The Lantern Man of Loon Pond: Obed Crane, Gilmanton's Uncaught Runner

The Lakes Country and Its Watchful Eyes

To understand the Lantern Man you must first understand the country he ran in. North of my fort at Pittsfield lies Winnipesaukee, the big lake, as wide and as full of islands as a Concord lawyer's bill is full of charges. Since 1849 the side-wheeler Lady of the Lake has gone thrashing out of Lake Village, smoking like a Methodist's first cigar and carrying freight, mail and pale Boston boarders, who come up for the air and leave complaining of the mosquitoes. The railroad brought them, and it brought something else besides, which was eyes. Where there are depots there are clerks, where there are clerks there are ledgers, and ledgers draw revenue men the way a dead woodchuck draws flies.

The Lakes towns of Gilmanton, Gilford, Meredith and Alton sit in Belknap County, which the legislature carved off Strafford County in 1840. A new county is like a new pair of boots: stiff, squeaky and certain to give somebody blisters. Belknap's blisters were her deputies, freshly appointed and keen as mustard, every one of them dreaming of the day he would haul in a real outlaw and see his name in the Laconia paper beside an advertisement for liver pills.

Gilmanton is old, hard country. The Iron Works village there took its name from the early forge that smelted bog ore dug out of the swamps and pond bottoms. That is iron that grows in the mud like a fungus, rusty brown and sullen. I have worked some of it. It welds like a grudge and rings like a cracked bell. Up among those hills sits Loon Pond. She is small enough that you could row her end to end before your pipe went out, but she is deep and dark, ringed with spruce, with a bare granite ledge standing up on the east shore like the forehead of a bald man. At night she lies so still you can hear a trout change its mind.

Dark Lanterns, Camphene and the Philosophy of Sound

Every reader has seen a dark lantern: a tin box with a chimney on top, a glass bull's-eye in front, and a shutter inside that you slide or turn to hide the flame in a wink. Night watchmen carry them, constables carry them and burglars carry them, which tells you all three trades are cousins. The thing grew so common that men called any secret society a dark-lantern party, and in the fifties half the politicians in this state belonged to one while the other half wished they had been asked.

There is history here that touches our own trade. Before the war half of New England lit its lamps with burning fluid and camphene, which are mixtures of alcohol and turpentine. They were cheap and bright, and as touchy as a cat in a sawmill. Camphene lit half the parlors in New England and burned down the other half. I once pulled a tooth for a Northwood woman who had lost both eyebrows and her parlor curtains to a camphene lamp, and she told me the curtains had been the less painful afternoon. Then came Mr. Lincoln's war and the federal tax on distilled spirits. Burning fluid is alcohol, so the tax made it dear, and kerosene came rolling in from the Pennsylvania wells and took the lamp trade nearly overnight. The tax was meant to wring the whiskey man's neck, and it wrung the lamp man's along with it.

One more matter of natural philosophy before the tale. Sound carries over still water at night. On a calm evening the air lying on the pond is cooler than the air above it, and this bends sound back down toward the water like a man stooping for a dropped coin. A whisper on one shore of Loon Pond can be heard on the other, and an oar knocking a thole pin sounds like a pistol shot. Any runner who works water must learn this. The Lantern Man learned it, and then he turned it against the law.

What I Saw on Loon Pond

His name was Obed Crane. I will not say Obadiah, for nobody but his mother and the census man ever did. He was a lean, quiet fellow with a jaw like a coal scuttle, and he worked a hardscrabble farm on the west side of the pond. He ran barrels of other men's spirit down the pond, across the carry and out to the Alton road for the lake trade. He worked alone and would take no partner, which was wisdom, for a partner is a man who knows where you sleep.

I keep two columns on this story: what I saw, and what Gilmanton swallowed. The second runs to four pages. The first would fit on my thumbnail, but it is the only one I will swear to.

In the autumn of sixty-three I was called up to Gilmanton to pull a molar from a farmer named Hezekiah Bumpus. That tooth was so rotten it had its own congregation, and it came out with three roots hooked like a lobster's claws. Hezekiah paid me in salt pork and directions to a good camping spot on Loon Pond. That night I sat dark at the water's edge with my pipe cupped in my hand while Barnaby, my black bear, snored in the wagon bed like a sawmill with the catarrh. A light showed on the north shore and went black. Then another showed far over on the east side near the ledge, and it was gone as well.

Next I heard three Belknap deputies crashing through the blueberry bushes on the far side. The water carried every word they whispered: one complaining that his boots pinched, another begging the others to wait while he made water. I shall call that one Deputy Tuttle. Then came a knocking, tok, tok, tok, like a mallet on a barrel head, plain as day from the east ledge. Off went the deputies round the pond, stumbling and swearing, one losing his hat in a spruce. Three Belknap deputies marched around a pond to arrest a rock, and to the rock's credit it did not resist.

While they were gone, not thirty feet from where I sat, a punt slid past me, low and flat and painted black as the inside of a cow, with barrels lashed amidships. The oarlocks were wrapped in sheepskin, wool side in, so the oars made no more noise than a cat licking cream. The man at the oars turned his head and said low, "Evening, Doctor. Mind the bear," and then he was gone into the dark like a bad debt. In the morning I found a pint jar on my wagon seat, and under it a copper cent with G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. struck across Liberty's face. One of my own stamped coins had come all the way round the county to pay me for minding my business.

