July 2, 2026

S2 Ep6: Buck Duke: The Boy Who Refused to Stay Small

S2 Ep6: Buck Duke: The Boy Who Refused to Stay Small
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Season 2

He was born in the red dust of a defeated South with no money, no name, and no empire waiting for him — just a single leaf of cured tobacco in a boy's hand. By the time James Buchanan "Buck" Duke was finished, he had built and lost one of the most total monopolies in American history, then turned around and built a second empire out of falling water and electricity, then poured his fortune into hospitals and a university that still carries his name.

In this episode of the MR. HANSoN Podcast, we trace the pattern beneath the man: how Buck Duke saw tobacco not as a product but as a system, how he weaponized a machine every other tobacco man laughed at, how the government broke his trust in 1911 — and how he had already moved on to the rivers. From the Bonsack cigarette machine to the American Tobacco Company, from the antitrust dissolution to the dams of the Catawba and the birth of Duke Energy, to The Duke Endowment and Duke University. A story of vision, domination, ruthlessness, and reinvention.

The boy who refused to stay small — and changed the future of an entire region.

EPISODE CHAPTERS

  • Cold Open — A leaf in a boy's hand
  • Act One — The Boy in the Dust
  • Act Two — The Family Trade
  • Act Three — The Question That Changed Everything
  • Act Four — The Machine Most Men Ignored
  • Act Five — The Weapon
  • Act Six — The Art of Elimination
  • Act Seven — The Height of Power
  • Act Eight — The Whispers
  • Act Nine — The Fall That Wasn't a Fall
  • Act Ten — The River and the Future
  • Act Eleven — The Magnet in the Water
  • Act Twelve — The Quiet Transformation
  • Act Thirteen — The Man Behind the Money
  • Act Fourteen — The Cost of Greatness
  • Act Fifteen — The Pattern
  • Final Act — The Rest of the Story


Buck Duke, James Buchanan Duke, American Tobacco Company, tobacco trust, Bonsack cigarette machine, Washington Duke, W. Duke Sons and Company, Duke Energy, Southern Power Company, Catawba River hydroelectric, Duke Endowment, Duke University, Trinity College, antitrust 1911, Sherman Antitrust Act, monopoly history, Gilded Age industrialists, North Carolina history, tobacco history, business empire, narrative history podcast, biography podcast, MR HANSoN Podcast, Empire Builders, robber barons, reinvention, business strategy history

The MR. HANSoN Podcast is a production of Fuzzy Life Studios, distributed by Fuzzy Life Entertainment.

Written, produced, and hosted by MR. HANSoN.

Season 2 — "Empire Builders."

Website: www.MRHANSoNpodcast.com

Q: Who was Buck Duke? A: James Buchanan "Buck" Duke (1856–1925) was a North Carolina industrialist who built the American Tobacco Company into a near-total cigarette monopoly, then created a second empire in hydroelectric power that became Duke Energy. He founded The Duke Endowment and transformed Trinity College into Duke University.

Q: How did Buck Duke build his tobacco monopoly? A: He bet early on the Bonsack cigarette rolling machine, mass-producing cigarettes far cheaper than hand-rollers could. He then undercut prices, bought out weakened rivals, controlled distribution, and merged the largest manufacturers into the American Tobacco Company in 1890.

Q: What happened to the American Tobacco Company? A: In 1911, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled it an illegal monopoly under the Sherman Antitrust Act — the same year it broke up Standard Oil — and ordered it dismantled. By then Duke had already shifted his focus to electric power.

Q: How is Buck Duke connected to Duke Energy and Duke University? A: Duke co-founded the Southern Power Company, building hydroelectric dams on Carolina rivers; it grew into Duke Energy. In 1924 he created The Duke Endowment, which transformed Trinity College in Durham into Duke University.

Q: Was Buck Duke a good man or a ruthless one? A: Both. He funded hospitals, child care, and education at enormous scale, while building that fortune through monopoly tactics that crushed competitors. The philanthropy and the ruthlessness are inseparable parts of the same story.

WEBVTT

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Buck Duke, the Boy who refused to stay. Small picture,

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a boy's hand, small and dirt under the nails. Callous

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is already forming where callous is probably shouldn't be on

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a kid, and resting in an open palm, a single

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leaf of cured tobacco. It's brown as old leather, veined,

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like a map of rivers that no one has drawn.

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Yet.

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It crackles with his fingers well, they close around it,

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and it gives off that smell, sweet and bitter, all

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at once, earth and smoke and money, though the boy

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is far too poor to know what money means. Yet

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he is eight years old.

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Maybe nine.

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He's standing in the red dust of world North Carolina,

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in a country that has just finished tearing itself apart

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at the seams.

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The war is over, the South has lost.

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The fields are burned and scorched, the banks are empty.

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The men who marched away have come home broken, or

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having come home at all. There's almost nothing left, almost nothing.

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There is dirt, there are barns, and there's tobacco. But

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the boy isn't crying. The boy is just looking and

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studying belief, turning it and reading it, asking a simple

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question that nobody else is asking, not even his father

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or his neighbors, not the broken men limping around from

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the surrender. The boy is asking how many of these

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are the air in the world and who controls them?

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His name is James Buchanan Duke, but the world would

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come to know him as Buck. And before he has finished,

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that same hand, the one holding a leaf in the dirt, well,

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He's going to reach out and grab a river. It

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will grab the lightning inside that river, and it will

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put an entire region kicking and sparking into the future.

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This is the story of Buck, the boy who refused

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to stay.

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Small Lister Answer podcast.

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The Boy in the dust. Now, he wasn't born into power.

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There were no marble floors, no legacy waiting in a vault,

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no empire with his name carved above the door. There

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were just dirt roads. There was the smell of cured

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tobacco hanging thick in humid, hot air. And there was

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a family that had just watched everything had owned vanished

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in four years. James Buchanan Duke came into the world

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on December twenty third, eighteen fifty six. I'm a small

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farm outside of Durham, North Carolina, He was the youngest,

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the last child of a tobacco man who would soon

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march off the war that he didn't start and that

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he couldn't win.

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Now.

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As a child, Buck did not stand out the way

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that history books liked to pretend that he did. He

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wasn't the brightest boy in any schoolroom. He wasn't groomed

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for greatness by tutors and titans of industry. He was,

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by every measure imaginable, just ordinary. But you see, there's

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something underneath ordinary, this quiet intensity, a stillness that made

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grown men slightly uneasy, without even knowing why. Now, while

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other boys ran the fields and then chased the long afternoons,

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Buck watched. And while he was watching, he studied, and

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he listened not just to people, though he listened to

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them too, more closely than they ever realized. You see,

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he was listening to patterns. He was listening to the

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way that money moved, to the way some men ended

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each growing season a little richer and some a little poor,

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to the invisible machinery that decided which was which. Even

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as a boy, Buck Duke understood that some things other

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people don't. He understood in his bones that most people

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spend their whole lives refusing to try to learn. He

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learned that the world isn't fair man. The world wasn't slow.

