It was the era of the mountebank, the charlatan and the snake-oil-salesman.
Of the three, the last one was the most common, especially in 19th-century Vermont.
Snake-oil usually took the form of patent medicines. Brooks McNamara’s “Step Right Up” notes that “the 19th century was a period of phenomenal growth in the American patent medicine industry.” He states that by 1858, one could compile a list of more than 1,500 patent medicines.
The term “patent medicine” is defined as “a proprietary medicine made and marketed under a patent and available without prescription.”
The various brands usually had an established trademark that was used in newspaper, billboard and medicine show advertising. The remedies were manufactured everywhere and many achieved national popularity.
In Montpelier, Lester Green’s “Syrup of Tar” was produced in a large plant on River Street. Promoted as a cough syrup, this common nostrum contained alcohol, chloroform and heroin — all of which were legal at the time.
Advertising was essential for patent medicines, as they were not prescribed by doctors. According to McNamara, “along with newspaper advertisements, a sea of handbills, posters, flyers, free magazines, trade cards, songsters, joke books and almanacs poured from the presses of patent medicine promoters.”
After the Civil War, traveling salesmen began employing popular entertainments to recruit customers for their products. According to McNamara: “Vacant lots and village halls began to be filled with free plays, vaudeville, musical comedy, minstrels, magic, burlesque, dog and pony circuses, Punch and Judy shows, pantomime, menageries, pie-eating contests and early motion pictures.”
With a musical performance or a comedy act it was easy to assemble a crowd in small-town America. For many rural hamlets, a medicine show might be the only live entertainment they would see that year, and the townspeople would flock to the makeshift stage in the back of a wagon or in the town hall.
Once the audience was deemed to be at its maximum size, the pitchman would step to the apron of the stage and begin his pitch, brandishing a bottle of whatever miracle cure he was selling.
The medicines usually were herbal concoctions liberally dosed with alcohol, and they promised to cure a variety of ailments, but especially those involving the liver, kidneys, and digestive tract.
Catarrh, or inflammation of the mucus membranes, was, apparently, a perennial problem for men, women and children on the medicine show circuit. These medicines often were manufactured in apothecaries, but also in the bathtub of whatever hotel where the pitchman might be lodging.
According to McNamara, Doc Ruckner, for example, sold a corn remedy made from camphor gum, sassafras and gasoline. Medicines intended to be ingested usually included a significant amount of alcohol, ensuring that purchasers would experience immediate (if temporary) relief from whatever troubled them.
Thomas Waterman Wood’s 1878 painting “The Quack Doctor” depicts an early medicine show at the intersection of Main and East State streets in Montpelier. There was once an arched pass-through from Main to East State Street, and it was an ideal setting for an early traveling show.
In Wood’s painting the “doctor” is making his pitch to the assembled throng while an exotic Turk is standing at the rear of the wagon, perhaps ready to carry bottles of medicine to the attentive purchasers. A parade of ducks under the wagon is, perhaps, a sly comment on the quackery presented above.
Medicine shows flourished between 1870 and 1910, and it is known from newspaper accounts that a succession of such carriage-bound enterprises played the towns of central Vermont during those decades.
A brief note in the Montpelier Argus in 1893 reported “a double-team-street fakir medicine show struck the vicinity last week and humbugged lots of people out of their dollars.”
In Montpelier, Dr. Morgan’s Medicine Show booked the Opera House for a week, suggesting that they were able to rent the largest venue in town and still turn a profit.
In the 1880s, the Indian Medicine show became popular. The idea of ancient aboriginal cures captured the imagination of rural America, and “Kickapoo Indian Sagwa” became the nostrum of choice for the masses in the path of the medicine show.
While many Americans in the last half of the 20th century associate Kickapoo medicine with the “Kickapoo Joy Juice” made famous by Al Capp’s comic strip “Li’l Abner,” there was a real Indian tribe by that name. The Kickapoo Native Americans resided in Kansas, Texas and Oklahoma. But the very profitable “Indian Sagwa” was manufactured in New Haven, Connecticut, by John Healy and Charles Bigelow, who called himself “Texas Charlie.”
