The Stolen Ham Bribe That Backfired on a Merrimack County Deputy

Fees, Informers and the Currency of the Smokehouse

No man can understand a bribe until he understands the man who takes it. Readers may picture a New Hampshire sheriff as a tin star standing for justice. Yet our county sheriffs are not elected at all. The Governor and Council at Concord appoint them, so a sheriff gets his post by knowing somebody and keeps it by knowing somebody else. Beneath him stand the deputies, and there lies the rot at the root. A deputy draws no proper salary. He lives on fees: a fee for serving a writ, a fee for an arrest, a fee for hauling a man to court. Every warrant is a meal ticket to him, and a man who lives on fees will always take one more from whoever is offering it.

Then Washington joined the dance. Mr. Lincoln's revenue laws, passed to pay for the war, brought assessors and collectors, and they set a bounty on every neighbor's neck. A man who informed on another for dodging the whiskey tax might take a share of the fines and forfeitures. Every man in a hill town with a grudge or a debt now had a cash reason to point at the next farm and holler 'still-house!' Half the revenue cases in this state began with a jealous neighbor and not with any detective.

Out here a bribe is seldom gold, or even greenbacks, for the country runs on barter. I have been paid for pulling a molar with mittens, seed potatoes, and one sulky goat that bit me harder than I bit the patient. A man who wishes to grease a deputy goes to his smokehouse, and the finest grease in New England is a cured ham. In the cold months the hams are rubbed with salt, a pinch of saltpeter and molasses or brown sugar, then left in the cellar to cure. Saltpeter keeps the meat rosy. It is the same saltpeter that goes into gunpowder, so a ham and a musket ball have more in common than most deputies have with the law. After the cure the ham hangs for weeks over smouldering corncobs and hickory or maple until it is mahogany-brown. Such a ham is worth more than a month of a deputy's honesty.

Mark one more word of law before the tale: replevin. It is the common-law action by which a man demands his own goods back, the thing itself and not merely its value. That may be his cow, his plough, his clock, or his ham.

A Rival, a Deputy and the Widow's Ham

At Barnstead Parade lives Thaddeus Grout, who makes cider brandy so harsh that the apples file a protest before they are pressed. We have been rivals since he tried to undersell me at the Epsom muster and ended up giving free samples to a regiment that marched home sideways. Last September Grout decided to sell more brandy by getting me raided. He dared not inform on me himself and invite a visit to his own cellar, so he went to Deputy Hosea Blodgett, a man with a face like a boiled boot. The bargain was this: raid Fort Wilkins, smash my copper, haul me to court, and a fine smoked ham would hang in Hosea's smokehouse by Saturday night.

Grout had no ham. He had a mother-in-law, the Widow Mehitable Pease of Gilmanton, who keeps the best smokehouse between the Suncook and the Lakes. She had lost hams to thieves before, so three winters back I forged her a little branding iron bearing the letters M.P. for burning into the rind of every ham she cured. One night, while the widow sat at prayer meeting, Grout crept into her smokehouse and took her finest ham, a fat, dark twenty-pound beauty. He carried it over the hill to Epsom and hung it in Hosea's smokehouse. The bribe was delivered.

Barnaby Serves the Warrant

The next Tuesday Hosea came up Route 28 on his swaybacked mare. He had a warrant in his pocket and a week of ham grease ground into the front of his greatcoat. He meant to creep to the still-house window and catch me red-handed, and he forgot who lives under that window. Barnaby, my black bear, smelled that coat the way a Concord lawyer smells a dead man's will. I was inside skimming a fresh run when I heard the chain go taut. I came round the corner to find the deputy flat in the burdock with four hundred pounds of bear on his belly, licking ham grease and mustache off him by turns. Barnaby took off the coat pocket where a hunk of rind was stashed, with the lining and two brass buttons, and then took the rest of the coat apart in three pieces. The mare bolted halfway to Barnstead, and the deputy's bowels resigned their commission before the rest of him did.

I sat Hosea on a stump with a medicinal tin of something clear and asked him gently where a man finds so rich a ham so early in October. He bragged that it had letters burned into the rind like a gentleman's monogram. 'M.P., by any chance?' He said yes. I sent him home in a horse blanket and drove to Gilmanton before supper.

