How Prohibition Made the Modern Cocktail
Every dry law in 1800s America, from the Massachusetts Fifteen Gallon Law to Neal Dow's Maine Law, left the country with worse liquor and cleverer drinkers. Dr. G. G. Wilkins tells how bootleg rotgut, patent bitters, Tudor's New England ice, sugar and lemon came together as the modern American cocktail, broadcasting from a log fort in Civil War era Pittsfield, New Hampshire. Master coppersmith Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister tells copper still and copper mug stories, a listener question covers thump keg wood for moonshine distilling, and Barnaby the bear strips a temperance spotter on the Turnpike.
In this episode
- Cocktail history: the 1806 Hudson, NY definition and the 'figging' horse-trader story behind the name
- The 1838 Massachusetts Fifteen Gallon Law and the striped pig of Dedham loophole
- Neal Dow, the 1851 Maine Law, town liquor agents and the 1855 Portland Rum Riot
- How rectifiers doctored raw whiskey, and why Hostetter's and Drake's bitters sold as medicine in dry towns
- Frederic Tudor the Ice King, the sherry cobbler and Jerry Thomas's 1862 bar book Brandy Cocktail
- Coppersmith Silas McAllister on flaming Blue Blazer mugs, a poisonous unlined copper punch bowl and a hollow copper cane
- Moonshine distilling Q&A: hickory ash vs red oak in the thump keg, potash, open grain and fake barrel color
- Barnaby the pet bear vs a Concord temperance spotter on the Suncook Valley Turnpike
Dr. G. G. Wilkins argues that every dry law from the Massachusetts Fifteen Gallon Law to the Maine Law left the country with worse liquor and cleverer drinkers, and that this is where the bitters, ice, sugar and lemon of the modern cocktail came from. He covers the striped pig of Dedham, Neal Dow's Portland Rum Riot and Jerry Thomas's 1862 bar book, and tells how Barnaby stripped a Concord temperance spotter down to his bare backside on the Turnpike. Master coppersmith Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister tells three new stories: flaming Blue Blazer mugs, a poisonous unlined punch bowl and a deacon's hollow copper cane. Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC gets an answer about hickory ash and red oak in the thump keg, with talk of potash, open grain and fake barrel color.
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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, you four-hundred-pound sack of fleas and bad intentions, drop that. That is not your lemon. That lemon cost me eleven cents at a Concord grocer's and came farther than you ever will, and it has better manners. Drop it! ...Well, he has ate the rind and spit the seeds out the window at me, which is more decorum than I have seen at a Pittsfield selectmen's supper. Settle down. Settle, I said, or I will pull your back molar and wear it on my watch chain.
♦ Bear grumble, chain slack hitting the log wall
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swelling and then falling under
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, sinners and revenue men alike. This is Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, broadcasting from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I am Dr. George G. Wilkins. I pull teeth, shoe horses, stamp coins, invent things, and I have stood in front of the county bench more times than the Merrimack County bench would care to admit. Tonight's sermon is a simple one. Bad liquor makes for big mixers. Every time some dry-lipped legislature tries to take a man's glass away, the man does not quit drinking. He gets clever. He hides the rotgut under sugar, lemon, bitters and ice, and he calls the result a fashion. Tonight I will show you how prohibition, from the Massachusetts statehouse to Neal Dow's Maine, made the American cocktail what it is.
♪ Banjo flourish out
Announcer: A quick word, friends! A clean drink starts in a clean vessel. The Flame-Flow Still, protected under U.S. Patent 10,561,960, is hand-crafted of pure electrolytic copper for your herbal tinctures, essential oils and distilling demonstrations. Find it at moonshinestill.com. That is moonshinestill.com!
♦ Wax cylinder crackle, a log settling in the stove
The History: Dry Laws And Wet Glasses
Wilkins: Let us start with the word itself. Cock-tail. In May of 1806 a newspaper in Hudson, New York, called The Balance and Columbian Repository, printed the first proper definition I know of. A reader wrote in to ask what the devil a cock-tail was, and the editor answered that it was a stimulating liquor made of spirits of any kind, sugar, water and bitters. He added that it was a fine thing for electioneering, because it emboldened the heart and stupefied the head, and that a man who has swallowed one will swallow anything else. Sixty years on, that is still the best description of a Merrimack County voter I have heard.
