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almanacs

The Dangerous Wit and Wisdom of Nathaniel Ames

Nathaniel Ames had a wit that nearly got him sent to prison. Ames, a physician and innkeeper, also published an almanac. He infused the astronomical and weather predictions with his caustic wit and dry humor.

When nothing seemed likely to happen on a given date, he would fill the void in his almanac with a wisecrack, generally aimed at colonial society’s more serious minded:

Some examples:

May 22.

Some materials about this time are hatched for the clergy to debate on.

November 9.

These aspects show violent winds and in winter storms of driving snow; mischiefs by the Indians, if no peace; and among us, feuds, quarrels, bloody-noses, broken pates if not necks.

December 15.

This cold, uncomfortable weather

Makes Jack and Jill lie close together.

February 24-27.

If you fall into misfortunes, creep through those bushes which have the least briers.

July 16-27.

Every man carries a fool in his sleeve; with some he appears bold, with some he only pops out now and then, but the wise keep him hid.

September 12-16.

To some men their country is their shame; and some are the shame of their country.

Nathaniel Ames’ sign redrawn in 1891

Yet Ames’ light-hearted nature had a querulous side, as well. Ames, one of many colonial humorists, lived in Bridgewater and Dedham, Mass., from 1705 to 1764, and he frequently called on the courts to settle slights and disputes. And he particularly enjoyed pricking lawyers with his wit, as in this couplet:

The lawyers’ tongues they never freeze,

If warmed with honest clients fees.

He Goes Too Far

However, he took his humor too far in one case. Ames had to sue members of his wife’s family after she died. She had owned the tavern that the couple operated, and her family claimed that they should inherit it. After a lengthy trial, Ames won the property, but two judges had argued against his position.

The Ames Tavern as drawn in 1891 based on the memory of Dedham’s oldest resident.

To mock the judges, he erected a sign that caricatured the judges. In it, nine of the judges who sided with him were pictured studying law books. Two, however, were facing the other way, ignoring the law.

Paul Dudley, chief justice of Massachusetts’ highest court, was one of the judges pictured ignoring the law. He heard about the sign and ordered the sheriff to arrest Ames and seize the sign.

Ames, however, learned of the plan to have him arrested and pulled the sign down. Unable to resist a parting shot, however, he replaced it with a Biblical quotation from the Book of Matthew:

“A wicked and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given unto it.”

After Ames’ death, his son Nathaniel continued with his almanac, though with less vitriol and greater success.

This story was updated in 2022.

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The 1773 Old Librarians Almanack: The Literary Fraud That Fooled the Critics

In 1773, librarian Jared Bean published his Old Librarians Almanack in New Haven, Conn., following the traditional format of Poor Richard’s almanac. On one page it contained weather predictions and advice on the next. But rather than advice for farmers, Bean’s almanac contained advice for librarians. It dealt with such topics as protection of books, books to be burned, organizing books and strict rules for who should be allowed in the library.

Old Librarians Almanack

One quick read through the Old Librarians Almanack and you might think: This is too good to be true. And you’d be right. The almanac was a work of satirical fiction written by librarian and author Edmund Lester Pearson.

The Man Behind the Old Librarians Almanack

Pearson, born in Newburyport on Feb. 11, 1880, later served the library there as trustee. He graduated from Harvard and then earned an M.L.S. from the New York State Library School at Albany. Over his career he worked at the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library and the Military Information Division of the War Department.

Rose Reading Room in the New York Public Library.

He also wrote books. He published his most famous book (aside from the Old Librarians Almanack), Studies in Murder, in 1924. It had a signature essay on Lizzie Borden.

From 1906 to 1920, Pearson wrote a humorous weekly column for the Boston Evening Transcript called The Librarian. It gave him the idea for the Old Librarians Almanack, as it featured the fictional Ezra Beesly Free Public Library of the town of Baxter.

Pearson swore that he never intended anyone to take his almanac seriously. But when first published in 1909, people viewed it as a true, historic almanac that shed light on library practices in colonial times.

‘Keep out the light-witted’

Jared Bean displayed a fiercely protective attitude toward library books.

“Keep your books behind stout Gratings, and in no wise let any Person come at them to take them from the Shelf except yourself,” Bean cautioned.

He had a long list of people to keep out of his precious library.

“Let no Politician be in your Library, nor no man who Talks overmuch,” he wrote. “It will be difficult for him to observe Silence, and he is objectionable otherwise, as well.”