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It was a game, and it had rules. It had

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winners and losers, and the rules could be read. He

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intended to learn all of them, and then he intended

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to win.

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So you have to.

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Understand that there was no reason to believe that he would.

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There were ten thousand boys just like him scattered across

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the ruined South that year. All of them were poor,

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all of them were dreaming. All of them were holding

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some small thing in their hands and imagining a little more.

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But history doesn't remember those ten thousand boys. It remembers

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this one. And the question is why, And the answer

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isn't luck, though luck would play its part. The answer

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is that while the other boys dreamed, this boy watched learn.

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And there is a universe of difference between a child

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who wishes the world were different than a child who

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studies exactly how the world works. The family trade Buck's

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father was a man named Washington Duke, not a titan

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and not a king, just a farmer trying to claw

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living out of the dirt. And the dirt didn't want

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to give it. When the Civil War ended, Washington Duke

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came home to almost it's nothing. The story goes that

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he walked much of the way back to the farm,

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and that when he arrived he had a few warm

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coins in a barn with a small store of cured

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leaf tobacco that the soldiers hadn't found. Now that leaf

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was the seed of everything. Washington Duke did the only

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thing he knew to do. He took the tobacco and

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beat it, and he packed it, and he loaded it

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onto a wagon, and then went out across the ravage

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countryside to sell it by hand, pouch by pouch, to

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anyone who still had a coin to spend on a

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small comfort item in a very hard time. He called

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his brand crow Bono public coat for the public good.

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You see, it was survival. It wasn't scale.

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The work was relentless and small leaves harvested by hand

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and dried with care in the long barn, sold in

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tiny batches at the mercy of a market that could

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crush a man in a single bad season.

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This was the world.

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Buck Duke grew up inside the world of the family trade.

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Now he worked at as a boy.

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He knew the weight of the leaf in the heart

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of the curing barns, and the long bone tired hours

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of a business measured in pennies. He knew what it

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was to load a wagon before dawn and count coins

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by lamplight that never quite added up to enough. W

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Duke Sons and Company, a name stamped on a cloth pouch,

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a small family concern, and a sea of small family concerns,

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none of them dreaming they were anything more than that.

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His father looked at tobacco when he saw a product,

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a good, honest product sold by good, honest.

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Hard work. But buck.

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Buck looked at the very same leaf and saw something

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that his father didn't. He didn't see a product at all.

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He saw a system, a system that was small only

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because no one had yet dared to make it enormous.

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His father was asking how do we make better tobacco?

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Buck was asking something else, how do we sell more

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of it to more people faster than anyone else. That

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single difference in the question, that's where his empire begins,

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the question that changed everything. See, there is a kind

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of man who improves the thing in front of him, and.

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Then there's a rare, more dangerous kind of man.

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Who looks at the thing in front of him and

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asks what it would become if it were torn loose

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from every limit that's holding it back. Now, Buck, he

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was the second kind. By the time he was a

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young man helping to run the family business, he had

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already grasped the idea that would define his entire life.

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The product wasn't the point. The product was almost incidental.

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What mattered was the system that moved the product, and

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how it was made, how it was priced, how it

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was placed in front of human hands, how fast, how cheap,

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and how everywhere. Now, most of his competitors were craftsmen

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at heart. They wanted to make the finest chewing tobacco,

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the smoothest pipe blind. They took pride in the quality

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of the leaf and Buck. Somehow, he didn't care about

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the pride is he He cared about flow. He looked

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at the entire the farm and the factory, and the wagon,

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the shelf, even down to the customer, and he saw

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it the way that an engineer looks.

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At a river.

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Well, where does it pool, where does it slow? Where

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is it wasting itself? And where if you place the

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right structure at the right point, could you take all

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of that wild, scattered energy and force it through a

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single channel that you, and only you control. He decided

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to stop competing on the leaf and to start competing

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on the system.

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He would later.

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Say, in his very blunt way, that he had simply

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made up his mind to be the biggest, not the best,

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the biggest. There's a big coldness in saying that, a

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little bit of honesty too. He was not pretending that

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work was about craft, or pride or the love of

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fine tobacco.

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He told you exactly what it was about.

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It was about scale and about domination, being the one

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left standing when all the other chaos had died down.

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That was a quiet decision. Nobody announced it knowing headline

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marked the day. But it was the moment that tobacco

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family from the dust of Durham began, very slowly to

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become something that the world had never seen before, the

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machine that most men ignored. In the early eighteen eighties,

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a machine appeared. It was strange, kind of ungainly. Most

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of the men in tobacco trade took one look at

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it and laughed and turned away. It was a cigarette

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rowing machine, the invention of a young man named James Bonzik,

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and it could do something that seemed almost unnatural. A

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skilled worker rolling cigarettes by hand could produce a few

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each minute, good.

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Work on a speed.

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The whole industry was built on the rhythm of those

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human hands. The Bondsic machine could produce them by the

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hundreds per minute, without rest and without complaint, without wages

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that rose or hands that tired. It should have been

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the most exciting thing in the industry that they had

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ever seen. Instead, most tobacco men just recoiled from it

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like a poisonous snake.

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You see, it was too new.

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The cigarettes it made were inconsistent at first, and the

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machine broke down. It was a gamble, and the trade

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was full of careful men who had survived by not gambling.

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Cigarettes themselves were a small, almost disreputable corner of the market.

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The real money was in chewing tobacco, and tobacco cigarettes

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were for dandies and city boys. Why why would you

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pour your future into a fragile machine that mass produced

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a product no serious man took seriously. At least that

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was the consensus. Then Buck Duke. He listened, he heard

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the consensus, but he just did what he wanted and

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did the exact opposite the weapon.

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You see.

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Where other men saw a risky machine, just novelty, buck

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Duke saw weapon. He understood with a clarity that bordered cold,

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what the machine actually was. It was not a faster

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way to roll cigarettes. It was a way to make

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so many cigarettes so cheaply that no human howard competitor

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could ever survive the comparison. So he didn't merely adopt

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the Bonziic machine. He built his entire strategy around it.

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He negotiated hard for the rights to use it, and

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harder still to make sure he was paying less to

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use it than anyone else could. He bet the future

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of the business on a contraption that his rivals were

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00:15:24.320 --> 00:15:30.919
laughing at, And then the factories began to hum. Production

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00:15:31.159 --> 00:15:37.320
didn't rise, it exploded. Buck Duke was suddenly making more

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00:15:37.399 --> 00:15:41.039
cigarettes than the market even knew that it wanted. He

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00:15:41.080 --> 00:15:44.399
had a supply that dwarfed the demand, and most men

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00:15:44.480 --> 00:15:47.759
who would have panicked at that a warehouse full of

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00:15:47.840 --> 00:15:53.759
product and no one to buy it. That's how businesses die.