Later, with a pencil and a cold jar, I worked out his apparatus. He set two or three dark lanterns on stakes along the shore, each with a cord run to its shutter, and he pulled one cord, then another, so the lights blinked on opposite coves while he rowed the other way. The knocking was his best trick. He tucked himself into a little cove behind a point and struck with a mallet straight at the bare ledge. The point of land hid the knock itself, so the deputies heard only the echo off the granite. He used the pond against them, the same as a dentist uses a patient's own jaw for leverage.

The Bridge My Bear Would Not Cross

Next morning I went home by the cart road, which fords the outlet brook below the pond. A plank footbridge runs alongside for walkers, and I had let Barnaby down on his chain to stretch his legs. At the bridge he sat down, all four hundred pounds of him, planted on his haunches like a Baptist at a barn dance. I waved a ham bone, and he looked at me as if I had proposed marriage. That bear has crossed the Suncook in March for a ham bone. He was not being lazy. He was being right.

I stamped out onto the planks to shame him, and the middle one sagged under me like an old mattress. Underneath I found the main stringer sawed three-quarters through from below, fresh, with sawdust still caught in the cobwebs. I drove through the ford and told nobody. The next afternoon Deputy Tuttle came trotting down that path after a lantern he had seen the night before and went through the bridge like a stone through a wet newspaper. The black brook mud took him to the armpits. When they hauled him out with a rail and a rope he carried more leeches than buttons, the brook kept his left boot as a toll, and he smelled so ripe that his own horse would not let him mount. Barnaby has better judgment about bridges than the Belknap County commissioners, and nobody has ever had to bribe him to approve one.

Gilmanton's Column, and Lights of the Blue Ridge

The neighbors will tell you Obed Crane walked on water. I say he had a punt painted with lampblack, and between a miracle and a can of lampblack you should bet on the lampblack. They say his lantern burned blue and never needed oil. It needed oil, and I smelled it, and it was kerosene, not camphene. They say Barnaby saw the Lantern Man's ghost on the bridge, but the man was not dead yet, and a bear fears cold mud, not ghosts. They say he was never caught because he was never there. He was there. He paid me in my own coin.

Miss Clara Higgins, an herbalist and historian of mountain speech from the Blue Ridge of Virginia, came up to Fort Wilkins and told me she had heard the tale from a Yankee tin peddler. In his telling the Lantern Man carried a lantern in each hand and a third clamped in his teeth, and ran barrels across the ice in high summer. The story had walked six hundred miles south and grown a third lantern on the way. "Stories travel the same as liquor," Miss Higgins said. "Every man who passes the jug takes a sip and tops it off with something of his own."

Her own people had their tricks. A cousin named Asa marked his trail with foxfire, the cold green shine of rotting oak and chestnut, pressed into notches cut waist high every twenty steps, until a possum carried off a chip and led him into Uncle Jubal's hog wallow with a forty-pound jug on each shoulder. He kept both jugs. Her great-uncle Thaddeus set a lantern inside a butter churn with a hole bored in the lid, so the light rose only toward the lookout on the ridge and never sideways toward the road. He used one flash for all clear and two for the law in the hollow, and three meant supper, after Aunt Delphine got hold of it. In their talk the makers were blockaders, a night delivery was an owl-hoot run, and a careless runner who let his light show was a lightning bug, who could be swatted just as easily.

Lanterns, Worms and the Still House

I give this as history, for only a licensed distiller may lawfully make spirits to drink. Miss Higgins's Aunt Pruda once set an open lantern on her still-house floor, and the vapour crept along the dirt to it and went whump, taking her eyebrows, her apron and half the roof shakes. Alcohol vapour is heavier than air. It sinks and creeps, and it may travel a good distance to find a flame. A lantern hung high is better, and one hung outside the window, with its globe whole, is best.

Keep the worm tub cold with fresh water moving through, as the men on Loon Pond's west shore did with a spring brook. A warm worm passes hot, invisible vapour out of its mouth, which wastes your spirit and courts fire. Never seal or block the vapour path. A plugged worm turns your still into a cannon. In Barnstead they found one man's kettle lid forty feet up a pine. Keep the fire low and stay with your still for the whole run.

Up in the Lakes towns the wash came from apples as often as from corn: pomace pressed, the juice worked in a clean barrel in an airy room until it was dry, then poured into the pot two-thirds full and brought up slowly. Catch the run in small numbered jars. Throw the sharp, gluey foreshots and heads away generously, keep the sweet hearts, and set aside the oily tails. Test each jar by smell and by a taste on the fingertip, and mark your cut where the character changes. Keep your copper scrubbed bright, because clean copper pulls the stink from the vapour.

Ashes, Oak Shavings and the Blue Flame

Cletus "Rabbit" Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, sent word that his uncle throws hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Ash leached with water makes lye, the potash our New Hampshire granddaddies sold to Boston for soap and glass. Lye may knock down a little sour smell, but it never touches methanol, and it leaves the run tasting like Monday washday. Red oak gives tannin and color, and its pores are so open that I have blown soap bubbles through a stick of it. Shavings only make a bad run look like an honest one. The thump keg strengthens a run, and only the cuts clean it.

As for the spoonful set alight: methanol and good ethanol both burn a pale blue, and that flame cannot tell poison from spirit. The bead on a shaken jar lies more often than a horse trader on a Sunday, so measure strength with a hydrometer and get your safety from your cuts. Miss Higgins's granny tried a sprig of sassafras, which made the heads smell of root beer and left Uncle Thaddeus blind in one eye for a week. After that she stuck to making cuts.

Obed Crane quit the water a few years later. Some say he went West and some say he drowned, but the last time I saw him he was buying new boots in Laconia and paying cash. Gilmanton swears his lantern still blinks on Loon Pond on foggy nights. If you see it, do not follow it, and never cross a footbridge my bear will not.