Newburyport Public Library

Also verboten: “No Astrologer, Necromancer, Charlatan, Quack, nor Humbug; no Vendor of Nostrums, nor Teacher of false Knowledge, no fanatick Preacher nor Refugee. Admit no one of loose or evil Life; prohibit the Gamester, the Gypsy, the Vagrant. Allow none who suffers from an infectious Disease; and none whose Apparel is so Gaudy or Eccentrick as to attract the Eye.”

Finally, he advised, “Keep out the Light-witted, the Shallow, the Base and Obscene. See to it that none enter who are Senile, and none who are immature in their Minds, even tho’ they have reach’d the requir’d Age.

Shun them as the devil

When it came to women, Bean, apparently a bachelor, held generally unfavorable views.

“Matrimony, so maintained worthy Master Peleg Gudger, is no fit Diversion for the Librarian, and in truth, I commend his Wisdom in the Matter.”

Women also caused concern as library patrons.

“Be suspicious of Women. They are given to the Reading of frivolous Romances, and at all events, their presence in a Library adds little,” Bean wrote. “You will make no error in excluding them altogether.”

While some librarians held that a man’s duties to his marriage and his library could co-exist, Bean turned to his trusted guide, fellow librarian Enoch Sneed, for the final word on the matter:

“Steer a straight course, he says, away from feminine Blandishments. These Females are as Leeches or Bloodsuckers, hardly to be torn off. They would make you take your Victuals at certain fix’d seasons to conform to their rules of Housekeeping, regarding not that you may wish to read at those Hours; while again they will Babble & Complain should it chance that after a hard night’s reading you ask that a hot Supper be served at Daybreak. Shun them as you would the Devil.”

Most of Bean’s writings deal with the proper care of books and the library, along with his disdain for those who would misuse them. For example, he wove this poem among the weather forecasts.

On gallows fifty cubits high

Hang the wretch and let him die

A dozen of my books he stole

May God have mercy on his soul

A Curse for Book Thieves

And he offers an earlier perspective on thievery, as well – one which has been quoted as true many times:

“What condemnation shall befit the accurst Wretch (for he cannot justly claim the title of Man) who pilfers and purloins for his own selfish ends such a precious article as a book? I am reminded of the Warning display’d in the Library of the Popish Monastery of San Pedro at Barcelona. This is the version Englished by Sir Matthew Mahan, who saw it writ in Latin in the Monastery, as he himself describes in his leam’d Book, ‘Travels in Spanish Countries, 1712.” The Warning reads thus:

“For him that stealeth a Book from this Library, let it change to a Serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with Palsy, and all his Members blasted.”

If that didn’t seem hard-hearted enough, Bean went on: “Let him languish in Pain, crying aloud for Mercy and let there be no surcease to his Agony till he sink to Dissolution. Let Book-worms gnaw his Entrails in token of the Worm that dieth not, and when at last he goeth to his final Punishment let the Flames of Hell consume him forever and aye.”

Throughout, Bean draws liberally from the wisdom of his learned colleague, librarian Enoch Sneed. He does, however, take umbrage at Sneed’s suggestion that the domestic mouse is the greatest enemy to libraries. Rather, he proposes, “Of the enemies of Books, I especially esteem the cockroach.” And he provides a recipe for cockroach poison.

Snakebite Cure

In another section of the almanac, Bean offers: “A sure and Certain cure for the Bite of a Rattlesnake made Public by Abel Puffer of Stoughton.”

The recipe calls for an improbable collection of ingredients to mix into a plaster and apply to the snakebite.

“If the sufferer be bit in the Leg (as it is very likely to happen), let him be placed in reversed position; That is with his head down and his Feet in the Air. It may be most convenient to lean him against a Wall or Fence, or if neither be at hand, then against a tree or bush.”

“The plaister should be applied on the wound, and mark that all depends that this is done within ten minutes from the time the sufferer was Bitten,” Bean wrote. And for insurance, he advised, “It may be well that a Minister of the Gospel be sent for, if so be it that one is at hand.”

“Then require the Sufferer to move his limbs about, at first slowly, now with increasing speed with all the Vigour and Rapidity in his power. After this, let him rise and run in a circle, or nearly so, first giving him to drink a half glass of Jamaica Rum.

