Vietnam Diary, Bootlegger’s Notebook and a Hollywood Ledger

EDUARDO: Tonight on History Detectives:

That diary was laying in plain sight.

Find that soldier's family so we can give the diary to them.

Would you be happy or sad

that you had a bootlegger in your family?

Oh, my god.

Woof!

"Spectacular Indian Productions Coming."

What were they being paid for and were they treated fairly?

ELVIS COSTELLO: ♪Watchin' the detectives ♪ ♪I get so angry when the teardrops start ♪ ♪But he can't be wounded 'cause he's got no heart ♪ ♪Watchin' the detectives ♪ ♪It's just like watchin' the detectives ♪ My brother Gary was killed in Vietnam in March 1966.

After his death, I met one of his Marine buddies, Bob Frazure.

After a fierce firefight, Bob went over to a dead Vietnamese soldier and found a diary.

With mixed emotions, he reached down and picked it up.

And after 46 years, he felt like he took something that really didn't belong to him.

When I opened the diary, a picture of these two children fell out.

I picked it up and looked at their faces.

I had the feeling that I was holding something very sacred.

Tears came to my eyes, and my first thought was, is this his children?

Could it be his sister?

Could the entries in the diary be something for them?

What if this was my brother's diary?

If they tried to find me, I would feel like a piece of him came home.

This is something he would want me to do, find who that family was and return it to them.

WES: I'm in Springfield, Missouri, and I'm on my way to see Marge and Bob.

This story has special meaning to me because I grew up during the Vietnam War.

I didn't serve, but I sure remember my draft number.

I understand Bob is not in good shape.

He's breathing oxygen all the time.

And I guess I'm lucky that he's still around to tell me his story.

I can't tell you how great it is to be here with you.

How do you know each other?

I wanted to do a story about my brother, a tribute.

And in my research, I found Bob.

What do you remember about the day that you found the diary?

I got the diary towards the end of March 1966, Operation Indiana.

While in pursuit of the enemy, Charlie Company of the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, had been ambushed in a rural area in a hot zone known as I Corps.

Eleven marines died and around 55 were wounded.

Bob Frazure's Bravo Company arrived the next morning and witnessed the aftermath.

I was the very first person there.

That diary was out of his shirt.

It was laying in plain sight.

I just wanted something to bring back.

It was a spur of the moment deal.

Bob says he found the diary's owner inside a pit, where it appeared he'd been part of a team firing a heavy machine gun.

There was two or three drag trails where they had drug other soldiers away from there.

And the only reason they didn't drag him away from there was because it just got too hot for them.

But you think that he died laying down covering fire.

Oh, I know he did, I absolutely know he did.

Yeah, he was -- he had killed a lot of our boys.

He was shooting right through a rice paddy dike and he just mowed 'em down.

He was left behind as the rear end guard.

So when they left him there, he wasn't going to leave there.

He was going to die right there on that hillside.

I could never quite figure why that diary was out of his shirt.

Do you think that maybe he was trying to give it to one of the retreating soldiers?

Like I said, I have never figured that out.

You've had this for 46 years now, almost a half a century.

Did you feel guilty having it?

I wanted to get rid of it.

It wasn't something I wanted to keep.

My first thought was that it was comments

that he made to his family

so his family would know what happened to him

if indeed he was killed in war.

When you'd open that diary, the first thing you seen was that picture of those kids.

What do you want me to do with the diary?

Wes, we want you to do everything you can

to find that soldier's family

so we can give the diary to them.

Hopefully they can be able to forgive me for taking it and keeping it that long.

Guys, if I can help, this will be an amazing journey for all of us.

For me, it'll mean the world.

The back of the diary has the embossed words "Doan Thanh Nien," but the writing inside is tiny, hard to read, and some of the ink has bled through.

Wait a minute.

Inside there's a piece of thin paper with formatted print and faded writing.

There's that same word again, Doan.

It could be an ID card.

And then there's this photograph.

Whether they're sisters or this soldier's children, we don't know.

