Whiskey in the Far West: Taos Lightning, Pike's Peak and Watered Barrels

A Bank, a Rumor, and the Road West

Fellow alchemists, set your thermometers down a moment and turn your wagons west with me. We go past the Hudson, past the Ohio, past the Missouri and past good sense, into the territories where a man bought his whiskey by the shot off a plank laid over two barrels and paid for it in gold dust. Half the time there was a pinch of somebody else's dust under his fingernail.

To understand whiskey in the Far West, you must first understand why ten thousand sound-minded American men sold their mules' grandmothers and walked toward the sunset. The reason, as with most foolishness, was a bank. In August of 1857 the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company, a grand institution with marble steps and a cashier who smelled of bay rum and confidence, shut its doors, rotten with bad loans. The confidence went first. The fright ran down Wall Street like a scalded cat. In September the steamship Central America went down in a hurricane off the Carolinas. She took better than four hundred souls to the bottom with her, and a mountain of California gold the New York banks had been counting on the way a drunk counts on payday. Banks failed and mills slowed. Here in the Suncook Valley I watched good men stand at a shut mill gate with nothing in their dinner pails but their hands. It was the Panic of 1857, and a panic it truly was.

A man with no wages has two cures for his troubles, whiskey and a rumor, and in the summer of '58 the rumor came. A Georgia man named Green Russell and his party washed color out of Cherry Creek where it meets the South Platte, in the Kansas country under the Rockies. By the spring of '59 the whole hungry nation was on the move, with 'Pike's Peak or Bust' painted on their wagon covers going out. Half of them painted 'Busted, by God' on the same canvas coming home, and that is the most honest bookkeeping ever done west of the Missouri.

Uncle Dick and the Taos Lightning

One man who did not go bust was the man with the barrel. About Christmas of 1858 old Dick Wootton, Uncle Dick to the trappers, came up from Taos into the Cherry Creek camps with wagons of flour and goods. He was a mountain man with a beard you could lose a squirrel in, and among his goods were barrels of Taos Lightning. The tale goes that Uncle Dick knocked the head in on one and let the camp drink free for Christmas. Picture two hundred half-froze gold hunters with their beards iced to their shirts, crowding that barrel with tin cups like hogs at a trough. By nightfall you could not tell the snoring from the singing, or the singing from the sick.

Taos Lightning was a raw wheat whiskey made down around Taos in the New Mexico country. The most famous of it came from Simeon Turley's mill at Arroyo Hondo, and he sold it to the beaver trappers in the thirties and forties. It had never sat in an oak barrel long enough to say good morning. It was clear as spring water and twice as wicked.

The Teamster's Gimlet and the Saloonkeeper's Receipts

Whiskey for the Western camps came down the Ohio and up the Missouri by steamboat to the river towns of Leavenworth, Atchison and St. Joseph. There it was loaded on freight wagons, twenty-odd to a train, and oxen hauled it six weeks or more across the plains while the barrels baked by day and froze by night. A freight teamster, God bless his blistered hide, is a man with a thirst and a gimlet. I describe his trick so you may catch it, not so you may copy it. He knocks a hoop up the barrel an inch with a mallet and bores a little gimlet hole where the hoop sat. He draws off a bucket of good whiskey and tops the barrel back up from the nearest creek. Then he plugs the hole with a whittled peg and taps the hoop back down over it, snug as a deacon's secret. By Cherry Creek that barrel had been drunk from by six teamsters and topped up from four rivers.

Then the saloonkeeper took his turn. His first saloon was a tent, a plank across two barrels, and himself with a revolver and a bad ledger. Finding his whiskey watered, he watered it some more, and then put the color and kick back with his receipts: burnt sugar for color, plug tobacco boiled in for bite, and red pepper so it burned going down like the real article. A frontier saloonkeeper could stretch one barrel of whiskey into three and a half barrels of regret. The West named these poisons honestly: forty-rod, for how far a man could walk after a glass; tarantula juice, because it bit back; coffin varnish, tanglefoot and red-eye. Out in the Utah country there was Valley Tan, named after the local tanned leather.

A fellow from Barnstead went out in '59 and drank a dollar's worth of tarantula juice in a tent at Cherry Creek. He spent the night on his knees in the snow behind it, and among what came up, he swore, was a button he had swallowed as a boy. He came home in '61 with no gold and no front teeth. I pulled his back molars myself, and they were stained the color of a saddle.

