The Canadian Border Run: Hauling Spirits North to Quebec in 1864-65

My black bear Barnaby gets restless whenever he hears the word Canada, and in that he is no different from every revenue man in Vermont. Every schoolboy knows the honest traffic on the northern border runs south. Canadian whisky slides down into Vermont to dodge Mr. Lincoln's tax collector like a cat under a porch. Yet for a season a sane Pittsfield man had good reason to turn his wagon toward Quebec and face a hundred and fifty miles of bad road and worse weather. I set the matter down as history and education only, because making spirits to drink without a federal permit is against the law of these United States.

Silver, Sermons and Sawdust

There were three reasons, and the first was silver. The government printed greenbacks to pay the army, and the more it printed, the less a man in Montreal or Sherbrooke cared to hold them. In the summer of 'sixty-four it took near two dollars and eighty-five cents in paper to buy one gold dollar. A Canadian buyer, though, paid in hard money: silver shillings, British half-crowns, and the little bronze Canada cents the Province first struck in 'fifty-eight when it went to dollars and cents. A jug sold for a silver dollar at Stanstead came home to Pittsfield worth very near three dollars in paper. I have spent twenty years trying to turn copper into gold, and the Treasury did it for me by ruining the paper.

The second was sermons. Last year the Parliament of Canada passed the Temperance Act of 1864, which tavern keepers from Coaticook to Three Rivers call the Dunkin Act, after the gentleman who wrote it. It lets any county or township vote itself dry, and some of them did, especially in the Eastern Townships, where the Yankee Loyalist blood runs thick and pious. A dry township is only a thirsty township with a hymnal. The deacons voted on Tuesday, and by Saturday their hired men stood in the road at midnight with silver in their fists, looking south.

The third was sawdust. Up the Connecticut past Colebrook, along the Saint Francis and toward the Magog country, there are timber camps of two and three hundred choppers. They come out of the woods in spring with a winter's wages, smelling of pitch and wet wool. Those men pay what you ask and never ask what is in the jug, and that is exactly why a decent maker must be careful what he puts in it.

A Stiffened Line and a Long Road

On the nineteenth of October, 1864, a pack of Confederate raiders who had been loafing in Canada rode into Saint Albans, Vermont, robbed three banks in broad daylight, took near two hundred thousand dollars, and tried to burn the town on their way out. After that the whole northern line went stiff as a dead deacon. Soldiers stood at the crossings, the customs men were doubled, and in December the government demanded passports from anyone coming down out of Canada. That rule was lifted this spring, thank Providence, but blue coats still crawl along the border thinking every wagon is full of rebels. Most of the wagons are only full of rye.

Even the line itself has been a matter of dispute. At the top of this state, past Pittsburg, the settlers grew so tired of the two countries quarrelling over them that in 1832 they declared themselves the Republic of Indian Stream. They had a constitution, an assembly and a militia of about forty men. New Hampshire marched its own militia up in 'thirty-five, and that was the end of the Republic. Mr. Webster and Lord Ashburton settled the line in 1842, and in the forties the commissioners set cast-iron posts along it. Since 'fifty-four the Reciprocity Treaty has let timber, grain, fish and potash cross free of duty, but distilled spirits are not on the list. This March, Congress gave notice that the treaty will die next March, so the customs men are fussier than ever.

The road runs out of Pittsfield to Gilmanton Iron Works, past the Lake to Meredith and Plymouth, up the Pemigewasset through Franconia Notch under the Old Man of the Mountain, then to Littleton, across into Vermont and up the valley to Derby Line, with Stanstead sitting on top of it like a cat on a warm stove. It is six days in good weather. In mud season it is a lifetime.

Forty Jugs and a Rotten Molar

In the fall of 'sixty-four I made the run myself with forty jugs in straw, packed in four stout crates. On each crate I stencilled PORCELAIN TEETH, PHILADELPHIA, FRAGILE, and every word was a lie except Fragile. On top of the first crate I set a quart jar of real teeth, a year of my pulling. They were molars with forked roots like little parsnips, and the jar rattled like hail on a coffin lid and smelled like a privy at a camp meeting.

The customs man at Derby Line was a big red-whiskered lad with his jaw swollen as if he had a crabapple in his cheek. I handed him the jar, watched the colour leave his face, and then noticed how he was holding his jaw. His left lower molar had been killing him since Lammas. I sat him down on my forty jugs, tilted his head back against the wagon wheel, took hold with the forceps I never travel without, and rocked the tooth once toward the cheek and once toward the tongue. It came out with a long wet crack and a pop like a cork. He let out a howl they heard in Stanstead and spat into the snow, and I gave him a rag soaked from my medicinal flask to bite on. He waved me through without once looking in the crates. Why would he? He had already seen the teeth. I keep a Canada cent of 1858 from that run on my watch chain, counterstamped G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H.

