Confessions of a Patent-Medicine Man
“I TELL you, sir, it is all a matter of destiny ! If a man is going to be a great patent - medicine man, or anything else, he can’t help it; he is just going to be one, that’s all.”
This remark was addressed to me one evening last summer on the veranda of the Congress-Water Hotel at Saratoga. The sentence was pointed at its close by a very decided brushing of the ashes from a cigar which had the unmistakable aroma of high price and direct importation about it. The finger which precipitated the hot, ashy meteor to the gravel-walk below gleamed for a moment in the light of what with us ordinary mortals would be termed two extravagances : first, of course, in the new baptism of fire at the end of the weed, — a coal of great cost ; and second, in the multitudinous sparkle of a large diamond, — a crystallized coal, as you know, of still greater cost. The speaker had his heels exalted to the top bar of the railing, and his silk hat thrust arear at such a perilous angle with his capacious occiput, that, as he leaned back in his armchair, the pose of his whole form came very near presenting, in the uncertain light of that summer evening, the admired semi-spiral line of sculpture. When he took his cigar from his mouth his hat became invisible in the corner of the veranda. Then it was that the indescribable something of acknowledged authority in his tone and manner, and in the independent elevation of his feet and legs, suggested a Western justice of the peace in full court.
But no justice of the peace, I take it, ever wore so gorgeous a solitaire diamond ring. As this glittered in the light of his cigar, or was eclipsed in the clouds of fragrant smoke, you might have taken him for a shoddy contractor come to the Springs to marry his daughters, or you might, perhaps, have taken him for a first-class sporting gentleman come merely to drink the waters and establish a faro-bank. Indeed, there is no end of surmises you might have made, if it had not been generally known that he was the great patent-medicine man, a millionnaire whose name has been so married to the board fences of our land that one has come to suggest the other. His advent at Saratoga was considered of so much importance as to be announced in the newspapers ; and I am very much mistaken if one of the local journals of that Spa did not, the day after his arrival, insert a free advertisement of his celebrated “ Tecumseh Oil,” out of mere compliment and gratuitous good-nature.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1870, by FIELDS, OSGOOD, & Co., in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.
He had been nearly a week at Saratoga, and the hopeless tedium and lonesomeness of a crowded hotel had begun to work upon him. I know not what else could have made him so confidentially communicative to me that evening ; nor can I remember the conversational stages leading to the remark quoted at the beginning of this paper. It was not till then that the reportorial instinct of taking notes of his observations asserted itself in me. I think the first expression of interest I discovered in his brown face and black eyes, for three whole days, was when he saw that his story seemed attractive to me.
“You’ve noticed my wife?” he asked. Yes, I had; it would have been hard not to have noticed her, as she came down to breakfast of a morning in the same diamonds which she had worn at the “hop” the previous evening. There was a certain determination about her walk, and about the plumpness of her form, even. Her dark gray eye had a managing, financiering look which would of itselt have drawn attention to her, I should say, if its owner had not been the proprietor also of the unseasonable diamonds, and if, too, it had not been noised about wherever she went that she was the wife of the great patent-medicine man.
“ Well, sir,” he continued, “ I ’ll give you an introduction to my wife tomorrow. She’s up stairs at the ‘ hop ' there. She likes such things, you see, for she — well, we ’re neither of us old yet.” As he spoke the music of a trois temps came swooning out of the open windows of the ball-room above. I had barely time to think of that portly, middle-aged lady moving with her wonted heavy determination to the exhilarating strain, and of her breakfasttable jewelry glancing in the festal gaslight, when her admiring husband went on : “ Now, sir, that wife of mine made my fortune.”
“ Indeed ? ”
“ Yes, sir. You think, perhaps, she was rich, but she was n’t; just smart, sir : that’s all, — smart. It was her and two dollars that made my fortune.”
Then, without any further solicitation on my part than was made inadvertently, perhaps, by my manifest interest, he gave me a running account of his life. I wrote down all I could remember, and as nearly in his words as possible, when I reached my room that evening. The one or two recipes which occur in the course of the narrative he gave me in his own writing the next day. I shall here try, however, to follow his facts rather than his phraseology ; and the general correctness of the former can be relied upon. Any attempt to reproduce his exact language, without the aid of a verbatim report, would result, I fear, in disastrous failure. His grammar especially was that of the American nouveau riche, which is remarkable in this, that it gets well over all the real difficulties of our syntax, but sticks perversely at all the simplest points.
