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Updated: June 19, 2025
The war ended and John Appleman was free again; but he had a personal acquaintance with a friend of the Confederate Major John Edwards of Missouri, the right-hand man of the daring General Joe Shelby.
With his experience and decadence came, necessarily, an expertness of judgment as to the quality of that which he drank. He could tell good liquor from bad, the young from the old. It came that, being thoughtful and imaginative, John Appleman decided that he, at least, should drink better liquor than did tipplers in general.
A great lens, in the first place, is a matter of finding a suitable crystal. Large and flawless crystals are not common, as you may possibly know. Such a crystal has recently been found, and is now owned by Mr. Appleman. It takes about four or five years to grind and polish it. Most of the polishing, as you may or may not know, is done by the hand smoothing it with the thumb and forefinger.
In 1856 John married a pretty girl of the neighborhood. A year later a child was born to them, a daughter. This is the brief history of John Appleman up to the time when he began to develop his real personality. He was a contented personage in his early married life.
And so the years went by, and John Appleman, dealing out groceries in Guaymas for such brief hours of the day as people bought things, his partner relieving him half the time, hungered more with each passing year to see southeastern Michigan, and with each passing year became more alarmed over the prospect of facing the partner of his joys and sorrows there.
The musky odors of the coast in blooming time often oppressed him. The fragrance of the tropic blossom had never become sweeter in his nostrils than the breath of northern pines. He wanted to go home, but feared to do so. Mrs. Appleman was assuming monumental proportions in his estimation.
He would buy it in quantity and let it age upon his farm, and so with each replenishing of the jug from his private store would come an increase in quality derived from greater age, until in time each daily tipple would be an absorption of something so smooth and potent that immediate subsequent existence would be a thing desirable in all ways. And John Appleman had a plan.
Then he hitched a horse to a buggy and drove to town drove to the same distillery where he had bought those barrels in the latter 'fifties. The distiller of that time had passed away and his son reigned in his stead the youth who had decorated the barrels with the red chalk-marks. To him, now a keen, middle-aged business man, Appleman told his story.
Appleman, chasing a woodchuck one day, had seen him scurry into a hole in this rocky surface, and prying away with a handspike had unloosed a small mass of rock and discovered a cave; not much of a cave, it is true, but one of at least twenty feet in length and eight or ten in breadth, and full six feet in height. This discovery occurred a year or two before John felt the grip of any stimulant.
The Appleman barn and house stood perhaps three hundred yards apart, near the crest of what was hardly worthy the name of hill, which sloped downward into what they called the "flats," through which the creek ran. The barn stood very close to uncleared woodland, and the banks ending the woodland showed a decidedly rocky exterior.
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