the elder handed back the token, but first the fellow had to stand there in the yard and say the Twenty-Third Psalm from start to finish. One time a fellow got stuck at 'thou preparest a table,' and the elder made him start over three times.
Wilkins: Junior, that's the only banker I ever met who made you pray before he made you pay. And lead tokens! I stamp my name on copper cents, and that old elder ran a whole savings bank on the hope of heaven. He beat me at my own trade.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: There's one for him, from the anvil. Junior Vance, you're welcome at Fort Wilkins any night. Mind the bear on your way out. He's partial to Carolina men, he thinks you taste of barbecue.
Junior: Doc, I've outrun a lot of things. I reckon I'll leave him a tip and walk real dignified.
♪ Banjo bridge rises
♪ Brass band flourish, slightly out of tune, like a medicine wagon pulling into town
Wilkins: AD BREAK. And here's the man with the voice like a calliope full of turpentine.
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♪ Brass flourish ends with a cymbal crash
♦ Barnaby grunts approvingly
Wilkins: Even the bear's convinced, and he doesn't buy anything he can't eat.
♪ Slow fiddle drone, low and warm
Wilkins: SEGMENT THREE. Copper and the Craft: An Ulster Double Run.
Wilkins: Here's the first thing I'll say, and I'll say it with my hand on my anvil. Distilling spirits for drinking without a federal license is against the law of these United States. What follows is history and education, the way the Ulster folk did it, so mind your own neck and keep within the law.
Wilkins: Now to the old Antrim method, as Deputy McNeil's great-grandmother would have known it. Start with the grain. The Ulster men, like the Scots, malted their barley. Steep barley in water a day or two, spread it on a clean floor, and turn it while it sprouts, until the little rootlets show and the grain tastes sweet when you bite it. Then dry it gently over a low fire to stop the sprouting, and that's your malt. The malt has the working power in it, the diastase, which turns starch to sugar. Now here's a piece of history the gauger won't tell you. After Britain taxed malt in 1785, the Irish distillers started mixing raw, unmalted barley into the mash with the malted, to save on taxed malt. That habit stayed and gave the Irish pot whiskey its oily, spicy character. A tax shaped the taste of a nation, which is the only good thing a tax has ever done.
Wilkins: In America, the Scotch-Irish swapped most of that barley for rye. The old Pennsylvania way runs something like this. Take rye meal as the main grain with a good share of barley malt, a fifth part or so, to do the converting, and maybe some oats for body, like McNeil's granny. Stir the meal into hot water and let it sit warm and covered so the malt can turn the starch to sugar. You'll taste it go sweet within a couple of hours. Then cool it right down. This is the step that fools beginners: if you pitch your yeast into hot mash you've boiled your workers alive. Wait until the mash is about blood-warm, so you can hold your finger in it and count to ten without cursing. Then pitch the yeast, cover the barrel loosely, and let it work three or four days, more in a cold cellar. Give it air in the room, mind, because a working barrel breathes out a gas that will smother a man in a closed pit.
Wilkins: When it's done talking, as Junior's granddaddy would say, you have the wash, a sour, beery liquor of only a few parts in a hundred spirit. Now the copper earns its keep.
♦ Fire crackling under a pot, a soft hiss
Wilkins: The Ulster men ran twice. The first run, the stripping run, goes fast and rough to pull the spirit out of the wash. What comes over is called low wines, and the old Irish and Scots called that first product the singlings. Most stillmen throw out the very first trickle of the stripping run too, as cheap insurance. Then they put the low wines back in the clean pot and run again, slow and low, for the doublings. That second, spirit run is where you make your cuts, and on the cuts hangs a man's honesty and his customers' eyesight.
Wilkins: The foreshots come over first, while the pot is just warming up. They smell sharp, like a hospital or a varnish shop, and they carry methanol, the wood spirit that blinds and kills. Every drop goes on the ground or in the lamp, never down a throat. My rule is that for every five gallons of wash in the pot you throw away a good couple of ounces of foreshots at the very least, and nobody ever died of throwing away too much. Next come the heads. They're still harsh, solvent-smelling, and they give you the morning-after headache that makes a man swear off drink until noon. Set them aside and don't sell them. Then come the hearts, sweet and clean with the grain in them, and there's your whiskey. Last come the tails, oily and wet-dog smelling, with a cloudiness when you cut them with water. Set those aside to run again with the next batch.
Wilkins: And the copper? A copper still will tell you everything if you listen. Copper carries heat quick and even, so the pot doesn't scorch the mash on the bottom, and the bright metal takes the rotten-egg stink out of the vapor before it ever reaches the worm. Brass and copper must be joined proper, not with lead. I've pulled lead-poisoned teeth out of heads that had drunk from bad joints, and those teeth came out gray and loose as fence posts in a spring thaw.
Wilkins: Now the fire rules, because the Ulster folk burned down more barns than the British ever did. Never seal your pot tight. A still is a kettle, not a cannon, and a closed vessel over a fire builds pressure until it throws its head through the roof and the cook along with it. Keep your fire low and steady. Never leave a running still alone. Spirit vapor is invisible, it burns, and it'll find a candle flame across the room like a revenue man finds a widow's pension. Keep a bucket of water and a sack of sand by the door. And never pour or proof spirit near an open flame.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: There. Stamped for the record. I pull teeth and I make spirit, and the only difference is that one customer screams before he pays and the other screams after.