Wilkins: Now, where did the name come from? Ask ten tavern-keepers and you will get eleven lies, but here is the one I like best, because it is the filthiest. Horse-traders called a horse with a docked tail that stuck up a cock-tail. A crooked dealer with a tired old nag to sell would make it look lively by the practice they called figging. He took a peeled knob of ginger, lifted the tail, and put the ginger where the sun never shines on a horse. That horse cocked its tail up like a regimental flag, pranced like a two-year-old, and fetched ten dollars more than it was worth. So the theory goes that a drink that perks a man up got named after a horse with ginger in its arse. I have been to dinner parties in Concord where every guest had plainly been prepared the same way.
♦ Wilkins sets down a tin cup, chuckling
Wilkins: Now to the law. In 1838 the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, in a fit of righteousness, passed what they called the Fifteen Gallon Law. You could not buy spirits in any amount less than fifteen gallons. A rich man could fill his cellar, and the laboring man who wanted one honest glass on the way home from the mill was shut out. A dry law is a dentist who pulls the healthy tooth, leaves the rotten one, and sends a bill for the improvement.
Wilkins: The Yankee answer came at a militia muster in Dedham. A sharp fellow set up a tent and a sign that said, for a small fee, you could view a remarkable striped pig. You paid your coin, you went in, you looked at a pig with some stripes painted on it, and on your way out the proprietor handed you a glass of spirits, free and gratis, because the law did not forbid giving it away. That was the most popular pig in the history of the Commonwealth, and not one man in Dedham could tell you what color it was. They threw that law out in 1840, and the striped pig became the byword for every dodge since.
Wilkins: Then came Maine. In 1851 Neal Dow of Portland, a tanner with a face like a pickled beet and the warmth of a January privy, got the first statewide prohibition law passed. Half the North copied it, New Hampshire included, though I will not go over our own dry statute tonight. I have pulled enough teeth over that one already. Here is the jewel. A dry law needs a back door, so the Maine Law let each town appoint a liquor agent to sell spirits for medicinal and mechanical purposes only. Under the Maine Law, a man's health falls apart in direct proportion to how close he lives to the town agent. I knew a farmer in Strafford County who suffered from medicinal purposes from the day he was weaned.
Wilkins: And in June of 1855, ten years ago this summer, word got around Portland that Neal Dow had bought sixteen hundred dollars' worth of liquor for the city agency and kept it in his own name. Well, the crowd came to see the temperance man's private stock. Dow called out the militia, ordered them to fire, and a man named John Robbins was killed in the street. They call it the Portland Rum Riot. Neal Dow bought the liquor, guarded the liquor, and shot a man over the liquor. That is the most devoted relationship with a barrel I ever heard of outside my own still-house.
♦ Barnaby grunts outside; chain rattles once
Wilkins: Yes, Barnaby, you would have joined the riot too. Now here is the meat of it, so lean in. When you make good liquor a crime, good liquor goes away. The man who would have sold you honest cider brandy is in jail or has gone to Ohio, and his place is taken by a dealer who buys raw high-wine spirit by the barrel and doctors it. Rectifiers, they call themselves. They color it with burnt sugar so it looks aged, put in pepper or worse so it bites like whiskey, and sell it to you as Old Monongahela. A man who drinks that straight is either brave or out of matches.
Wilkins: So what does the drinker do? He drowns it. He pours in sugar for the harshness, lemon for the stink, nutmeg for the deception and bitters for the conscience. And bitters, my friends, are the slyest trick of all. Hostetter's Stomach Bitters, Drake's Plantation Bitters, and a hundred more, all sold in dry towns as medicine and nearly as stout as whiskey. Drake's has painted S.T.-1860-X on every rock and barn between here and Niagara Falls. Nobody knows what it means, which is exactly how I sign my tax returns. Bitters are medicine the way Barnaby is a lapdog: technically, if you have a very large lap and no further use for it.
