Smuggling Spirits by River on the Merrimack and Suncook in New Hampshire

When the River Was the Turnpike

Before a single rail was laid in this state, the Merrimack was our turnpike, our post road and our tavern all in one. She begins at Franklin, where the Pemigewasset comes down out of the mountains to meet the Winnipesaukee coming out of the lake. From there she runs south past Concord, over the great Amoskeag Falls at Manchester, past Nashua and Lowell, and out to the salt at Newburyport. Our own little Suncook comes down past Pittsfield and Barnstead, picking up every mill-dam's worth of grudges on the way, and empties into the Merrimack at Suncook village, between Pembroke and Allenstown.

In 1803 the gentlemen of Boston opened the Middlesex Canal, some twenty-seven miles of ditch from the Merrimack at Chelmsford clear to Charlestown. Locks and side canals were cut around the falls at Amoskeag, Hooksett and Bow, and by about 1815 a canal boat could come all the way up to Concord. Boston was now a river trip from the Granite State, and the Granite State has regretted it ever since.

The boats were long, narrow, flat-bottomed things, seventy-odd feet long and about nine wide, built like a coffin for a giant lying on his back. Going upstream, two or three men walked the running boards with setting poles. Each man jammed the iron end of his pole into the river bottom, set his shoulder to the knob, and pushed her ahead a step at a time. Down the river went lumber, Concord granite, potash and cordwood. Up the river came salt, molasses, iron, dry goods, and barrels upon barrels of Medford and Boston rum, all perfectly lawful and consigned to honest Concord merchants. That was where the trouble began.

Sucking the Monkey

Give a boat crew three days of hard poling and a hold full of rum and you have about the most dangerous combination in nature. The boatmen had a practice they called sucking the monkey, which is old sailors' talk. A man took a gimlet and bored a hole no bigger than a pea, low on the cask where the hoop hid it. Into it went a goose quill or a rye straw, and he drew on it like a calf on its mother until his eyes watered. Then he tapped in a little whittled peg, smeared it with tar, and passed the straw to his partner. Whatever came out of the cask was made up with a dipper of Merrimack water, so a cask that left Boston at ninety proof arrived in Concord at about forty. The merchants called it evaporation. I have tasted that rum. It had a body like a drowned cat and a finish like the bottom of a well.

Then the railroad came, damn its iron heart. The Boston and Lowell line opened in 1835 and the Concord Railroad in 1842, and the freight left the river for the cars. By about 1851 the Middlesex Canal had stopped carrying regular boats, and its locks now hold nothing but frogs and the opinions of old men. So in this year of our Lord 1865, river smuggling hereabouts is no fleet. It is a craft of small boats, single kegs, the spring freshet and the log drives, and I have stood on the bank and watched every trick of it.

Three Tricks of the Current

The first trick is the sunk keg. The English smugglers of the Channel coast invented it. They tied their brandy tubs to a stone, sank them offshore, and came back by night with a grappling iron they called a creeper to fish them up. They called that sowing a crop. Our Merrimack men improved on it, and here the natural philosopher may take notes. In place of the stone, a man lashed a canvas sack of coarse salt to his keg and sank it in a quiet eddy above the Hooksett falls. River water dissolves salt, and in two or three days, depending on how cold the water ran, the salt was gone and up came the keg, bobbing like an apple at a Harvest Home. A revenue man could watch that bank with a spyglass until his backside took root and see nothing at all until then. That keg is the only honest thing in Merrimack County that keeps its appointments.

The second trick is the freshet. Every April the snow lets go in the hills, and the Suncook comes down brown and roaring, full of dead pine, drowned fence posts and lost sheep. Into that mess a man drops his kegs, wrapped in bark so they pass for stumps. The Suncook is too skinny for a flatboat and too rocky for a sermon, but a keg goes down her fast and noisy, banging into everything on the way. At the mouth a cousin waits in a skiff with a pike pole, plucking stumps out of the current while the neighbors wonder why anyone gathers firewood in April.

