How a Pittsfield Dentist Read the Sheriff's Telegraph Raid Plans by Ear

Lightning Comes Up the Suncook Valley

Good evening to every brother and sister of the apparatus, and to the county clerks who read these pages only to copy them down. I write from Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I am a dentist, blacksmith and inventor, I have been arrested twice, and I am the only man in this valley who has pulled a sheriff's tooth and his warrant in the same week. My subject this month is lightning on a wire. The telegraph has come to Pittsfield, and I mean to tell you how a humble tooth-puller learned the sheriff's raid plans before the sheriff's own deputies did.

In May of 1844 Professor Samuel Morse sat at a little brass key in Washington and tapped out a message to Baltimore: 'What hath God wrought.' It is a fine Bible verse. Had I been at that key, the first message ever sent by lightning would have read 'Send more jars,' and history would be the better for it. Ever since, the wire has crept north pole by pole along the turnpikes and the railroad grades. It came up the Merrimack, and now there is talk of running it up the Suncook Valley beside the rail line folks have been promising us since Adam was a boy. They say the cars will reach Pittsfield before the decade is out. I shall believe it when the engine scares my hens.

The wire companies leave one thing off their handbills: they charge by the word. A man who wishes to tell his sister in Concord that Mother is poorly must pay for every syllable, and so our Yankees have learned to talk like a miser counting change. MOTHER POORLY COME. There is no greeting, no love, no blessing. The telegraph is the only gossip in New Hampshire that charges by the word, and it still talks more than the Ladies' Sewing Circle.

Then came the war. Mr. Lincoln, God rest him, very nearly lived in the War Department telegraph office, sitting up half the night waiting for the sounder to tell him which of our boys had lived and which had not. The Military Telegraph ran wire behind the armies the way a spider spins behind a fly. Each side cut the other's lines, tapped them and spliced in fibs of its own, and the generals wrote in cipher so the Rebels could not read it. Remember the cipher, for it comes back into my story.

A Dentist Learns to Read Lightning

The early operators read a paper tape, dots and dashes punched along a ribbon like a drunk man's stitching. By the fifties the sharp ones had given up the tape and read the clicks by ear, as you know your wife's footstep from the hired man's. The trade calls this sound reading. A good sound reader can sit across a room eating his supper and take down every word on the wire without looking up from his beans. Now consider who in this valley spends his whole working day listening hard to small clicks. Who can tell a sound molar from a rotten one by tapping it with a steel pick and cocking his ear? Your humble dentist. A Morse operator and a dentist have the same occupation: we both tap on things until somebody gives up a secret.

A few winters back a young operator named Abner came into my chair with a lower molar so far gone you could have kept chickens in it. His breath would have wilted a fence post. He was too frightened to stop talking, so he talked about his trade and tapped the letters on the arm of my chair to keep his courage up. I made him a bargain. For every letter he taught me, he would get a swallow of my medicinal apple and one more minute before I pulled. Within the hour he had given me the whole alphabet, the numbers and half the operators' shorthand, and he was singing Morse like a hymn. The molar came out with a sound like a boot leaving a bog. He paid in coin and walked out lighter by one tooth and one alphabet.

After that I practised every night. I tapped on the anvil. I tapped on the bedpost until my wife asked whether I was sending for help. Even Barnaby, my four-hundred-pound bear, learned some of it, or at least he learned that three short knocks on the cabin wall mean supper. He has never once come running for 'Revenue Man,' which proves him smarter than half the deputies in this county.

The Sheriff's Backward Cipher

The sheriff had decided that loose talk was spoiling his raids on Fort Wilkins. Every time he rode out, the valley knew of it before his horse was saddled. So he grew clever. He would send his orders by wire from the county seat to a substation down the line, in a cipher of his own invention, and tell his deputies nothing until they were mounted.

That winter the substation was a back room behind a general store. The wall between the two was one board thick, with gaps you could pass a dime through. Every Tuesday a certain dentist stood in that store buying coffee, tobacco and horseshoe nails and lingering over the cracker barrel longer than any man needs to.

Click, clickety, click. The sheriff's grand cipher was to spell every word backwards, and that was the whole of it. DIAR SNIKLIW YADSRUHT. The man had spent a week inventing a code a bright child with a slate could break. Worse, he spelled 'raid' with two D's and paid for the extra letter out of county money, which is the most generous thing he has ever done with a dollar.

By Thursday morning, when four deputies came up the turnpike with their warrant, Fort Wilkins held nothing but a cold kettle of turnip soup, a dental chair, a fresh-swept floor and Barnaby lying across the doorway like a hairy hearthrug known to bite. Since the deputies had not been told their destination until they were in the saddle, I knew where they were bound before they did, and I had coffee on for them. The lead deputy, a long, sour fellow with a face like a hatchet somebody gave up on, asked how I knew they were coming. I told him I had a feeling in my teeth whenever the weather turned foul. He searched the woodshed and the privy and came out of the privy considerably less curious than he went in. The plan had been so secret that only the sheriff, his deputies, the operator, the operator's wife, the bear and I knew of it.