Wilkins: Then add ice. Mr. Frederic Tudor of Boston, the Ice King, got the idea that a man in Martinique would pay good silver for a block of frozen Massachusetts pond. Everyone called him a lunatic, and he went on shipping New England ice as far as Calcutta. Because of Tudor, any city hotel in this Republic can shave you ice for a drink, which Europe still thinks is next to sorcery. Mr. Dickens put a sherry cobbler in his novel Martin Chuzzlewit: sherry, sugar, slices of orange, a mountain of shaved ice, drunk through a straw. The Englishman in the story nearly faints with joy. It took a Yankee pond to impress an Englishman, and the pond did not even try.
Wilkins: Put it all together and in 1862 you get a book. Mr. Jerry Thomas, the most celebrated barman in New York, printed How to Mix Drinks, or The Bon-Vivant's Companion. As far as I know it is the first bar book ever printed in this country. Here is his Brandy Cocktail, as near as I recall it. Three or four dashes of gum syrup, two dashes of bitters, one wineglass of brandy, a dash or two of curacao. Fill it a third full of fine ice, stir it, strain it, and twist a little piece of lemon peel over the top. Sugar, bitters, spirits and water, the same as the Hudson editor said in 1806, with Tudor's ice and some French orange liquor added. And mark me, neighbors. If ever this whole Republic goes dry from the Penobscot to the Pacific, the drinks will get so fancy a man will need a dictionary and a nurse to order one.
♪ Short fiddle sting
Legends, Outlaws And Runners, With Guest Interview
Wilkins: Now a true story from Fort Wilkins, and I warn the ladies to send the children out to the woodshed. Last fall a gentleman came up the Turnpike from Concord in a little yellow peddler's wagon. He called himself a dealer in Peruvian Lemon Elixir, and he was a temperance spotter if I ever saw one. You can tell them every time. They have the pinched mouth of a man who has never been kissed with any enthusiasm. He meant to buy a cocktail from me so he could swear to it before the justice.
Wilkins: So I took a page from Dedham. I told him I sold no liquor, God forbid, but for a quarter I would let him view a remarkable black bear, and any man who viewed the bear would get a cup of complimentary tooth-rinse. He paid his quarter, I stamped it G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. right there while he watched, and he took his rinse. The rest of his visit is where it went wrong for him.
♦ Steel punch clangs on a silver coin; ring dies away
Wilkins: He had been sampling his own goods all the way from Concord, and his Peruvian Lemon Elixir was mostly sugar syrup and lemon oil. It was smeared all down the back of his frock coat and soaked through the seat of his pantaloons where the jug had leaked on the wagon bench. Then the fool tried to sneak round back to the still-house window to get a look at my copper. That window, as every rascal in three counties knows, is where Barnaby lives.
Wilkins: Barnaby smelled lemon and sugar the way a Concord lawyer smells a widow's estate. He came off that log pile without a sound. Four hundred pounds of bear moves quiet as a sermon right up until it doesn't. He got the coattails first. You never heard a sound like it, wool tearing like wet canvas, a long rip, and then a pop when the buttons let go, like a string of firecrackers going off at the Fourth of July muster. The coat came away entire. Barnaby sat down with it and ate the pocket that held the lemon drops.
Wilkins: But there was still syrup on the man, and Barnaby is thorough. Next he hooked one claw in the seat of those pantaloons and pulled the way a man pulls a stubborn turnip. The pantaloons, drawers and one garter all came off together, and the spotter was left standing in my dooryard with his whole white hindquarters out to the October air, shining like two boiled puddings. Then Barnaby licked the syrup off him, all of it, slow, like a boy cleaning out a molasses barrel. The man hit a high note the Pittsfield choir has been reaching for since 1820. When Barnaby got to the bottom of the syrup, he took a little nip to see if there was more inside. There was not, and it left a patch of shiny pink hide the size of a saucer.