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00:15:53.919 --> 00:15:57.480
Bac Buck had already thought three moves ahead. If he

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00:15:57.519 --> 00:16:00.559
had more supply than there was demand, then he would

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00:16:00.559 --> 00:16:05.519
simply go out and manufacture the demand. He poured money

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00:16:05.519 --> 00:16:08.720
into advertising at a scale that the industry had never

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00:16:08.799 --> 00:16:12.480
ever witnessed. He put his cigarettes on his cards and

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00:16:12.559 --> 00:16:16.559
shop windows, in front of soldiers and travelers and workingmen

225
00:16:16.679 --> 00:16:20.639
in every corner of the country. He drove the price down,

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00:16:20.799 --> 00:16:24.440
the visibility up, until his product was not just available,

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00:16:25.159 --> 00:16:30.440
his product was unavoidable. He sent his cigarettes around the world.

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00:16:31.159 --> 00:16:34.200
He chased markets other men ever bothered to even try

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00:16:34.240 --> 00:16:38.200
to imagine, in cities whose names his competitors couldn't have

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00:16:38.200 --> 00:16:42.799
found on a map. He understood that the machine had

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00:16:43.320 --> 00:16:47.480
untethered him from the old limits, that a man who

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00:16:47.480 --> 00:16:50.919
could make almost unlimited supply had no reason to think

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00:16:51.360 --> 00:16:56.240
in small geographies any longer. The machine made the cigarettes,

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00:16:57.039 --> 00:17:01.720
the advertising made the customers, and Buck Duke stood at

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the center of it, holding both ends of a system

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00:17:05.000 --> 00:17:07.839
that was beginning to spin faster than anyone in the

237
00:17:07.880 --> 00:17:13.200
trade could even follow, a system that, with every passing month,

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00:17:13.319 --> 00:17:15.720
looked less like a business and more like a force

239
00:17:15.759 --> 00:17:28.759
of nature, the art of elimination. Now, this is where

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00:17:28.759 --> 00:17:32.160
the story stops being the story of a clever businessman,

241
00:17:33.200 --> 00:17:37.920
and it becomes the story of something much harder. Because

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00:17:38.000 --> 00:17:40.880
Buck Duke did not want to win the cigarette market.

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00:17:40.920 --> 00:17:42.000
He wanted to own it.

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00:17:43.119 --> 00:17:46.240
And there is an enormous difference between those two ambitions,

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00:17:46.559 --> 00:17:50.519
and most people just simply never grasp it. To win

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00:17:50.680 --> 00:17:53.480
is to come out ahead of your rivals. To own

247
00:17:53.599 --> 00:17:57.200
is to make sure eventually that you have no rivals

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00:17:57.240 --> 00:18:01.680
at all. So Buck went to work eliminating them. He

249
00:18:01.920 --> 00:18:06.160
undercut prices until his competitors, who couldn't match his machine

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00:18:06.240 --> 00:18:10.960
driven costs, began to simply suffocate. He could afford to

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00:18:10.960 --> 00:18:13.599
sell the loss longer than they could afford to stay alive.

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00:18:15.559 --> 00:18:18.960
It really wasn't a fair fight, but that's the point

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00:18:19.000 --> 00:18:19.680
it was never.

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00:18:19.519 --> 00:18:19.920
Meant to be.

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00:18:22.279 --> 00:18:26.319
When arrival weekend, Buck didn't celebrate. He just bought them.

256
00:18:26.839 --> 00:18:30.319
He absorbed their factories and their brands, their customers before

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00:18:30.839 --> 00:18:34.720
they could recover or try to regroup. He moved down

258
00:18:34.799 --> 00:18:38.000
the distribution channels and the wagons and the wholesalers and

259
00:18:38.039 --> 00:18:43.160
the shelves themselves, and them toward his own supply intel.

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00:18:43.200 --> 00:18:46.000
A shopkeeper who wanted to sell tobacco at an all

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00:18:46.119 --> 00:18:53.799
increasingly rate, and to sell Bucks Duke's tobacco. This wasn't luck,

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00:18:53.839 --> 00:18:55.920
and it wasn't merely ambition.

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00:18:56.960 --> 00:18:58.119
It was method.

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00:18:58.680 --> 00:19:03.880
It was patient and repeatable, almost mechanical, and method for

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00:19:04.000 --> 00:19:08.599
taking a fractured industry of independent men in grinding on it,

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00:19:09.039 --> 00:19:13.720
piece by piece into a single thing that he held,

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00:19:14.799 --> 00:19:20.720
and he held completely. Compete, or rather refuse to compete,

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00:19:21.079 --> 00:19:26.279
eliminate was the strategy. He controlled the shelves, the supply,

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00:19:26.440 --> 00:19:30.960
and the flow. In eighteen ninety, he pulled the five

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00:19:31.079 --> 00:19:36.440
largest cigarette manufacturers in America into a single combination, and

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00:19:36.480 --> 00:19:40.720
he named it the American Tobacco Company, with Buck Duke

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00:19:40.759 --> 00:19:43.079
at the head. By the time the rest of the

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00:19:43.119 --> 00:19:47.359
world fully understood what was even happening, it was already

274
00:19:47.359 --> 00:19:47.839
too late.

275
00:19:52.799 --> 00:19:57.319
The height of power. By the eighteen nineties.

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00:19:56.960 --> 00:20:00.519
Buck Duke controlled nearly the entire cigarette mark in the

277
00:20:00.680 --> 00:20:06.079
United States. Think about that, A boy from the dirt

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00:20:06.160 --> 00:20:09.759
roads outside Durham, a boy who had stood in red

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00:20:09.920 --> 00:20:13.680
dust with a single leaf in his palm, now held

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00:20:13.880 --> 00:20:17.359
very nearly an entire American industry in his hands.

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He didn't stop at cigarettes.

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00:20:20.559 --> 00:20:25.759
The American Tobacco Company reached outward, swallowing, chewing tobacco and

283
00:20:25.960 --> 00:20:31.000
snuff and cigars pluck the whole sprawling map of the trade.

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00:20:31.720 --> 00:20:34.519
Pulled one piece at a time, into a single empire

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00:20:34.680 --> 00:20:39.400
under a single person's will. It was an extraordinary thing

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00:20:39.400 --> 00:20:43.519
to behold, and it was by now almost impossible to

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00:20:43.519 --> 00:20:47.480
look away from. You see, there's a moment in the

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00:20:47.640 --> 00:20:52.240
life of every single powerful man, that moment when the

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00:20:52.359 --> 00:20:56.039
climbing ends, when he teaches the height that he has

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00:20:56.119 --> 00:21:01.039
spent his whole life reaching for. And the view from

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00:21:01.119 --> 00:21:07.519
up there is magnificent, but it's also dangerous. Buck Duke

292
00:21:07.599 --> 00:21:12.119
had reached that height. He had wealth beyond the imagination.

