The Whiskey Rebel

Joan Maycott

Summer and Autumn 1789

The half-face camp built that day proved but a poor shelter, yet shelter it was, and though we endured a few rain showers that rendered it near useless, it was, at most times, not so terrible. To be sure, our difficulties were eased by the help of our new neighbors. Mr. Dalton developed a particular attachment to my husband that first night, and he proved to be a good friend. We learned that his companion, Mr. Jericho Richmond, was generally praised as one of the great marksmen in the region, and in that period of adjustment we would have starved had it not been for their regular gifts of game. Two or three times a week, as sunset approached, we would see the two of them enter our clearing, some great beast stretched over Mr. Richmond’s shoulders or, if too large, dragged in a cart. They brought us deer and bear and once a small panther, quite sleek in form and beautiful in its tan color.

“Can panther be eaten?” I inquired, skeptically eyeing the felled beast.

“Panther’s good,” answered Jericho Richmond, in his terse and soft-spoken manner.

“What does it taste like?” I asked.

Mr. Dalton considered this question. “Tastes a lot like rattlesnake.”

I laughed aloud. “You cannot expect me to know what rattlesnake tastes like.”

Dalton answered by strolling toward the thick growth of forest. Richmond stared at his back, and then, when Dalton was gone from view, Richmond stared at me. He seemed to have nothing to say, and yet his look held an accusation I did not understand. I attempted conversation-nothing of great complexity, for most of what I said involved speculation upon what Mr. Dalton might be doing-but Richmond would not speak to me. And so we stood there, Richmond as quiet and inscrutable as an Indian, I confused and not knowing how to excuse myself. So we remained until Dalton returned ten minutes later, the limp body of a rattlesnake dangling from one hand, its lifeless head peeking out from above his fist. He held it out to me.

“Roast it on the fire. Don’t boil it. Boiling’s too tough.” He winked at me as I, with some effort, reached out and took the thing from him. Later, when I examined it, I found it had not a scratch upon it, and that, for all I could tell, Mr. Dalton had reached out, grabbed it by the neck, and strangled it. Not precisely Hercules in his crib, but near enough to astonish me.

Richmond said nothing during this exchange, but he shook his head once in a way that made me feel as though I had walked into a disagreement between the two of them.

Dalton was equally useful in selling us supplies that we required, including seed for our first crops and ropes for land clearing, giving us a pup to be raised as a hunting dog and, most useful, an old work horse whom he called Bemis. I later learned that the beast had been named after the skirmish at Bemis Heights, the pivotal encounter of the battle at Saratoga, in which both Mr. Dalton and Mr. Richmond had served under Colonel Daniel Morgan. Mr. Dalton told us that Mr. Richmond was the marksman who dispatched the British general Simon Fraser, a shot that changed the course of the battle and thus of the war itself, given the victory’s influence on France’s entry into the conflict. It was something I loved about my country. In a war with countless turning points, one never needed to look far to find the men who had worked the levers upon which all depended.

With the occasional assistance of our new friends, Andrew managed to fell eighty trees within three weeks, and so the call went out that there was to be a cabin raising. I had thought our camp building had been a significant gathering, but a cabin raising turned out to be an event of an entirely different order. Mr. Dalton had it put about that he wished everyone to help, and as a prominent distiller of whiskey for the region and an employer of more than ten men-his whiskey boys, who traded his wares-his wishes were always obeyed. From as far away as twenty-five miles, dozens of men arrived for what was to be a four-day frenzy of work and merriment. When it was completed, we had a home and we had friends. The house was rough, and so were the people, but life seemed much easier than it had at first.

Through Andrew’s skill and industry, and with the aid of our new friends, we managed to improve upon our uncouth cabin week by week. Though there was much to do outside the house, Andrew found time to construct for us a bed, a dinner table with chairs, and a tolerably comfortable rocker, and to set to work on a wood floor, though this would be a long and ongoing project. He could make simple household furnishings quickly, so he was soon trading for other necessities: blankets, plates and cups, and even a tablecloth and some rough flaxen napkins. These were difficult times but sweet ones. Never had Andrew and I spent so much time together alone, without visitor or distraction, and we delighted in taking refuge in each other, a soft relief to our hard surroundings. The world was only unfamiliar challenge, but in our cabin we could find familiar delight.

