The Old Drover's Road from Pittsfield to Concord: Cattle, Toll Gates and Jug Runners

This afternoon a drove went by Fort Wilkins, and Barnaby, my black bear, smelled two hundred head of Coos County beef walking past his window like a church supper on legs. He raised such a fuss at the end of his chain that I had to remind him of the last steer he got his paws on. It cost me eleven dollars to the drover, and I had to fish the cowbell out of his dung with the fire tongs. He lay down at last against the log wall, four hundred pounds of resentment going to sleep. Since the drove put me in mind of it, I will take the reader down the old drover's road, a long and manure-spattered stretch between Pittsfield and Concord and on to Brighton.

The Long Walk to Brighton

We still have no railroad worth the name in this valley. The gentlemen in Concord keep promising us a Suncook Valley line the way a Chichester suitor promises a ring: loudly, often, and with no intention of paying for it. Until it comes, New Hampshire beef reaches a Boston dinner plate on its own four feet.

Every fall since before my grandfather lost his first tooth, the drovers have come down out of the hill country. They buy young stock and grass-fat steers from the farms of Coos and Grafton and the Lakes, and from across the Connecticut on the Vermont side. Then they walk the whole bawling, stamping procession south to Brighton, just outside Boston, the great cattle market of New England. Every week of the season its pens fill with animals that walked a hundred miles or more to be eaten.

Some droves come down the Suncook past my door. Some swing west to Concord for the river road south. Others cut across Chichester and Epsom to the First New Hampshire Turnpike, chartered in 1796 as the first turnpike in this state, which runs from Portsmouth through Northwood, Epsom and Chichester to Concord. Chichester is our mother town. Pittsfield was set off from it in 1782, so every Pittsfield man is only a Chichester man who got tired of the Chichester men.

Toll Gates, Shunpikes and the Shrink

A turnpike is a road that charges you to walk on it, and the companies charged drovers by the head or by the score. You never heard such cussing as a drover counting out coppers at a gate for animals that would foul the company's road for nothing. So the drovers did what any honest Yankee does when asked to pay, and went around. A road built or used to dodge the toll gate is called a shunpike, and this county is laced with them: cow paths, wood roads, a lane behind a widow's orchard. Bear it in mind, for drovers were not the only fellows who wished to travel without passing a gate with a man at it.

A drove is a slow beast. It makes twelve miles a day if the drover is sober and eight if he is not, and by suppertime the cattle can tell you which. Walking takes flesh off an animal. The drovers call this the shrink, and a steer that shrinks too much fetches less at Brighton. So the drover rests his herd each night at a tavern with a drove yard and pasture, and pays the keeper by the head for a night's grass. These roads are lined with taverns that have great stone-walled yards out back, and the keepers know the price of beef at Brighton before the Boston papers print it.

Postman, Banker, and Cover for the Jug

The fine people of Concord never understood that a drover is more than a cattle man. He is post office, newspaper and bank, all walking on one sore pair of feet. He carries letters south for farm wives whose sons went to the Manchester mills or to the war. He sells the herd at Brighton, sews the money into a belt under his shirt, pays every farm he bought from, and carries a widow's mortgage payment to her lawyer besides. Many a copper cent I stamped on my anvil with G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. has gone south in a drover's pocket. My advertising walks to Boston on hooves and comes home in a rum bottle.

Now and again a drover carries a jug as well, or nine. Picture yourself as a newly appointed revenue collector in a Concord tavern, with a list of suspicious persons and a new hat. Down the turnpike comes a drove of two hundred steers. It fills the road from wall to wall for a quarter mile, raises dust like a plague, and lays down manure six inches deep. At the very back rides a hay wagon or a horse with fat saddlebags. Will you wade a quarter mile of steaming muck in that new hat to poke at the hay? You will not, and nobody does. A revenue man will search a peddler's cart to the axle, but he will not touch the back end of a drove. A drover has reason to be on every road in the county, his comings are expected each season, and no one asks a man with two hundred cattle why he travels. A runner riding along with him is as noticeable as a fly on a cow.

The suppliers along the way are discreet folk. On the Chichester road, a lantern in a barn's left loft window means one thing, and a lantern in the right means the sheriff's cousin is visiting. A drover learns which barns sell hay and which sell the thing that makes hay fever pleasant.

Much of this I learn in my dentist's chair. Three weeks of plug tobacco, salt pork and biscuit hard enough to shoe a horse leave a drover's teeth in ruins. While I rock his molar with the forceps, he talks: which deputy calls on which widow, which keeper waters his rum, where the new collector sleeps. That is how I heard that Hosea Crumb, a Concord cattle-jobber with a crooked steelyard, meant to earn a reward by informing on a certain Pittsfield dentist's still-house. One moonless October night Hosea crept along my log wall in his Concord shoes and planted one of them square on the belly of a sleeping bear. Barnaby took him by the seat of the trousers and shook him like a terrier with a rat. Hosea left behind half his breeches, one shoe, a stocking, and the false upper plate I had made him, which I found in the bear's water dish. He rode out at dawn belly-down across a brindle steer, and the drovers made him pay toll at the Chichester gate as one head of cattle. He moved to Lowell. I hear he stands up to eat.

