I’ve already mentioned that the MacLeods of Upper South West Mabou made moonshine. My grandfather was introduced to it during the summer of 1937. In fact, that summer and the next, Duncan MacLeod and his brother Hughie didn’t just take the occasional swig of it. They helped make it.
Every year when the weather was just right, the MacLeod boys would make moonshine. At least, they did the two summers that Papa and his brother were there. Papa told me the whole family got involved, except for his aunt Annie MacLeod, who hated liquor, guns, and swearing, and would pack her bags and go off to stay in a hotel in Port Hood whenever moonshine season rolled around. Meanwhile, Annie’s brothers would buy large quantities of blackstrap molasses and yeast and take their 30-gallon copper pot out of its hiding place and into the woods.
At first, nine-year-old Duncan and his eight-year-old brother Hughie were given the task of feeding the dogs that their uncles kept further down the brook as an early warning system in case the authorities tried to find the still. It wasn’t long before the boys were given a more important job: keeping the worm cool. The worm was a copper coil that ran through the big copper pot and was submerged in a bucket of water. The boys’ job was to keep putting cool water from the brook into the bucket, to keep the worm cool and make the moonshine just right.
When the moonshine was ‘just right’, it would burn blue on a spoon and leave no trace it had ever been there. It was potent stuff; most people didn’t drink it straight. Papa said it “would curl the hairs in your nose” so most people only used it to make hot toddies. Duncan and Hughie would take the occasional sip of the pure shine, though, when no one was around.
The MacLeods would run the shine off three times before it was considered ready to drink. They would also brew their own beer, in two 100-gallon barrels. The Nova Scotia government, which had taken control of liquor distribution and sales in 1930, didn’t take too kindly to anyone trying to get around the Liquor Control Act, so the police often went looking for the still. That’s why there were dogs, and that’s why Papa’s uncle Alec ended up shooting an RCMP officer one day. But the police never found the still, because the MacLeod boys valued not only their freedom but also the big copper pot, which they would hide up in the trees. I think Papa was only half joking when he told me it might still be somewhere in those woods.
Duncan MacLeod would later become an alcoholic. He would also brew his own alcoholic beverages — and get caught. In fact, one run-in with the law during his teenage years would land him in jail.
But those are all stories for another day.
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Chronicles of Duncan MacLeod is a series of posts on my MacLeod ancestors. Some are based on my research but most are stories told to me by my grandfather, Duncan MacLeod. Here are the other posts in the series:
The Swans of Eigg
The Gardener’s Crossing
The Kilt
Crooked-Neck MacLean
One Eye, Two Guns, Three Tunes & Twenty-five Cents
Hold Fast
Up Over the Mountain
Black Bears & Blueberries
The House Down the Road
The Blind Man’s Biscuits
Down by the Brook