How Fort Wilkins Nearly Won a Union Army Copper Kettle Contract in 1863

In the summer of 1863 the Army of the United States came up the Suncook Valley Turnpike with a contract in its saddlebag. For about six weeks that paper came near to making me a rich man and a federal man. It came near to making me a dead man as well, and it ended with a porcupine on Lake Superior. I have kept this tale corked a good while. Tonight I draw the bung, and I ask you to read it the way you would watch a run come off the worm, with a steady eye.

The Greatest Shopper Ever Loosed Upon This Continent

When the war broke out in '61, the Army was a few thousand men guarding forts out West. Within a year it was hundreds of thousands, and every one of them wanted a coat, a blanket, a tent, a tin cup, a canteen, a pair of shoes and a kettle to boil his coffee in. The man charged with buying all of it was Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs. He was stern, gray-bearded and honest, and he had the hardest post in Washington. His Department bought on a scale no American government had ever tried: wagons by the thousand, mules by the tens of thousands, and camp kettles by the cartload.

Wherever a government opens its purse, some contractor opens his mouth. Before the war, 'shoddy' meant one particular cheap cloth, made from old rags shredded to fluff and pressed back together with a little glue and a prayer, then sold as wool. The Union bought acres of it. The first hard rain turned those coats back into rags, and boys stood in formation with their elbows out and their blankets running down their legs like oatmeal. A shoddy blanket was the only thing in the Union Army that surrendered faster than General Pope. By '62 the word meant any rotten goods sold to the government, and the men who sold them were called the shoddy aristocracy. They rode about New York in carriages paid for with soldiers' frostbite.

Copper was the blood of that war, and the Union got nearly all of it from the Keweenaw Peninsula of Michigan on Lake Superior. That copper comes out of the ground already pure, in masses so large the miners had to cut them apart with hammer and chisel, like a butcher working a frozen ox. It went into bronze cannon, percussion caps, ship fittings and boiler pipes. Every cap fired at Antietam carried a pinch of Lake Superior in it.

Then there was whiskey. The regular Army's daily spirit ration was abolished in 1832 and replaced with coffee and sugar, which gives you an army that is wide awake and miserable about it. A commander could still order an issue for men worn down by heavy fatigue duty or exposure, and by the letters home every regiment of the Army of the Potomac was exposed and mightily fatigued. The Medical Department also bought whiskey and brandy by the barrel, as stimulants for fever, for shock and for the leg sawed off below the knee. Much of what the contractors sold the hospitals was poison: spirit cut with water, burnt sugar and pepper, or raw corn spirit dyed brown. In 1863 Surgeon General William Hammond set up the Army's own laboratories in Philadelphia and Astoria, New York, so the wounded would no longer be finished off by the very men paid to heal them.

So that spring I sat down with a quill, a candle and a jar of my best for inspiration, and I wrote to the Office of the Quartermaster General in Washington City. I offered six hundred hand-hammered copper camp kettles, double-riveted and tin-lined, from the Fort Wilkins foundry. In a postscript, polite as a parson, I offered such medicinal stimulant as the hospitals of the Republic might require, of a purity unknown south of Concord. I sealed it with a counterstamped large cent pressed into the wax. It may have been the cleverest thing I ever did, and it may have been the stupidest.

A Captain, a Tin-Man and a Bear

Six weeks later, on a hot June afternoon, Captain Ambrose Pettibone of the Quartermaster's Department rode up from the Suncook bridge on a sorrel horse, with a clerk following on a mule. His mustache was waxed sharp enough to cut foreshots, and his soul was about as clean as the foreshots. He looked up at my log walls and said, "This is FORT Wilkins? I expected a garrison." I told him the garrison was chained by the window, and asked him kindly not to step in its breakfast. Barnaby, my black bear, showed him a mouthful of yellow teeth the size of hog's knuckles, and the Captain went the colour of skimmed milk. Fear keeps a man honest for about a quarter of an hour.

He inspected the foundry and a sample kettle, and he tasted the medicinal stimulant three times for thoroughness, then a fourth time to be sure the first three were accurate. A second rider was on the road meanwhile. Hiram Crouch, a tin-man out of Manchester, had come to undercut me with sheet-iron kettles washed in a skin of brass so thin you could peel it off with a thumbnail. He set one on my own chopping block and called mine old-fashioned.

To get the Captain alone, Crouch went round the back of the still-house and stepped over Barnaby's chain. He did not go around it. A bear gives one grunt by way of warning, and Crouch did not speak bear. Barnaby came off his log like a cannonball off a frigate, hooked a claw in Crouch's coat-tails, and opened him from coat-tails to boot-tops like a codfish: wool, linen, drawers and a hand's width of hide. I have pulled four hundred teeth and never heard a squeal like the one he gave. It began as a man and ended as a teakettle. He went down the Turnpike at a dead run, showing Pittsfield a full moon at two in the afternoon. The Widow Tilton, hanging her wash by the road, judged it the most honest thing that ever came out of Manchester. I bandaged him and charged a dollar for the linen. I also pulled a molar for the Captain, rotted black as a stovepipe, for two dollars. That tooth was the only thing the government ever got out of Fort Wilkins on time.