293
00:21:11.559 --> 00:21:12.599
Of the boy in the dust.

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00:21:13.519 --> 00:21:17.000
He had influence that spilled across industries and into the

295
00:21:17.039 --> 00:21:20.519
lives of millions of people who had never even heard

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00:21:20.559 --> 00:21:26.000
his name. He was, by any measure they age understood,

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00:21:26.920 --> 00:21:29.680
one of the most powerful men in the United States.

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00:21:30.480 --> 00:21:33.759
He had taken a shattered family trade in a defeated

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00:21:33.799 --> 00:21:37.920
region and built it into a colossus that touched nearly

300
00:21:38.039 --> 00:21:40.799
every smoker in the nature, and.

301
00:21:40.759 --> 00:21:42.440
A great many beyond its borders.

302
00:21:43.599 --> 00:21:46.039
And he had done it by building a machine of

303
00:21:46.240 --> 00:21:51.480
commerce so total, so efficient, and so absolute that the

304
00:21:51.519 --> 00:21:56.559
most powerful forces in the country were beginning finally to

305
00:21:56.799 --> 00:22:01.799
turn and look directly at him. From the height was magnificent,

306
00:22:02.680 --> 00:22:05.759
and the men in Washington were climbing up to see it.

307
00:22:05.799 --> 00:22:15.720
Also the whispers. It began, as it always begins, with whispers.

308
00:22:16.920 --> 00:22:20.200
A word passed from a senator to a journalist, to

309
00:22:20.480 --> 00:22:21.839
a courtroom.

310
00:22:21.319 --> 00:22:22.200
And then back again.

311
00:22:24.480 --> 00:22:28.839
A particular word passed from a senator to a journalist,

312
00:22:28.880 --> 00:22:32.319
to a courtroom and back again, A word that had

313
00:22:32.319 --> 00:22:35.640
begun to follow the great combinations.

314
00:22:34.839 --> 00:22:38.519
Of the age, like a shadow of monopoly.

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00:22:39.759 --> 00:22:45.880
The Duke was too large, too dominant, to complete. It

316
00:22:46.039 --> 00:22:50.440
had not just outpaced its rivals, it had erase down.

317
00:22:51.720 --> 00:22:53.400
In a country that liked.

318
00:22:53.200 --> 00:22:57.200
To believe in fair competition did not know what to

319
00:22:57.200 --> 00:23:00.039
make of a man who had quietly made competition in

320
00:23:00.119 --> 00:23:07.720
itself disappear. The complaints grew louder. The newspapers ran their numbers.

321
00:23:08.319 --> 00:23:11.720
Farmers who grew the leaf found themselves with only one.

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00:23:11.559 --> 00:23:14.759
Real buyer, and that buyer set the price.

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00:23:15.839 --> 00:23:19.720
Small manufacturers told their stories of being undercut and then bought,

324
00:23:19.720 --> 00:23:24.960
and then swallowed. The government was watching, and then the

325
00:23:25.000 --> 00:23:31.480
whisper became a roar. Monopoly, unfair control, too much power in.

326
00:23:31.480 --> 00:23:32.839
Too few people's hands.

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00:23:34.200 --> 00:23:38.200
The machine Buck Duke had built, the beautiful, terrible, perfectly

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00:23:38.319 --> 00:23:43.960
engineered machine, had grown too enormous for the government to ignore.

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00:23:45.559 --> 00:23:46.720
The same scale that.

330
00:23:46.720 --> 00:23:49.839
Had made him untouchable in the market had made him

331
00:23:49.880 --> 00:23:56.079
a target everywhere else. The fall that wasn't a fall.

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00:23:57.200 --> 00:24:02.519
When the government finally moved, it moved hard. In nineteen eleven,

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00:24:02.599 --> 00:24:06.519
the same year it broke apart Standard Oil, the Supreme

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00:24:06.599 --> 00:24:09.799
Court of the United States ruled the American Tobacco Company

335
00:24:09.960 --> 00:24:14.400
was an illegal monopoly, and it ordered the empire dismantled.

336
00:24:15.519 --> 00:24:20.440
The trust was broken into pieces. The great combination buck

337
00:24:20.559 --> 00:24:24.880
Duke had spent decades assembling was pulled apart by force

338
00:24:24.920 --> 00:24:29.400
of law. On paper, it looked like the end, the

339
00:24:29.440 --> 00:24:32.559
fall of a titan, the defeat of a man who

340
00:24:32.599 --> 00:24:36.960
had reached too high. And this is the place where

341
00:24:37.079 --> 00:24:40.519
most people tell the story. Would just close the book.

342
00:24:41.440 --> 00:24:47.920
The monopolists undone justice, serve the Empire in ruins. But

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00:24:48.400 --> 00:24:51.160
you see, if you tell it that way, you missed

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00:24:51.160 --> 00:24:56.359
the most important thing about buck Duke. You see, he

345
00:24:56.400 --> 00:25:00.559
didn't lose everything. He lost one system, and he had

346
00:25:00.599 --> 00:25:05.640
already been building another because the entire country had been

347
00:25:05.799 --> 00:25:10.160
busy seeing him as the tobacco guy. While the lawyers

348
00:25:10.200 --> 00:25:13.359
and the senators and the newspapers fixed their eyes on

349
00:25:13.480 --> 00:25:18.039
the empire of the tobacco leaf. Buck Duke had quietly

350
00:25:18.079 --> 00:25:20.960
turned his back on it. He was already looking at

351
00:25:20.960 --> 00:25:25.519
a river. The men who broke the Tobacco Trust thought

352
00:25:25.559 --> 00:25:29.079
they were ending the story of buck Duke. They believed

353
00:25:29.119 --> 00:25:32.279
they had taken his empire and with it, his future.

