Patent Medicine Swindlers of the 1860s: The Professor Who Watered My Whiskey

The Painted Wagon Comes to Town

Let me set out the medicine-show trade as it stands in this year of our Lord eighteen hundred and sixty-five. A wagon rolls into Pittsfield painted red and gold, like a circus that went to seminary. Down its side runs the legend DOCTOR SO-AND-SO'S VEGETABLE PANACEA, CURES CONSUMPTION, DROPSY, FITS, FEVERS, AND FEMALE COMPLAINTS. A banjo player draws the crowd, a fellow in a stovepipe hat bites a live frog or eats fire, and then the Professor steps out with a crate of brown bottles.

Here is the first secret, friends. You call it patent medicine, but hardly one in the lot is patented. A true patent requires a man to tell the government what is in his bottle, and that is the last thing a swindler wants known. So he protects the name and the label and keeps the guts of the thing hidden. A patent medicine, as I reckon it, is a bottle that cures everything except the poverty of the man who bought it.

The second secret is one any distiller will appreciate. Lift the cork on the popular bitters of this age, the ones the soldiers carried in their haversacks and the temperance ladies take by the spoonful for their nerves, and you will find more alcohol in that bottle than in a jug of hard cider. The good Methodist sisters of Merrimack County are drinking stronger stuff than I sell and calling it stomach medicine, while their husbands wonder why Sunday dinner got so cheerful.

Worse yet, a good many of the soothing syrups and cure-alls hide opium or morphine. No law in this Republic makes a man print what is in his bottle, not one line, so a mother may spoon poppy juice into a squalling child and never know it. I will make no joke of that. A swindler who doses babies ought to be fed to something larger than my bear.

Uncle Sam Takes His Penny

Washington did take an interest, though not the right one. Under Mr. Lincoln's Revenue Act of 1862, Schedule C, every proprietary medicine must carry a revenue stamp, and the big bitters houses have their own private stamps engraved with their names in fancy curlicues. So Uncle Sam does not ask what is in your bottle. He only asks for his penny on it. He does not care if you poison the patient, so long as the poison is properly licensed.

The Professor of Vital Sciences

Two summers past, a fellow rolled up Route 28 calling himself Professor Thaddeus Pomfrey of the Philadelphia College of Vital Sciences. There is no such college, and there may be no such Philadelphia. He wore a beard like a burst mattress and a vocabulary bought by the pound from a Boston auctioneer. He came to my door at Fort Wilkins polite as a deacon and bought four kegs of my best double-run rye, cash money, no haggling. I should have known then. An honest man haggles.

Three weeks later my cousin in Epsom sent word that the Professor was selling Dr. Wilkins' Granite Mountain Elixir, with my own name on it, out of his wagon at a dollar a bottle. It promised to restore lost vigor, cure the ague, make the bald man hairy and the hairy man handsome. I rode down for a taste. He had watered my whiskey so thin a minnow could have filed a complaint about the current. Four kegs had become forty, colored with burnt sugar and a pinch of red pepper so it would bite the tongue and pass for strong.

I pull teeth as well as hammer copper, so I know a liar's mouth when I see one: it is the one always open. I said nothing and went home. There I gathered my hydrometer, the little glass float the excise men use, which rides low in strong spirit and high in water. Any natural philosopher will grasp the principle at once, for water is the heavier of the two, and the float tells the truth whether the seller likes it or not. I took my anvil punch as well. And I took Barnaby, my black bear.

The Trial at Barnstead Muster Field

The Professor was booked to play the Barnstead muster field on the Fourth, so I set up my own wagon not forty feet from his. When he hollered about the miraculous strength of his Elixir, I hollered back that we ought to test that strength before the whole town. I bought one of his bottles with a copper cent I had stamped fresh that morning, G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., so there could be no question whose money paid for the evidence.

I poured his elixir into a tall glass and dropped in the hydrometer. The float sat up out of the liquor like a bishop in a bathtub. Beside it I poured a glass of my own true rye, and the float sank to its proper mark. The whole muster field leaned in. Old Mrs. Tilton, who had bought six bottles for her lumbago, read the mark aloud and said a word I did not know Freewill Baptists were allowed to own.

The Professor blustered and called the instrument a Yankee trick. Just then Barnaby, tethered behind my wagon with a ham bone and strict instructions, caught the smell of burnt sugar and molasses in the Professor's crate. A bear will cross a county for molasses. He snapped his rope like a garter, ambled over at his leisure, put one great paw through the canvas, and licked the crate open bottle by bottle, like a deacon at a church supper.

The tonic had promised to restore lost vigor, and the only vigor I saw restored that day was the Professor's own, going straight up a sugar maple in his shirt-tails. He hung there with his trousers caught on a branch, flapping like a wet nightshirt on a line, wailing for the constable. The constable was in the crowd, laughing so hard he had to be helped to a hay bale. Barnaby finished the crate, belched in a manner that frightened a team of oxen, and lay down under the maple for a nap. The Professor stayed aloft till sundown, left Merrimack County next morning, and set up, I am told, in Vermont, which is punishment enough for any man.