A Revenue Man's Recollections

Captain Donald Vance of Manchester spent twenty-eight years riding the customs lines and revenue roads, and he recently sat by my stove while Barnaby was under orders to behave. About ten years ago at Derby Line, he told me, a December funeral came down the hill: four pallbearers with a pine coffin, a minister reading, and a weeping widow in a heavy veil. When the coffin tipped on the grade, the Captain heard a glug like a cow at a trough. The widow cried that the dead man had been a temperance man, and the Captain answered: "Madam, then he is the first temperance man I ever met who was forty gallons of rye from the neck down." Inside he found ten stoneware jugs in sawdust. When the widow raised her veil, she wore whiskers as red as a fox.

He also told me about Amos, who kept a tavern built square on the line with a chalk stripe across the barroom floor. Amos slid his jug back and forth across that stripe with his boot depending on which officer walked in. The Captain sat over a cider for four hours until Amos went to his privy thirty feet out back, which stood in Vermont, and arrested him there with his trousers down. Another time on Lake Memphremagog, in fog as thick as wool, the Captain rowed six hours after a lantern. At dawn he found it tied to a shingle raft, with a dead goose lashed underneath whose wings had caught the wind. The real boat had gone south along the east shore.

The Captain's grimmest story came from a timber camp around 1855. The men there suffered colic and wrist palsy because they had been drinking spirit kept in red earthenware crocks with a lead glaze. Strong spirit left standing in such a crock pulls the lead out of the glaze. He broke every one of those crocks in the road with an axe.

Spirit Made to Travel

Here is the bones of my uncle's old rye-and-corn mash from Barnstead, for a forty-gallon tub. Cook a bushel of cracked corn soft as porridge and stir it so it does not scorch. Corn starch is not sugar, and yeast cannot eat it. When the mash cools to about one hundred fifty degrees, stir in a peck of ground malt and a peck of rye. If it is too hot you kill the malt's virtue, and if it is too cold the mash sulks. Hold it there an hour until it tastes sweet. Then cool it to blood warm, ninety degrees or under, pitch your yeast, cover it with a cloth and keep the room aired. In four to six days, when it goes quiet and tastes sour-dry, you have your wash.

Strip the wash once, quickly, and then run the low wine a second time slowly over a low fire. Alcohol vapour runs along the floor looking for your stove, so keep the receiver well away from any flame and keep sand and a wet blanket within reach. Throw away every drop of the foreshots. The heads come next and smell sharp, like varnish or a cabinetmaker's glue pot. That is the poison end, the wood spirit and its cousins, and it goes to waste. When the smell turns sweet like warm bread, you have reached the hearts, and those you keep. When it turns flat and oily like damp wool socks on the stove, you have reached the tails, and you set them aside. Make your cuts with your nose, with your tongue on the back of your hand, and with patience.

Copper scrubs out the sulfur where the hot vapour touches it, in the helmet, the arm and the worm. After a season you will find a black bloom inside the helmet. Clean it with vinegar and a little salt and rinse it until the water runs sweet. At Stanstead the buyer will test your spirit with a Sikes hydrometer. Since 1848 our Congress has called proof spirit half alcohol, but British proof is about fifty-seven percent, so Yankee one hundred proof reads only eighty-seven and a half British proof. Many a man there thought he had been robbed when he had only been out-arithmeticked. Ship your spirit in salt-glazed stoneware or glass, never in lead-glazed red earthenware. Cork it tight, wax the cork and pack it in straw. A gallon of hundred-proof spirit weighs a little under eight pounds, which is lighter than water, and your horse knows it.

Ashes, Shavings and the Blue Flame

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, asks whether hickory ashes or red oak shavings in the thump keg will clean out bad heads. Hardwood ash is mostly potash, a strong alkali. In the keg it may sweeten a sour backing a little, but it will also foam and soap up. Bad heads are not sour; they are light and boil off early, and an alkali does not catch them. Oak gives colour and tannin only to spirit that sits in it for a long while, and in a thump keg those stay in the water. Red oak is all open pipes inside, which is why every spirit barrel is coopered from white oak. The only way to clean out heads is to cut them out.

The tavern blue-flame test proves only that the spirit is strong enough to burn. Wood spirit burns pale blue as well, so a jug full of heads passes it easily, and I would not trust a spoon of flame to find lead. Make honest cuts, keep your copper clean and use stoneware. That is the whole catechism.