354
00:25:33.400 --> 00:25:36.720
They had read him as a tobacco man, because that's

355
00:25:36.759 --> 00:25:41.599
all they wanted to see him ass But buck Duke

356
00:25:41.759 --> 00:25:45.519
was never a tobacco man. He was a builder of systems,

357
00:25:45.599 --> 00:25:48.480
and he happened for a time to build them on

358
00:25:48.559 --> 00:25:52.240
a tobacco The leaf had been the vehicle, and the

359
00:25:52.319 --> 00:25:56.240
moment the law took the vehicle away, he simply stepped

360
00:25:56.240 --> 00:25:59.279
into the next vehicle, and one that he had been

361
00:25:59.359 --> 00:26:04.000
quietly as assembling for years. Well, everybody was pointed in

362
00:26:04.039 --> 00:26:11.160
the other direction, the river in the future. At the

363
00:26:11.319 --> 00:26:15.079
turn of the century, electricity was a rumor, a trick,

364
00:26:15.119 --> 00:26:19.359
a novelty, a flickering light, and a rich man's parlor

365
00:26:19.400 --> 00:26:25.160
that went dark as often as it wasn't. It was unreliable,

366
00:26:25.200 --> 00:26:29.160
it was expensive. It was to most sensible people just

367
00:26:29.200 --> 00:26:33.240
a luxury, not a necessity. The world that had run on

368
00:26:33.480 --> 00:26:36.720
muscle and steam and fire for all of human history,

369
00:26:36.759 --> 00:26:41.359
and most men assumed that it always would. Buck Duke

370
00:26:41.440 --> 00:26:45.680
looked at that flickering, unreliable light, and he saw the

371
00:26:45.920 --> 00:26:50.640
entire future. He saw cities that hadn't been built yet,

372
00:26:51.480 --> 00:26:56.920
factories that hadn't been powered yet, a South his self

373
00:26:57.559 --> 00:27:01.319
poor and rural and broken by war, that had never

374
00:27:01.359 --> 00:27:04.799
been industrialized, and that was sitting on the very thing

375
00:27:04.880 --> 00:27:11.599
it needed to change everything. Water falling water, rivers tumbling

376
00:27:11.680 --> 00:27:15.279
down out of the Carolina hills, carrying inside them an

377
00:27:15.319 --> 00:27:18.240
ancient force that no one had yet bothered to capture

378
00:27:18.279 --> 00:27:22.519
at scale. And he asked the question that only he

379
00:27:22.640 --> 00:27:27.559
seemed to be asking, what happens when everything runs on power?

380
00:27:29.000 --> 00:27:34.039
The answer was simple, and it was staggering. Everything changes,

381
00:27:34.799 --> 00:27:39.880
and whoever controls the power controls the change. Most men,

382
00:27:39.960 --> 00:27:43.880
even visionary ones, saw electric power as the thing to

383
00:27:43.880 --> 00:27:48.640
be sold, a product like any other, to be delivered

384
00:27:48.680 --> 00:27:52.640
to whoever could pay for it. Buck Duke saw further.

385
00:27:53.359 --> 00:27:55.759
He saw that power was not a product at all.

386
00:27:56.000 --> 00:27:59.200
Power was the foundation everything else would be built on.

387
00:28:00.079 --> 00:28:05.319
Whoever owned the foundation owned, in some quiet and permanent way,

388
00:28:05.880 --> 00:28:10.279
everything that rose from it. So buck Duke turned to rivers,

389
00:28:11.000 --> 00:28:14.680
and he prepared to do electricity, exactly what he had

390
00:28:14.720 --> 00:28:18.759
done to tobacco. Not to enter the business, but to

391
00:28:18.960 --> 00:28:23.279
simply become the business.

392
00:28:24.799 --> 00:28:26.039
The magnet in the water.

393
00:28:27.680 --> 00:28:31.599
Here is the secret at the heart of the thing

394
00:28:31.720 --> 00:28:35.759
he was about to build. If you take a coil

395
00:28:35.839 --> 00:28:39.400
of copper wire and you spin a magnet inside it,

396
00:28:39.480 --> 00:28:44.799
something close to magic happens. The motion becomes invisible force,

397
00:28:45.599 --> 00:28:52.240
the turning becomes current, The river becomes light, a magnet

398
00:28:52.519 --> 00:28:55.079
spinning in the dark at the center of a great machine,

399
00:28:55.200 --> 00:29:02.000
turning the fall of water into power for the modern world. Now,

400
00:29:02.359 --> 00:29:06.240
it's worth pausing and thinking about that, because it's the

401
00:29:06.279 --> 00:29:11.000
truest picture of Buck Duke that there is. He was

402
00:29:11.039 --> 00:29:14.799
the magnet, not the leaf anymore. The leaf had been

403
00:29:14.880 --> 00:29:17.680
the beginning, the thing that he held, the thing that

404
00:29:17.799 --> 00:29:24.000
he understood, the small brown fact in a boy's palm.

405
00:29:24.279 --> 00:29:28.319
But the man he became was something else entirely. He

406
00:29:28.519 --> 00:29:33.799
was a force that pulled things towards him. Capital, engineers,

407
00:29:33.960 --> 00:29:38.480
land and rivers, whole industries bent in his direction the

408
00:29:38.519 --> 00:29:42.240
way that iron filings bend toward a magnet. They can't

409
00:29:42.240 --> 00:29:47.480
even see, and they just simply can't resist. He and

410
00:29:47.640 --> 00:29:51.400
his will was magnetic. People felt it in a room

411
00:29:51.440 --> 00:29:55.839
before even spoke. Engineers who had every reason to work

412
00:29:55.839 --> 00:30:00.640
elsewhere found themselves drawn into his. Projects that could have

413
00:30:00.680 --> 00:30:04.799
gone anywhere flowed toward him. Land, rights and rivers and men,

414
00:30:05.720 --> 00:30:10.119
all of it bending slowly in his direction, pulled by

415
00:30:10.160 --> 00:30:14.480
a forest that could not quite understand her name. And

416
00:30:14.519 --> 00:30:19.799
they simply couldn't refuse. And now he turned that will,

417
00:30:20.480 --> 00:30:27.319
that thing that invisibility to the water. He joined with

418
00:30:27.400 --> 00:30:31.720
his brother, and with a brilliant engineer, and together they

419
00:30:31.759 --> 00:30:35.720
began to raise dams across the rushing rivers of the Carolinas.

420
00:30:36.640 --> 00:30:41.400
They formed the Southern Power Company. They built generating stations

421
00:30:41.440 --> 00:30:44.519
and strung the lines and harnessed the falling water of

422
00:30:44.599 --> 00:30:51.359
the Catawba, and turned it mile by mile into electricity.

423
00:30:52.119 --> 00:30:55.400
What would one day be called Duke Energy was born

424
00:30:55.440 --> 00:31:01.200
in that water, around those spinning magnets. He didn't build

425
00:31:01.240 --> 00:31:04.480
one dam and rest. He built a system of them,

426
00:31:05.480 --> 00:31:09.559
a chain of generating stations linked along the rivers, feeding

427
00:31:09.599 --> 00:31:13.400
a single power grid, designed from the start not as

428
00:31:13.440 --> 00:31:17.039
a collection of parts, but as one integrated machine for

429
00:31:17.240 --> 00:31:22.119
powering the region. The same instinct that he had pulled

430
00:31:22.279 --> 00:31:26.279
five cigarette companies into one trust now pulled the wild

431
00:31:26.319 --> 00:31:31.000
water of the Carolinas into one current, under one company,

432
00:31:31.119 --> 00:31:38.039
under one iron will. And once again buck Duke did

433
00:31:38.039 --> 00:31:48.519
not merely participate. He dominated the quiet transformation. This time

434
00:31:48.880 --> 00:31:53.960
it looked different. There were no flashy price wars, no

435
00:31:54.119 --> 00:31:59.240
public executions of rivals in the marketplace. The second empire

436
00:31:59.279 --> 00:32:02.400
did not bounce itself with the same ruthless.

