Perry Davis Pain Killer

chained_bear commented on the word Perry Davis Pain Killer

"In the mid-1920s, Alaskans most commonly used alcohol-filled thermometers, which were often handmade and unreliable. During the Klondike rush, one popular pioneer trader named Jack McQuesten set outside his popular trading post four bottles, placed in the order in which they froze: quicksilver, whiskey, kerosene, and Perry Davis Pain Killer. Pioneers said that when the Perry Davis Pain Killer froze, it indicated a minimum of minus 75 degrees. Instructions for the painkiller were said to warn a traveler not to move away from the fire when the product had frozen."

--Gay Salisbury and Laney Salisbury, The Cruelest Miles: The Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race against an Epidemic (NY and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 2003), 139n

January 24, 2017

chained_bear commented on the word Perry Davis Pain Killer

"'... a man starting on a journey began with a smile at frozen quicksilver, still went at whiskey, hesitated at the kerosene, and dived back into his cabin when the Pain-Killer lay down,' Arthur Walden wrote in his memoirs, A Dog Puncher on the Yukon."

--Polly Evans, Mad Dogs and an Englishwoman: Travels with Sled Dogs in Canada's Frozen North (NY: Bantam Dell, 2008), 135

January 25, 2017

chained_bear commented on the word Perry Davis Pain Killer

"Up there," continued Eli, "when the weather gets really cold, we use Perry Davis's pain killer as a thermometer. Mercury freezes at about 39, but it's got to get 72 below zero before the pain killer congeals. Then it's cold some."

The Sunday Star, Muncie, Indiana, March 17, 1907. P. 21

January 31, 2017