The saber went in just below his collarbone and came out the other side. That is what we know. The rest is reconstructed from regimental records and the memory of men who were there in a small fight at a place called Columbus, Georgia, on the 16th of April in the year 1865.
The man on the receiving end of the saber was 33 years old. He was a lieutenant colonel of the Third Georgia Cavalry. His name was John Stith Pemberton.
He was a doctor by training, a pharmacist by trade, and a soldier by accident of birth like most men in the Confederate Army by the spring of that year. The war was already over and he did not know it. Robert E.
Lee had surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse on the 9th of April. Word had not yet reached the western part of Georgia. The Union cavalry under General James H.
Wilson was riding through the state burning what was left of the Confederate war machine and on the 16th of April they rode into Columbus. The men of the Third Georgia formed up to stop them. They could not.
The fight lasted about an hour. The Union won. Pemberton was on the wrong end of a Union cavalry saber during the close-in work and when the fight was over, he was lying in the street with a hole in his chest and his men were carrying him to a building that had been a dry goods store the week before and was a field hospital that night.
The army surgeon who treated him gave him morphine. Morphine was what they gave you in the spring of 1865. There was nothing else.
The morphine took the pain away and the morphine put him to sleep and the morphine kept him alive through the worst of the next week. And by the time Pemberton was well enough to walk again, he could not stop taking it. He did not know yet that he could not stop taking it.
He would not know for another year or two or three. The men who came home from the war by the hundreds of thousands with morphine in their pockets and morphine in their saddlebags called it the soldiers’ disease and it killed more of them in the slow way that disease kills men than the war itself had. By the time he understood what had happened to him, John Stith Pemberton was a morphine addict for life and the rest of his life would be a search for a way out.
He did not find one, but what he did in the looking was the most consumed beverage on the face of the earth. That is one half of this story. The other half is happening at the same time, 800 miles to the west in a place called Tombstone, Arizona, where another southern man with a wound that would not heal was also looking for a way out.
His name was John Henry Holliday. They called him Doc. He was a dentist, a pistolero, a tuberculosis patient, and a regular customer at the same chain of American pharmacies that John Pemberton was supplying.
He coughed blood every morning of his adult life. He carried, in his coat pocket, a small flat tin of white powder he had bought across the counter at a drugstore for 10 cents, the same way a man today might buy a pack of gum. The powder was cocaine.
It was legal. It was for sale in every town in the country. It was in his teeth-pulling kit.
It was in the cough syrup of his housekeeper. It was in the candy his neighbors’ children licked on Sunday afternoons. It was in the wine some men drank with dinner.
By the year 1885, it would be in a brown bottle of fizzy syrup that John Pemberton had invented in his lab in Atlanta to try to get himself off morphine. And a year after that, when Georgia outlawed alcohol, it would be in the same syrup with sugar swapped in for the wine, and the name on the label would be Coca-Cola. Two men, one 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔, one nation that did not yet understand what it had welcomed in.
That is the story I want to tell you tonight.
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Now, to understand what happened to John Pemberton and to Doc Holliday and to the country they both lived in, you have to understand something about the leaf the powder came from and how a plant that had been chewed by Andean Indians for 4,000 years ended up in a brown bottle in a Georgia pharmacy. The plant is called Erythroxylum coca. It grows on the eastern slopes of the Andes in what is now Peru and Bolivia and Colombia at altitudes between 1,500 and 6,000 ft above the sea.
It looks ordinary, a small bush, green leaves about the size of a man’s thumbnail. The Inca chewed those leaves for centuries before any white man had heard of them. They chewed them to fight the thin air at high altitude, which is real.
They chewed them to suppress hunger on long marches, which is also real. They chewed them in religious ceremonies, and they buried them in the mouths of their dead, and archaeologists in Peru have dug up mummies 4,000 years old with coca leaves still tucked in their cheeks. When the Spanish conquistadors came in the 1500s, they tried at first to ban the leaf.
They thought it was demonic. Then they realized that the Indians they had enslaved in the silver mines worked harder and longer on the leaf than off it. The Spanish reversed themselves.
They legalized the leaf. They taxed it. They took a cut of every harvest.
For 300 years after that, coca leaves were a piece of South American local economy that almost no one in Europe paid attention to. That changed in the 1850s. A German chemist named Friedrich Gaedcke, working in a small laboratory in the city of Stettin in Prussia, was the first man to successfully isolate the active compound from the coca leaf in a pure crystalline form.
The year was 1855. He called this substance erythroxyline. He published a short paper in a German chemistry journal.
