The Snuff Brush

by Douglas Fodge



If you ever dipped snuff or chewed tobacco and gotten sick as a result, then you probably never again had a desire to use the stuff. Years after the following event happened I tried both, got violently ill to my stomach and never again had a desire to use either of these forms of tobacco. Unfortunately, this wasn’t always the case with other members of my family, as the following tale shows.

Smokeless tobacco was available in two forms: chewing tobacco and snuff. The distinguishing differences between the two were texture and particle size. Chewing tobacco was either stringy or compressed into a block or plug, almost always moist, and often contained chocolate or vanilla flavoring. In the old days, flavors were added sparingly to most snuff. Snuff was sold as a finely ground, dry powder once available in 1 or 4.65 ounce containers. Both forms of smokeless tobacco required mixing with saliva. Chewing tobacco needed to be chewed, hence the name, to release the stimulating chemicals. All together hundreds of these chemicals were present, but tobacco was commonly known for the presence of nicotine, a very addictive substance.

Women who lived in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries were raised in a time when many young women, especially those in the southern USA, wished to experience the pleasures of tobacco like the men. Men often used snuff, chewing tobacco and also smoked – on occasion all at the same time! I recall in my teen years seeing a man using all three, and he removed only the cigarette to take a drink of water. I do not recall observing many women smoking cigarettes, but it was common to see elderly ladies using snuff. In rural Northeast Texas, this habit was not confined to race, nor gender, but it appeared to flourish mostly in white women. A large number of elderly women in my family used snuff, but most were deceased before I was born.

My grandmother, 1872 – 1960, was about 5’ 10” and had a full head of long blond hair. She was about 70 when I was born so I recall being entertained by an elderly lady. We called our grandmother by a shortened version of Grandma, Ma (pronounced phonetically in rural Texan as Maw). Ma was the most famous snuff dipper in our family, at least in my eyes. Like most grandmothers Ma had developed considerable skills in dealing with boys after rearing 3 of her own and handling my older brothers and numerous cousins. She applied this skill in getting me to help with her snuff use. This was my very first job and my first exposure to snuff dipping, a grand experience for a pre-schooler. The following event certainly had its impact on me as I recall it with surprising clarity nearly six decades later.

Ma used snuff by placing a pinch of the powdery stuff between her lower lip and gum, a habit absolutely approved of by me. Saliva rapidly mixed with the dry powder that led to the development of a paste. This was quite different than sniffing the dry powder into your nose, as practiced more widely in European countries. Once thoroughly mixed, the release and absorption of considerable quantities of nicotine occurred. Although the speed of release and absorption were fast, it was nowhere near the rate desired by the users. The lining of the mouth, mucosal cells and tissue, were the absorption sites for the snuff rather than the tongue. The snuff user could typically use a dip much longer than it took to smoke a cigarette, as there was an abundance of nicotine in the product.

Apparently, by swishing the paste in your mouth you could hasten the absorption process. The downside of swishing was that it could be messy and socially unappealing. Although it wasn’t common with Ma, I did observe a brown liquid dribbling out of the corners of several elderly ladies’ mouths, including at least one aunt. The liquor would run in rivulets down their chins. This was not very pleasant to observe, especially near dinnertime. In spite of the risk of developing an unacceptable appearance, Ma wanted a faster “hit” from the snuff, so the dipping process was altered. I am certain this desire was fueled by the exhiliration a snuff dipper felt when the extra nicotine contacted the nervous system. To change the process, local snuff dippers had developed a special tool, a brush, although the advent of the tool may not have been local at all. The brush was used to spread snuff carefully over the mucous membranes lining the inside of the mouth, and particularly the lower lip.

Long before my involvement, the one tool that was universally acclaimed, at least by the local ladies, was a brush fashioned from a small branch of an elm tree. Here my memory blurs a bit. There were plenty of trees in the area, including oak, persimmon, hickory, and other hardwood species, but a brush developed from an elm twig was what I remember as being most desirable. Of course, this was prior to the wide availability of plastic or plentiful Wal-Marts where brushes of all sizes and types could be had for a pittance.

Remarkably, the characteristics of elm trees that caused so many problems for woodsmen were the very qualities that snuff dippers needed – a little stick that wouldn’t break and splinter and that could be frayed on one end to make a small brush. I suppose that any of the other species would have worked also, but I was given specific instructions as to the kind of tree to seek.

My assignment in this adventure was to scamper up an elm tree and fetch a few small twigs (4 to 5 inches long and up to ¼ inch in diameter) from the uppermost limbs. I suspect that all the male youth of my family had preceded me with similar requests. Apparently, the best brushes were made from new growth at the end of branches in the springtime. Naturally, few 70-year-old women were likely to climb trees to get at the newly sprouted twigs. It was with great glee that I did this job.