There's a long inscription on the back of the photograph and then a couple pieces of Vietnamese currency.

This is a very poignant reminder of the losses that both sides suffered during the Vietnam War, with entries that end, of course, presumably when the soldier himself was killed.

What I would like to do is to send this to the conservation lab at the Morgan Library in New York City.

The lab will make ultraviolet scans which will hopefully make the diary easier to translate.

While I'm waiting, I want to get more information about who the Marines were fighting during Operation Indiana.

I'm attending a reunion of Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, in Missouri, which includes retired Lieutenant Colonel Robert Prewitt and Private First Class Dave Shelton.

They also saw the grisly aftermath of Operation Indiana the morning Bob Frazure picked up the diary.

And just three weeks earlier, in Operation Utah, they'd landed helicopters in the same area of the Quang Ngai province and found themselves in a hornet's nest of enemy fire.

You could hear the whistles of the unit leaders shouting, hollering.

I don't know, just hell broke loose.

And that's when I -- the very first time I ever saw a guy face to face just before I fired.

The machine gun squad leader 20 feet to my left was killed by a gunshot to the abdomen.

One of the other members of my squad bent down to pick up his helmet, and he was killed by a head shot.

He fell on top of me.

These guys were good at making fighting.

They were determined to wipe us out.

The veterans believe the soldiers they fought in this battle and in Operation Indiana were from the same unit of the North Vietnamese Army.

Up until then, the Marines had been fighting local Viet Cong guerrillas.

It was in the same area and it was the same people.

We thought we had pretty much eradicated them the first time around, but they came back.

[ bomb explodes ] That's the Indiana Hill right there, where the A-4 has just dropped a napalm bomb.

When you got up on this hilltop,

you knew there had been a terrible fight there.

Absolutely.

There were in excess of 20 dead NVA still in their spider holes.

And it was at this moment that Bob Frazure picked up the diary.

And were there uniform patches?

Did the NVA have uniform patches?

- I didn't see any, did you?

- I don't know.

And how could you tell them from the Viet Cong?

Because they wore uniforms.

Greenish-gray uniforms.

And the VC just wore black silk pants, pajamas, sometimes a cone hat.

In this guy's case, he probably had very little contact with the family back home and then he just never came back.

There was no closure.

They don't know where he went, how he got there, or where he was killed.

This will give his family closure.

WES: I'm in Washington, DC.

I'm here to see Mark Leepson.

He's a Vietnam vet and an author about Vietnam.

It never ceases to affect me, 58,000 names are here.

It's not a memorial that celebrates this war, which was so controversial.

It honors Vietnam veterans who survived and Vietnam veterans who died.

With Mark's help, we find Marge's brother Gary's name on the wall.

You know, while we're standing in front of our memorial,

how many North Vietnamese were killed?

You know, we don't have the exact figure, but it could be 1 1/2 or 2 million.

One study on Vietnamese casualties puts the number as high as 3.8 million.

You know, the folks that own this diary,

they really want to find out if we can return it

to the family of the soldier.

The 7th Marines were in the northern part of South Vietnam.

What was this territory like, and what was going on in March of '66?

I'll show you on the map.

This is Quang Ngai, where we're talking about here.

So what was the strategic importance of this area?

The strategic importance of this area was that it was crawling

with North Vietnamese and Viet Cong as well,

regiments of them.

Mark explains that by 1966, large numbers of North Vietnamese Army regulars were pouring south through neighboring Laos and Cambodia down the Ho Chi Minh trail, a maze of primitive roads, jungle paths and waterways extending over 1,500 miles of terrain.

We tried to destroy the trail.

They kept moving it.

The main strategic mission of the Americans in Vietnam

was what we called a war of attrition,

or search and destroy.

So where did this guy come from?

That's a good question.

And if I had to guess, I would say

he was a North Vietnamese soldier.

I think you're going to find out

when you get this diary translated.

Merle Pribbenow was a Vietnamese language specialist working for the CIA during the war.