437
00:32:01.960 --> 00:32:02.880
Theater as the first.

438
00:32:04.160 --> 00:32:09.759
It came quietly as infrastructure of steel and concrete and copper,

439
00:32:09.880 --> 00:32:15.359
as lines marching across the countryside on wooden poles, and

440
00:32:15.400 --> 00:32:18.359
those poles reaching toward towns that had never known a

441
00:32:18.480 --> 00:32:23.839
light that didn't burn. Oil electricity spread across the Carolinas,

442
00:32:25.079 --> 00:32:27.119
and where it spread.

443
00:32:26.720 --> 00:32:27.640
The world changed.

444
00:32:28.599 --> 00:32:32.880
Factories came alive, and textile mills humming with machines that

445
00:32:33.000 --> 00:32:37.359
ran on buck Duke's current. Cities lit up after dark

446
00:32:37.440 --> 00:32:41.319
for the first time in their history. Industries that could

447
00:32:41.359 --> 00:32:45.839
not have existed before suddenly could because the power.

448
00:32:45.680 --> 00:32:48.599
Was there, steady and cheap and just waiting.

449
00:32:49.880 --> 00:32:53.119
A South that the war had left in dust began

450
00:32:53.240 --> 00:32:57.839
to slowly start rising. Then much of that rising ran

451
00:32:57.880 --> 00:33:00.359
on the empire of a man who had won spend

452
00:33:00.480 --> 00:33:05.039
laughed at for betting on a cigarette machine. Buck Duke

453
00:33:05.119 --> 00:33:08.000
had done the thing that almost no one in history

454
00:33:08.680 --> 00:33:13.680
ever manages to do. He had not just won once,

455
00:33:14.680 --> 00:33:20.680
he had reinvented himself completely and one again. A second

456
00:33:20.759 --> 00:33:23.759
empire built from the ruins of the first in an

457
00:33:23.920 --> 00:33:28.640
industry the first empire had absolutely nothing to do with

458
00:33:30.319 --> 00:33:33.359
and you could say the genius of it. The thing

459
00:33:33.440 --> 00:33:37.079
that separates buck Duke from a thousand other rich men

460
00:33:37.119 --> 00:33:41.920
of his age is that he was not nostalgic. He

461
00:33:41.960 --> 00:33:44.680
did not cling to the empire that made his name.

462
00:33:45.519 --> 00:33:48.880
When the tobacco trust fell. He did not spend his

463
00:33:48.920 --> 00:33:51.880
final decades bitter about it, just telling the story of

464
00:33:52.440 --> 00:33:55.960
the government just wronged him. He just let it go.

465
00:33:56.680 --> 00:34:00.599
He was busy with copper and concrete and water. The

466
00:34:00.720 --> 00:34:05.920
leaf had made him rich, the magnet would make him permanent.

467
00:34:08.719 --> 00:34:12.920
The man behind the money. Power has a way of

468
00:34:13.039 --> 00:34:17.119
forcing a question, and so does money, especially when you

469
00:34:17.239 --> 00:34:23.119
have more of both than almost anyone alive. Sooner or later,

470
00:34:23.199 --> 00:34:28.320
the question arrives, quiet and relentless, What is all this for?

471
00:34:30.000 --> 00:34:34.119
In his later years, buck Duke began to turn that question,

472
00:34:34.280 --> 00:34:37.599
not away from business and never truly let go of

473
00:34:37.639 --> 00:34:43.039
the building, but towards something beyond it, toward the thing

474
00:34:43.239 --> 00:34:47.840
that somebody leaves behind when the building is finally done,

475
00:34:48.519 --> 00:34:54.039
toward legacy. In nineteen twenty four he created the Duke Endowment,

476
00:34:54.599 --> 00:34:57.960
and he poured an enormous portion of his fortune into it,

477
00:34:59.119 --> 00:35:01.280
Not in the more fact trees, not in the more damns,

478
00:35:01.360 --> 00:35:08.119
but into people, into hospitals across the Carolinas, so that

479
00:35:08.199 --> 00:35:11.000
the sick and the poor might be cared for, into

480
00:35:11.119 --> 00:35:15.119
childcare for orphans, into churches, and into schools and colleges

481
00:35:15.159 --> 00:35:18.440
that would educate generations that he would never even live

482
00:35:18.480 --> 00:35:21.719
to meet. And most famously of all, he turned his

483
00:35:21.760 --> 00:35:25.480
attention and his money toward a small college in Durham,

484
00:35:25.960 --> 00:35:30.119
Trinity College, and transformed it into something far larger than

485
00:35:30.199 --> 00:35:34.440
anyone had imagined it could be. The story goes that

486
00:35:34.480 --> 00:35:38.239
he had considered other names, other cities, but in the

487
00:35:38.360 --> 00:35:41.039
end he tied his fortune and his family's name to

488
00:35:41.159 --> 00:35:42.679
the one institution and.

489
00:35:42.719 --> 00:35:43.880
Told him to become great.

490
00:35:44.760 --> 00:35:47.800
He funded it the way he had funded everything, at

491
00:35:47.800 --> 00:35:51.880
a scale meant to overwhelm, to take the outcome, and

492
00:35:52.199 --> 00:35:57.679
almost inevitably, he made it a university. He gave it

493
00:35:57.719 --> 00:36:02.920
his family's name, dukesy not just a school, but a

494
00:36:02.960 --> 00:36:07.159
statement carved in stone that what this man had built

495
00:36:07.159 --> 00:36:11.159
out of dust and leaf and falling water would outlive

496
00:36:11.280 --> 00:36:19.159
him by a hundred years and more the cost of greatness.

497
00:36:20.280 --> 00:36:24.320
But let's not romanticize this man too much. See, it

498
00:36:24.360 --> 00:36:27.440
would be easy here near the end to wrap Buck

499
00:36:27.519 --> 00:36:29.920
Duke in the warm glow of the hospitals and the

500
00:36:30.039 --> 00:36:35.000
university and call him simply a great benefactor. The dust

501
00:36:35.039 --> 00:36:38.840
to glory story is comfortable one, and we love to

502
00:36:38.880 --> 00:36:42.920
tell it, but the truth is a little harder. You see,

503
00:36:42.920 --> 00:36:46.679
Buck Duke was not a gentleman. He played hard. He

504
00:36:46.840 --> 00:36:51.599
crushed competition with sentiment and without apology. He built monopolies

505
00:36:51.639 --> 00:36:56.039
on purpose, and he understood exactly what they did to

506
00:36:56.119 --> 00:36:59.480
the men on the other side of them. The farmers

507
00:36:59.519 --> 00:37:03.760
he squeezed on price, the rivals he undercut into ruin,

508
00:37:04.760 --> 00:37:08.480
the careful craftsman swallowed by a whole machine that they

509
00:37:08.519 --> 00:37:09.880
would never even.