Almost no one read it. Four years later in 1859, a doctoral student at the University of Göttingen named Albert Niemann picked up where Gaedcke had left off. Niemann was 26 years old.
He had received a chest of coca leaves brought back from South America by an Austrian scientific expedition, and he refined the extraction process until he had a substance that was clean enough to work with. He renamed it. He called it cocaine.
He published his thesis in 1860. Albert Niemann died 1 year later in 1861 at the age of 28. He died, by the most accepted account, from inhaling the fumes of another substance he was studying, mustard gas, which he was the first man to synthesize in a laboratory and which would later 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 more soldiers on the Western Front than any other chemical weapon in human history.
The young man who had given cocaine its name and the young man who had given the world mustard gas were the same young man. He was dead by 28 and almost no one outside a few German chemistry departments knew his name. But the work he had done outlived him.
By the 1870s, European medical journals were full of papers about the new substance called cocaine. Doctors were experimenting with it as a local anesthetic. Eye surgeons in Vienna were dripping cocaine solution onto the cornea and finding that they could operate on a conscious patient who felt no pain.
Dentists were applying it to the gums and pulling teeth that would have required half a bottle of whiskey to pull the year before. The 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔 seemed, to the medical men of the 1870s and the 1880s, like the miracle of the age. By 1884, the most famous neurologist in the German-speaking world, a young man named Sigmund Freud, was prescribing cocaine to his patients for depression, for fatigue, for sexual dysfunction, and for morphine addiction.
Freud took it himself. He took it for years. He wrote a paper in 1884 called Uber Coca, in which he praised the 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔 as a cure for almost every nervous complaint known to medicine.
And he sent reprints of the paper to medical colleagues across Europe and across the Atlantic. Freud would later, when his closest friend died of cocaine addiction at the age of 45, regret almost everything he had written in that paper. But by then, the genie was out of the bottle.
In Detroit, Michigan, a pharmaceutical company called Parke, Davis and Company began to manufacture cocaine commercially in 1885. They sold it in every form a man could imagine. Cocaine cigarettes, eight to a pack.
Cocaine inhalers for hay fever. Cocaine cordials for the nerves. Cocaine cigars for the throat.
Cocaine in crystalline powder form for any use the doctor saw fit. Cocaine in pre-filled hypodermic syringes for injection, sold complete with the needle. The company’s marketing copy, which is preserved in their advertisements from the 1880s, claimed that cocaine could supply the place of food, make the coward brave, the silent eloquent, and render the sufferer insensitive to pain.
In a country full of veterans of the Civil War, men who had come home with wounds that would not heal and morphine addictions that would not lift, those words sold. They sold by the wagonload. They sold from coast to coast.
And the man who sold the most of them in the South was a Confederate veteran in Atlanta, Georgia, who had been on the wrong end of a Union cavalry saber at the age of 33. John Pemberton had moved to Atlanta from Columbus, Georgia in 1870. He brought with him his wife, Ann Eliza, and his son Charles, and the lingering wound in his chest, and the morphine habit that had grown up around the wound like ivy around a wall.
He had read every European paper on cocaine he could get his hands on. He believed, as Freud and a hundred other doctors of the 1870s believed, that cocaine was the cure for morphine addiction. It was not.
Cocaine was simply the second addiction layered on top of the first, but Pemberton did not know that yet. Almost no one in 1875 knew that yet. He set up his own laboratory in a small building behind his pharmacy on Marietta Street, and he started experimenting.
He took as his model a product that was already a sensation in Europe, a coca wine called Vin Mariani. A Corsican chemist named Angelo Mariani had patented the formula in Paris in 1863. It was Bordeaux wine infused with coca leaves.
Each ounce contained about 6 mg of cocaine. Mariani sold his wine across Europe and exported it to the United States, where he sold a stronger version, because the American market wanted stronger versions of everything. Vin Mariani was endorsed by Pope Leo the 13th, who carried a hip flask of it on his person and gave Angelo Mariani a gold medal of appreciation.
The wine was endorsed by Queen Victoria. It was endorsed by Thomas Edison, by Jules Verne, by President Ulysses S. Grant, by the actress Sarah Bernhardt.
It was, in the 1880s, the most heavily endorsed product in the world. Pemberton wanted to make an American version. In 1884, he succeeded.
He called it Pemberton’s French Wine Coca. The label promised relief from headaches, neurasthenia, melancholia, and impotence. He advertised it in the newspapers.
He sold it to a million customers. He was in Atlanta by the autumn of 1885 a wealthy man for the first time in his life. And then, in November of 1885, the city of Atlanta in Fulton County passed a prohibition ordinance.
