Fort Whoop-Up - "Bug Juice" and Other Names

"Bug Juice" and Other Names

A lot of folklore has grown up around the concept of the various forms of liquor traded in the west with the First Nations peoples. The recipes of those liquors exist mainly in the realm of folk tales, and still require some research and interpretation to bring rationality to the Whoop-Up story. But the naming of those specious and spirituous concoctions has a little more scholarship.

"Whoop-Up wallop" is a fairly self-explanatory name relating to the immediate sensations caused by the alcohol. "Fire water" refers to a testing of the proof of the alcohol – literally whether the product could be lit on fire. Another appellation is "forty rod" – said to have derived by the distance the imbiber could be expected to walk (40 rods, or 440 yards) before the intoxicating effects took over to impair his mobility.

But one of the names is "bug juice" – a term that appears on the surface to just as ribald as any other. But there is a background to the name with roots in 19th century religious, colonial and racial divisions.

In 1863, an expedition from Fort Benton, funded by John J. Healy visited Fort Edmonton with the intention of mining for gold in the North Saskatchewan River. Healy's party was not welcome in the Hudson's Bay territory, and taken as rival traders. But one of the Bay men, carpenter William Gladstone, seemed to enjoy the company of the Americans, who helped him build a cabin. Gladstone had no objection to a return of the favor to his new neighbors: "I got into my new house some time in December. The miners brought over some Montana bug juice with them and we had a gay time at the house-warming." Gladstone remarked about "another big blow-out at New Year's (1864) ... exciting enough while it lasted, I can tell you." When the Americans left for home in the spring, Gladstone came with them, and eventually was the chief architect and carpenter in charge of Fort Whoop-Up.

When Alf Hamilton and J.J. Healy did come to establish their trade in 1869, they were allowed by the US government to cross the Blackfeet Reservation in northern Montana, and "take with them a party of from 20 to 30 men and six wagons loaded with supplies provided there is no spirituous liquors in the wagons except a small quantity which may be taken safely for medicinal purposes."

Fort Benton historian Joel Overholser wrote the "medicinal liquor was probably sufficient to provide alcohol rubdowns for all of the men of the expedition." Healy said that the liquor on that first trip was not designed so much to trade as an item of barter, than as a "lubricant" of the trade – gifts to tribal leaders to ensure their business. "We took up 50 gallons of alcohol, not so much for the value of the goods it would bring in, as thereby to secure the Indian trade."

But liquor definitely was a commodity of trade between Whoop-Up and the Blackfoot people, as they had long been introduced to the substances by the Hudson's Bay and the American Fur Companies. The Bloods and Piegan knew what whisky was, and wanted access to that bug juice.

The word bug has a derivation, that in its eventual evolution as a word in everyday lexicon, as slang for an insect (most often the fly), a pest, a covert monitoring device or a technological defect. The word has a derivation from the term Beelzebub. In ancient Israel, Ba‘al Zebûb translates from ancient Hebrew as 'Lord of Zebûb', referring to a place called Zebûb, "a high place" that may refer to Heaven, or the city of Ekron, in Canaan. In Arabic, the name translates directly as Lord of the Flies. That creates the tie to the insect.

In Christianity, the name begins to appear in Biblical times, in the books of Mark, Matthew and Luke, as "the Prince of Demons" or another name for the personification of Satan, Lucifer or the Devil. Beelzebub also appears in the Testament of Solomon, and moves on into literature of the muddle ages including appearing in John Milton's Paradise Lost and John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress. He appears in other works as one of the Seven Deadly Sins (either pride or gluttony, depending on the work) or as the prince of false gods. Eventually, British writer William Golding returns to the original Arabic term for his 1954 allegorical novel Lord of the Flies on the devolution of culture into barbarism.

With the era of the witch hunts, Beelzebub becomes the whipping boy of religious extremism, blamed for demonic possession. During the execution by burning of the priest Urbain Grandier in Loudun, France, witnesses noted the appearance of a fly – said to be there to snatch the priest's soul. The tale spread, and the fervour brought Beelzebub to North America, where the witch-hunting Cotton Mather was the unseen villain of the Salem Witch Trials. Somewhere along the way, the identification with the flies, led Beelzebub to became simplified to "Bug".

The reputation of the fly as a pest and carrier of disease did not help. Neither did its association with Greco-Roman mythology, in which the sorceress Circe treated flies as special wards. These ancient myths were what Cotton Mather and subsequent religious leaders would refer to as "pagan religions". The association carried on through the next two generations, as biblically literate, and literal Americans expanded into the West and territories of the continent's First Nations.

Those old traditions, practices and prejudices came with the early trappers up the Missouri with the fur trade and that brings us to the world of the Piegan. The earth spirituality of the Blackfoot was not something that newcomers raised in the Catholic/Protestant traditions of the church would immediately understand, or want to. As such, the world of Nappi, was lumped into the world of the pagan or the godless, which to the newcomers might just as well mean the world of the devil, or Satan. Or Beelzebub – Bug.

According to Bernard DeVoto, in Across the Wide Missouri, trappers often referred to the Blackfoot as "Bugs Boys". DeVoto confirmed that the term derived from the trapper Joe Meek who called them "Beelzebub Boys" or "sons of the Devil." That soon devolved into "Bub's Boys" and finally corrupted to merely "Bugs' Boys", in derision of their spirituality.