The third trick, and my favourite, is the pine coffin. A sly man takes a pine log and splits it lengthwise with wedges. He gouges out the heart with an adze and a hot iron and beds two or three stone jugs inside in sawdust. Then he pins the halves back together with hardwood trunnels, smears the seam with pitch and mud, and rolls the log in among a thousand others on the drive. No revenue man can search a log drive. The river drivers dance across those logs in spiked boots with their peaveys, the hooked tool a Maine blacksmith named Joseph Peavey worked up at Stillwater in 1858. Inside two years every driver on this river carried one. A driver always knew which log was heavy, and he steered it into the eddy at the Suncook landing like a mother hen herding a chick.

Tales from the Yadkin

Mr. Junior Vance, a retired runner from the Brushy Mountains of Wilkes County, North Carolina, sat by my stove lately with my bear Barnaby eyeing his boots. One night he found the law waiting in the dark at the far end of a bridge. He went a mile downriver and borrowed a johnboat, but he could not find its paddle, so he ferried forty quarts across the Yadkin in four trips, ten quarts to a tow sack, using a coal shovel. That is the only time in history a shovel got a man out of a hole. Out in the middle a lantern swept the water. He lay flat with his face in two inches of river and played the most innocent pine log in Wilkes County, while a longnose gar came up and nosed his elbow.

He once kept quart jars on a hookless trotline sunk across a swimming hole on the Reddies River. Then a church took to baptizing in that same hole. A sawmill hand who was laid back under the water hooked the line with his foot and came up a new creature with a quart jar in his right hand. The preacher took charge of its proper disposal, which by report took him about two weeks. Junior's uncle kept a still, a copper pot his daddy made, beside a cold spring above Wilkesboro. Then the Army Engineers dammed the Yadkin, and around '62 the Kerr Scott reservoir filled over the whole hollow. Fishermen still haul up three feet of green coil now and again. As Junior put it: "Rivers'll carry anything you give 'em, but they don't ever give it back the way you sent it."

Cold Water, Copper and the Cut

That uncle sat beside a cold spring for good reason. Every old still-house squats beside a brook like a toad beside a puddle. Hiding is part of the reason, but the true reason is cold water. Half a still's work happens in the worm, where the hot vapour turns back into liquid. If the coil runs warm, your whole run goes up into the sky. Set the worm in a tub fed with brook water, letting the cold come in at the bottom and the warm spill out at the top. Heated water rises and carries itself away, and the coldest water stays around the bottom of the coil, where your spirit comes out.

Make your wash of cracked corn, or of ground and pressed apples if you are a Suncook Valley man, and let it work until the cap falls back and it goes still and sour. Strain it into the pot, and never fill the pot past three-quarters. A full pot foams up into the worm and plugs it, the joints let go, and burning vapour sprays over an open fire. I saw a Barnstead still-house go up exactly that way. Never seal a still tight; it must stay open to the air through the end of the worm. And give up the old flour-paste slobber on your joints, because it dries, cracks, and lets vapour creep out to your fire.

Bring the heat up slow. Throw out the foreshots, which smell of varnish and carry the wood spirit, the methanol that blinds and kills. Throw out more than you think you need to, because a frightened distiller lives longer than a stingy one. Set aside the harsh heads and keep the clean, sweet hearts. Save the oily tails, which smell of wet dog and boiled grain, to run again another day. Catch the whole run in a row of small jars numbered in chalk. Smell each one, rub a drop between your palms, and only then decide where your cuts fall. Remember too that copper cleans out the sulphur stink only where the vapour touches it: in the head, the neck and the worm. Making spirits for drinking without a federal permit is unlawful, and I set all this down for history and instruction only.

Ashes, Red Oak and Gunpowder

Cletus "Rabbit" Miller of Wilkesboro wrote to ask whether his uncle was right that hickory ashes or red oak shavings in the thump keg clean out bad heads. Run water through wood ashes and you get lye, as every farm wife who ever boiled soft soap knows. When lye meets the oils of a run, it turns them toward soap; give it a week and you could bathe a hog in it. Red oak is so porous that you can blow pipe smoke clean through a short stave. Its shavings give the spirit colour and a woody, bitter taste, and that is flavour, not cleansing. Nothing you put in the doubler takes out the methanol. Only the foreshots and heads you throw out at the pot will save your eyes.

As for proving whiskey on gunpowder, the old British excise men really did wet powder with spirit and touch it off, and if it burned they called the spirit proved. But the powder tells you only that the spirit is strong. A jar of pure foreshots would set it off as handsome as a Fourth of July. Strong and safe are two different words, and gunpowder knows only one of them. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low.