510
00:37:09.760 --> 00:37:10.480
Ask to fight.

511
00:37:12.000 --> 00:37:15.360
He pushed every system he touched to its absolute limit,

512
00:37:15.679 --> 00:37:22.800
and sometimes passed it. He understood something that most of

513
00:37:22.920 --> 00:37:27.039
us would rather not look at directly. He's he to dominate,

514
00:37:27.079 --> 00:37:30.639
to truly dominate. The way that he did it twice.

515
00:37:31.440 --> 00:37:33.719
You must be willing to do the things that other

516
00:37:33.800 --> 00:37:37.800
people are not willing to do. And that willingness always

517
00:37:37.840 --> 00:37:42.280
comes at a cost, a cost, especially to the people

518
00:37:42.400 --> 00:37:46.119
in your path, and in ways that are quieter and

519
00:37:46.239 --> 00:37:50.320
harder to measure, a cost to yourself, to the parts

520
00:37:50.360 --> 00:37:53.079
of a man that gets set aside in the relentless

521
00:37:53.199 --> 00:37:59.440
business of winning. Now here's where you're gonna get uncomfortable.

522
00:38:02.000 --> 00:38:05.599
The good that buck Duke's money did, the children house,

523
00:38:05.639 --> 00:38:08.239
the sick, healed, the students educated for a century and

524
00:38:08.320 --> 00:38:12.079
counting was aid for by the hardness that made the

525
00:38:12.159 --> 00:38:16.039
money in the first place. You can't cleanly separate the two.

526
00:38:16.159 --> 00:38:20.679
The endowment was built on the empire. The empire was

527
00:38:20.719 --> 00:38:25.519
built on the elimination of weaker people. The hospitals were real,

528
00:38:26.079 --> 00:38:29.840
so is the ruthlessness. Both belong in the same story

529
00:38:29.840 --> 00:38:32.840
and the same man. To keep only one is to

530
00:38:33.000 --> 00:38:40.400
understand neither. So what do we really take from the

531
00:38:40.440 --> 00:38:44.760
life of buck Duke? Not just the wealth. Wealth is

532
00:38:44.800 --> 00:38:47.039
the least interesting thing about him.

533
00:38:47.719 --> 00:38:48.800
Not just the companies.

534
00:38:48.880 --> 00:38:52.719
The tobacco trust long since broken, the power company is

535
00:38:52.719 --> 00:38:56.800
still humming today. Not even the legacy carved into the

536
00:38:56.920 --> 00:38:57.880
university gates.

537
00:38:58.920 --> 00:39:00.599
You see, what we take is the pattern.

538
00:39:01.559 --> 00:39:05.760
A boy who saw beyond the president when everyone around

539
00:39:05.840 --> 00:39:06.840
him was just trying.

540
00:39:06.679 --> 00:39:07.280
To survive it.

541
00:39:08.280 --> 00:39:12.039
A man who executed faster and harder than anyone in

542
00:39:12.079 --> 00:39:17.440
his path, and anyone who never confused the product with

543
00:39:17.480 --> 00:39:21.840
the system that actually moved it. A builder who understood

544
00:39:21.880 --> 00:39:25.480
in his bones the single rule that governed his entire

545
00:39:25.679 --> 00:39:30.559
extraordinary life. When one system ends, then another must begin.

546
00:39:31.920 --> 00:39:34.599
You do not mourn the empire that the world takes

547
00:39:34.639 --> 00:39:39.440
from you. You're already standing in the next one. Because

548
00:39:39.639 --> 00:39:44.440
Buck Duke's real power was never tobacco. It was never electricity,

549
00:39:45.320 --> 00:39:49.199
it was never even the money. It was the ability

550
00:39:49.280 --> 00:39:53.400
to see an opportunity that nobody else could see, and

551
00:39:53.599 --> 00:39:58.280
to act on it with total and utter force before

552
00:39:58.320 --> 00:40:00.920
anyone else even under stood that it was there.

553
00:40:02.320 --> 00:40:04.519
He read the world like that boy read the.

554
00:40:04.559 --> 00:40:07.159
Leaf in his palm, and then he reached out and

555
00:40:07.199 --> 00:40:11.800
took the part that he wanted. And the rest of

556
00:40:11.840 --> 00:40:16.760
the story go back, Go back one last time to

557
00:40:16.840 --> 00:40:20.840
the beginning, to the boy's hand in the red dust,

558
00:40:21.480 --> 00:40:27.079
the small, dirty palm, the single leaf of cured tobacco,

559
00:40:27.360 --> 00:40:30.280
brown and as old as leather vein, like a map

560
00:40:30.320 --> 00:40:33.800
of rivers that no one had drawn yet. He held

561
00:40:33.840 --> 00:40:36.679
that leaf the way a man holds the only thing

562
00:40:36.719 --> 00:40:41.079
that he has, and then when the time came, he

563
00:40:41.320 --> 00:40:45.800
let it go. That's the part of the dust of

564
00:40:45.880 --> 00:40:50.400
glory stories that we always miss. Buck Duke's genius was

565
00:40:50.519 --> 00:40:55.039
never holding on. It was knowing when to open his hand.

566
00:40:57.320 --> 00:41:00.280
He let go of the leaf to reach for the machine.

567
00:41:00.880 --> 00:41:03.320
He let go of the machine when the law tormed

568
00:41:03.320 --> 00:41:06.920
from it and he had already grabbed the river. He

569
00:41:07.039 --> 00:41:09.239
let go of the river's profits at the end to

570
00:41:09.400 --> 00:41:13.599
build the hospitals in school. The leaf became a factory.

571
00:41:13.639 --> 00:41:17.400
The factory became an empire. The empire became a river,

572
00:41:17.480 --> 00:41:21.519
the river became light. The light became a university with

573
00:41:21.599 --> 00:41:25.079
his name above the gate. And the boy in the

574
00:41:25.159 --> 00:41:29.880
dust became a magnet, a force of will, spending quietly

575
00:41:29.960 --> 00:41:34.119
at the center of an entire region, turning the raw,

576
00:41:34.400 --> 00:41:39.039
full world into power, and pulling the future toward him,

577
00:41:39.079 --> 00:41:43.760
whether the future was ready or not. There is temptation,

578
00:41:44.800 --> 00:41:48.000
looking back across a life like this, to reduce it

579
00:41:48.039 --> 00:41:52.079
to some sort of lesson, to make a Buck Duke

580
00:41:52.440 --> 00:41:55.559
poster on a wall, to make it work harder, and

581
00:41:55.599 --> 00:42:00.239
see further and never really quit. But the man resists

582
00:42:00.320 --> 00:42:03.400
the poster. He is too large, and too strange and

583
00:42:03.440 --> 00:42:07.000
too hard for that. He gave a fortune to heal

584
00:42:07.039 --> 00:42:09.880
the sick, and he built a fortune by crushing.