Those early weeks now seem a blur to me as, with the warmth of spring turning to the heat of summer, we spent our days engaged in little more than the business of surviving-or, perhaps more accurately, attempting to understand how we were to survive. Andrew cleared land-backbreaking labor which I feared might be the death of him and his horse. Even with all his strength poured into the work, it yet confounded him, as he pulled saplings from the ground and chopped to the stump a near forest of oaks and birches and sycamores. They gave up their earth grudgingly, and Andrew would return from a day’s work covered in dirt, his hands caked with blood. I would gaze out upon the land and be unable to see what his efforts had yielded.

Yield it did, though, and at last enough land was cleared for a small planting. I would spend my mornings tending to corn and vegetables in the hopes that enough would grow for us to have some food in the fall. Many in the West planted Indian style, sowing the seeds upon the earth in a formless scatter and hoping a sufficient number took, but Andrew and I were more methodical, tilling the earth, planting in rows, giving each stalk room to breathe and grow.

The purchase of an old spinning wheel-it required significant repair at Andrew’s clever hands-allowed me to spin flax, and my needle was often busy in repairing our clothing and making new from the cured skins of Andrew’s hunts. Only a few months in the West, and with his beard, hardened muscles, sun-reddened skin, and buckskin clothes, my husband had become a true border man. He would come home at night, exhausted and hungry but content to eat the meager repast I could provide-corn pone from our stock of meal and meat from what animals he had hunted, given what flavor we could by an always diminishing supply of precious salt. Venison was a rare treat, for he had little time to hunt deer, but almost without effort he might kill a turkey or bear or even a rattlesnake, which were ever lurking; no trip to our own gardens could be conducted without vigilance. In some strange compensation, the woods afforded a species of pigeon so insensible to danger that to kill it one need only walk up to one and hit it with a stick.

This was our life. After his dinner, Andrew lay down upon our rough bed while I lit candles (which I learned to make with my own hands from bear fat!). Perhaps I might spin awhile or, if I could steal an hour, pore over my copy of Postlethwayt’s Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce or James Steuart’s Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy. Even in the wilderness, I still sought inspiration for my novel, now little more than scraps of dead characters walking though their fictional lives like ghosts-empty and evacuated, present but incorporeal. Despite my bone weariness, I knew that this book resided somewhere inside me, wanting only its time of quickening, awaiting the right alchemy of idea and story and setting. The West, or perhaps the scheme by which we had come west, held something for me, but I could not say precisely what. I could not name it, but it was there.

We were often enough called upon by what was there styled neighbors, though the nearest lived more than half a mile away; these visits were often a strange mixture of backwoods civility and the hostile curiosity with which outsiders are often regarded.

Mr. Dalton and Mr. Richmond sometimes ate the evening meal with us, and I sensed that they imposed upon us not only because they had taken to Andrew but also because our hospitality allowed us, in a small way, to compensate them for the pains they had taken on our behalf. Dalton and Andrew talked at great length about land clearance. Mr. Richmond said little, but he did not seem uneasy or resentful of Mr. Dalton’s interest in us. I surmised that Mr. Richmond was simply a quiet man, who rarely found in the routine of ordinary life circumstances that required speech.

While Andrew and Mr. Dalton talked-of how we were neglected by the East, of how the government in New York (and then Philadelphia) would not send soldiers to fight the Indians, and of how Hamilton’s schemes in the Treasury Department would destroy the poor man for the sake of the rich-Mr. Richmond would sometimes aid me in washing and replacing the dishes. He might sit with me while I spun or sewed, content to sip his whiskey and look as though he thought about significant things. Once, however, he turned to me and offered me a rare smile of crooked teeth. “Andrew is a great friend to him.”

There was something more than his words to what he said, but I did not understand it. I only replied simply, “I am glad of it. You have both been good to us.”