♪ Fiddle drone resolves
♪ Banjo picks a jaunty postcard tune
Wilkins: SEGMENT FOUR. Myths, Slang, and the Listener's Cylinder.
Wilkins: We've had a recorded message come over the wire from down in Carolina. Let's crank it up.
♦ Wax cylinder hiss, needle drop, faint distant crackle
Wilkins: This is Cletus Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina. Let's hear him.
♦ Recording plays, tinny and far away
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 fades
Wilkins: Rabbit, my boy, your uncle's half a chemist and half a liar, which makes him a whole Carolinian. Let's take the two halves one at a time.
Wilkins: First the hickory ash. Ash is mostly potash. Do you know what our grandmothers did with potash? They leached it in a barrel with rainwater and boiled down the lye to make soft soap. Potash was such a staple in colonial New England that whole townships cleared their forests by burning the trees and shipping the ashes off to the soap-boilers of England. So when your uncle shovels hickory ash into his thump keg, he's putting a cake of lye soap into it that hasn't made up its mind. That alkali might knock back some sourness, but it can leave a bitter, soapy taste in the doubler, and it does nothing at all to the heads. The methanol and the harsh volatiles boil off early in the run no matter what's sitting in the keg. The only thing that cleans out bad heads is the man's hand on the jar, cutting them away and throwing them out.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Now the red oak shavings, and here's a cooper's secret. No honest cooper in America makes a whiskey barrel out of red oak. Red oak is open-pored, like a sponge. You can put your mouth on the end of a red oak stick and blow bubbles out the other end into a cup of water. A red oak barrel leaks so badly that a cooper would sooner hoop a fishing net. That's why barrels are made of white oak, whose pores are plugged up tight by nature. Red oak shavings in the keg will give your spirit some tannin and some color, and they'll make a raw white run look older than it is. That isn't cleaning, Rabbit. It's putting a Sunday coat on a drunk.
Wilkins: So your uncle was making swamp medicine, but swamp medicine with a pedigree, and I respect a family that keeps its old foolishness polished. You tell him Dr. Wilkins says to cut his heads honest and save the hickory for his smokehouse hams. Cletus Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, thank you for the question. You're a credit to the Brushies, and if you ever come north, Barnaby will greet you personally, so wear thick breeches.
♦ Barnaby grunts, chain jingles
Wilkins: Now for tonight's myth, and it's the one that's killed more fools than the Union army killed rebels. It's the blue flame. You'll hear it in every tavern from Pittsfield to Pigeon Forge: pour a spoon of spirit, put a match to it, and if it burns blue it's safe, and if it burns red or yellow there's lead in it, and the rhyme goes 'lead burns red and makes you dead.'
♦ A match strikes, a soft whoomph of flame
Wilkins: Nonsense. Pure, tinkered-together nonsense. Wood spirit, the methanol that blinds men, burns with a pale blue flame of its own, so that blue flame you're trusting could be the very poison you're afraid of. As for lead, a few grains of poison dissolved in spirit won't reliably paint a flame any color you could swear to in the dark of a barn. The color of that flame tells you a little about the strength and about whatever dirt is on the spoon, and nothing about whether the stuff will kill you. If blue flame meant safe, every drunk who ever set his whiskers alight would be a certified chemist.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Lead burns red and kills you dead is the only true poem in the whole business, because it doesn't work and still sounds pretty. If you want safe spirit, make it from clean grain in clean copper with no lead in the joints, throw out the foreshots and heads, and buy only from a maker you'd trust with your own mother's teeth. That's not poetry, it's chemistry, and chemistry doesn't rhyme.
♪ Banjo tune winds down
♪ Theme returns softly underneath
Wilkins: That's the night, neighbors, and before I bank the fire, one more word from the man with the brass lungs.
Announcer: A quick word, friends! Real copper, honest craftsmanship, and a patent to prove it: the Flame-Flow still, U.S. Patent 10,561,960. Order yours at moonshinestill.com, that's moonshinestill.com!
Wilkins: Thank you, Announcer. Now, if tonight's story of the Ulster men has stirred your blood and you want to learn the craft properly, the lawful, historical, educational way, with the cuts, the copper, the fire, and the patience of a man with a cow horn to his barrel, then enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I'll teach you to read a mash like Junior's granddaddy, cut a run like Deputy McNeil's great-grandmother, and keep your eyebrows where the Lord put them. I don't teach any shortcuts, because shortcuts are how a man ends up in the river with the deputies.
Wilkins: My thanks to Junior Vance of North Wilkesboro for his stories. Thanks to Cletus Rabbit Miller and his uncle's hickory ash, to great-aunt Ossie and her doomed Barbara Allen, to the old elder and his lead tokens, and to the Scotch-Irish, who crossed two seas and a mountain range with a copper cap in the oatmeal and a fight in their bellies. Every jar in this valley owes them a toast.
♦ Barnaby grunts, chain clinks, a long bearish yawn
Wilkins: Yes, Barnaby, you too. Goodnight to the bear, goodnight to the sheriff, and goodnight to Deputy McNeil's breeches, wherever they rest.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme swells and fades
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♦ Wax cylinder crackle runs out to silence