Barnaby the Bear Chases Revenue Deputies Into the Suncook River, 1861

Reader, you who stand at your own apparatus of copper and fire and watch the vapour turn to drops, I write to you as one natural philosopher to another. Let me first set down a matter of law and good conscience. The making of spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of these United States, and it remains so. What follows is history and learning, and nothing more. I give no man a recipe, and I give no man a receipt for trouble. Now, to business, and to the tale most asked about in all of Merrimack County.

The War and the Two-Dollar Gallon

To understand why four grown men with warrants in their pockets ran from a chained animal, you must understand the times. The year is 1861. The war has come. The Union needs money the way a dry well needs rain, and the Congress means to raise it by taxing nearly everything that moves, sits, or ferments. The excise on distilled spirits climbs, and in 1862 it climbs again to two dollars the gallon. Two dollars! A farmer in the Suncook Valley who once sold a jug of cider brandy to his neighbour for pocket change now finds the government sitting at his table asking for a share.

New Hampshire folk have a long memory for taxes. Our grandfathers made cider brandy in this very valley in colonial days, and they made it in the open, and no man thought less of them for it. Apple orchards ran up and down these hills. Cider was currency, medicine, and Sunday supper all in one barrel. So when the revenue men began riding the turnpike with their ledgers, you may imagine the warmth of their welcome.

Four Horses on the Suncook Valley Turnpike

The Suncook Valley Turnpike runs right past my door at Fort Wilkins in Pittsfield, and that was no accident. A man in my line of work likes to see who is coming from a good long way off: teamsters, drovers, mill hands from the Suncook mills, the occasional preacher, and now and again a deputy. A deputy has a way of riding that gives him away. He sits too straight and looks at every barn as though it owed him money.

It was a raw morning in the autumn of 1861. Mist lay on the Suncook River like a wet sheet on a clothesline. I was at my anvil, as an honest man is at his anvil, counterstamping a few large cents with my punch, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. I will tell you that a cent with my name on it holds its value better than a cent without it, for the simple reason that nobody will spend it.

Up the turnpike came four horses, four men, and four pairs of boots that had never seen a day of honest mud. They wore the look of men who had been told that a New Hampshire dentist is a soft target. Whoever told them so never pulled a tooth in his life.

Barnaby Stands Up

Barnaby is a gentle soul. He is also a four-hundred-pound black bear with opinions about strangers, and his opinion is that they smell like trouble and not enough like ham. That morning he lay chained outside my still-house window, as he always is, taking the air and a dandelion or two, looking for all the world like a heap of old blanket in the shadow of the woodpile.

The deputies dismounted. The lead man, a long-faced fellow with a tin star polished like a Sunday spoon, unrolled his warrant and began to read in a voice like a church bell. He got as far as the words in the name of the County of Merrimack when Barnaby stood up. A bear standing up is a thing that changes a man's opinion of the law. The reading stopped. I will not say the deputy screamed, for I would not slander a county official. I will say he made a noise like a rusty gate in a high wind.

Here the science of the thing enters. A chain is a chain, and mine is a good one, forged at my own anvil. Barnaby cannot go past the length of it. But a frightened man does no arithmetic. He does not stop to measure the chain; he looks upon four hundred pounds of bear and assumes it has no limits. So those four men ran, down the slope behind the fort, past the stone wall, through the alders, and straight into the Suncook River.

There they stood in the cold current, up to their belts, looking back up the hill while their warrants floated off their hands into the mud and the reeds. Four warrants, and not one of them ever served. I found two the following spring, pressed flat as autumn leaves in the clay, the ink run to nothing. Fine paper. Poor swimmers.

I walked down to the bank with my hat in my hand, as a man should who respects the dignity of the law, and asked the lead deputy whether he would care for a hot drink and a dry blanket. He said he would not. I said the offer would stand till noon. He stood in that river a good deal longer than that, and in the end he took the blanket.

A Runner From the Brushy Mountains

I have lately had the pleasure of trading tales with Mr. Junior Vance of North Wilkesboro, a man who knows a good deal about running from the law, though in his case on four wheels and not four hooves. He drove a modified 1940 Ford coupe, and later a 1950 Ford, hauling liquor out of the Brushy Mountains of North Wilkes County, North Carolina, down to Charlotte. He was chased by a few sheriffs, a couple of revenue men, and one very angry mother-in-law, but never by a bear. I assured him the bear has the better manners.