Wilkins: The spotter ran a quarter mile down Route 28 toward the village with nothing on below his waistcoat, past two farm wagons and a Sunday-school picnic coming home late. One of the deacons' wives fainted dead away, and another, I am told, asked her husband to drive slower. The temperance spotter came to catch a sinner and left wearing nothing from the waist down but his convictions. When he came back for his wagon, I washed the bite with clean spirit and stitched it with horsehair, and charged him fifty cents. He paid it, which is the only fine a temperance man has ever paid in Merrimack County. Barnaby kept the trousers and sleeps on them to this day.
♦ Barnaby grunts contentedly; chain clinks
Wilkins: Now, my guest tonight. He hammers copper at the Fort Wilkins foundry, he has burns on his forearms older than some of my patients, and he welds like a parson preaches: slow, careful, and powerfully convinced that he is right and you are going to burn. Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister, welcome to the cylinder.
Silas: Evening, Doctor. Evening, folks. I see the bear is in good spirits.
Wilkins: The bear is in good trousers. Silas, tonight's subject is fancy drinks and the metal that serves them. I know you have hammered more for the drinking trade than stills. Tell them about the Blue Blazer.
Silas: Well, sir. There is a barman at the Eagle Hotel in Concord. I won't name him, since he would not thank me. He read Mr. Thomas's book and wanted to do the Blue Blazer. You set whiskey and boiling water afire in one mug and pour the burning liquor into another mug, back and forth, arm's length apart, so it makes a stream of blue fire through the air.
Wilkins: A drink for men with no eyebrows and no fear.
Silas: He soon had the first, at any rate. He used a pair of cheap tinned-iron mugs, and the thin tinning scorched, and the seam opened up. It was lead solder, which was the second sin. The first time he poured, the fire ran down the outside of the mug and up his wrist and lit his side-whiskers. The whole dining room smelled of burnt hog.
Wilkins: I recall he looked like a scorched broom with opinions for a month.
Silas: He did. So he came to me. I raised him a matched pair of mugs from heavy copper sheet, hammered seamless so there were no joints to give way, lined them with silver so the hot spirit never touched bare copper, and rolled the lips back thick so a flame would not creep over the rim. I fitted long handles of ash wood, riveted, with no solder anywhere near the fire. He has poured them every Saturday night since, and he has his whiskers back.
Wilkins: Now tell them the one about your father and the muster kettle, because that one is a lesson.
Silas: That is a hard lesson. When I was a boy, a militia company was having its muster supper. They wanted to make lemon punch for two hundred men, and the only thing big enough was a fine, bright, unlined copper wash-kettle. My father told the captain flat out: don't put acid in bare copper and leave it sit. Lemon eats copper. He said it twice. The captain said copper is copper and he had been in the Mexican War.
Wilkins: A man who has been in a war thinks he cannot be killed by a lemon.
Silas: They mixed it at night and let it stand till the supper. By morning the punch had a green cast to it, like pond water in August, and the bright inside of the kettle had gone dull where the lemon worked it. They drank it anyway. Inside an hour half the company was sick, coming up both ends. They held the privy against all comers for a day and a night.
Wilkins: The only position that company ever held.
Silas: That is the truth. And ever since, my family will not sell a bowl, a cup, or a mug that will hold anything sour without lining it first, with tin or silver. Bare copper is a fine thing in a still where there's vapor. It is a poor thing for lemon to sit in.
Wilkins: One more, Silas. The cane.
Silas: Under the dry law, there was a deacon over in Barnstead, a sober man to look at, who asked me for a walking stick. He did not want ash or hickory. He wanted copper, hollow, painted black to look like ebony, with a screw ferrule at the bottom and a silver knob on top. I asked him what for, and he said rheumatism. I made it. It held near a pint.
Wilkins: The rheumatism of the heart, Silas. The most common disease in a dry county.
Silas: He carried it to meeting every Sunday for a year. Then one cold morning he struck it hard on the meeting-house steps to knock the snow off, and it sloshed. Plain as day, like a cow walking through a puddle. The whole congregation heard it. The minister stopped mid-prayer.
Wilkins: The only thing in that meeting-house with any spirit in it, and it gave itself away during the long prayer. Silas, stay right there.