Let it be on the record that the bear was no hero. He was a thief who happened to rob a worse thief. A wild animal near a crowd endangers everyone in it, and I was lucky that day, not wise. Do not take your bear to a muster.

Granny-Women and Frozen Panaceas

Miss Clara Higgins, a herbalist of the Blue Ridge of Virginia who knows more words for bad whiskey than a Concord judge knows excuses, rode a long and rough way up my turnpike to tell me the mountains suffer these Professors worse than we do. Every holler in Floyd County, she says, has been visited by some gentleman with a painted wagon and a beard bought off a goat. Her great-grandmother came upon one in a bitter January week selling Seven Hills Panacea at two bits a bottle, sworn strong enough to raise the dead. Every bottle in his wagon bed was frozen solid as a creek rock, corks popped clean out. Strong spirit does not freeze in a Virginia January, and the old woman held one over his head like a preacher with a Bible and told him, "If this here raises the dead, it'll have to thaw them out first." It proved to be creek water, burnt sugar and something bitter, and he was gone before the ice melted.

The granny-women took such men personally, for the swindlers stole their trade and poisoned their patients. At Wytheville a granny-woman called Aunt Delphy sniffed a bottle of Thunder Root Restorative and pronounced it ditch water, cayenne and a splash of turpentine, a remedy to cure you and varnish you in one go. Before the whole general store she invited the drummer to restore himself with it. He drank it down, tears running into his beard, and some four minutes later was running for the privy behind the livery, loud enough to be heard over the blacksmith's hammer. It is the finest clinical trial I ever heard of, and cheaper than anything done in Boston.

Miss Higgins keeps the mountain names for such swill: tanglefoot, for liquor that ties your legs in knots; popskull, for the kind that feels next morning like a nail being knocked out of your head; and bust-head, popskull's meaner brother. The first name came true at the Galax church picnic, where a salesman of Elixir of Long Life caught his boot on his own sample case and went over backwards into the fried chicken. The preacher looked down at him and said, "Brother, your product's working already." Near Hillsville an awful temperance deacon bought a crate of Temperance Bitters for his congregation, until a sharp schoolteacher set a spoonful afire on the church steps and it burned like a lamp. The deacon kept the crate in his barn for his rheumatism, which got very regular after that, every evening about supper.

Copper, Heat and the Separation of Spirits

Since the Professor sinned against the spirit, let us consider how honest spirit is made. Copper melts at nearly two thousand degrees by Fahrenheit, so it stands up well over a fire, and it carries heat smoothly across a kettle rather than scorching one spot. Hammering a pot on the anvil makes the copper hard and brittle, so every so often I heat it and quench it in the water trough. Smiths call that annealing; it softens the metal to take more shaping. Skip it and your pot splits like a Concord lawyer's alibi.

Mark this, experimenter: a still makes no alcohol. The yeast does that in the mash barrel, turning grain or fruit sugar into a weak beer. The still only separates by heat. Methanol, the wood spirit that blinds and kills, boils at about one hundred forty-eight degrees; good ethanol at about one hundred seventy-three. So the poisonous light stuff comes over first.

Therefore never run your spirit into one big jug. Catch it in a long row of small jars and judge each alone. The foreshots go straight out, never drunk, never sold. The heads, sharp and solvent-smelling, are set aside. The hearts, sweet and clean, are the reason for the whole business. The tails, oily and dull and smelling like a wet dog, go aside too. Make those cuts by nose and patience. A greedy man saves his heads to stretch a batch, and a greedy man is how a family ends up at a funeral.

The copper works upon the vapour, catching the sulfur stink before it reaches your jar, and the helmet and neck do most of that labour. Keep the metal bright and scrubbed, the joints silver-soldered and never lead, and the fire low and steady. Alcohol vapour near an open flame will light a still-house like the Fourth of July; I have seen a neighbor's barn go that way. Ventilate, watch your fire, and keep a bucket of sand and a wet blanket by the door.

Ashes, Oak Shavings and the Blue Flame

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. Pour water through hickory ash and you get lye, the same your grandmother boils with tallow for soap. In a thump keg it makes a slippery, foaming mess smelling of washday. Your uncle could wash his Sunday shirt in it, Rabbit, but not his sins. Red oak shavings lend color and a woody taste, and brown liquor looks aged, and aged looks honest. But methanol comes over early because it boils low, whatever wood floats in the keg. A Gilmanton man threw a whole hickory log into his doubler, and the only thing it cured was his supply of hickory. The one cure is to discard foreshots and heads every time. A fresh-stamped Wilkins cent goes to Rabbit's mantel for the asking.

Bury the blue-flame test beside it. Folks light spirit in a spoon and swear a blue flame proves it safe. Yet methanol itself burns with a pale blue flame, scarcely visible by daylight. The flame tells you there is alcohol in the spoon, not which alcohol, and it cannot tell a good cut from a deadly one. All it proves is that your eyebrows are about to leave the county.

Remember, friends, that making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of these United States, and all of this is set down for history and education only. And if a man with a painted wagon offers you a bottle that cures everything, ask him to drink it first, as Aunt Delphy did. Keep your copper clean, your cuts true, and your fire low.