The Kettle That Rang

Master coppersmith Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister hammered those kettles. The Captain did not know copper from a cow-pie, and he knew it. He drew his saber halfway and rapped Silas's sample on the rim with the brass hilt, and it rang long and sweet like a wedding bell. That is sound copper, hammered even all round, with no thin spots and no cold seams. Then he struck Crouch's, and it went thunk, like a cowbell packed with mud. Iron under a brass wash has no song in it. On the third blow the brass flaked off onto the Captain's boot. Silas told him that such a kettle would be a sieve in two weeks on a Virginia campfire, and the Captain wrote it down.

The rim of that sample was forged from Lake Superior mass copper that Silas's father had carted out from Concord by ox. One lump held a miner's broken chisel point, driven in about an inch and fused there as though it had grown. His father would not cut it out, and it shows in the rim like a nail head. They call it the Chisel Kettle, and it sits in the foundry still.

On the second day the clerk, a pale little fellow with ink on his cuffs and a smile like a pickerel, caught Silas alone at the quench tub. He proposed that they deliver four hundred fifty kettles, sign for six hundred, and send the price of the difference to friends. Silas said nothing. He took a number punch and struck a 1 into the bottom of the kettle in his hand. Every kettle from that foundry would carry its own count in copper, and if the last one read 450, the Army could read it as well as any clerk. Ink does not hold up against a punch mark.

The Other Fort Wilkins

Pettibone rode out with samples and a jar for his commanding officer, swearing approval inside the month. I bought a new bellows on credit, and Silas chalked all six hundred kettles on the foundry floor in rows like a cemetery. June passed. Vicksburg fell and Gettysburg was fought. July passed, then August. In October a letter came, water-stained, stamped six times, with one corner chewed. It held the contract, APPROVED, for six hundred copper camp kettles and sundry hospital stores, and it was addressed to G. G. Wilkins, Fort Wilkins, Copper Harbor, Michigan.

There is another Fort Wilkins, an Army post on Lake Superior built in 1844 to keep the peace in the copper rush. It was named for William Wilkins, Secretary of War, who is no kin of mine. It stood empty through most of the fifties and the whole war. Some clerk saw 'Fort Wilkins' and 'copper' on the same page and filed me under Michigan. The contract sat with the caretaker and the porcupines, and Silas knew that chewed corner for a porcupine bite at a glance. By the time it came back, the Army had filled its wants elsewhere, and the contract was 'superseded by circumstance.' It was superseded by a porcupine. That winter a Shaker elder from Canterbury looked over the chalk circles and asked whether we were building a cathedral. I told him we were: the Church of the Lost Contract, with the bear for deacon.

Why a Kettle Is Not a Still

Kettles and stills are cousins, but they are not twins. A cooking kettle must be tin-lined, because any sour food boiled in bare copper pulls the metal into the food and sends the whole company to the bushes by morning. A still is left bare inside on purpose. The rising vapour should rub against naked copper through the pot, the helmet and the neck, where the metal grabs the sulphurous stink and holds it. That is the alchemy, and it is the reason bright copper matters. The copper pays for it, though. Every run spends a little metal, until the shoulders, helmet and neck wear thin as an old stair step. Tap your copper, study it in good light, and feel for soft places at the shoulder. When it has gone thin, have a smith put in new metal. Never patch it with lead solder.

The Mash and the Run

Cook cracked corn in water, stirring it in a little at a time as you would hasty pudding, until it is thick as wallpaper paste. Cool it to about a hundred and fifty degrees. The old-timers held that it is right when a finger can bear it to a slow count of three and no longer. Stir in crushed malted barley, about one part to four of corn, and let it rest an hour or more while the malt turns the starch to sugar, until it tastes sweet as a schoolgirl's lie. Cool it to about eighty degrees, near blood-warm, and pitch your yeast. Keep it warm with the air moving, because a working mash breathes out a gas that will smother a man in a closed room. In five to ten days the cap falls, and you have a sour, beery wash of only a few percent spirit.

Keep the fire LOW, for a still in a hurry foams over and sends raw mash into the worm. Throw out the foreshots, a good cupful for every five gallons of wash, and be generous, because that is where the wood alcohol runs, and it blinds and kills. Next come the heads, sharp as the inside of a varnish can, and they are set aside. Then come the hearts, clean and sweet. Last come the tails, oily and smelling of wet dog and boiled grain, which are saved for a later run. Catch the run in a row of small numbered jars and smell each one by daylight. Measure strength with a proof hydrometer, keeping in mind that American proof is twice the spirit by volume. Alcohol vapour is invisible and heavier than air, and it creeps along the floor to the nearest flame, so keep every flame far from the collecting jar and check your joints before the fire is lit. The law of these United States forbids distilling spirits for drinking without a permit, and all I set down here is history and learning.

Ashes, Oak and the Bead

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, writes that his uncle swears by hickory ashes or red oak shavings in the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Red oak is full of open pores, little tubes running the length of the grain, so you can blow bubbles through a stick of it. That is why coopers use white oak for barrels. Shavings will give colour and bitter tannin, and brown is not clean. Brown is only brown. Water run through wood ash makes lye, so ashes in a keg turn your whiskey into weak soap. The old thumper men did charge the doubler with fresh mash, or with peaches or apples, for flavour and a little strength, and somewhere along the way the story got mixed up. No keg can save a bad run. The only remedy for bad heads is the cut.

The bead test is the same kind of half-truth. A shaken jar gives a rough notion of strength, but it tells you nothing about safety. Wood alcohol beads as prettily as a bride's pearls, and lead from a soldered joint shows no bead at all. Use the hydrometer for strength and your cuts for safety. And remember what Silas says of a man's kettle: "Strike it. It'll tell you the truth even when he won't."