What seemed to me the most extraordinary thing about his whole narration was that he never in any way betrayed the slightest consciousness of the want of principle which marked, as you shall see, so many of his exploits. In fact, his most questionable operations were the ones in which he evidently delighted most. I fear that he does not present the loveliest sort of character, and that, in a moral point of view, he has little claim to attention, except as the representative of a class in all kinds of colossal fortune-making which is still growing and which is already appalling in numbers. But the reader can form his or her own judgment. Herewith is submitted as faithful an account as I have been able to give of the confessions of the great patent-medicine man : —
I commenced to serve the public with liquid at an early age. I was a mere lad when I opened a lemonadestand in my native place. Some one was building a large factory in the town, and I began business in the immediate neighborhood. My principal customers were the workmen employed upon the building. I sold two glasses of lemonade for five cents ; and before that factory was done I had made twenty-two dollars, all in silver, not counting what was trusted out and which I never got. I had n’t my present knowledge of chemistry in those days. I did not know the virtues of old lemon-peels, tartaric acid, and brown sugar, in the concoction of lemonade ; but no matter. I made money out of the legitimate article, though it was rather weak.
It was about this time, I think, that I commenced to wonder if I should, when I grew to be a man, have to work so hard as I saw most of the people in my thrifty neighborhood working, and I resolved that I would not. To sell lemonade to the builders of that factory, for instance, was far easier than to carry a hod toilsomely up the building, I thought, and about as profitable. So I determined that some one else must carry the hod through life, and leave me to merchandise in the shade.
My next venture was in sewing-silk. The foreign article was then selling for five cents a skein. I purchased the American stamp for sixty cents the hundred skeins, and peddled it at immense profit, two skeins for five cents. The only connection which I can discover between this and my next business is such an imaginary one as would be suggested by two wooden spools. These I had turned together, with artful little creases between for the insertion of a bogus cement which I took to selling. Of course I challenged people to pull the two spools apart, and, when they failed in the attempt, I generally sold them some of my ware. My cement was represented to be infallible in the mending of leather, wood, and crockery. 1 had a pair of traces from an old harness which I allowed the incredulous teamster to try with his horse. The places where they had ostensibly been stuck together had been merely peeled up and filled around with cement, leaving the leather all sound beneath. That test was, in the main, satisfactory to the unsophisticated farmer and others, and my sales were large. My attempts, however, with crockery were for a long time hazardous, and often humiliating. Finally I hit upon the discovery that my cement would not hold in that brittle ware till it had had three days to dry ; and before the three days expired I took good care to be well out of reach.
This venture was generally profitable, but some uncontrollable influence, as you will see, kept me always drifting toward the great pursuit of my life, the patent-medicine business. By some lucky inspiration I now made my first invention in that line. I discovered a new style of cough-lozenges and corn-salve. One invention sprang directly out of the other. It was in a consumptive country, which of course suggested the cough-lozenges ; but everybody could not be supposed to have a cough, so it occurred to me that, in that country at least, those who did not have the consumption had corns : hence the complemental inspiration of the salve. It was a boyish guess, but proved tolerably correct. I had the general public, as you see, by the throat and feet. I have since learned, of course, that if you get their heads alone interested in a professional venture of any kind, their stomachs will take almost anything prescribed. I think, however, any unprejudiced person will see a natural talent for my peculiar line of business in the comprehensiveness which, in this early scheme, took in human nature, as I may say, by means of its two extremities. Indeed, a scientific gentleman now in my employ assures me that I had even then hit upon what he announces as the most general principle in the application of patent materia medica, namely, produce for sale only such medicaments as shall be deemed the necessary products of the extremes of the general public, and they will always be equal to the products of their means.
My corn-salve was made of potash and gum-arabic. It would do its work in five minutes, but of course it made the foot outrageously sore afterward. This was a matter of very little inconvenience to me, because my business required me to be moving continually from place to place. I always managed to get out of town on the flood tide of my reputation as an effective chiropodist. It will be easily believed that I did not acquire my skill and self-reliance as an operator all at once. My corn-salve grew in my confidence from the feet it fed on. You think that is a queer expression ? You cannot, then, be aware of the corrosive nature of potash. Well, sir, experience and special knowledge are everything in one’s business. I will confess that I was nervous before my first patient. The salve had never been tried, and a friend told me I had better not try it. But my subject was a good one, and rather an anomaly, too, in life. I think you hardly ever heard before of a poor shoemaker with corns. That describes my first patient. I mustered up courage, at last, and flourished an old razor at him with quite a professional air for a youth of sixteen. The job was not as neat a one as I learned to do afterward, but still it gave temporary satisfaction ; and I sold that shoemaker two boxes of the salve.