Richmond said nothing, and then, after a moment, “ Dalton is a good friend to have, but not to take advantage of.”

“I can assure you, Mr. Richmond, that Andrew would never-”

“I know Andrew would not,” he said.

I could not have been more surprised had he struck me. Did he accuse me of in some way abusing Mr. Dalton’s kindness? I turned to him, but he only shook his head, as if to say that the subject had been exhausted, and with that he left the room.

O ne night we sat with Mr. Richmond and Mr. Dalton, this time joined by Mr. Skye, the five of us enjoying some precious tea and sweet corn bread following a meal. Skye happened to glance over to a little round table next to our rocker upon which sat my copy of Postlethwayt. This interested him at once, and after rising to inspect its edition and condition, he inquired of Andrew what he did with such a book.

“’Tis not mine,” he said. “In truth, it’s too dull for me.”

“You, madam?” asked Skye. “You have an interest in finance and economical matters?”

“I do,” I said, feeling myself redden. I was not quite ready to reveal myself to be a budding authoress.

It was fortunate that he spared me a request for further explication. “Then perhaps you have some thoughts upon the latest news, just arrived in a mule train from the East this very day?” His gray eyebrows raised in amusement, or perhaps anticipation. “I spent the afternoon reading through the newspapers, and I cannot credit what I have discovered.”

“Then tell us,” said Andrew.

He smiled, clearly pleased to be the one to relate it, yet I could see it troubled him too. “The new treasury minister, Alexander Hamilton, has appointed an immediate assistant, the second most powerful man at the Treasury. With the influence that department is gaining over George Washington and the federal government as a whole, it makes him well near one of the most powerful men in the entire country. Can you guess of whom I speak, for he is known to us all?”

Dalton snorted. “We have no idea, so out with it, man.”

Andrew smiled. “I have no idea, but look at Joan. I think she knows.”

I had opened my mouth, but I had not yet spoken. It seemed to me impossible, but I could think of but one man who met the criteria Mr. Skye had outlined, and I could not, at first, bring myself to say his name out loud. “No,” I managed at last. “Not William Duer?”

Skye nodded. “How ever did you guess it?”

“She didn’t guess it,” said Andrew. “She merely drew the only logical conclusion. I did not myself, but now I see how she did so. He is, after all, the only man known to us all, and he did speak of his close ties to Hamilton when we met him.”

Dalton actually snarled in disgust. “It makes me ill to think that a man like Duer, who has made his living by cozening patriots, should be rewarded with such power and influence.”

“He shall do well for himself,” said Skye. “It seems that his good friend Hamilton has convinced Congress to pay in full the states’ debts from the war. All our promissory notes that Duer got in exchange for land are now to be paid at full value.”

“He knew!” I cried. “He and Hamilton must have plotted it out all along. They would trick patriots into surrendering their debt, and when they had enough they would get the American people, through their taxes, to pay off that debt, enriching themselves. It is the most monstrous abuse of power imaginable.”

“That is how things are done in England,” said Dalton, “but it is not how they are supposed to happen here.”

“No, but it is the way of things,” said Skye. “It hardly matters what principles are foremost in men’s minds. Those men are still men, and they will either be too idealistic to maintain power or too corruptible not to seize it.”

“You judge human nature too harshly,” said Andrew. “For what did we fight if this country is doomed to be no better than the one from which we won our independence?”

Dalton regarded him with the greatest seriousness. It seemed his orange whiskers stiffened, like the ears of a cat going back. “You do not submit to a harsh master because the next master may, for all you know, be no better. You fight, and that is what we did. We fought for the chance, lad.”

“And do we not fight now?” I asked, looking up from my needlework. “Is the fighting all done? We fight against England for oppressing us, but when we do it to ourselves, when our own government places men like Hamilton and Duer in a position to destroy the soul of the nation, do we take our ease and do nothing?”

“There’s nothing to do,” said Skye.

