Jan. 7, 2010 - A lot of what we can say about Clark Stanley or Charlie Bigelow would come off today as a left-handed compliment or even a downright insult. Where's the glory in being history's best-known snake oil salesman, or even the original Drug Store Cowboy? Stanley and Bigelow have been called both of those things, and worse.
Stanley is probably history's best-known snake oil salesman. He claimed to be from Abilene, but then again, he claimed a lot of things, including a birthday that would have him living in Abilene for many years prior to the city's founding.
The term "snake oil" is used now to describe anything that promises nothing short of a miracle but delivers little or nothing at all. When Clark Stanley was openly and proudly selling the stuff, there were no laws requiring medicine makers to list the ingredients of their products. This little loophole was convenient for snake oil salesmen like Stanley and Bigelow.
In his own curious autobiography, published in 1897, Stanley wrote that he first "went up the (Chisholm) Trail when he was 14 and lived the cowboy life for the next 11 years before he made a life-altering trip to Arizona. There, he claims to have fallen in with the Moki Pueblo tribe where he learned many ancient secrets, including the miraculous healing power of snake oil.
Clark first sold his new product in Abilene where it was such a popular item that he began manufacturing it in bulk as Stanley's Snake Oil Liniment. He hit the road, hawking his product in every town along the way. He appeared at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, where he was recruited to Providence, R.I., to produce the magic medicine in a factory.
The end came in 1917, when the government seized a shipment of Stanley's Snake Oil Liniment and ran tests to see what was in it, with chemistry having come a long way since Stanley first went into business. His snake oil was found to contain some beef fat, kerosene, a little bit of red pepper, turpentine and camphor. Noticeably absent from the list of ingredients was anything derived from a snake, a fact all the more troubling because Stanley claimed to slaughter the reptiles by the thousands back home in Texas in order to produce the stuff.
Another Texan who made a good living in the snake oil business was a man known to his neighbors in Bee County as Charlie Bigelow. A man by the name of Phil Grant, aka Doctor Yellowstone, came through Bee County one day selling herbal remedies. Charley joined the doctor right then and there and went on the road with him. He learned a few magic tricks, let his hair grow and became the traveling medicine man, Doctor Lone Star.
With partner John Healy, who manufactured a liniment known as King of Pain, Bigelow formed the Texas Therapeutic Road Show and took the act on the road. In today's terms, Bigelow and Healy's show would be considered a multi-media event -- dog and pony shows, minstrel skits, singing and dancing were all used to lure the public to its Kickapoo medicines.
Bigelow and Healy exploited members of the Kickapoo, Sagwa and Pawnee tribes to lend credence to their products, claiming that the Indians had used these natural cures for many centuries with great results. They planted shills in the audience who were paid to buy and sample the product and then proclaim that they were immediately cured - a miracle!
Druggist Wayne Bethard, who wrote the book "Lotions, Potions and Deadly Elixirs" about the history of frontier medicine, writes that some of the medicines actually worked to one degree or another on superficial aches and pains. "As for their ability to 'cure' such things as consumption and frostbite, well that was a different story," he added.
It's interesting to note that science, which revealed the deceptions at the heart of the snake oil business, keeps taking new looks at snake oils, and especially snake venom, which has been studied as part of an effort to clone proteins to slow the growth of human tumors. Certain old-timers believe that a good snakebite, if not fatal, can cure a lot of diseases the victim might have at the time of the bite. "It works like chemotherapy," they say.
For some of us, that sounds like a case of the cure being worse than the disease.