Atlanta went dry. Pemberton’s French Wine Coca, because it contained wine, was illegal to sell within the city limits. He had two choices.
He could move the business to a wet county and start over, or he could take the wine out of the formula. He took the wine out. He spent the early months of 1886 in his laboratory behind the pharmacy on Marietta Street working with cola nut extract instead of wine, sweetening the mixture with cane sugar syrup, balancing the flavor against the bitterness of the coca leaf.
By May of 1886, he had a syrup that, when mixed one part to five with carbonated water at the soda fountain of the local pharmacy, produced a beverage that customers said tasted strange, but not unpleasant, and that left them feeling refreshed and alert. His bookkeeper, a man named Frank Robinson, was the one who suggested the name. The drink contained two main exotic ingredients: cocaine from the South American coca leaf, and caffeine from the West African cola nut.
Robinson took the two words and stretched them together with a hyphen and a curl of Spencerian script. Coca-Cola. He wrote it out by hand for the label, in his own penmanship, in the spring of 1886.
That handwriting is still on the side of every can of Coca-Cola sold anywhere in the world today, 140 years later. It has never been redrawn. It is the handwriting of a Confederate veteran’s bookkeeper, written on a piece of paper in an Atlanta pharmacy in the year that the last federal troops were still chasing Geronimo in the desert of New Mexico.
The first batch of Coca-Cola was sold at Jacob’s Pharmacy in Atlanta on the 8th of May, 1886. They sold nine drinks that day at 5 cents a piece. Total receipts, 45 cents.
The first year of the business, Pemberton spent more on advertising than he made in revenue. He lost money. He kept losing money.
And his health by the end of 1886 was failing. The morphine had been with him for 21 years by then. The cocaine he was using to manage the morphine was not helping.
He had stomach cancer that nobody had yet diagnosed. He was in pain almost all the time. He was running out of money.
He began to sell off pieces of the Coca Cola business to pay his debts. He sold a third of his shares to one man. He sold a third to another.
He sold the rest in pieces to a Methodist druggist named Asa Griggs Candler. John Stith Pemberton died on the 16th of August, 1888 in Atlanta, Georgia. He was 57 years old.
His wife was beside him. He died poor. He died still addicted to morphine.
He died believing his beverage might one day make a living for his son, Charles, but that he himself would never see it. The morning of his funeral, every pharmacy in Atlanta closed for the hour of the service. His coffin was carried by men who had ridden with him in the Third Georgia in 1865, by men who had bought his cocaine wine in the 1880s, and by men who had drunk his new dry county syrup at the fountain of Jacob’s Pharmacy.
He was buried in Linwood Cemetery in Columbus, Georgia near the field where the saber had gone through him. Two years after his death, Asa Candler bought out the remaining shares in the Coca Cola company for a total price of $2,300. Within 10 years, Candler was a millionaire.
Within 20 years, Coca Cola was being sold in every state in the Union and in 14 foreign countries. Within 50 years, Coca Cola had become the most consumed beverage on Earth after water itself. The cocaine stayed in the formula until 1903.
That year, under pressure from the rising public concern about cocaine addiction, the Coca Cola company began using what they called spent coca leaves. Leaves from which most of the cocaine had been chemically removed before the syrup was made. Some small trace of the alkaloid remained for another generation.
By the 1920s, the chemistry was clean. There is no cocaine in Coca-Cola today, and there has not been for 100 years. But there is, in the very name of the product, the ghost of a Confederate veteran’s morphine addiction.
The ghost of a green leaf chewed by Andean miners 4,000 years ago, and the ghost of a young German chemist who died at 28 of his own experiments. And the ghost of a saber that went through one man’s chest on a street in Columbus, Georgia, in April of 1865. 800 miles west of Atlanta, in the same year that John Pemberton was inventing his new dry county syrup, another southern man was running out of time.
John Henry Holliday had been born in Griffin, Georgia, in 1851, 20 years younger than Pemberton. His father had been a Confederate officer. His mother had died of tuberculosis when he was 15, and the disease that had killed her had been waiting in his own lungs all along, the way that disease waits in the lungs of the children of consumptives.
He did not know it then. He grew up tall and slim and quiet and well-educated. He went to dental school in Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery, and he graduated in 1872 at the age of 20.
He came home to Georgia. He set up a dental practice in Atlanta, on Whitehall Street, less than half a mile from where John Pemberton’s pharmacy was operating. The two men almost certainly knew each other in the way that the professional men of a small southern city knew each other in the 1870s.
Pemberton was a pharmacist. Holliday was a dentist. They moved in the same circles.