He's been studying the ultraviolet scans made by the Thaw Conservation Center at the Morgan Library and Museum, which have enhanced the faded script.

Diaries are often very difficult things to translate,

especially the case during the war.

The people from the North developed their own vocabulary.

They said things differently.

"Giay chung minh," that means literally, "identity certificate."

And there is his date of birth.

It's faded as to the day and month,

but you can clearly see he was born in 1937.

So that means if he was killed in '66, he was 29 years old.

28 or 29, that's correct.

So here is his name, Vu Dinh Doan.

Wait a minute, Doan.

Doan was one of the words embossed on the diary cover.

It can be a name, but Doan also means "group."

This says, "Doan Thanh Nien, Lao Dong, Vietnam."

And the translation of that is...?

That's Communist Party Youth Group.

This was actually a group for young people

to prepare them for party membership.

Did they hand these diaries out to every soldier?

I do not believe so, no.

This guy probably would have been somebody

that they were considering for moving up.

North Vietnamese soldiers,

technically they were not supposed to keep diaries.

Okay.

And here he's talking about where he is from.

This is his home.

Cay hamlet, Long Xuyen village,

Binh Giang district,

Hai Duong province, North Vietnam.

The province certainly is still there.

You can find it, yes.

Hai Duong province is 35 miles from the capital of Hanoi and almost 500 miles from the former border with South Vietnam.

The diary records how on August 11, 1965, Doan began his journey.

[ reading in Vietnamese ] Here he's going into Laos, okay?

This is -- in Vietnamese, it's Truong Son.

That is the end of Annamite Mountains.

It confirms what Mark and the vets had already suspected.

So wait a minute, when he crosses into Laos, he must have been coming down the Ho Chi Minh trail then.

Yes.

The trail was grueling for Vietnamese soldiers: mountains, jungle, and relentless air attack.

"On this march, I have encountered

a great deal of problems.

I ate cold rice gruel made of leaves."

There were great difficulties with food on the trail...

On October 13th, the climbing became even harder.

"On the death anniversary of my father,

I had to climb a pass that was 2,800 meters high."

Oh, my gosh.

- That's pretty high.

- 7,500 feet.

And he says actually that sweat was pouring off of him

and it took eight hours to reach the top.

And when he reached the top --

[ speaks in Vietnamese ]

"I was able to see South Vietnam."

After weeks of hauling heavy weapons over mountain peaks, Doan could see where he had come to fight.

He thought of his father and his father's death.

In Vietnam, especially in traditional Vietnam,

the date of the death anniversary was very important

because you have your death altars.

The Vietnamese came from the Confucian tradition

of ancestor worship,

and every house has a death altar.

It's incredibly poignant to hear these words written from a soldier on the other side.

This diary obviously would be very valuable to the family.

It would show the family that he was thinking about them.

You know, Merle, as you're translating this, I've got to tell you, this is one of the most exciting things that I've done in 10 years on History Detectives.

I still don't know what regiment the guy was with.

Is there any way for us to determine that?

All indications are that he was 21st Regiment.

Although the diary does not give a regiment number, Merle says the dates match the history of the 21st Regiment, one of the earliest NVA units to arrive in South Vietnam.

It was organized in North Vietnam

in the summer of '65

and marched down in the fall of '65.

And it was formed in the province where he's from,

in Hai Duong province.

By the 4th of March, 1966, seven months after leaving home, Doan's regiment was northwest of Quang Ngai City engaged in fierce fighting with U.S. forces.

"Twelve helicopters arrived and landed troops.

Then my unit fought all day."

And that's the last entry in this diary,

21 March of 1966.

That's it.

That's it, that's where it ends.

He was killed one week later in Operation Indiana.

- Yeah.

- Wow.

I want you to look at this photo, too, the inscription that's on the back.

What's it say?

Okay, this says, "Dear Nhat and Ien."

So that's who these girls are.

Probably.

"If I am alive when the country is unified,

we will all be together again.