And thus I went about over a wide extent of territory, leaving I know not what number of sore feet behind me. I have no better idea how much more pedal distress I might have worked, on a credulous community, had it not been for an accident which, at the end of a couple of years, overtook me in my career. I had left a great quantity of my salve and lozenges stowed away in a town which I was then making my head-quarters. They were carefully packed, I remember, in neat paper boxes. On my return, after an unusually long trip, I found that the infernal potash had eaten up the paper boxes, and, making its devouring way to my cough-lozenges, had involved my whole stock in one agglomerate mass of ruin.
Out of my temporary despair, however, sprang a lucky inspiration. You have doubtless heard much of the happy elasticity of youth. There is, I grant, something available in that, but I found something a great deal better for my business in the rapid growth and physical changes of that period of my life. The fact is, I had grown and altered so in appearance since I had first started out with my corn-salve, that at the time of this appalling accident no one of my first patients would have recognized me from a mere surgical acquaintance of two years before.
I may say here, in fact, that these repeated changes in my physical appearance, aided by the cropping of my hair, or the abandoning of it to excessive length, and at last by the coming of my beard, were, all through my early experiences, of untold advantage to me. Thus, in the course of time, I became personally acquainted with all the people who could be duped in a given region of country, and with every new project or nostrum I returned unrecognized to them over and over again. Now out of the potashes of the agglomerate ruin of my entire stock in trade sprang, Phœnix-like, a lucky inspiration, as I have before said, without the present indifferent joke, which is altogether accidental. While contemplating my irretrievable loss I conceived the idea of a patent pain-killer, which I would go about selling to cure the sores left by my corn-salve.
As a general thing, money, or, I should say, the want of it, gets the immortal work out of first-class brains. I read the substance of that remark in a newspaper ; or was it a magazine ? It doesn’t matter; I believe it, and I verified it in the production of that pain-killer; that’s enough. Well, sir, the project worked to a charm. I commenced operations, of course, in almost the exact traces of my former chiropodal exploits. It was not long, therefore, till I came upon my first patient, the shoemaker. I began cautiously to extol the stomachic virtues of my medicine, and gradually led up to its external application. It was good, I assured him, for bruises, sprains, — still keeping my eye stealthily on his, from under my hat, to catch any faint gleam of recognition, — bruises, sprains, wounds, sores —
“ On the feet ? ” asked he, interrupting me in my catalogue of positive cures.
“ Certainly; better for the feet than for anything else.”
“Well, I have sore feet, and that’s the fact,” said the shoemaker. “ You see there was a rogue of a fellow around here a couple of years ago curing corns, and he made my feet so— If I ever catch the villain I ’ll use a strap on him ; that’s what I ’ll do.”
I now felt sure, I need scarcely add, that my former patient did not recognize me, and so I sold him two bottles of pain-killer to cure the sores I had made two years before.
It was not, perhaps, a remarkable fact that my pain-killer went faster than my pain-maker, the corn-salve. I did a thriving business in this, — so thriving, indeed, that I gradually caught up, as I may say, with the intervening time between the sale of the latter and former articles. That is, my earlier traces became so recent that my disguise grew perilous. But there was such a demand for the pain-killer that I went on, notwithstanding the danger. One day, however, I encountered a sturdy young fellow upon whose feet I had operated not very long before. In his eagerness for relief he was in the act of purchasing it at my hands, when, suddenly recognizing me, he changed his mind and gave me a sound thrashing instead.