I was not so certain. I could not think what we might to do push back against the interests of greed and cruelty that had so clearly gained ground, but that did not mean I could do nothing. I thought of my book once more and considered that perhaps this novel, this first American novel-could I but write it-might be an instrument of change, or at least part of a movement for change, a movement of sincere citizens hoping to keep their government free of corruption. If this news about Duer so troubled me, it would trouble others. All over the country, honest men and women must be looking on with horror as corruption wound its way into the hearts of the political men in Philadelphia. Alexander Hamilton, once Washington ’s trusted aide, had turned the nation in the direction of British-style corruption. I knew I must find my voice, and soon.

These thoughts were upon my mind as I stepped outside to clean dishes in the stream. The men, or so I believed, were still within, drinking whiskey and speculating upon the evil plans laid back east. To my surprise, Mr. Skye stepped out with me. He appeared slightly, only slightly, uneasy, with his hands in his pockets, stepping with a gait too casual.

“I observed to your husband that it might be best to have an escort with you as you went about your chores,” he said, with a slight simper. Were I unmarried, I might think from his tone that he wished to declare himself.

“I do it often enough,” I said, but not unkindly. It was a cool evening for summer, and a light breeze made the air pleasant. The night sky was cloudless, and the thin crescent of a newly waxing moon underscored the brightness of the stars without overshadowing them. Together, Mr. Skye and I strode the short distance to the creek, where, setting down my sack of dirty dishes, I squatted by the cool water and plunged in the first vessel.

He took another dish. We worked in silence for some minutes until Mr. Skye said to me, “I did not mean to make you uncomfortable before. You blushed when I first spoke of your interest in economical books. I am sorry if I stepped upon something.”

He was not sorry, he was curious. If he were sorry, he would not have pursued the subject, but I could not fault him for it. Even so, I hesitated for an instant, for I did not like to speak of my ambitions to just anyone, but I sensed in Mr. Skye a man who would embrace and not scorn my project. I took a deep breath. “I plan to write a novel. Perhaps the first American novel.”

It was dark and I did not look upon his face, but even so I sensed a look of interest and respect. “The first, you say. I believe it may be too late for that. Our own Mr. Brackenridge in Pittsburgh has set his cap at the same thing.”

I felt a twinge of disappointment, but it would not last. I had long been determined to write my book and had not done so. Surely someone with more resolve would succeed where I had only delayed. Instead of dwelling upon this point, I determined that I would have to meet this worthy. “Well, it is not vital to me that I be the first, but that it be particularly American. I know not what Mr. Brackenridge’s novel might be, but I doubt we intend to write the same thing.”

“I have seen part of it,” said Skye. “It is a picaresque-a sort of American Don Quixote, or perhaps an American Smollett.”

“Then we have very different projects,” I said, and saw no reason to say more.

“Should you ever require a pair of eyes to look at it, I hope you will call upon me.”

“You are very kind,” I said, and turned to my dishes. A moment later, because I sensed my words had so pleased him, I repeated myself. “Very kind.”

A ndrew began to spend a great deal of time with these men. They helped him with the land clearing-at least Dalton and Jericho would, for John Skye avoided such work where he could, pleading age and back pain. Instead, he would aid me with the farming or join me in the cabin and ease my isolation while I prepared the evening meal. The five of us would eat together and then pass the evening with whiskey and conversation, or perhaps Andrew would join them, riding out to one of their cabins. Then, so slowly I did not notice, the land clearing diminished until it ceased entirely. Andrew would leave in the morning and come home in the evening. He would more often than not smell of whiskey, but he did not seem inebriated and I had no concern that he had found another woman. Even so, there was something furtive in his looks, as though he had been about something not entirely wrong, but certainly something he chose not to reveal. I did not love it, but I would not ask him to speak before he was ready.

Indeed, Andrew appeared happy, self-satisfied. Though he would approach the cabin with a secretive lightness in his step, I had not seen him appear to be so pleased with himself in a long while. I was lonely, yes, and missed the company of the men, Mr. Skye in particular, but I could not protest. I was a woman, and my presence was expendable so long as I did my duty. I would have to endure the solitude even while Andrew enjoyed company.