“When he be ready to fall from Dizziness (which flushed the brain with Blood) again apply a second plaister, like the first.

“Tokens of improving Health are sure to be seen in the Sufferer: if not Prayers had better be addressed to Providence.”

Hints Not Taken

The book includes hints that it’s a parody, such as its improbable weather predictions. “I guess there will be a storm of snow about this time, then clear,” reads one. Nevertheless, critics reviewed the almanac as an actual historical reprint.

The Outlook magazine, The Nation, The New York Times and the New York Sun praised the rediscovered gem. The Bulletin of Pharmacy reprinted the snake bite remedy as historical fact.

Not a Hoax

Pearson and publisher John Cotton Dana of Woodstock, Vt., insisted they didn’t intend the publication as a hoax. Rather they saw it as a send-up of old-fashioned thinking among some librarians. Those old timers viewed library patrons as nuisances who distracted librarians from their true calling – their own personal reading.

The two men were probably at least somewhat disingenuous in claiming they never intended the book to fool anyone. Perhaps, though, it succeeded beyond their expectations.

As the hoax gathered steam in the first few months of 1910, Pearson did take steps to prevent embarrassment of several reviewers. He also warned off an historical association that wanted to reprint the almanac as an actual, historical document.

But he did enjoy the furor the book caused, whether he intended it or not. He noted that some libraries still catalogued it under the heading “literary frauds.”

To read the complete almanac, click here. This story about the Old Librarians Almanack was updated in 2022. Images: Rose Reading Room By Diliff – Own work, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=533750.

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The Almanac, Indispensable Day Planner for the Busy Colonist

When John Winthrop set foot on the shores of Salem in 1630, he carried with him an out-of-date almanac that belonged to his father, Adam Winthrop.

Like many Englishmen, Adam Winthrop carried a pocket-sized almanac that included astronomical predictions. Some had blank pages inserted between the calendar pages, known as ‘interleaved.’ The owner used the blank pages to record expenses, debts, travel, the weather and important events.

John Winthrop arrives in Salem with an almanac

In the book John Winthrop carried across the Atlantic, Allestree’s Almanacke for 1620, his father had written such entries as:

Jany 12. Mr. Gurdon fel out of his coache in Boxforde Street.
March 1 We dined at Goodman Coles.
March 15. The assises at Burye, where Porter a minister was condemned for Sodomie.
July 31. Sir John Deane sent us venison.
Sept. 2. There was seene in ye skie a fearful sight.

John Winthrop

Winthrop brought it as a keepsake, but it foretold the explosion of almanac publishing and diary-keeping in colonial New England. For centuries they were surefire bestsellers, serving as daily planners for New England colonists. Eventually, nearly every New England household ordered an almanac at year’s end. Without one, the colonist was lost.

Second Only to the Bible

An almanac was the second publication to come off the first American printing press in Cambridge, Mass., in 1639 – nearly a century before Benjamin Franklin began publishing Poor Richard’s in Philadelphia in 1731.

John Winthrop recorded daily events in his almanac, though even his descendant Robert Winthrop didn’t find them interesting. Winthrop’s son John, later governor of Connecticut, also kept the habit instilled in him by his grandfather, who had made him an almanac to keep as a diary.

An early almanac

On May 10, 1662, Gov. John Winthrop of Connecticut recorded the event that confirmed the colony’s self-government under its fundamental orders:

This day, May 10 in the afternoon, the Patent for Connecticut was sealed.

Salem witch trial judge Samuel Sewall jotted notes in the interleaves of his almanac so he could later add them to his diary. On Dec. 15, 1678, for example, he wrote,

Returned to my own bed after my sickness of the Small Pox.

On March 16, 1679, he wrote,

Governour Leverett dieth.

On Jan 10, 1681:

Charles River frozen over, so to Nod[dles] island.

The Almanac Market

Nathaniel Ames began to corner the New England market in 1726, five years before Poor Richard’s came off the printing press. Ames claimed he sold 60,000 annually in New England – six times as many as Franklin sold in Philadelphia.

Ames wasn’t the only one who printed almanacs in New England, though. Franklin’s sister-in-law, Ann Smith Franklin, published Rhode Island Almanac by Poor Robin in Newport, R.I. The Old Farmer’s Almanac was a latecomer, as Robert Thomas didn’t start printing it until 1792.

George Washington recorded his activities on interleaved pages of the Virginia Almanac, as did Thomas Jefferson. On the top of every page, Washington wrote, “Where & how my time is Spent.”