585
00:42:09.440 --> 00:42:10.760
His rivals into dust.

586
00:42:11.960 --> 00:42:14.719
He saw the future with a clarity that bordered on

587
00:42:14.840 --> 00:42:18.760
the supernatural, and that he used that clarity to take

588
00:42:18.800 --> 00:42:21.960
things from people who never saw him coming. He was

589
00:42:22.079 --> 00:42:25.400
generous and he was merciless, and both were true on

590
00:42:25.480 --> 00:42:26.199
the same day.

591
00:42:28.559 --> 00:42:30.800
That is the rest of the story.

592
00:42:31.480 --> 00:42:35.719
Not a lesson, but a man who started in the dust,

593
00:42:36.519 --> 00:42:41.000
who built in the chaos, and he left something behind,

594
00:42:41.039 --> 00:42:46.360
something permanent in stone, incurrent in the electricity still flowing

595
00:42:46.360 --> 00:42:50.360
through the Carolinas tonight, in the gates of a university

596
00:42:50.400 --> 00:42:54.679
that thousands walked through every year, without ever knowing whose

597
00:42:54.719 --> 00:42:59.320
hand once held a single leaf in the dirt. This

598
00:42:59.639 --> 00:43:03.039
was the story of Buck Duke, the boy who refused

599
00:43:03.039 --> 00:43:07.800
to stay small, and who, in refusing, changes the future

600
00:43:07.840 --> 00:43:13.199
of an entire region. My name is mister Hanson, and

601
00:43:13.280 --> 00:43:17.440
you've been listening to the mister Hanson podcast. Now you

602
00:43:17.559 --> 00:43:21.480
know the rest of the story. If you like this story,

603
00:43:21.480 --> 00:43:23.280
and do you want to hear more, go to mister

604
00:43:23.440 --> 00:43:53.960
hansenpodcast dot com. That's mister hansenpodcast dot com.

605
00:43:53.960 --> 00:43:58.800
Mister Hanson said, come clues, I'll tell you what I

606
00:43:59.000 --> 00:44:02.960
knew down in the ash and tobacco dust, where the

607
00:44:03.000 --> 00:44:04.159
black top.

608
00:44:03.920 --> 00:44:05.719
Ends in a floodplain roads.

609
00:44:11.760 --> 00:44:15.760
Both Duke had a ledger fool and a grin like

610
00:44:15.800 --> 00:44:19.519
a pocket and NiFe cure the leafstack.

611
00:44:19.000 --> 00:44:22.519
To the rafters high held the whole.

612
00:44:22.239 --> 00:44:26.519
Town up it I but the river kept the secrets

613
00:44:26.639 --> 00:44:31.079
deep and the cool black hill stay me until the

614
00:44:31.159 --> 00:44:34.599
boat man came with a wire school and a hard

615
00:44:34.639 --> 00:44:36.599
eye plan to feed the screen.

616
00:44:36.719 --> 00:44:40.719
Tell me the rest, mister Hanson, tell me the rest,

617
00:44:41.119 --> 00:44:43.039
mister Hanson, who.

618
00:44:43.000 --> 00:44:47.440
Let the dark for Buck Duke's town on good let

619
00:44:47.599 --> 00:44:49.480
the dark, tell me the.

620
00:44:49.519 --> 00:44:54.440
Rest, Mister Hanson, tell me the rest, mister Hanson.

621
00:44:55.000 --> 00:45:00.639
The river man roll pier through the blood darg.

622
00:45:06.440 --> 00:45:09.320
They called him the river Bomb.

623
00:45:10.239 --> 00:45:13.840
With tar on his cuffs and boots. He ripped the

624
00:45:13.840 --> 00:45:18.360
bens like a preacher reads every sin or soul can do.

625
00:45:19.000 --> 00:45:22.519
He brought those poles on a rattling barge and brought

626
00:45:22.679 --> 00:45:26.039
the copper and naples and wire hung the first bridle

627
00:45:26.079 --> 00:45:29.400
line on a sycamore hill in the night, lean back

628
00:45:29.840 --> 00:45:33.719
from the fire of women came out on the front steps.

629
00:45:34.079 --> 00:45:38.000
Kids stood still, and there's some the shoes. When that

630
00:45:38.239 --> 00:45:43.400
first bull shook away, it turned their shadows blue.

631
00:45:43.599 --> 00:45:47.760
Tell me the rest, mister Hanson, Tell me the rest,

632
00:45:48.199 --> 00:45:50.239
mister Hanson, who.

633
00:45:50.119 --> 00:45:54.440
Lit the dark foot Buck Dukestown.

634
00:45:53.880 --> 00:45:58.440
Who lit the dark? And tell me the rest, mister Hanson,

635
00:45:58.880 --> 00:46:04.239
tell me the rest. Listen, mister Hanson, the riverman rolle

636
00:46:04.280 --> 00:46:07.920
poer through the man in the dark.

637
00:46:14.440 --> 00:46:18.159
Of the Duke kept counting his gold, but the lamps changed.

638
00:46:18.280 --> 00:46:22.199
One't thing could see. I wear the whistle at the

639
00:46:22.320 --> 00:46:27.599
pines eating the poor felled halfway free. And mister Hanson

640
00:46:27.800 --> 00:46:31.719
tipped his hat, said, that's the part they don't recite.

641
00:46:32.559 --> 00:46:35.679
A king can on the tobacco staff, but a river

642
00:46:35.880 --> 00:46:39.400
man can on the name.

643
00:46:41.559 --> 00:46:45.679
Tell me the rest, mister Hanson, Tell me the rest.

644
00:46:46.119 --> 00:46:49.320
Mister Hanson, who let the dark.

645
00:46:49.519 --> 00:46:56.320
For buck Duke's town, Tell me the rest, Mister Hanson,

646
00:46:56.800 --> 00:47:00.239
Tell me the rest, mister Hanson, the.

647
00:47:00.239 --> 00:47:05.519
River main road, pour through the mud in the dark.

648
00:47:05.960 --> 00:47:10.199
Tell me the rest, mister Hanson, tell me the rest,

649
00:47:10.519 --> 00:47:11.679
mister Hanson.

650
00:47:12.000 --> 00:47:18.199
Now I know the rest Stoke story. Now I know

651
00:47:18.519 --> 00:47:30.480
the rest