Replevin in Open Court

The widow neither fainted nor wept. She fetched her late husband's lawbook, put on her spectacles, and said one word: 'Replevin.' By Friday a justice of the peace had issued the writ, and Hosea Blodgett had to produce the ham in open court. Farmers came from Chichester and Northwood, and the schoolmaster dismissed the children so they might learn some practical law. Hosea carried in the ham on a platter, half carved to the bone, with M.P. black and plain on the rind. Forced to confess either theft or bribery, he chose the bribe and pointed at Grout in the third row.

The widow had Grout by the collar before he cleared the stove. She sued both men, and the justice gave her every penny: four dollars and fifty cents for the ham, plus the fees. Hosea lost his badge before supper. Grout's wife locked him out, and he spent three cold nights in his own cider barn. The widow hung the hambone over her mantel like a twelve-point buck. At Christmas she sent me an unbranded ham with a note, 'For the iron.' I sent back a jar marked 'For the bone.' A bribe, friends, is only a confession that took the long way round by the smokehouse.

A Revenue Man's Ledger of Bribes

Captain Donald Vance of Manchester, a retired revenue officer, called at the Fort. He holds that a bribe is about the most reliable evidence there is. As he put it, "A man who isn't guilty doesn't bake you anything." In Bethlehem a farm wife served him mince pie, and in it he found a five-dollar greenback folded and baked into the filling. Her husband had a forty-gallon outfit in the hayloft. Near Stowe a farmer left a cake of maple sugar the size of a family Bible on the Captain's saddle, and his bay gelding Deuteronomy ate it. The next morning that horse followed the scent a mile and a half through the sugar bush to a copper still running behind the evaporator pan. Near Woodstock a distiller offered a fat gray goose to the Captain's young partner. The goose took the partner's thumb and chased him three times round the woodpile.

The tale with a lesson came from Lisbon. A man offered the Captain a jug, and the Captain said he would take it if the man drank first. The man refused. His worm was patched with lead solder at every joint, and lead is a slow poison that rots gut, mind and kidneys. He was selling that drink to mill hands in Littleton. Any man who will not drink his own whiskey has told you all you need to know about it.

Apples, Pectin and the Careful Run

Grout's brandy is a lesson in natural philosophy. Pectin, the stuff in fruit skins and pulp that makes jelly set, breaks down in fermentation and gives off methanol, the wood alcohol that blinds and kills. Grain mash yields little of it. Apples mashed whole, with skins, pomace and bruised windfalls, yield a good deal more, so fruit brandy demands even greater care at the cuts. Jacking is worse. Freezing takes out water and nothing else, so every bit of methanol and fusel oil stays behind in the jack, packed tighter than before. A still lets you throw the bad parts away. A frozen barrel keeps them all for you.

Mind the law: making liquor for drinking without a federal permit is unlawful, and I set this down as history. Use sound apples only, washed, and leave the pomace behind as much as you can. Ferment the cider in clean casks in a cool cellar for some weeks until it is dry. Run it in sound copper with no lead anywhere, and fire it gently. Rushed heat makes the wash foam and puke into the worm, which fouls the run and can choke the vapour path. Catch the run in small jars, numbered in chalk on a plank. The foreshots go to the ground or the lamp. The heads, sharp as varnish, go aside. The hearts, sweet and smelling of baked apple, are the keepers. The oily, wet-dog tails are saved to run again. Liquor vapour is heavier than air and creeps along the floor to your firebox. I saw a still-house in Strafford burn in the time it takes to say the Lord's Prayer. Keep the place aired, never leave a running still, keep the jars from the flame, and keep sand and water at hand.

Ash, Oak and the Blue Flame Humbug

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, sent word that his uncle swears by hickory ash or red oak shavings in the thump keg to clean out bad heads. The hickory ash only makes a soap kettle. Water leached through hardwood ash is lye, the same stuff our grandfathers boiled down in iron pots to make potash. Lye is caustic and can make a hot charge foam terribly, and it carries off no heads at all. Red oak is so open in the grain that a man can blow pipe smoke through a stick of it. That is why tight barrels are made of white oak. Oak shavings do lend colour, tannin and woody flavour, so the old-timers were flavouring their spirit, not cleaning it. The only honest remedy is a clean mash and heads thrown out. I have stamped an Indian Head cent with my mark and posted it south to Rabbit.

Last, the blue flame test seen at every county fair is humbug. Methanol burns with the same pale blue flame as good grain spirit, and no flame on God's earth reliably reveals lead. Your protection is clean copper, honest joints, a decent mash, and cuts made by a sober man with a good nose. Keep your copper clean and your fire low.