A Boston Drummer Meets Barnaby

This Western poison did not stay in the West. Last autumn a whiskey drummer came up the Turnpike from Boston in a checked waistcoat, peddling Genuine Western Rectified Red-Eye. I uncorked his sample and smelled plug tobacco, red pepper and burnt sugar, and under them a sharp varnish stink. It told me the man who ran it never knew where his heads stopped. I said so. He looked at the copper pot I hammered with my own hands and remarked, 'That is a nice old kettle, for a country boy.'

Barnaby, my black bear, has never let a man insult my copper. He came off the end of his chain like a cannonball off a barge, shook the sample case until twelve bottles burst at once, and took the drummer's coattails and a piece of backside about the size of a Sunday pork chop. Then the bear licked the red-eye off the stones, stood a moment while the pepper worked through him, and gave the whole mess back over the drummer. It was the only honest review that whiskey ever got. Even the bear would not keep it down.

Bullet Holes, a Drowned Frog, and a Shallow Cup

Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister, the master coppersmith of our foundry, has a cousin, Ephraim, who went to the Cherry Creek diggings in '59 with a roll of coppersmith's tools. A saloonkeeper on the Auraria side brought him a kettle shot through eleven times in a single quarrel over cards. Ephraim asked a dollar a hole. Why patch it rather than buy iron? 'Because copper forgives you, Doctor, and iron doesn't,' says Silas. Copper is ductile. A ball punches a clean hole or dents it in a cup shape, while cold cast iron cracks clean across and cannot be mended on the plains. Ephraim dressed each hole with a file, hammered a copper plug or patch to fit, and closed it with silver solder. He never used lead, for a kettle full of lead patches will poison every man who drinks from it.

Two summers ago Silas bought a whiskey barrel at a freight auction in Concord that had come back east from Leavenworth. He wanted its hoops. Under the third hoop from the top he found a gimlet hole plugged with a whittled pine peg, the teamster's toll exactly. When he knocked in the head, out floated a drowned green frog, pale as a boiled onion. That barrel had been topped up from a Kansas creek. Silas's father once made a copper cup with a sealed false bottom for a saloonkeeper from Virginia City, in the Comstock country. It held about half a shot, so he could drink cold tea with every lucky miner. It served him about a year, until a Cornish hard-rock miner rapped the bottom and heard it ring hollow.

Mash to Barrel, Done Right

Know first that making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against United States law. Bring cracked corn to a boil in clean water and cook it to a thick porridge. Let it fall to about one hundred and fifty degrees, stir in malted barley at about one part to four or five of corn, and hold it warm and stirred an hour. Cool it below ninety degrees, or you will boil your yeast alive like a lobster, then pitch the yeast and cover loosely. Grain mashes make little methanol and fruit mashes more, but neither excuses you from the cuts. Charge your pot no more than about three parts full and keep the fire low. Never seal a still while it heats, never leave it lit, and keep sand or a heavy wet sack at hand to smother a spirit fire.

Throw out at least the first five fluid ounces of foreshots from every five gallons of wash. Catch the heads, which smell sharp as varnish, in their own jar. Keep the hearts, clean and sweet of the grain, and set aside the tails, which smell flat as wet cardboard. If a spoonful of hearts cut with water goes milky, you let in tails. That cloud tells you nothing of heads or safety. Scrub the dark copper inside the pot head, arm and worm, for that is where the copper draws the sulfur out of the vapor. Barrel in charred white oak, never red oak, whose open grain will let your whiskey walk out through the staves.

Ashes, Shavings, Blue Flames and Beads

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, writes that his uncle threw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Hardwood ash is potash, a strong alkali. A pinch of ash or lime may sweeten a mash gone too sour, but in a thump keg it hunts out no heads. Shavings give color and tannin quickly, which is how many a Western saloonkeeper faked his age, but that is paint, not soap. As for the blue flame, it proves only that the liquor will burn, and men have drunk poisoned whiskey that burned blue as a June sky. The bead gives a rough notion of proof and tells you nothing about whether the heads were cut. The only medicine is good cuts, a low fire and clean copper.