Hollow Axle Hauling: How Teamsters Hid Spirits Inside Wooden Cart Axles

The Humble Axle-Tree Gets Ambitious

The reader who has never crawled under a farm cart, and I suspect most have crawled only under tables, should first learn what holds the thing up. It is the axle-tree, a stout square beam of hickory, white oak, or hard maple laid crosswise beneath the bed. At each end it tapers to a round arm, and the wheel rides on that arm. A good wheelwright sleeves the arm in an iron skein so the wood does not wear to splinters, and he holds the wheel on with a linchpin, an iron peg driven through a hole in the axle end. Pull the linchpin and the wheel walks off down the road on its own errands, like a husband at a cattle show.

Under every cart in this valley swings a tar bucket, a little pail of pine tar and tallow that is generally the soberest thing on the rig. The teamster dabs that grease on the arms every few miles, for a dry axle squeals like a widow at the reading of a will. Mark that well, for grease comes back into this tale to bite a deputy, and I mean bite.

The axle-tree carries the whole load, never complains, and never asks for a drink. Naturally we filled it with one. When Washington put his collectors and assessors in every district and sent the gaugers round with their long brass-tipped rods, the barrel became a confession. A gauger sees a cask, sticks in his rod, and figures the tax in his little book with a pencil he licks between sums. But no gauger in Merrimack County ever thought to put his rod in a wheel. A gauger can count barrels; he cannot count past the obvious.

Boring the Beam and Lining the Bore

To hollow a solid beam of hickory without splitting it, one borrows from the pump-log men. Before anybody dreamed of iron water mains, half the villages of New England drank through pine logs bored end to end. The borers used an auger longer than a tall man, with a T-handle you lean your whole belly upon, walking it down the heart of the log a few inches at a time, pulling shavings, sighting down the hole, cussing, and going again. I had the loan of one from a fellow at the mills at the falls who asked no questions, for I had pulled two of his teeth and he owed me the third.

The experimenter bores from one end, straight down the middle, leaving thick sound wood all round so she still bears the load. Now attend closely, for here is where fools killed people. You do not let spirit sit in raw wood. Raw hickory drinks spirit like a deacon at a wake and gives back tannin, colour, and the taste of a fence post. So you line the bore. I drew a seamless copper tube in my own shop, slid it home, and sealed the end with a threaded plug behind the linchpin hole, waxed with beeswax and capped with a dab of tar, so that it looked like every other greasy axle end in Christendom. No lead. Not a speck.

Now some honest arithmetic, which is more than the Treasury ever does. The American gallon is the old wine gallon of Queen Anne's day, two hundred thirty-one cubic inches. A bore about two and a half inches across, running five feet, gives near a gallon and a quarter. Two axles to a wagon makes two gallons and a half. No man gets rich on that. He gets rich by making the trip forty times a season while the gauger waves at him from the tavern porch.

Hosea Brackett, Deputy Fogg, and a Bear Named Barnaby

My finest hauler was Hosea Brackett, long gone to his reward, which I suspect was a fine. He had a face like a dropped pie and the morals of a wet cat, and he was the best teamster that ever cussed an ox up Catamount Hill. He drove a rattling two-wheel cart piled with cordwood, or turnips, or once a dead calf for the tannery, and beneath that honest-looking excuse sloshed two gallons and a half of my best.

For two seasons no one suspected a thing. Then the county hired Lemuel Fogg, a long thin article with a neck like a plucked heron and a nose that could smell a lie through a feather tick. Fogg noticed three things. First, in mud season Hosea's empty cart cut ruts as deep as a load of granite. Second, coming down over the frost heaves, a solid axle goes thunk, and Hosea's went glunk, a wet sound, a sound with a cork in it. Third, and this one hanged us, so to speak, was Barnaby, my four-hundred-pound black bear, who rose up whenever that cart entered my yard and licked the axle ends like a schoolboy licks the molasses spoon, long after the tar and tallow were gone. Fogg lay three nights in the alders across the road and concluded that no bear loves axle grease that devoted.