They drank at the same hotels. They almost certainly purchased supplies from each other, because dentists in the 1870s bought their painkillers from pharmacists. The painkiller of choice for a dental procedure in 1872 was a topical solution of cocaine hydrochloride applied directly to the gum.
Pemberton sold it. Holliday used it. Within a year of starting his practice, John Henry Holliday began to cough.
He coughed at first occasionally, then often, then constantly. He coughed at his patients while he was working on their teeth. He coughed in the middle of the night.
He woke up with blood on his pillow. A doctor in Atlanta examined him and gave him the diagnosis he had been expecting and had been refusing to ask for, pulmonary tuberculosis, consumption, the disease that had killed his mother and was now going to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 him. The doctor told him to go west.
The medical theory of the time held that dry desert air was beneficial to consumptives. The doctor told him to get out of the Georgia humidity, out of the river bottom climate of Atlanta, out into the high dry country of Texas or New Mexico or Colorado, and to live what was left of his life there. The doctor wrote a prescription for a regular supply of laudanum and cocaine to manage the cough and the pain and the fever that came with the consumption.
He left Georgia in 1873. He was 22 years old. He had been a dentist for 1 year.
He would never come home. He went first to Dallas, Texas, where he tried to keep practicing dentistry, but the coughing made his patients nervous and his practice failed. He started gambling for a living.
He wasn’t, it turned out, very good at gambling. He moved west and south and west again, Fort Griffin, Dodge City, Las Vegas, New Mexico, Trinidad, Colorado, Tombstone, Arizona. In every town he went to, he carried with him the same flat tin of white powder, refilled at the local pharmacy, and the same small brown bottle of laudanum tincture.
The cocaine, applied to the back of the throat with a small brush, suppressed the cough. The laudanum, taken in measured drops, suppressed the pain. The whiskey, which he drank by the bottle, suppressed everything else.
By the time Doc Holliday rode into Tombstone in the autumn of 1880, 2 years before the gunfight at the OK Corral, he was a man held together by chemistry. He weighed about 120 lb on a 6-ft frame. His face was the color of paper.
He coughed up blood every morning into a handkerchief that he then folded carefully and put in his pocket. He kept the powder in a flat silver tin in his coat. He kept the laudanum in a brown bottle in his bag.
He had, by the calculations of the Tombstone historians, perhaps 4 or 5 years left to live, and he knew it, and he had known it for almost a decade. The cocaine was sold to him at every pharmacy he stopped at, the way it was sold to every consumptive in the American West. By 1880, the Parke, Davis Company in Detroit was selling, in the form of mail-order catalogs sent to every drugstore in the country, an entire product line aimed at exactly Doc Holliday’s condition.
Coca leaf cigarettes for the cough, coca cordials for the energy, pure cocaine powder for the local pain. The drugstore in Tombstone where Doc Holliday filled his prescriptions, the same drugstore where every other consumptive in Southern Arizona Territory filled his prescriptions, was stocked with the Parke, Davis catalog. The gunfight at the OK Corral happened on the 26th of October, 1881.
30 seconds of shooting. Three men dead. Doc Holliday wounded in the hip.
Wyatt Earp untouched. The vendetta ride that followed killed more men over the next few months. By the end of 1882, Doc Holliday was back in Colorado, hunted by warrants out of Arizona, drifting from town to town, gambling, coughing, drinking, taking the white powder, taking the brown drops, holding himself together with one hand while the other hand played cards.
He died at the Hotel Glenwood in Glenwood Springs, Colorado on the 8th of November, 1887. He was 36 years old. He had come to Glenwood Springs because the hot mineral baths there were said to help consumptives.
They had not helped him. He died in bed. The legend has it that he looked down at his bare feet, which he had expected for his entire adult life would never be bare at the moment of death because he had always expected to die with his boots on, and that he said the words, “This is funny.”
And then he was gone. He died 1 year before John Pemberton died in Atlanta. Pemberton in his bed on August 16th, 1888.
Holliday in his bed on November 8th, 1887. Two Southern men, born 20 years apart, raised in the same state, educated in the same professional class, both addicted to the same 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔, both buying their supply from the same network of pharmacies, both killed in the end by other things, but both held to the end by the white powder that the country had decided was medicine. They never met.
There is no record they ever met. Pemberton was making the syrup that would carry the trace of coca leaf into the bloodstream of America for the next 40 years. Holliday was running it through his own body day after day in the brushed on solution that let him keep coughing without choking on his own lung.
The same 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔, the same nation, the same year. Two men who would have recognized each other if they had ever sat down at the same table as men who carried the same companion. The country woke up slowly.