Lightning Posts and Wire-Walkers of the Blue Ridge

I had the pleasure of a visit from Miss Clara Higgins, a mountain herbalist and historian of old-time talk, who came up from the Blue Ridge of Virginia by rail, stage and one very unhappy mule. Her granny's people called the telegraph the lightning post, and when the revenue man began following the poles up into the hollers, they named him the wire-walker. Every child on the ridge knew to run and tell Daddy when the wire-walker was coming.

She told me of Mrs. Talley, a widow who kept the key at a little depot after the war. Whenever men in city boots and new hats stepped off the train asking too many questions, she would tap four words to the next station up: COW SICK SEND DOCTOR. There was no sick cow. Within the hour every fire on the ridge was out, every barrel was in the creek and every man sat whittling on his porch. Four words to empty a mountain is thrift of the first order.

During the war a good-hearted soul named Lemuel, needing a new worm for his still while copper was scarce as hen's teeth, climbed a pole beside his cornfield and cut himself about forty feet of the Confederate line. Half of it was iron, and it rusted until his whole run tasted of horseshoe. Then a Union patrol following the cut line found him coiling their evidence in his shed. They had the rope out, but Lemuel offered them the first jar off his new apparatus. It was a cold night, and by morning the sergeant was singing 'Lorena' with his arm around him, and the report said the line had been 'damaged by weather.'

Miss Higgins also told of a Botetourt County farmer who wired his cousin in Roanoke for twelve jars of persimmon preserves, extra ripe, which everyone from the depot clerk to the preacher knew to mean persimmon brandy made after the first frost. All but one jar arrived. When the farmer complained, the clerk wired back three words that are said to hang framed in a Roanoke barbershop: PRESERVES WERE SPOILED.

Copper, Cuts and Fire at the Apparatus

First the plain word that law and conscience both require: making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of these United States, and what follows is for history and education.

Lemuel's iron worm teaches the lesson. Copper earns its place because it moves heat well, bends sweetly under the hammer and takes up the foul sulphur stinks riding in the vapour, which leaves the spirit sweeter. Iron rusts. Cheap scrap carries who knows what. Lead solder is plain poison, and many a mountain man has gone to his grave a little at a time from a lead-patched pot, blaming the weather the whole way down.

Every run is an experiment, and the cuts are where it is won or lost. The first spirit over is the foreshots, with the heads close behind. That early run carries methanol, the wood spirit, along with harsh volatile matter that blinds men and kills them. Throw it away, all of it, every time. Do not drink it, do not sell it, and do not rub it on a baby's gums. Next come the hearts, the clean middle of the run, which an honest maker keeps. Last come the tails, oily and dull, and those are set aside. No trick, charm, powder or prayer will excuse you from making those cuts.

Mind your fire as well. Alcohol vapour burns, and it burns eagerly. A seeping joint near open flame has turned more than one still-house in this county into a bonfire. Keep your joints tight, the room aired, the flame steady and low and a bucket of water at hand. Treat that vapour as I treat Barnaby: with respect, at a distance and never with your back turned.

Ash, Oak and the Bead Myth

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, writes that his uncle swears the old-timers threw 'hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads.' Hardwood ash soaked in a hopper gives lye, the potash your granny used for soap and hominy. Tip it into the keg and you have made a weak lye bath. It turns the liquid alkaline and may foam terribly, and it does nothing whatever to the poison in the heads. Your uncle's ash bucket will make you a fine bar of soap and a sorry jar of anything else. At least you will die clean. I have struck a copper coin with my stamp, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., through Liberty's forehead, and it goes to you by post.

The oak holds a grain of truth. Oak gives spirit its colour and some of its character, but it does so slowly, over months in a barrel. A fistful of shavings boiled in a keg for an hour is neither aging nor cleaning. It is only splinters with ambition. The only thing that removes bad heads is the distiller's own hand throwing them away.

Lastly, the bead. Shake a jar, hold it to the lamp and admire the bubbles, and you will learn roughly how strong the spirit is. The word roughly is doing a great deal of work there. The bead cannot tell you whether there is methanol in the jar, whether the cuts were honest or whether the pot was patched with lead. A jar may bead like a string of pearls and still blind you. If whiskey could be judged by its beads, my late aunt's rosary would be the finest distiller in Merrimack County. As Miss Higgins put it, 'a man who trusts the bead is a man who'd buy a mule by the shine on its shoes.'

The lightning beats the horse, the dentist beats the lightning, and the bear beats everybody. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest and your fire low.