I also got to watch as Ma prepared the twig for use. To prepare it, the bark was removed with her thumbnail from about 0.5 inch on one end of the twig, and then she rived the exposed wood with thumbnail and teeth. This process resulted in the development of a brush with fine, resilient fibers. The entire process of preparing the brush took no more than a few minutes. I was highly motivated by Ma, and I was very dedicated to being successful as a direct reflection of the importance she gave to it. Unfortunately the snuff brush and Ma are not present in my life, but in my earliest recollections the snuff brush was a high priority item to make, and it was worth its weight in gold, at least to a post-depression era kid with only one grandmother to please.

The Cucumber Patch

by Douglas Fodge



It could have been due to the honey bee stings, having to traipse though the sand burrs, or perhaps the crack-of-dawn start, but something soured me on work in our cucumber patch. However, whether or not I enjoyed it mattered not one whit. Every farm boy learns at an early age, when there is work to be done everyone pitches in, like it or not. Of course my recollected experience of picking cucumbers is viewed through a haze of six decades of fuzzy memory.

If I ever knew why we had a cucumber patch, the reason escapes me now. I do recall that we raised tomatoes for a while, and I seem to remember that the auction barn where we could sell the tomatoes closed permanently. On the other hand, Mr. Landers Guest managed to keep a pickling company going, albeit quite a small affair, and I suppose we raised cucumbers because we could sell them. If ever there was a clearer message about manufacturing and sales, I can’t imagine it – you know the adage: manufacturing without sales equals a large scrap heap!

We started preparing the cucumber patch about the time winter ended in Northeast Texas – roughly mid March. This schedule just happened to yield cucumbers to pick about the time that the school year ended. How the patch was prepped reflects Texas farm life during the late 1940s, as the implements of the trade were work horse, plows, hoes and a wagon, and of course, lots of backbreaking work for the humans who were involved.

I can recall older members of my family catching our big, black workhorse, Maude (Old Maude was her affectionate name, but this was sometimes prefaced by more profound adjectives that cannot be repeated here) and then putting a harness on her. Both activities were often time consuming as Maude resided in a 10-acre plot and in spite of her immense weight and feet roughly the size of large dinner plates, she could run like the wind and had the demeanor to do just that. But eventually, Maude was caught, harnessed and hooked to a turning plow, the implement that conquered the west. I was too young and small to do anything except to stay out of the way. Mostly I have a mental picture of my older brother, Robert, and my father, Russ, heading out to plow the ground for the cucumbers. They may have loaded the plow into the back of our two-wheel wagon, but I seem to recall they let Maude drag it to wherever plowing was to be done. The patch was perhaps 1/3 mile from the house in a direct-line-of-sight, so it didn’t take very long for Maude to pull the plow to the field and with her huge size, plowing was a piece of cake. I can only speculate but it seems that no more than a couple hours were required to till the small acreage. I’ve always been amazed that she didn’t pull someone’s arm loose from the shoulder socket, but I do not recall anyone being injured during this process. I always suspected Maude factored into Robert’s thought processes when a few years later he made a conscious decision to become a mechanical engineer.

The cucumber patch was situated on top of the highest point on our property, a site that was very fertile and overlooked a small valley and creek that was about 50 feet lower in elevation. This hilltop had apparently been an encampment for many generations of Native Americans as each year we found stone arrowheads and spear points while walking in the furrows. Once plowing began, my job, if one can call it a job, was to walk along in the freshly plowed, deep furrows and collect the exposed, fat red worms. These made good bait for all the perch in the local ponds, and since I liked both the fishing and to eat the fish, I was judicious in this effort and often filled a half-pound coffee can in a short time. Given that our father was an avid hunter and fisherman, such activities almost always took higher priority than walking behind some plow horse – this may be the largest understatement of my entire life!

Shortly after the initial plowing was done, I seem to recall that the turning plow was exchanged for a harrow, another type of plow. Ours was a spring tooth harrow made of steel or iron and probably manufactured in the 1920s, if not before. It covered a surface area roughly the size of a double bed and had about 40 teeth projecting down about 10 inches from the iron frame. If one placed a heavy weight on top of the harrow the teeth dug deeply into the furrows. Sometimes the heavy weight might have been a human. The harrow was used to level the ground for the cucumber plants as they grew as vines and needed a flat surface to ease the picking process. Once the deeply grooved, plowed ground was flattened somewhat into beds, then it was time to apply fertilizer. The latter was accomplished by hand. I have a vivid memory of Robert walking in the furrows and scattering fertilizer by hand while carrying a sack of the stuff on his shoulder. No one ever said it was easy being a farm boy.