That put an end to the pain-killer business. I returned considerably bruised to my head-quarters, and set all my energies to work on the invention of something less perilous to others as well as myself. I may say here that I always kept the little town which I have called my head-quarters open to me as an asylum, by leaving it and its immediate neighborhood free from all my medical and surgical experiments. The result of my arduous creative thought culminated this time in a paste to make old razor-strops new. It professed to do its rejuvenating work by a simple application ; yet it did not sell very well. From the very nature of things I did not have the credulous woman half of the world to work upon : they had little or no interest in superannuated razor-strops. It was this consideration more than any other, I think, which inspired me with the brilliant afterthought of changing the name of my paste into that of a healing salve. Thus the same article became at once endowed with universal curative virtues, and became also the professed desideratum of all human nature. I suppose it would not be modest in me to say that my salve was too good for its original purpose. It is at least true that, if it failed upon razor-strops, it succeeded admirably upon mankind. You will hardly believe me when I tell you, but still it is also true, that, by means of an incipient beard and my hair grown long, and of a broad-brimmed slouch hat, as a disguise, I sold a box of my celebrated healing salve to that same innocent shoemaker who has already twice figured as my customer. Owing to my pain-killer, or the recuperative nature of his healthy frame, his feet were about well ; and I am glad to add that there was nothing in my healing salve that would materially prevent his ultimate recovery.
At this time my life was rather wild and thoughtless. I looked upon money only as a means of enjoyment. I did not save it for itself, as I learned to do afterward. Still, I had quite a sum by me, and I resolved to take a trip of pleasure and exploration to the South.
I sold out my healing salve and started. I know not what ill-advised courses I adopted; but youth is youth, you know, and at last I found myself without money in the middle of one of the remotest Southern States. I cannot tell what but the exigency of my circumstances prompted me to the thought, but I straightway announced myself as a plain, fancy, and ornamental painter. I had, of course, served no apprenticeship. Still, my Yankee cheek and versatility helped me out, and I did tolerably well till I was taken sick of one of their Southern fevers. I lay helpless for six weeks. It was a long struggle between life and death ; but I lived through it, and on my first return to consciousness I was made aware that all my money was exhausted.
As I lay there on my bed in tedious convalescence, I thought and thought again how I could earn the means to get immediately out of that deadly climate. My weak stomach revolted at the idea of resuming my toilsome attempts as a painter ; and, if I had not long ago forsworn hard manual labor, my feeble condition then would have been enough to make that impossible. What could I do ? How many times I asked myself that question, in utter hopelessness, I am glad that I cannot now remember. Of course my thought wandered back again and again to what was to be the absorbing pursuit of my life. Numberless panaceas, crude and shapeless, floated about in my mind just above my grasp, breaking themselves to pieces, as I may say, one against the other, and never leaving anything tangible behind in the wreck. I think a grand universal fever-cure was, at this time, the principal burden of my thought, suggested, as you will understand, by the malady from which I was slowly recovering. I am not sure that I would not have discovered something in that line which would have been beneficial to the world, or, at least, to my depleted pocket, if the idea of vinegar had not in some way been suggested to me. Vinegar was very dear in that country just then,— fifty cents a gallon, — and a good article could hardly be obtained at that price. I determined forthwith to get up some plausible receipt for making vinegar at a cheaper rate. As my plan took form gradually in my mind it seemed to communicate new courage, and my body positively recovered a portion of its old strength under the exhilarating pecuniary prospects held out by my vinegar receipt. It even occurred to me, as an afterthought, to change the name of my invention to that of a fever catholicon, in view of its reviving effects upon myself; but then I was so anxious to get out of that malarious climate that I applied my discovery only to the object for which it was first made.
As it was an invention to depend for its success wholly upon its plausibility, I did not need to make any experiments. As soon, therefore, as I was able to leave my bed, my receipt was ready. It was as follows: Take five gallons of soft water, one gallon of whiskey, two pounds of alum, one pound of cream of tartar, and one gallon of yeast. Let them work three days. A prime article of vinegar, it was claimed, would be the fair result, at the cost of from three to five cents a gallon. I borrowed or begged a bottle of good cidler-vinegar for a sample, and commenced operations. Having no money to get my receipts printed, I stated that they were copyrighted—whatever that meant — in Charleston, S. C., and that I was expecting a new supply in a few days. I would, however, as a favor, write out a limited number of them for any impatient customer who was willing to pay the regular price, which was one dollar. I called my invention United States Premium Vinegar; and by means of challenging people to discover the difference between my sample and the best article made from the old, exploded, conventional cider, I sold eight receipts the first half-day. Going on to the next town, I had five hundred receipts printed, purchased an additional bottle of cider-vinegar, and started on my travels North.