It was not only the company of Mr. Dalton and Mr. Skye that drew him in, however. He would sometimes spend his evenings at the Indian Path tavern, where women were not welcome. There the men would talk of the things that plagued Westerners-how the politicians of the East wanted us to tame the land but cared not to help us fight Indians. They spoke of the fear of foreign agents combing Pittsburgh -the British, the Spanish, the French-looking to stir up trouble. They talked of the new government back east, their hatred of Duer, and how all must be set squarely at Hamilton ’s doorstep.

So it was that, with Andrew gone so much from the cabin, my novel began to take shape in my mind-slowly at first, but the characters gathered around me, moths drawn to the flame of my mind. In the quiet, I spent the day making notes, examining the contours of my story, and, soon enough, beginning the writing process itself. I would write, I decided, a novel about our own experiences, about the evil men who defrauded patriots to line their pockets. I would write about the Duers and Hamiltons and Tindalls of the world, and about a group of Westerners who decide to exact their revenge upon them. Perhaps it was the thrill of confronting these men, if only on paper, but the words came to me as they had never done before.

This is how our time passed for two months, and then, as summer began to turn to autumn and a coolness settled over the land, Andrew spoke to me.

“Have you never wondered,” he said, “where I go each day? Where I spend my time?”

“I have wondered,” I said, “but I thought you would tell me when you were ready.”

“It is not like you to restrain your curiosity.”

“’Tis not like you,” I countered, feeling somewhat chastised, “to be secretive.”

“You have your novel,” he said. “You do not have to tell me it goes well, for I can see it upon your face. Can you not see from my face that something goes well for me?”

I could not help but smile. “I have seen it.”

“And shall I tell you what it is?”

“Do not tease me, Andrew. You know I wish it. Tell me if you are ready.”

“It is better that I show you.”

And so we set out across the rugged path to Dalton ’s large cabin, some two miles away. It was a pleasant afternoon, the air filled with the buzz of insects, and we strolled in easy silence, my hand upon his arm. Somehow we were happy. Somehow in the midst of our ruin we had each found something, some part of ourselves we had been missing, I in my writing and Andrew in his secret.

At Dalton ’s cabin, which I had never before visited, the large man greeted me, Mr. Skye beside him, at the door, and they both had the foolish look of boys who have done something both wicked and childishly charming. Behind the house, Jericho Richmond worked in the field. He raised his hand at us as we approached, but at once wiped his brow with his sleeve and returned to his work. Mr. Dalton invited me in, sat me near the fire, and set before me a small glass of whiskey, which I began to lift to my lips.

“You’ve come to enjoy your whiskey,” Skye said, before I could drink.

“I don’t think enjoy is the right word,” I said. “But it is part of life here.”

I took a sip of the drink, but I immediately took the cup away in astonishment. I’d had whiskey before, in quantities I would not have credited in my former life, but here was something entirely different. It was darker, I saw by the light of the fire, amber in color and more viscous. And its flavor-it was not merely the sickly sweet heat of whiskey, for there was a honey taste to it, perhaps vanilla and maple syrup and even, yes, the lingering tang of dates.

“What is this?” I asked.

“To answer that,” said Skye, “to fully answer your question, we must first make sure you understand what whiskey is. Do you know why we make whiskey? Are we merely hard-drinking men, reprobates who cannot live without their strong drink?”

“Would you catechize me?” I asked.

He smiled. “Oh, yes. You see, I’ve been planning this conversation in my mind, and I mean that it should go as I wish. Now, tell me. Do you know why we make whiskey?”

“It is the only way to profit from your harvest.”

“A woman who reads the Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce misses very little,” my husband observed.

I took another sip, attempting to dissect its intricacies. “You grow your grain, but beyond what you need for your own use, there is nothing to be done with the surplus. There are no good roads, so the voyage east is too long and too difficult, and ultimately too expensive to transport large quantities of grain. You cannot use the Mississippi to travel west, since the Spanish will not permit it. So what is to be done? The most logical answer is to turn your surplus grain to whiskey.”