We will truly be happy when our country is unified."

He refers to them as "em," which means younger sister,

but it's not necessarily a relative.

It also applies for people that are younger than you,

that are in a close relationship with you.

They're probably not his daughters, but we really don't know how they were related.

Right, in Vietnamese, that's not enough to tell you.

Do I have enough now to find his family?

You have enough to start the search.

I was able to enlist the help of Kyle Horst, a former UN staff member who lived in Vietnam for 10 years.

We're meeting at the Van Hanh Buddhist Temple just outside Washington, DC.

Kyle and his contacts in Vietnam have searched for weeks for anyone related to the diary owner.

Were you able to find the family or village of Vu Dinh Doan?

You would think in a country of 90 million people,

which is still largely rural, that that would be impossible.

But in fact, the Vietnamese

are deeply rooted in their communities.

Kyle's Vietnam contacts were able to track down surviving members of Doan's NVA regiment, who remembered him.

This is a picture of him, a painting of a photograph.

Wow.

It's amazing that the search effort was able to retrieve an actual image of Doan.

The veterans told Kyle that of the 50 young men that had enlisted with Doan from his small farming village, only three survived the war.

Within that regiment,

he was part of a reserve artillery squad.

The name of the unit, Hao Doi,

would suggest a reserve

or rear guard function for that unit.

As a rear guard, Doan's job may have been to sacrifice his life so others could escape, which is exactly what Bob Frazure had suspected.

The picture of the girls was particularly haunting for Marge and Bob.

Kyle's team had actually found Doan's village and also discovered his memorial tomb.

He sent a researcher to investigate further.

It took some questioning of various people in the village

to confirm exactly who these two were.

Take a look at this.

So here's the same photo being held by the younger girl,

who's now a 71-year-old woman, the woman holding the picture.

Oh, my god.

And you can see the resemblance.

This older gal, her name is Ien.

She moved away to another province a few hours away.

She's also still alive.

Are these his sisters?

Actually, these are not his sisters.

But in fact, they were members of the [Vietnamese term]

which is a village guerrilla squad, village militia.

Are you kidding me?

[ chanting in Vietnamese ] In fact, through North Vietnamese history,

going back thousands of years,

the great generals, the great military heroes,

the ones who led the charge, they were mostly women.

The militia did participate in the war effort and sometimes even fired anti-aircraft guns at U.S. forces.

The older one, I think, Ien Shi,

was a member of the cultural troupe,

which had patriotic songs or skits

involving music or poetry,

to give to these soldiers to take with them,

like this photo.

After the war, the Vietnamese government assigned Doan martyr status, an official recognition given to soldiers who died while serving their country.

His family still lives in the very same hamlet

that he was born and raised in before he went off to the war.

This, in fact, is a picture of the two surviving children

of Martyr Doan, holding that photo

that I showed you a little earlier.

Three sons, one daughter.

So he's the only one of the three sons still alive.

His name is Son.

Here is a photo of Doan's wife.

Her name is Vuong.

Oh, my god.

So Kyle, how do I get the diary back to the family?

Should we take a deep breath?

We're trying.

There's a picture of him.

- Oh, my goodness.

- Wow.

He was the head of the local militia in his village.

And when he joined the North Vietnamese Army, he became a squad leader of that 51-caliber machine gun that you guys found.

Here he is with his wife.

Good-looking young kid, really.

And here he is with his wife and two of his children.

He had three sons and one daughter.

I'm sorry.

No, no, no, that's okay, that's all right.

They were real people just like us.

The two young ladies are not the soldier's children.

These two were members of the local village militia.

The photographer had found Pham Thi Nhat still living in the village, and she remembered Doan and her long ago photograph.

VOICE OF ENGLISH TRANSLATOR: We presented this photo to him before he went to the battlefield.

As a militant, we did a lot of things.

We served in an anti-aircraft troupe which shot down a U.S. aircraft.

That's why I was awarded a medal.

Well, I'll be darned.