I never waited long enough in a place to learn the results of my amateur chemistry; but one day I happened to be overtaken at some village by one of my recent customers, residing at a town a little way back in my route gone over. He beckoned to me across the street. I professed not to see him. He beckoned again, and I had a sudden call around the first corner. Following, he overtook me and observed : “ Hello ! my friend, that vinegar does n’t seem to work.” “ My friend,” I answered, “ your yeast was probably not good.” He had never thought of it in that light, and would take my advice to get some yeast that he was sure to be fresh, and go home and try it again. Escaping him, I left that town by the first conveyance.
I have said that I purchased an additional bottle of cider-vinegar, and it is strange what advantage this was to me. I would often come across some village wiseacre, loafing about a blacksmith or shoe shop, who, tasting the first sample, would elevate his eyebrows, purse out his lips, and say that didn’t taste like cider - vinegar. He knew something about that article himself. Then it was my custom to produce the other bottle ; and this village wiseacre, whether man or woman, would almost invariably pronounce that “ something like it,” “ the original article,” etc. ; being in reality the same as the vinegar first presented. Some days I cleared by the sale of my valuable recipe as high as ten dollars above expenses. I would often give the printed secret of my vinegar in payment for a night’s lodging and breakfast. Sometimes I paid for my dinner at a farm-house in the same way, taking a half-dollar in change. When I found people doubtful about investing, I would agree to show the recipe on condition that they would take it if they thought it would make vinegar. This move, as strange as it may seem, was almost infallible. They could see at once that alum alone, or cream of tartar, or yeast, would make something sour, and which, united with whiskey, they were easily convinced would make vinegar. By the time I reached the Western States my health was established again. But the fever had so changed my appearance that I longed to get back and try my new venture upon my old acquaintances, or rather patients. I did eventually drive a thriving business in U. S. P. Vinegar receipts in the scenes of my first professional exploits. My shoemaker, however, had moved away and was never afterward one of my constituency. Nor did I ever again meet my pugilistic friend who ruined the pain-killer business for me, because I omitted his town thereafter in my travels.
Going out West again, I took a friend in partnership with me. He was too big a coward ever to be successful as a patent-medicine man ; but then he was a jovial rascal, and was good company. I know now, it was a great mistake to take him with me, for, some way, we managed to spend not only all I had made by myself, but all we made jointly. There must have been something bad about that fellow’s face. One evening in a thinly settled country where we were travelling afoot, as we generally did, we knocked at the door of a farm-house, and the farmer, eying us a moment, told us we could not stay all night. We were importunate, for it was late and the nearest tavern was miles away. The farmer, persisting in his refusal, said at last that they had had horses enough stolen in his neighborhood lately, and bang went the door in our faces. We took it, of course, as an insult to ourselves and to United States Premium Vinegar, through us ; but the case was closed with the door, and we had to trudge on wearily to the distant village. At another time we were belated, and we sought shelter at a respectable-looking frame-house by the roadside. It was very dark, and the person who opened the door came without a light. To our plea for a night’s lodging a man’s voice said that its owner thought he could hardly accommodate us. We asked him why; was his house not large enough ? Yes, but he was a little short of groceries, and on the whole thought he had better not try to entertain us. We wanted a bed, we assured him, more than his groceries, and by remarkable persistency we gained admission to the house. We found it to be the home of a well-to-do negro, who had made the excuses fearing that we would not care to lodge in his house, if we knew the color of its occupants. That, of course, was long before the time of the Fifteenth Amendment, but, in our fatigue, we had no scruples, as we afterward had no cause to complain of the quantity or quality of his groceries. Even at that period, it seems, men were ‘free and equal’ in the dark.
My partner somewhere stole a dog, carrying him away in a bag. When well outside of the town he threw away the bag, but could not make the dog follow. In the midst of his struggles with the animal a man suddenly appeared from some unexpected place on the road. It was a fine thing to see the terror of my companion, so long as he took the stranger for the owner of the dog ; but when that innocent fellow paused and regarded philosophically the amusing scene, it was a still finer thing to see the swaggering airs which my partner straightway assumed. He accused the silent spectator of preventing the dog from following, and made him stand to one side of the road. Seeing the non-resistance of the man, he vented his spleen furthermore on him in all manner of opprobrious epithets, and ended by making him get over the fence. I don’t know when I ever saw anything so neatly illustrating the peculiarities of your true coward. The recalcitrant disposition of the dog was conquered in the course of time, and, he followed us faithfully. He was christened “United States Premium Vinegar,” a name which he heard so often, in the course of our business, that he knew it well. His title finally crystallized into “ Vin ” ; but he was never present at the sale of a recipe without pricking up his ears and manifesting a lively interest, at least in the name under which the transaction was brought about. He became very fond of me in time, and had a disagreeable and expensive way of showing his fondness by going through windows after me of nights. So there was a sense of pecuniary gain mingled with our sorrow at his loss, when he was stolen from us and we saw him no more.