♪ Banjo bridge, lively, then under
Ad Break
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♪ Patent-medicine fanfare, short brass blast
Copper And The Craft, Alchemical Metallurgy
Wilkins: Now for the craft. What I said all evening comes down to this: a cocktail is a cover-up for a bad cut. If you make your cuts honest, you can drink it plain. Here is how a rye was made at an honest still in this valley, step by step. Note it as history, because the Announcer has a word on the law.
Announcer: In these modern times, making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against United States law. This program is for history and education only.
Wilkins: As he says. Step one is the mash. Rye and corn are starch, not sugar, and yeast cannot eat starch any more than Barnaby can eat a sermon. So you need malted barley, grain that has been sprouted and dried, because the sprout carries a ferment that turns starch into sugar. A good old proportion is about four parts cracked rye to one part malted barley. Stir it into hot water, hold the mash at about a hundred and fifty degrees on a good thermometer for an hour or more, and keep stirring, or it will scorch to the bottom and taste like a burnt barn.
Wilkins: Step two, cool it down to blood-warm, pitch in your yeast, and let it work for several days in a warm room with air moving through it. That gives you a wash of a few parts in a hundred alcohol, sour and beery. Step three, you strip it. Run the wash through the pot still once, fast, and collect everything that comes over. That is your low wines. Step four, you run the low wines a second time, slow and gentle, and that is where you make your cuts.
Wilkins: First come the foreshots. You throw them out, all of them, every time, with no exceptions. A rule of thumb is the first half-gill or so for every five gallons of wash, and more if you are generous, and you should be. Next come the heads. They smell like the varnish shop, sharp and sweet and solvent-like, and they are good for about what varnish is good for. You would not drink varnish unless you were courting a widow in Epsom. In that front end is the wood spirit, the same pyroligneous spirit they get by cooking wood in a retort, and it will blind a man and then kill him. It does not all come off in one neat spoonful, either. It smears into the run, so do not be greedy with your heads.
Wilkins: Then come the hearts. They are clean, sweet, and smell of the grain. That is what you keep. Last come the tails. They go oily and cloudy and smell like wet dog and old dishwater. That is the fusel oil, the heavy alcohols. Fusel is an old German word for bad liquor, and the Germans should know. It gives a man the headache that feels like I have been at his skull with a turnkey. Your tails are like your wife's relations: fine to have around the house, but you do not put them in the jar you show company. Set them aside to go back through with the next run.
Wilkins: Here is something for you cider-brandy men. Fruit makes more wood spirit than grain does. There is pectin in an apple, which is what makes your wife's jelly set, and during fermentation the pectin breaks down into methanol. So an applejack man or a pear-brandy man has to cut his heads more cautiously than a rye man. Silas, tell them where the copper does its work.
Silas: People think the copper does its work down in the pot, in the boil. The copper in the pot does its share, but much of the sulfur work happens where hot vapor touches bright copper, up in the head, the neck, and the worm. So I don't skimp on those. If you build a pot of copper and put a cheap iron or tin cap on it, you have thrown away the best part. And none of it does any good if the copper is fouled.
Wilkins: Give them your fire rules, Silas, and then I will let you get back to your hammer.
Silas: Never seal a still tight, because pressure builds up and it will burst like a boiler. Keep your condenser water running cold the whole run, so no vapor gets out the end uncondensed, because that vapor will catch fire. Never leave a running still alone near an open flame, not even to see to your bear. And no lead in it anywhere. That is all of it.
Wilkins: Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister, the only man in Merrimack County I trust with a hammer near my head. Thank you, sir.
Silas: Thank you, Doctor. Keep that bear off the Turnpike.