Washington compulsively recorded the weather. On Dec. 31, 1774, Washington wrote,

Clear but pretty cool. Wind fresh from Northwest. (You can see Washington’s entire 1774 almanac here.)

An almanac typically had useful information for travel: lists of roads between New York and Boston, when the courts were in session, coach fares, lists of local officials, currency conversion tables and directions to inns.

Historian Molly McCarthy wrote that Washington recognized the almanac ‘as an indispensable calendar and local guide.’

“More than many early newspapers, almanacs were a font of local information,” she wrote. “They provided readers with the kind of facts needed to negotiate the geographic and commercial terrain of early America … The almanac enjoyed a status in early America unparalleled by any book, except the Bible.”

The Adamses

John Adams

John Adams was an indefatigable diarist, but the narrow pages of almanacs weren’t enough for him. He recorded daily events on blank paper he had cut and stitched together.

John Quincy Adams kept a diary from the time he was 12 years old until shortly before he died in 1848. He often wrote a line a day diary in the interleaved pages of an almanac.

Such was the case in 1788, when he was studying law in Newburyport, Mass., with Theophilus Parsons.

On New Year’s Day that year he wrote,

I feel every day a greater disposition to drop this nonsense. It takes up a great deal of my time, and as it is incessantly calling upon me, I can never have any respite: in the extreme cold of winter I have no convenience, for writing, and was it not for the pleasure of complaining to myself, I believe I should have done long ago.

John Quincy Adams

He didn’t give it up. His total diary output lasted for 68 years, including an unbroken daily record for more than 25 years. On Dec. 31, 1788, he concluded the year 1788 with the New Year’s Eve diary entry,

31.

Eve with Foster at Mr. Jackson’s, He was out.

With thanks to Molly McCarthy in The Accidental Diarist: A History of the Daily Planner in America. This story about the almanac was updated in 2022.

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The Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company of New Haven Entertains the Masses (But Doesn’t Cure Them)

Kickapoo Joy Juice was a fictional moonshine created by Al Capp, but there were real Kickapoo ‘medicines’ that sold like wildfire in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries.

Crowds flocked to the medicine shows.

The Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company boosted sales with traveling medicine shows. Part carnival, part sales pitch, they featured Indian ‘agents’ or ‘professors’ making outlandish claims for quack cure-alls in between Indian acts.

The Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company’s medicine shows were the biggest and most successful in the United States. They were the brainchild of a New Haven peddler and a bogus Texas frontiersman who capitalized on the American belief that Indians had a deep knowledge of natural medicine.

Capp’s Kickapoo Joy Juice was so potent the fumes alone could melt the rivets off battleships. Kickapoo Cough Cure and Kickapoo Sagwa could cure just about any ailment – or so claimed the New Haven entrepreneurs who concocted the products.

A Kickapoo Medicine Show company in front of a stage.

Patent Medicines

English patent medicines came to the British colonies from England. They were made under grants, or ‘patents of royal favor,’ to purveyors of medicine for the royal family.

Americans soon discovered it was cheaper to make their own patent medicines than import them. They didn’t trust doctors, for good reason, and were susceptible to peddlers’ claims of miracle cures. By the 19^th century, traveling patent-medicine salesmen brought medicine shows along with them to attract customers.

John E. Healy led a checkered career before he stumbled on the idea of an Indian medicine show. He had been a drummer boy in the Union Army during the Civil War, a door-to-door salesman of vanishing cream, a purveyor of ‘King of Pain’ liniment and proprietor of an Irish minstrel show. He hooked up with Dr. E.H. Flagg, a Baltimore peddler who played the violin on street corners to help sell his Flagg’s Instant Relief.

Flagg’s Instant Relief was soon renamed Kickapoo Indian Oil. In the fall of 1879 the two men hired Charles Bigelow to take the Kickapoo Indian Oil show on the road. He had left the family farm in Bee County, Texas, to tour with a phony Indian medicine man who called himself ‘Dr. Yellowstone.’ Bigelow called himself ‘Texas Charlie,’ wore a sombrero over his long flowing hair and spewed humbug about Indian medicine.

Soon Flagg was out of the business and Healy and Bigelow were partners. As acolytes of P.T. Barnum, they shamelessly and tirelessly ballyhooed their products.