The premise of their enterprise, according to McNamara, was that only the Kickapoo knew exactly what went into their remedies. The necessary components (roots, barks, gums, herbs, leaves and buffalo fat) were shipped to New Haven, where they were secretly combined into a mixture by the “wisest of Kickapoo Indian medicine men, who had left the reservation to serve Healy and Bigelow and the cause of health.”
In addition to promoting the Kickapoo Indian Sagwa at medicine shows, the company also made their remedies available at drugstores and advertised their products with pseudo-news reports. The “articles” capitalized on “the belief among many white Americans that the Indian was a natural physician who possessed secrets unknown to the white man.”
These were professionally written stories and testimonials that had the appearance of news stories, but instead of informing the reader, were intended to encourage buying the products at a local drug store. Placed prominently in local newspapers, the advertisements also promoted the medicine shows when they came to town. There were hundreds of individual Kickapoo Indian shows, each with a pitchman and a small contingent of Indians (each paid $30 a month plus expenses) who were tasked with brewing a kettle of the famous Sagwa over an open fire.
The smallest traveling units, according to McNamara, consisted of an agent, a few Indians and a few performers. The performers would attract an audience, the Indians would lend authenticity to the famous product, and the agent was the fast-talking pitchman who coaxed the money from the pockets of the vulnerable rubes.
A notice in the Argus for Nov. 20, 1909, reported the interest garnered by a traveling show.
“The appearance of an Indian in full war-paint and array this morning on State Street, tickled the youngsters with visions of pioneer days. The Indian is with a medicine show band, he evidently knew how to ride a horse for he sat on the pony as if glued there and didn’t go to the trouble of using a saddle,” the paper noted at the time.
An old photograph of Main Street in Barre shows Charles Smith’s Drug Store (later Drown’s) with posters for Kickapoo Indian Oil and Kickapoo Sagwa in its window. A Kickapoo pitchman stands outside the apothecary next to his horse and wagon. The Barre Daily Times reported in October 1901 that the Kickapoo Medicine Show had been in town for two weeks, which is a good indication of the popularity of the enterprise. In Montpelier, the show rented the armory on Barre Street. The newspaper reported that they had a week-long engagement.
Often, the show was at a local drug store. In Rutland, they plied their trade at Abraham’s in November 1909. The entertainment was promoted in the Rutland Herald: “Everybody is invited to the interesting exhibit at Abraham’s Drug Store. The demonstration goes on all day and evening for a week or so. Trial bottles of Kickapoo Sagwa will be presented free to everybody who calls, provided they desire to make a test of Sagwa as an appetizer, as a medicine which creates a natural hunger. The Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company believes that medicine composed of roots, barks, twigs, leaves, seeds and berries are the most beneficial because they assist Nature in the right way.”
The recipe, according to a purveyor of the medicine did actually include roots and herbs. But he did not disclose that it also contained prodigious amounts of alcohol.
The Kickapoo Medicine show set up shop at the State Fair in Rutland. In 1915, an unexpected side effect was reported in the Rutland Herald.
“A queer incident occurred on the grounds in the afternoon. H.H. Gilmore of Ira who suffers from rheumatism, patronized the Kickapoo Indian who sells ‘Snake Bite’ oil. The liquid was rubbed generously on Mr. Gilmore’s back. Under the hot sun, the man’s skin began to blister, and his suffering became so intense that an ambulance was summoned and he was taken to Rutland hospital where he spent the night.”
Occasionally, the medicine show was welcomed with less than open arms.
In Northfield, an unruly group of Norwich University cadets disrupted a performance at the local concert hall. The Daily Journal noted, “the students, who considered it a fake, conspired to put it out of business.” Detonating a stink bomb, the students rushed from the hall and the two ringleaders were arrested.
The U.S. Congress passed the Food and Drug Act in 1906, after which there was a precipitous decline in patent medicines and, consequently, medicine shows.
When the law went into effect, a shipment of Kickapoo Sagwa was seized, tested and the company fined for mislabeling its products. Eventually, the medicine shows and the pitchmen went the way of the lamplighter and the buggy whip.
Paul Heller is a writer and historian who lives in Barre.