“Quite right,” said Skye.

“There is always a market for whiskey,” I continued. “It becomes popular back east, and the army is increasingly replacing rum with whiskey, and though it is cumbersome to transport grain, it is far less to transport whiskey by the barrel. That is why whiskey stands as a substitute for money. At some point it may be exchanged for specie and thus is useful for barter.”

“And that,” said Mr. Skye, “is where your husband has become so useful.” He pointed at Andrew. “He almost at once recognized that there was more flavor to be got into the drink. ’Tis a barter economy, but right now all whiskey is held equal. No one’s drink is lauded above another’s. But what if we could produce something that was better than what anyone else had?”

“Of course,” I interrupted. “You introduce something more scarce; it generates more desire; you get more for your trade.”

“Exactly so once again, lass,” Skye said. “Now, Dalton and I have been in the whiskey trade for some time, and we thought that Andrew here, with his skill as a carpenter, could be of use to us. We’ve long known you get more flavor out of whiskey by storing it in barrels rather than jugs, but the difference is not significant. More flavor, but the flavor is not always good, and an abundance of bad flavor does not add much value. Beyond that, the barrels are harder to transport, and the wood absorbs some of the whiskey, leaving you with less product for the market.”

“But sometimes barrel storage is desirable,” said Dalton. “Jugs can be hard to come by in large quantity, and wood is plentiful. If you have enough surplus, it is better to lose some to barrel storage than have no place to store it at all. When we explained all this to your Andrew-well, he had other ideas than mere coopering.”

I looked at him. “Is that right?”

He smiled, somewhat sheepish.

“Let’s show her the still,” Dalton said.

We exited the cabin and went to what Dalton called the outhouse, though it was a cabin twice in size to the one he lived in, a kind of rusticated warehouse or factory. In it was a profusion of pots, jars, and tubes that jutted out from one another and crisscrossed the room in a fowling-piece blast of confusion. Wooden barrels lined the walls, small fires burned in contained furnaces, steam boiled out of pots in tight little puffs. It smelled rich and rank in there, a kind of sweet and decaying smell, combined maybe with something less pleasant-like wet waste and fleshy decomposition. It was enticing and revolting.

“The principle is fairly simple,” Dalton said. “You start with a kettle full of fermented corn, what we call the wash. Then we boil it there, over that fire. The lid goes on the kettle. You see that tube coming out of it? That catches what burns off, since ’tis the strong stuff that burns off first-the spirit, if you will, which is why we call strong drink spirits.”

“So the drink that comes out of that tube is whiskey?” I asked.

“No,” Skye said, “that’s what we call low wine, which is run through the still once again. Now it comes out in different strengths. The first of it, the foreshot-well, that ain’t for drinking, let’s say that. ’Tis nasty and foul and strong. You can add a little bit of that to the final produce to give it some strength, but no more. After the foreshot comes the head, which you can drink, but it still ain’t good. Then comes the clear run. It looks like this.”

He handed us a glass bottle, and inside was a near-colorless liquid.

“That is more the whiskey I’m used to.”

“Aye, it is,” said Skye. “The flavor and color of ours come from the barrel. The longer it sits in the barrel, the more flavor and color it gets, but there was more to it than that.”

“It seemed to me,” said Andrew, “that more of the barrel’s flavor could be brought out by charring its insides. And so it is. The whiskeys we’ve been experimenting with the past few months are more flavorful than any we’d ever tasted before.”

“He’s done more than that,” said Mr. Dalton. “He’s been meddling with the recipe too, adjusting the proportions of the grains, adding more rye than corn to the mash. We’ve made your husband a partner in our still, and unless I’m mistaken he’s made the lot of us very rich.”

Dalton took out a bottle of the new tawny whiskey and poured us all a glass, with which we toasted our future. We had come west as victims, but now, it seemed, we would be victors. It was what we believed at the time and what we ought to have believed, because this was the America we had fought for, where hard work and ingenuity must triumph. We did not know that at that moment, back east, Alexander Hamilton and his Treasury Department schemed to take it all away from us.