Content advisory: This yarn includes lawful pursuit, liquor charges, rustic superstition, and Shatagee Woods rumor, where every jug has cousins and every bog road grows longer after breakfast.
Brainardville. Every thing quiet up here, though the woods below Big Bog appear to have had a little stir of their own.—We learn from the papers that the internal revenue officers have lately made a descent into the North Woods after Moses St. Germain, a guide and hunter, who has for some time been suspected of selling liquor without the needful license, and also of keeping a still where the law does not commonly go unless well shod and provided with a dinner pail.
On Monday, the 22d ult., Agent Hale and Deputy Collector Haddock left Utica for Ogdensburg, where they were joined by Gen. Bradley Winslow, of Watertown, and Deputy United States Marshal Higgison, of Utica. The party then proceeded to Potsdam, procured a conveyance, and went thirty miles into the woods along the banks of the Racket river, which is a road that looks shorter on paper than it does to a horse. At Munger’s Hotel, at the foot of Big Bog, twenty-two miles from Potsdam, they halted, and on Wednesday, taking buckboards, pushed on to the head of the Bog.
There they found St. Germain’s house, but not the man. His wife informed them that he had gone on a hunt and would return in the afternoon. She supposed the gentlemen were sportsmen seeking a guide, and was anxious they should secure her husband’s services. In this she was not far wrong, for they had come a good distance to have his company, though perhaps not precisely in the manner she expected. About half past three St. Germain returned, when Deputy Marshal Higgison arrested him, and the whole party went back to Ogdensburg, the hunter having become game in a fashion not set down in the game laws.
On Thursday he was brought before United States Commissioner Soper, where he confessed to having sold liquor without a license, but claimed the liquor belonged to another man. This is a convenient sort of ownership, if it can be made to stand, but we have noticed that whiskey, like a stray pig, is apt to belong to the person in whose shed it is found. He was held to appear at the Auburn term of the United States district court, on the third Tuesday in November.
St. Germain is described as the “Outlaw of the North Woods,” which is a large title for any man to carry through a swamp, and we trust it does not chafe him. His neighbors are said to be afraid of him and unwilling to testify, lest he do them sorcery. This is a serious charge in a country where a cow may fail in her milk, a gun miss fire, or a man’s axe glance from a hemlock knot, and every such misfortune require an explanation. It is also charged that he has violated the game laws repeatedly, but the constables, like many hunters after deer, have found sign enough and proof too little.
There is an old flavor to the name. “Mose Sangimo,” as many pronounce St. Germain, was one of the guides made known by Hammond in his book, Hills, Lakes and Forest Streams, a volume of sketches from the Shatagee Woods, published some thirty years since, and one of the first books to throw a sort of romance over our Adirondack wilderness. Old Sangimo then lived in a log cabin on the east shore of Chazy Lake, near the western line of Clinton county, and guided Mr. Hammond in his excursions. It was the braying of Old Sangimo’s donkey, if we remember the account rightly, that once disturbed a gentlemanly reverie in the forest, where the small birds and lesser animals were conducting themselves with more decorum than the donkey.
After Clinton prison was located at Dannemora, within five miles of the old cabin, clearings and settlements pressed in upon Sangimo’s domain until he moved farther back into the woods. The present Moses St. Germain, we are informed, is a son of the old guide, and appears to be, in common phrase, a chip of the old block, for the elder man had the reputation of being a liquor smuggler for more than forty years. Some families leave silver spoons, some leave good farms, and some leave only a trail through the balsams which the officers may follow with care.
We do not know how much of this wild talk is true, nor how much has grown in the telling, as stories will grow when they have swamp water at the roots. But it is certain that the law has gone into Big Bog and come out with a prisoner, which is more than some men can do with both boots. Let those who traffic without license take warning. The wilderness is wide, but not quite wide enough to hide a jug forever.
BELZORAM.
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What mysteries of Chateaugay Lake haunt you?