He survived three chases that counted and plenty that did not. The first came when he was nineteen and, by his own account, dumb as a fence post: a revenue car crept up behind him on a mountain road at night with its lights off, and he shook it on a switchback by running with his own lights out, a practice he does not recommend. Closer still was a roadblock outside Statesville, two cars across the road and men with lanterns, a load aboard and a mile of straight road behind him. He put the car in the ditch, drove a hundred yards down the creek bed, and came up onto a farm lane. The revenue men waited an hour for a car already three miles gone. It smelled like a wet dog for a month.

Mr. Vance is also a mechanician of some ingenuity. A loaded car sits low at the back, and the law sees it from a mile off; heavy on one side, it handles like a drunk mule. So he worked out a leaf-spring equalizer that made the car sit level and ride true, loaded or empty. It looked empty and ran full. There is a grand principle in that: the best deception is a plain one. My own method, I confess, is less mechanical and involves a bear. As he observed, a dog will bark at a rabbit, but a bear wastes no time on notice. A bear is the most honest sentinel there is. He takes no bribes and no sides. He takes whatever is nearest.

Copper, Heat, and the Separation of the Run

Now to the metal, for a man who stamps copper at his anvil has a right to opinions about it, and you at your own vessel are conducting experiments upon it daily. Copper is the old servant of the distiller and has kept that post for centuries. It conducts heat evenly, it is workable under the hammer, and it has a most useful chemical habit. In the old understanding, vapour passing over hot copper surrenders certain sulphur compounds that would otherwise foul the character of the spirit. The old hands lacked the chemistry words. They knew only that a clean copper vessel made a cleaner product and a blackened, neglected one made a worse. The alchemists of my trade understood the effect long before the chemists named the cause.

There is also the matter of what a distiller learns to separate. Men spoke of the run in parts: the heads, the heart, and the tails. The earliest portion carried the harshest and most dangerous of what came off, and a careful hand set it apart and had no dealings with it. I go no further, for here the line between history and recipe grows thin. I will say only that the craft is old, exacting, and punishes carelessness. When I pull a tooth I do not do it hastily, nor blind, and the difference is that between a grateful patient and a very loud one. The still is no different. The metal rewards respect. It does not forgive vanity.

Lead, Radiators, and a Myth Buried

A word reached me from Deputy Tim Bradley of Bristol, Virginia, a badge-wearer whose good sense earned Barnaby an extra ham bone for his nerves: "Tell these young folks listening about why anyone who uses a salvaged car radiator or lead solder should be run out of town. We found an abandoned site last year with lead solder that would have put a man in the hospital."

Lead is a poison. That is the whole of it, and everything else is commentary. It does not smell, taste, blister, or warn. It settles in the bones and the blood and the brain and does its damage quietly. I have seen, in my own chair, the gray gums and trembling hand of a man who spent his days around the stuff. The cure for lead is never to meet it. A radiator is built to hold coolant, joined with metals chosen for that task and often with solder that carries lead. Run hot spirit vapour through it and you ask the metal to give up its contents into what a man will drink. The same holds for lead solder on any joint where vapour passes. Honest builders use clean joints and sound metal; the man in a hurry ends in the hospital. Run such a fellow out of town, by all means, but kinder to do it before he poisons a neighbour than after.

And let me bury an old myth. Some claimed a test with a flame or a shaken bead of bubbles would tell whether a product was safe. Do not believe it. No bubble and no flame will tell you whether lead has gotten in. The only safe course is to keep the poison out by clean metal, honest construction, and above all by staying within the law. Mr. Vance, who has known men hurt this way, put it best: "The danger ain't the sheriff. The danger's what you put in the jar."

I struck a cent in the deputy's honour, to carry my name and a little of his good sense into the world. Barnaby cares neither for lead nor for deputies, and in the Suncook River in the autumn of 1861 he proved a good animal can settle a dispute the whole Merrimack County bar could not. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low.