Wes, were you able to find his family?

Members of his family are still living, and that is his only surviving son, and his daughter.

Sadly, Doan's widow, Vuong, had passed away only weeks after hearing about the discovery of her husband's diary.

Our photographer had found the surviving daughter and son mourning their mother's death.

- Oh, my goodness.

- Oh, my God.

This is an excerpt from an interview with his son in Vietnam.

VOICE OF ENGLISH TRANSLATOR: Hello, I am Vu Dinh Son, a son of Martyr Vu Dinh Doan.

You picked up my father's diary.

On behalf of my family, I would like to say thank you.

During the war, I think you were an ethical person.

Isn't that something?

The person who is the happiest to learn of the diary was Vu Dinh Doan's wife.

"Before she died, my mother was very happy she received the news about my father's diary.

This is what she told me."

I can't.

I can't read that.

"This is what she told me about the American

who wanted to return the diary.

In war, if you don't shoot me, I will shoot you.

The fact that this man held onto my father's papers

and sought to return them

proves that the one who survived is a good man, a moral man."

You were to keep that diary for this.

BOB: I would like to know what happened to that diary, if it was returned to him.

That's a great question.

And actually, we found something very special to do with this diary.

History Detectives is about to be involved in international diplomacy.

Right now I'm on my way to meet with a representative from the United States Department of Defense, and I'm going to turn this diary over to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, who is going to take it to Vietnam.

Thank you very much, and good luck.

Thanks.

PANETTA: My whole trip here is aimed at trying to improve relations between our two countries 50 years after we were at war.

If this can help in that healing process, then I think it will serve an important purpose in trying to let them know that we care about not only our people that were lost in battle, but their people as well.

On June 4, 2012, Secretary Panetta handed the diary to Vietnam's Defense Minister, Phung Quang Thanh, part of an exchange of artifacts which included returned letters from a U.S. serviceman.

A diary that was recovered in war that can hopefully be given back to that individual's family.

[ applause ] It's amazing.

Unbelievable.

The diary will really go down in the history of our continued healing process.

Does this bring you any closure?

It's so far out of my imagination that you could find all of this out, so to me we both got closure.

I'm just so happy that we got it where it belongs.

I'm really grateful for that.

I couldn't have asked for anything more than that.

The Vietnamese government is planning a ceremony to present the diary back to the family with the ultimate goal of displaying it in a museum.

For updates on this story, visit pbs.org/historydetectives.

Coming up, a mystery about a faded accounts ledger that may connect a silent movie mogul with the Lakota Sioux.

But first... My name's Kevin O'Connell.

When my dad passed away, I inherited a box of beautiful leather-bound books that belonged to my great-grand-uncle Mike.

I remember Uncle Mike from when I was young, and he was a great guy.

When I was going through the books, in the box inside one of the covers, I found this book.

I started reading it, and what it appeared to be was manufacturing recipes for a fairly substantial bootlegging operation.

So I asked the people of my father's generation, and their answer was, "What?

What are you talking about?"

What I'd really like to know is does this book contain the secrets to a large-scale bootlegging operation during Prohibition?

I'm Elyse Luray.

Who doesn't like a good cocktail?

Booze, Prohibition, illegal bootleggers: this is my kind of story.

I'm excited to meet Kevin and see his recipe book.

Why do you think this book is so unusual?

Well, it's got recipes for making spirits, or booze, in significant quantities.

Look at this: 30 gallons, 40 gallons, 30 gallons, 30 gallons.

It's a lot of booze.

Kevin says the notebook reads like a manual for a complete illegal operation.

This book contains the plan all the way down to such things as the glue for the labels.

Was he in the liquor business?

Oh, no, he wasn't in the liquor business, he was in the construction business.

He owned a construction company with his brother Tom.

And Tom and he were -- I was going to say "thick as thieves" -- were very tight, and they were in business together.

And I think they may have been dabbling in side businesses.

And where is Uncle Mike from?

Did he live in New York?

He did.