What the Captain Saw Behind the Steers

Two Octobers back, a Coos drover I will call Lem was bringing three hundred head through Pittsfield, and eighteen of my jugs rode under the hay at the tail of his drove. Two miles down the Chichester road the high sheriff came up behind on his gray mare, in a hurry for Concord, and could not pass. For four miles he ate the herd's dust, and one brindle steer let fly square on the mare's forehead. By the time the drove turned into the yard at the Epsom tavern, the jugs had gone into a barn a mile back. The sheriff stomped in, ordered a drink to settle himself, and was served from one of my jugs. He called it the best thing that had happened to him all day.

Captain Donald Vance, retired revenue officer of Manchester, has spent more time behind cattle than that sheriff and kept better manners about it. He holds that a drove will sometimes tell on itself. On the Northwood road he once trailed a drover who was suspected every fall and came up clean every fall, dressed as a farmer going to market. The lead ox, a solemn beast with one horn bent down like a question and named Deacon, kept stopping dead and turning his head toward certain barns, because years of habit had taught him where the stops were. By sundown the Captain had marked three barns, and every one had a kettle and worm in the loft. He reported the tip as coming from a reliable source who wished to remain anonymous, and afterward ate no beef for a week out of respect for his informant.

There was also an Epsom drover whose tally book balanced to the head, a hundred forty bought and a hundred forty sold, except for eleven brindle heifers sold at Brighton for a price no heifer ever fetched. The Captain had walked behind that drove and seen not one brindle in it. And at the Chichester gate he once paid a penny's toll for a shaggy dog that walked wide in the hind legs, with a stone jug strapped under its belly. He chased the dog half a mile, and a cedar swamp kept his left boot. The dog waited a mile down the road, dry as you please, while the drover talked salt at the gatehouse. Yet the Captain made a distinction every reader ought to weigh: 'I never lost sleep over a brindle heifer. I lost sleep over a poisoned one.'

Corn, Copper and the Cuts

Making spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law, and I set this down as history and natural philosophy. In lean years corn comes north on the drovers' wagons, and here is how the old men made it into a wash. Crack the corn, but do not grind it to flour, or it will glue up like paste. Allow fifteen gallons of water or thereabouts to the bushel, then cook and stir until it goes thick and sweet, for a scorched mash makes a spirit that tastes like a burned-out church. Yeast cannot eat starch, so when the mash cools to about one hundred fifty degrees, stir in malted barley or sprouted corn. Hold it between one forty-five and one fifty-five for an hour or more, until it tastes sweet. That is true alchemy: a dead grain turned to sugar by the life in a sprouted one. Cool it to blood warmth, pitch good brewer's barm, and let it work four days to a week, until the cap sinks and it smells sour and strong.

Strain out the grain before charging the still, because even copper, which spreads heat better than iron, cannot save a thick mash over open fire. Fill no more than three-quarters full and keep the fire low and steady. Otherwise the wash pukes into the cap and worm, clogs the line, and turns your still into a bomb with a copper jacket. Never seal it tight, and never leave it running. Strip the wash fast into a cloudy low wine, then run the low wine again slowly. Ethanol boils at about one hundred seventy-three degrees and methanol at about one hundred forty-eight, but in a mixed pot they come off tangled together. Throw the foreshots away, and discard the solventy heads generously. Keep the sweet hearts, and set the oily tails aside. Judge them by smell in a row of small numbered jars, never in one bucket. Hang your lantern high, away from the collecting jar, and keep a pail of water and a wet sack at hand. Copper is forgiving. Fire is not.

Ashes, Oak Shavings and the Blue Flame

From Wilkesboro, North Carolina, Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller sent word that his uncle threw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Hardwood ash is mostly potash, a strong alkali, and early New Hampshire farms were paid for in the potash boiled down from burned forest. It will neutralize a sour, vinegary run, but in hot liquor full of corn oils it is halfway to soap. An over-ashed doubler tastes like a washerwoman's bucket, and the ash does not touch the heads at all. Oak gives colour, tannin and sweetness, as a seasoned keg of peaches or apples gives flavour, but that is cooking, not cleaning. Red oak's pores run open end to end, which is why no cooper will build a whiskey barrel from it. White oak's pores are plugged with tyloses. Nothing put in a thump keg will remove the heads. They leave the house only in your hand, in a numbered jar, poured on the ground.

As for the tavern trick of setting a spoonful alight and calling a blue flame pure, it is hogwash. A flame proves only that there is enough alcohol to burn. Methanol burns a pale blue of its own, and a dirty spoon or a bit of salt will turn any flame yellow. The barn will burn too, and nobody judges a barn by the colour of its fire. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low.