After a while, when there was little left of the gullible world to conquer, we changed our business into the sale of recipes for a “lightning” process of tanning which I invented. There was, as you shall see, more merit and money in this venture. But in dismissing here my United States Premium Vinegar, it is due to it to state, that, for the next few years whenever, in the course of a wild life, I found myself without money, I was in the habit of distilling it, as I may say, from the secret of this bogus compound. If I was overtaken in a strange place by Saturday night, without the means of paying my way over Sunday, I always sallied forth and sold vinegar recipes enough to put me in funds. One time, I remember, I was penniless in St. Louis, and made a hundred dollars in an afternoon by confiding my secret to wholesale and retail grocers of that city.
My tanning process would, in reality, tan the smaller furs in twenty-five minutes. It required our presence therefore in the far Western States, where furs were abundant. Our custom was to stop at a tavern for a week or so, exhibiting the merits of our recipe in the bar-rooms to all comers. We hired boys to bring us cat-skins, paying ten cents apiece for them. Thus it happened that the honest villagers would be the unconscious and astonished witnesses of the swift tanning of their own grimalkins. When we stayed long in a place, “ the neighbors ” would miss their cats and the animals would become scarce. To prevent an undue supply and a too promiscuous slaughter, we learned at last to insist upon paying for only such cats as should be all white or all black. This equalized matters.
There was an old tan, from which I partly plagiarized mine, whose principal ingredient was oil of vitriol. When asked — as I sometimes was — whether my tan had that in it, “ No,” I always told my inquisitor ; “ O no, nothing but sulphuric acid ”; which, as you know, is the same thing. To carry on this sort of business, in fact, it always requires a good degree of presence of mind. One day, I remember, I was tanning a black cat-skin before a great crowd in a bar-room, and holding it up to dry before a red-hot stove, I inadvertently burned and ruined it. By a dexterous movement, however, I substituted for it another of the same color, which I had tanned admirably the day before ; and I sold a half-dozen recipes on the spot. The usual price was five dollars for a recipe. I will give it to you as nearly as I can recollect it herewith for nothing : Take wheat bran and pour hot water on it; then strain ; also dissolve salt in water at blood heat until no more will dissolve ; mix equal parts of the bran and salt water, and to each two quarts of the mixture add one ounce of sulphuric acid ; put the pelts in and stir for twenty-five minutes ; then rinse and dry.
We made more money than even my reckless partner could spend ; but still we were not contented. We got out some sort of a great legal document nearly three feet long, with immense seals appended, and went to “ selling territory,” that is, we disposed of our right to use or peddle the recipe in certain towns, townships, and counties, giving one of these vast documents to the purchaser. Now we prospered grandly. We took horses, sheep, and all sorts of live stock in pay for “territory.” We drove our business everywhere. On one occasion a fellow out hunting crossed the road we were travelling, and we gave him one of our great documents for an old musket which he carried, and which from its exceeding length and weight we were forced to throw away before we reached the next town. On another occasion we met a man driving a heifer, and sold him a township for her. We always disposed of our live stock at auction.
We finally hit upon a still more lucrative move ; we disposed of our territory by lottery. We put up in sealed envelopes the recipe of the lightning tan and documents entitling the winner to the right of a town or township in the particular county where the drawing took place. We rated a county generally at a hundred dollars, and charged five dollars for an envelope, which was, as I have said, the regular price for the recipe alone. Each purchaser was assured of an individual right to use the recipe, and had a chance of winning the right of selling it to a whole town or township. Our profits were so large now that I convinced my partner of the benefit which would accrue to both of us by operating separately. For the consideration of eight hundred dollars cash down and safely in my pocket, the arrangement was completed. A line, very much like the one drawn up by the good Pope for the kings of Spain and Portugal, I once read about, in Irving’s Works, was agreed upon by us. This line divided between us all the New World not yet discovered and disposed of by us jointly. We parted and never met again. He was scarcely out of sight, when I took my eight hundred dollars with my other gains and started directly for the East.