On the fourth night he came to confirm it personally, crouching behind the cart with his ear to the axle-tree, within reach of the chain. Barnaby hooked a claw in the collar of his good county coat and drew it straight down to the belt, opening him along the backbone like a man slitting a letter. Then the bear sat on him and licked the tar off his boots. By the time I came out with a lantern and a ham bone to bribe the beast off, Fogg had bitten a fence rail and cracked a molar clean in half. I sewed his back with dental silk, eleven stitches, pulled the molar, and charged him nothing. He called it the only honest bargain he ever struck in Pittsfield, and then went straight to Concord and swore out the whole business.

They came by daylight with two more deputies and a bucket, drew the plug, and my good spirit ran out into the county bucket. Hosea swore it was "axle oil of a superior grade," and the magistrate could find no statute against superior axle oil. They auctioned the axle-tree on the courthouse steps, and I bought it back for forty cents, the only tax I ever paid gladly. It hangs over my door yet.

A Revenue Man's Ear for Hollow Wood

Captain Donald Vance, retired from long federal service chasing copper through the White Mountains and the Green, sat at my hearth and told how a revenue man learns to listen. He carried a hickory stick with a brass ferrule and tapped everything. Sound wood rings tock, clean and high. A spare wheel lashed to a Franconia farmer's tailboard said thud, and behind a painted bung in the hub face lay near three quarts of applejack, the hollow lined with a snug stoneware crock. Somebody had spent a whole winter on that hub.

He told also of a Vermont milk route where the barn cats wound round every can but one, walking wide of it with tails puffed like bottle brushes. Inside, a sealed tin cylinder held a good four gallons of corn whiskey, with only a ring of milk in the gap round it to show white to a careless eye. And he told of a tin peddler whose sorry old bay leaned into the collar as though hauling a church. The wagon tongue had been bored its whole length and lined with salvaged lead water pipe. The Captain poured every drop on the roadside, and the grass there stayed bare three summers. Of such men he said plainly, "They were poisoners who didn't know it yet." Whatever a man thinks of the law, the law is not the worst thing that can befall him. Bad metal is.

Copper, Fire, and the Cuts

First, the law: making drinking spirits without a federal permit is unlawful, and what follows is history and instruction, not an invitation. Cook cracked corn soft, cool it till you can hold your hand in it without cussing, pitch the yeast, cover it, and keep it warm and airy. In some days it quits bubbling and leaves a thin sour wash, a few parts in a hundred spirit. Strain off the solids, for thick grain scorches on a hot bottom. A pot still is never sealed tight; it must always have a free path out through the worm. Bring the fire up slow, lest she puke foam into the arm, for a clogged arm on a hot pot is a bomb with a handle. Never leave a lit still, keep the vapour from the firebox, and keep a bucket of sand close.

Then the cuts, which are the true experiment. Foreshots come first, sharp and nasty, and go to waste. The heads smell of a varnish pot or a hatter's shop; set them aside. When the smell turns sweet, clean, and round, you have the hearts, your keeping spirit. The tails go oily and flat, like a wet dog that rolled in porridge, and are put by to run again. Judge by small jars and by the nose, and cut early rather than late. Meanwhile the bright copper of helmet, neck, and swan's-neck arm grabs the stinking sulphur from the vapour; the dark grime on your rag after a run is the rotten-egg stink that never reached the jar. Dull copper is a lazy workman. And remember that spirit takes the character of whatever holds it: oak gives colour, glass and stoneware keep it as made, but zinc, lead, and mongrel metals leach poison. Even my axle tube was clean copper, and the spirit sat in it no longer than the trip.

Ashes, Oak Shavings, and the Blue Flame

A correspondent from Wilkesboro, North Carolina, Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller, writes that his uncle threw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Hickory ash is the finest lye ash there is; in a hot keg it makes soap, foams like a mad dog, and gives a spirit tasting of washday, while the heads come through bold as ever. Red oak is open-pored, which is why coopers will not make whiskey casks of it, and its shavings give colour, tannin, and woodiness: flavouring, not cleaning. The thump keg is only a second boiling that makes the spirit stronger. It is not a sieve, a filter, or a priest. The cut is the cure. There is no other.

Likewise the tavern sage who lights a spoonful and declares blue flame good and yellow flame poison. Wood spirit burns too, with a pale blue flame scarcely visible by daylight. A blue flame proves your liquor burns, and so does my barn, and I would drink neither on that evidence. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low.