♦ Wooden chair scrapes; door latch; wax crackle
♪ Fiddle interlude, slow and warm
Myths, Slang And The Call-In Cylinder
Wilkins: Myth time. First is the blue flame. Every wise man in every tavern from here to Kentucky will pour a little on a spoon, light it, see a pretty blue flame, and pronounce it pure. Hogwash. Wood spirit burns with a pale blue flame too, near the same as good spirit. The blue flame test proves your liquor will burn, which is a fine quality in lamp oil and a poor recommendation for supper. It cannot tell you whether you made your cuts.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Second is proof. Ever wonder where the word comes from? The British navy used to test rum by wetting gunpowder with it and putting a match to it. If the powder still lit, the rum was proved. If it fizzled, it was watered, and somebody was flogged. The British proved their rum with gunpowder, which explains a great deal about the British. They gave it up for Mr. Sikes's hydrometer in 1816 or so, and a glass float that never blew up a purser is a good improvement.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Now, we have a cylinder in the call-in box, all the way from the Carolina hills. Let us hear it.
♦ Phonograph cylinder hiss and warble, needle drops
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
Wilkins: Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina! Rabbit, I salute you and your uncle both. A man with an uncle who has opinions about a thump keg comes from good stock. Let me take your two remedies one at a time.
Wilkins: Hickory ash first. You should know what ash is. Every farm boy in New Hampshire knows it, because before there was much cash money in these hills, ash was our cash. Our grandfathers burned whole hillsides of hardwood, leached the ash with water, and boiled the lye down in iron kettles at the asheries into potash, and they sold that potash in Portsmouth and Boston for soap and glass. Ash is potash, and potash is a strong alkali, the stuff that takes the hair off a hide. Put it in your doubler and you have made the low wines in it slippery and bitter, and done nothing about the bad heads. The wood spirit still comes boiling off in the front of the run as before. The only cure for heads is to cut them. Rabbit, your uncle's ash bucket will make fine soap, and if he has been drinking from that doubler, soap is what he needs most.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Now red oak. Your uncle is half right about that, and the wrong half is interesting. Any cooper will tell you that white oak and red oak are different trees. White oak has its pores plugged up with little natural corks inside the wood, so a white oak barrel holds liquor tight. Red oak has open pores. You can put your lips to the end of a red oak stick and blow bubbles through it into a cup of water. Red oak in a still is a sieve with a reputation. That is why tight casks for spirits are white oak and red oak goes into flour barrels.
Wilkins: But throw oak shavings, red or white, into hot spirit, and inside a day it will turn the color of tea and taste of the woodpile. That is not cleaning. It is costume. Old Hosea Pettengill on the Barnstead road did exactly that. He put red oak shavings in his doubler, ran spirit off two days old the color of good sherry, and sold it as ten years old. It was, if you counted the age of the tree. One winter he ran it so heavy with shavings that a customer pulled a splinter out of his gum, and I am the one who charged him to take it out. So, Rabbit: color, yes. Flavor, some, if you like a sawmill floor. Clean out bad heads? No. That is swamp medicine with a pretty label, and you and your uncle can both make your cuts honest. God bless Wilkesboro, God bless the Carolina hills, and you have a counterstamped Wilkins cent coming to you, Rabbit.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin; coin rings and spins on the anvil
♪ Banjo and fiddle reprise, gently under
Sign-Off
Announcer: One more quick word! The Flame-Flow Still, U.S. Patent 10,561,960, is heavy-gauge pure electrolytic copper with no lead anywhere. Order yours at moonshinestill.com, or visit the Fort Wilkins showroom on Route 28. That is moonshinestill.com!
Wilkins: Neighbors, if tonight has done anything more than make you thirsty, you should come learn the craft properly. The Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course will teach you the copper, the mash, the fire, and above all the cuts, and how the history of this craft goes back further than any temperance man would like. I will teach it like I pull a tooth: quick, honest, and with no nonsense from you. Inquire at Fort Wilkins.
Wilkins: Remember what we learned. Every dry law in this Republic has made the liquor worse and the drinker cleverer. The striped pig, the town agent, the bitters bottle, the hollow cane, and Mr. Thomas's brandy cocktail all came out of the same Yankee stubbornness. A good mixed drink is a fine thing. But a man who makes his spirit right does not need to hide it under a lemon. Thank you, Silas. Thank you, Rabbit. And thank you, Barnaby, for your service to public decency.
♦ Barnaby grunts loudly; chain clinks
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