In April, out came the hoes to reshape the beds, chop the weeds and then plant the cucumber seeds. The combination of the fertile soil, fertilizer and plenty of spring rains led in mid-May to a plot of land covered by cucumber vines growing all over the place. Almost immediately after school days were behind us we set about picking cucumbers every day from mid-May almost into August, all dependent on the amount of rains. We could have skipped days, but the cucumbers grew rapidly and we got paid more per pound for the little than the big ones. Generally, we picked cukes from ½ of the patch each day, alternating between halves daily. I suppose this schedule kept us in the money, so to speak.

Again I was too young and small to be much use for picking as I often overlooked the small cucumbers. Secondary to my poor picking skills level was an overriding concern about getting stung by the ever-present honeybees searching vigorously for nectar among the numerous blossoms. So I was assigned other jobs, and this is where the misery started. My main job was to follow behind the others (mostly my other brother, Mack and my mother, Edith) and gather the big cucumbers that they threw into the middling between the rows. These were culls, and the buyers didn’t have any use for them. But, we had a use for them. It seems that hogs like to eat large cucumbers, and we had a hog pen complete with nondescript hogs in it. I don’t know for certain, but I suspect that the hogs secretly conspired with my mother to get me assigned to this job. But I couldn’t communicate with the hogs, and I never thought to ask my mother if she could. Anyway, I went barefoot then and between the hog pen and the cucumber patch lay the thickest growth of sand burr plants known to man, at least to this man. Somehow or the other my brain wasn’t working too well then as I could have walked to the end of the cucumber patch and then along a path (the other side of the triangle) to the hog pen and avoided all the sand burrs. But I never was very good in geometry, and I walked the hypotenuse to the hog pen and hated every minute of it. The mere thought of having to pick those sand burrs out of the bottom of my feet hurts even as I write this.

The only saving feature for this operation was getting to hear the wild squealing of the hogs as I approached with my bucket of culls. In fact, I often suspect they delighted about as much in watching my misery in dealing with the sand burrs as they did in eating the culls because the squealing started long before I got to their pen. However, I enjoyed throwing the culls one-at-a-time over the fence to the hogs and watching to see which one got the most to eat. I guess I inherited this tendency from one of my grandfathers. Grandpa Vickers apparently loved to place bets on natural events with his neighbors. It seems kinda’ antiquated these days, but Grandpa and a neighbor would take watermelon rinds to a hog pen and place bets on which hog would respond first to a thrown watermelon rind.

After a bout or two with sand burrs and a few stings from the honeybees, my complaining, whimpering and whining led my mother to suggest that I put my head down low to the ground, pick up all the culls and not look up until she told me to. She always told me that when I was given the word to look up we would be all the way on the other side of the patch. However, the pain from sand burrs is awful, and her motivating speeches weren’t enough to eliminate all those pinpricks from the sand burrs. This is where my other job during the cucumber picking time became of utmost importance.

In late spring and early summer, wild mulberry trees would sprout forth with an abundance of berries, and we had a couple of these trees growing near the cucumber patch. Later in life I suspected that being sent to pick some mulberries was a “make work” plan concocted by my mother to get some respite from all my whimpering and complaining. Also, undoubtedly the hogs had informed her than they couldn’t eat another bite of cucumbers. Mack often asked me to bring him some mulberries, but to this day I do not recall ever doing a very good job fulfilling that request. This failure was probably due to youthful greed on my part and a perceived need to compete with the Mockingbirds who also happened to like mulberries. Mack suffered as a result, but since he pocketed most of the money from the sale of the cucumbers, I didn’t feel too badly about slighting him. Such was the life of a young farm boy during the spring and summertime in Red River County, Texas.

Maude: Our Workhorse

by Douglas Fodge



If you never used the rump of a very large horse as a diving board, then you missed one of life’s more interesting events, especially when it involved swimming in a snake-infested stock pond or creek. Trying to clamber aboard – sans stairs or ladder – a water-soaked shuffling horse was difficult enough, but just when you were perched and positioned to launch into the stream, the horse moved, and you either fell into the stream or on the ground. One such animal on our farm was Maude, our workhorse. Maude served all kinds of other functions for our family in addition to carrying about a ½ dozen of us to the swimming hole and serving as a diving board.