I was young and very reckless yet. My money did not last me long. When it was almost gone, I paid my fare West as far as it would take me. It was not a great while, therefore, till I found myself in a far inland town, without a cent. I resolved this time to go into something that would make money so fast and in such quantities that I could not get poor again. Our late success in our lottery ventures inspired me with the plan of a grand gift concert. The authorities of the town told me that they did not see any objection ; and though I was not able to pay my board at the time, I entered into negotiations with my concert company, engaging them to come own from the nearest large city for the appointed evening. I secured my tickets on credit, and paid with them the rest of my printing bills. I managed to get the editors, lawyers, doctors, and principal citizens interested in my long list of building-lots, horses, carriages, watches, etc., etc., by securing their prizes to them in advance. This style of lottery was a new thing in the country then, and everything worked admirably till I roped in a deacon of one of the local churches. I gave him, two or three weeks before the concert and drawing were to come off, a splendid watch which cost me fifty-two dollars at wholesale, buying it with the money accruing from the rapid sale of tickets. The deacon himself, thus encouraged, purchased twenty-five tickets at one dollar each ; but he was in reality the source of all my subsequent misfortune in this promising scheme. His share in the enterprise, some way, got to the ears of his church, and he was expelled. This seemed to change the minds of the town authorities about the legality of my measures, and they refused to give me my license. That exploded the whole scheme. As fast as my money had come in for tickets I had expended it in prizes for the principal citizens. The thing was well planned. I have not time to enter into details, but if they had let me alone I would certainly have cleared ten thousand dollars. As it was, I came out of the enterprise, not only without a cent, but in debt ; and I had to leave the town in the night.
I made my way ton smaller town farther West, and turned my hand to making baskets, resolved, however, that I would soon go back to the patentmedicine business, but not till I could do something worthy in that line. I had, of course, no previous experience in basket-making, any more than I had had in drugs and simples before I went into constructive chemistry. It takes, I suppose the same kind of Yankee confidence and handiness to make a basket or a patent catholicon. At any rate, I was tolerably successful at my new business. When I had had finished enough of my wares, I went around selling them. It was in a neighboring village, where I was peddling my baskets, that I encountered what I have learned to call my destiny. My knock at the door of a trim little cottage was answered by a plump, gray-eyed young lady of about nineteen. She looked to me the prettiest girl I ever saw in my life. She had on a neatfitting calico dress, and then such lovely slippers ! Well, sir, when she would n’t buy a basket, I asked her for a drink of water. That was an excuse to have her ask me to sit down. It succeeded, and when she returned with the water in a bright tin cup, I thought of Rebecca at the well, and all the good things that I ever heard of in my childhood. You see, of course, I was in love with that girl. In some way I became inspired with a sudden interest in the adjoining country, and I asked her innumerable questions about the distances of the neighboring towns, just to keep her talking ; for it seemed so pleasant to hear her. Finally getting back to the subject of my wares, I observed that if she did n’t want a basket, probably she might want a willow cradle, if I would make her one. She turned red, and looking right down at the toe of her lovely slipper, she said that she reckoned she didn’t need any of those things. I told her that she might, and she replied that she was sure she did n’t know, — which latter remark I took for encouraging. So when I saw that I could not properly stay any longer, I assured her that I would be around in a week or ten days, and then, probably, she would have made up her mind about the cradle. Well, to make a long story short, I went to her house so regularly, with and without baskets, that she agreed, at last, to marry me.
The 11th of March was set for the wedding-day. I resolved in the mean time to make a large stock of baskets, hire a one-horse wagon, and peddle them out so as to have ample funds for the great occasion. As soon as I could get my baskets done, I started. I wandered away sixty or a hundred miles, I suppose, through all sorts of late winter and early spring storms, before my wagon was empty of its stock. At last my baskets were all sold and I was on my return journey. The rivers and watercourses were swollen with the usual floods of that season of the year ; but it lacked only four days of the 11th of March, and I hurried on faster, I suppose, than was prudent. I attempted to ford a river after dark, I know, and drowned the horse and lost the wagon, barely escaping with my life from the swift current. I had to pay for the horse and wagon, and that left me just money enough to buy a marriage license, and no more. I went and stated the case to my intended. She was a brave girl, and made only this memorable remark : “ I reckon our wedding-day was set for to-morrow; the old folks is willing; and I don’t see why it should n’t come off.”