The first state to regulate cocaine was Colorado in 1897, 10 years after Doc Holliday died there. The state had a mining industry that depended on labor, and the labor was beginning to fall apart on cocaine the way the labor in the Andes had been falling apart on coca leaf for centuries. And the mine owners went to the legislature and asked for a law.
Georgia banned the over-the-counter sale of cocaine in 1902. California required a prescription in 1907. New York followed in 1913.
In 1914, the United States Congress passed the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act, the first federal law in American history to control the distribution of opium and cocaine. It was signed by President Woodrow Wilson on the 17th of December, 1914. From that day forward, cocaine could no longer be bought at the corner drugstore by a man with a dollar and a cough.
It became, for the first time, a controlled substance. The shelves emptied. The catalogs were withdrawn.
The little flat tins disappeared. It had been, from Albert Niemann’s first published thesis in 1860 to the Harrison Act in 1914, 54 years. 54 years from the moment cocaine had a name in a scientific journal in Germany to the moment the United States government decided the experiment had to stop.
54 years is one human lifetime. A man born the year Niemann named the substance could have lived to see the Harrison Act passed, and many men did. John Pemberton did not.
He died in 1888, 26 years before the federal government caught up to him. Doc Holliday did not. He died in 1887, 27 years before the law would have made his medicine illegal.
They were both, in the calculation of the country they lived in, ordinary men. A pharmacist, a dentist, a veteran, a drifter. They were not criminals.
They were not even, by the standards of their own time, unusual. There were thousands of men like Pemberton in the South after the war. There were thousands of men like Holliday all across the Western frontier.
The country had handed them the powder and the syringe and the bottle, and the country had told them it was good for them, and they had believed it because their doctors had believed it, and their doctors had believed it because the medical journals had told them so, and the medical journals had told them so because no one yet knew any better. By the time the country figured it out, both of these men, and 100,000 other men just like them, were already in the ground. That is the story.
That is what happened. A leaf was chewed for 4,000 years in the Andes. A young German chemist took it apart in a laboratory in Göttingen and gave it a name and then died of his own work at 28.
The substance traveled across an ocean. It was put into wine in Paris, into syrup in Atlanta, into candy in New York, into the saddlebags of a tubercular dentist in Tombstone, into the bedside drawer of a Confederate veteran in Columbus, Georgia. It made one of those men poor and killed him.
It made the other one famous and killed him. It made one company in Detroit very wealthy. It made one company in Atlanta wealthier than any company in the history of the world up to that point.
And it took 54 years from the moment it had a name to the moment a government finally said no. The bottle of Coca-Cola in your refrigerator tonight is a direct descendant of John Pemberton’s effort to cure his own morphine addiction in the spring of 1886. The thing in it that gives it the kick today is caffeine, the same caffeine you find in coffee.
The cocaine is gone. The cola nut is gone, too. There is sugar, and there is water, and there is carbon dioxide, and there is a flavor profile that has been protected as the most closely guarded trade secret in American business for over a century.
But the curl of the script on the side of the can, the white letters on the red field, is still the handwriting of Frank Robinson, the bookkeeper in Atlanta in 1886, who wrote out a name for a drink his boss had invented in a back room, trying to get off morphine with a hole in his chest that had never properly closed since the spring of 1865. They were not heroes. They were not villains.
They were people. A Confederate cavalry officer with a saber wound and a habit, a Georgia dentist coughing his way west with a tin in his pocket, a young German chemist who would never see 30, a country that wanted more than it understood the cost of wanting, a way to feel less tired and less sad and less afraid, and that believed for 54 years that it had found one. It had not.
The country went looking for the answer to the next thing instead, and the next thing, and the next, and it’s still looking. But, for a while in the second half of the 19th century in the small towns of the American West, in the small pharmacies of the American South, there was a white powder that promised to do for tired men what nothing else had ever done before. And a great many tired men reached for it, and a great many of them in the end did not let go in time.
The bell above the door of Jacob’s pharmacy in Atlanta rang nine times on the 8th of May, 1886. Nine customers, 45 cents in the till, a pharmacist in the back dying slowly of cancer and morphine and 20 years of unfinished war. Outside on Whitehall Street, the street lights were coming on.
Somewhere west, in a hotel room in Glenwood Springs that he had not yet checked into, Doc Holliday had 1 year and 6 months left to live, and he did not know it. And he would have laughed if you had told him, and he would have reached for the small flat tin in his coat pocket, and he would have brushed a little more of the powder under the back of his throat, and the cough for another hour would have eased.