The reader would have had to see Maude’s huge feet and matching size, but take it from me; Maude was the biggest animal around. I don’t know for certain Daddy’s objective when he traded for her, but he sure got more than he bargained for. We were told that Maude had been working in the logging woods for some time, but we never confirmed this rumor. In any event, she had huge, muscled hindquarters. The distance from the ground to her front shoulder nearly equaled the distance from her tail to her front shoulders; she had a rectangular box shape. Maude had straight legs, and after studying physics I know they transferred the power in her hindquarters straight to the ground. We never weighed Maude, but she had to weigh about 1,500 lbs. Additionally, Maude had the personality of a high-powered racehorse, and Mack (brother) often rode her Indian-style (no saddle would have fit her girth) on the weekend. When any of Mack’s friends wanted to race their little cow ponies, particularly over rough terrain for a ¼ mile or so, he was quick to oblige. Maude was also eager to race, and Mack’s friends got more action than they imagined possible. I don’t know if she ever lost a race, except perhaps on short flat raceways, and even then it was neck-and-neck to the finish line.

The trouble most family members had with Maude resulted from the fact that she was poorly suited for the jobs we had. We had plowing and lightweight wagon pulling primarily, but these jobs were nothing to a logging horse, and Maude didn’t cotton too much to doing them. Maude was a bonafide logging horse, and not in the least bit docile. Her demeanor probably worked quite well for logging, but we needed a horse to pull a plow. Instead, we had a high-strung, unusually big, strong horse that was born to do heavy lifting. When presented with a plow to pull, by comparison to a log, Maude toyed with anyone holding the reins, usually my brother, Robert or Daddy. In modern times, animal psychologists would propose that Maude was insulted by trivial pursuits such as farm labor.

Now that I’ve had time to think about it, I know what kind of animal Daddy should have looked for to pull a plow – an easy-going horse with a gentle personality. A horse that would not be easily upset by clanging noises or general antagonism would have been perfect for plowing our small farm. It was certainly the case that we didn’t need an animal with giant feet, implements of destruction that could smash plants to smithereens in a small garden site, and it would have helped if the animal possessed long legs to step over, rather than on, things in front of them. Maude had pretty long legs, but the hooves on the ends of her legs were the problem; a good guess would put her hooves at 10 to 12 inches in diameter. Maude’s hooves had never been shod with iron shoes. In contrast, most farm horses possessed slightly developed hindquarters and had slender legs and small hooves.

When you need to pull some log out of the woods you needed an animal, or animals, that would rise to intense athletic challenges and wouldn’t quit on the job. In case the reader never thought about it, a logging horse needed to pull a log through brush with limbs and briars flapping their flanks and face. Moreover the log had to be pulled over or around standing and fallen trees, and this took skill and strength for both the horse and driver. Since the loggers worked year round, weather could be a factor or the ground would be marshy and slick. The terrain could be hilly and almost never was a wide-open space. Maude qualified as a logging horse on all fronts, and she never quite learned how to be a gentle soul at plowing time. Unfortunately we had more plowing than logging, and Maude was a challenge for the entire family – hard to catch and harder to handle once caught.

In case you were wondering why power was needed to pull a log out of the woods, hardwoods weigh from 37-45 lbs/ft3, and a 16’ red oak log roughly 1.2 feet in diameter might have weighed @ 750 lbs. I don’t know for certain, but in a logging camp the latter would probably be considered a small log. However, this was the typical size and type we cut for firewood, and it was blunt cut on both ends – not exactly amenable to dragging it through the brush. Normally, we didn’t have Maude pull a log very far, if at all. If she did pull a log, it was a short distance to a clearing where we had set up to saw and split the log into firewood. Afterwards, the firewood was loaded on our two-wheeled wagon, and if we stacked it thoroughly, the load was worthy of Maude’s ability. This only happened a few times each year. I suspect that Maude enjoyed the challenge of pulling the load of firewood, but her joy was unmatched by the joy of those holding her reins. Compare the latter task to pulling a sharpened steel turning plow weighing perhaps 150 lbs through a depth of 12 inches in garden soil, and you can quickly understand that pulling a plow was child’s play for such a horse.

Somewhere toward the end of Maude’s stay with our family, Maude mated with a local rodeo stud horse, and the female offspring had some qualities of both parents – long legs, muscled body and a feisty spirit. I don’t know whether it was the combination of having to deal with Maude and her colt or whether it was the decreasing interest in farming, but one Saturday when I was about 8 Daddy hitched Maude to the two-wheel cart, leashed the overgrown colt to the back, and went to town. In town, he traded the entire assembly for a little retired rodeo pony with the oxymoronic name of Tarzan. Tarzan had a hard time pulling a dead limb to the house, much less a load of firewood, and he couldn’t run fast for more than 50 yards. We never even bothered to try plowing with Tarzan. Things were never the same around the Fodge’s household after the ignominious disposal of Maude.