And come off it did. While working over my baskets, my mind had been constantly struggling over a great idea ; no other, sir, than the composition of what has since become my celebrated “ Tecumseh Oil.” I borrowed two dollars of my wife, and made the first halfdozen bottles of that famous medicine. You have seen it advertised all over the world ; so that two dollars, I need not tell you, was the foundation of my fortune. I sold the six bottles and made eighteen more. Selling those, I increased my stock further, and started out through the country to introduce my invention. For a long time it was my custom to travel afoot, my medicine on my back and my paint-jug in my hand, blazoning the fences on my way with “ Tecumseh Oil.” Gradually I got to leaving it at the drug-stores, working up a demand for it rather than peddling it wherever I went. My wife stayed at home, manufacturing the medicine. Our business grew so that she had to have a man to help her, then two men, and then I had to build a little house, separate from my own, over which I painted “ Laboratory ” in mammoth letters. I commenced now that great system of advertising which has since been imitated by so many interlopers in the business. All the money that could be possibly spared from the manufacture of the oil was invested in heralding its merits about over the land. Ornate woodcuts of Indians scalped and healed by my medicine were scattered everywhere. The death scene of Tecumseh himself became our trade-mark. His is last agonies were so vividly portrayed in colored ink, that the sympathetic beholder was at once inspired with regret that the great chief’s namesake, my celebrated oil, had not been discovered in time to relieve his terrible sufferings.
My humble laboratory at last made way for a great manufactory, and my wife retired to the exclusive management of her household. I spent thousands and thousands upon advertisement, and yet my money came back to me tenfold. You will probably think I was satisfied with this prosperity, but I wasn’t. I had introduced all sorts of other medicines, but never could succeed in getting up a “bitters” that could compete with a certain Eastern article of the kind. I finally determined, if I could not make a better one, or even as good a one, I would at least make the same “ bitters.” I went quietly incognito to the great factory of my rivals, and enticed away one of the principal men in their laboratory. I say “their,” because it was a joint-stock concern. I took home the new man whom I had bribed, and set him to work ; but the “ bitters ” did not sell as I expected they would, on their own merit. So I came out with the trademark of my rivals, adding an “o” and doubling an “1” in the name of the medicine. This, of course, brought a great lawsuit, which, however, at great expense to lawyers and witnesses, I won, ostensibly on the strength of my additional letters. But my rivals now brought a more formidable suit against me for infringement of their patent. I might have added some new ingredient to the mixture, I suppose, and have beaten them in that way ; or I might have adduced in defence, what was actually the fact, that, in the failure of the necessary supply of cherry-bark, — the base of the “ bitters,” — I had substituted prussic acid ; but that being well known as a poison, I did not care in either case to take the trouble. I had beaten my rivals once by means of the best counsel, and I had no doubt I could do it again. When, however, I came to consult the most eminent lawyer I could find, he shook his head, and told me that I was a ruined man ; he, at least, would not go into court with such a suit. He spoke of injunctions which the opposition could bring, and in fact talked to me in the most hopeless, discouraging way. I told him of other injunctions which we might get out, since I might claim the invention of the “ bitters ” myself, for the sake of law; and I ended by asking him how long he thought, by appeals and counter-injunctions, he could probably stave off the suit. He was of opinion that it might be delayed for two years. I told him to spare no pains or money, and trust the rest to me. He left me with the assurance that he would obey orders, but that the case would certainly be my ruin.
I went back to my manufactory, trebled my force, and put them all to work in the concoction of the “ bitters.” The medicine sold hundreds of thousands of bottles. The original makers of the “bitters ” were, as I have said, a joint-stock company. Well, in that two years I made money enough out of the infringement of their patent to buy up, in an underhanded way, the greater part of the stock of the whole rival concern ; and, when it came time to bring on the suit, I had the majority of the votes to cast as I would, and, of course, the suit was abandoned. Both of the great establishments are now wholly in my hands, and I think you have heard for yourself how prosperous they are.
My wife manages her house on Fifth Avenue as well as she did her cottage, when it was half laboratory ; and, by the way, I must go up and see how she and the “ hop ” are getting on.
Ralph Keeler.