Kickapoo Sagwa

The Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company reassured its customers that medicines made of ‘roots, barks, twigs, leaves, seeds, and berries are the most beneficial, because they assist Nature in the right way to make her own cure.’

Kickapoo Indian Oils were ‘quick cures for all pains,’ and the Kickapoo Indian Cough Cure could cure ‘all diseases of the throat and lungs.’

They promised their most popular product, Kickapoo Indian Sagwa, would purify the blood and cure all diseases of the digestive system. They advertised it as a product of roots, herbs and bark, but a rival claimed it was really a mixture of stale beer and aloe.

Buffalo Bill Cody endorsed Indian Sagwa in a patently false claim:

Kickapoo Indian Sagwa … is the only remedy the Indians ever use, and has been known to them for ages. An Indian would as soon be without his horse, gun or blanket as without Sagwa.

Healy and Bigelow opened a storeroom for their ingredients in a Providence hotel, then moved on to Boston where they produced their first medicine show outside of a railroad station. During the winter the show moved to the former Aquarium in New York City.

A Kickapoo Medicine Show company

Principal Wigwam

From 1881-84 the Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company was headquartered in Boston, then it moved to New York for three years and in 1887 settled its ‘Principal Wigwam’ in New Haven before a final move to Clintonville, Conn., in 1901.

Healy and Bigelow weren’t the first to stage Indian medicine shows, but they were the best. The two men knew how to capitalize on America’s infatuation with the rapidly closing Western frontier.

Their traveling medicine shows were popular entertainments when they came to town, featuring fake war dances and marriages, dances, acrobatics, vaudeville acts, fire eaters, rifle shooting, ventriloquists and trained dog acts. The only thing they didn’t feature were Indians from the Kickapoo tribe in Oklahoma. Many came from small Iroquois tribes in New York and Québec or Plains Indians lured away from other shows.

The Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company on the road.

The Kickapoo Medicine Show

An Indian agent in buckskin or a tuxedoed ‘professor’ would hold forth until the war whoops of Indians interrupted his lecture. They would come running down the aisles with baskets of Sagwa, Indian Oil, Cough Cure and Worm Killer, which they sold to the audience.

The Kickapoo Medicine Company produced almanacs and calendars to promote its products.

In another version, the agent would stand on an open platform with an Indian panorama as a backdrop. He would introduce the Indians, seated in a semicircle, and give short histories of their lives. Then one of the Indians would deliver a speech in impassioned ‘Kickapoo,’ which the agent ‘translated,’ though he had no idea what the Indian was saying. Sometimes the speech would have the seated Indians convulsed with laughter. Then a vaudeville show would follow, interrupted by as many sales pitches as necessary.

John Johnson

One of the show’s most popular performers was Dr. John Johnson. He looked and acted like a medicine man, and for more than 20 years he believed he was. Johnson, however, had been kidnapped as a child from Saco, Maine, by Mi’kmaq Indians from Nova Scotia in 1834. He learned traditional Indian medical practices and the Indians viewed him as a medicine man. Later in life he learned his true identity, but he continued with the medicine show for decades.

By 1890, 800 Indians spent the winter in the Principal Wigwam—actually several buildings along the river — in New Haven. Healy and Bigelow contracted with federal Indian agents to send hem performers for room, board and $30 a month. The government delivered as many as 200 Indians at a time from their reservation to the Principal Wigwam.

The shows were so successful that Bigelow and Healy had close to 100 troupes on the road at one time. They traveled as far west as Chicago and as far south as the West Indies. Their success spawned cheap imitators, who claimed the Kickapoo name but offered lame entertainment and dangerous medicines.

Pure Food Law

The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, along with the advent of the motion picture, put a slow end to the traveling medicine show.

At first the Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company praised the new law for putting out of business ‘fake ‘patent medicines’ and so-called ‘remedies’ containing dangerous drugs. And yet the Kickapoo Cough Cure was deemed ‘misbranded’ under the Act in 1911. The reason? It contained far more alcohol than indicated on the label.

The Kickapoo Medicine shows continued into the 1920s, when the owners sold out for a half million dollars.

A few legitimate patent medicines survive to this day: Listerine, Bayer Aspirin, Milk of Magnesia and Ex-Lax. Richardson’s Croup and Pneumonia Cure Salve now goes by the name Vick’s VapoRub.

With thanks to Step Right Up by Brooks McNamara. This story was updated in 2023.

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