He grew up on the Lower West Side on Bethune Street.

Do you have anything else for me to go with?

I've got some papers of Mike's and his family's here that I don't know if they'll help you or not, but you're welcome to them.

All right, Kevin, I have all your stuff.

I'm going to go look into this.

So just remember, some skeletons might come out of that closet.

Okay with me.

All right, I'll get back to you.

[ jazz music plays ] On January 16, 1920, one year after the states ratified the 18th amendment, the nation officially went dry.

But the law did little to stop America's thirst for booze.

In New York City alone, there were more than 30,000 speakeasies.

Did Uncle Mike run one of them?

The book's in pretty good condition, but it's still a little fragile.

The book itself looks like a book that you would see around the turn of the 20th century.

Up to about 1920, 1930, they carried books like this.

Then the paper changes.

So the paper looks period.

Every recipe is for big quantities.

It's consistent throughout this book.

Some of the recipes are for drinks I've never heard of: Holland Gin, Old Tom Gin, and others are a little confusing.

The title of the recipe is Rye or Bourbon Flavor, and then at the end of the recipe, it says, "makes a good rye or bourbon."

So which one is it: are you making a rye or bourbon or are you making a flavor?

You know, there's a lot of ingredients here that I don't recognize.

It says NE rum.

I've never heard of that.

Hold on a second.

This says APE or maybe APL90.

That could be April 90.

And now here's another one.

They're only on a couple pages.

It's in the column that shows quantities.

They could be the dates that these recipes were made up.

The other documents don't offer any clues: a will, an envelope, and a letter written by Mike's brother Tom.

The letter is dated during Prohibition, but it's certainly nothing criminal.

I am going to scan this book, because I don't want to carry it around.

It's in really good condition.

I don't want to jeopardize it at all.

[ buzzes ] First law of detective work: visit the scene of the crime.

[ doorbell rings ] Meaghan Dorman, head bartender at Raines Law Room, agrees to take a look at the book and whip up one of Uncle Mike's possible bootlegger concoctions.

Here is the book that I told you about.

It says here on one of these recipes, rye or bourbon flavor.

To me it looks like someone was trying to make rye or bourbon

without having any access to a distillery.

This looks like something you could do in your basement.

That makes sense to me that during Prohibition they would be doing that, right?

People were definitely just trying to fulfill

that demand for alcohol

and doing it much cheaper and much quicker.

Let's see if it tastes like a good rye.

Let's scale this down a little bit,

because we're not going to drink 44 gallons.

The recipe starts with cook's malt and prune juice.

And then the angelica.

We've got an extract here.

NE rum: what does that mean?

That would most likely be a New England rum,

which in the 1800s,

actually Americans made quite a bit of their own rum.

We don't have a New England rum like they would have had,

but I picked a pretty high-proof and funky Jamaican rum,

which I think -- you can smell it here --

[ inhales ] Woof!

Wow.

-- is a lot like what they would have had.

But Meaghan explains the main ingredient is neutral grain spirits, a bootlegger's favorite.

It's also known as moonshine.

Which is a spirit that's really high-proof,

it doesn't really have any specific flavor to it.

- It's basically grain alcohol?

- Yes.

- Ready to have a taste?

- I'm not sure.

I guess so.

Now that I know what's in it, I'm even more scared.

- Cheers.

- Cheers.

Oh, my god.

Woof!

Hoo.

Wow, that's awful.

[ coughs ]

That's awful.

Although, if you can get past the heat of this alcohol...

[laughs ] It does have some spicy notes like a rye whiskey would.

I can't -- I mean, wow.

Well, I guess during Prohibition and bootlegging, they weren't really picky.

Do you think that during Prohibition, they would be making recipes like this?

I do.

But Meaghan thinks something is off.

So a cocktail is always a single-serving mixture

of one or two spirits and probably some modifiers,

like juice or syrup.

These look -- at first they look like cocktails,

but it's the amount of everything that's used

that makes it not look like a cocktail.

Were cocktails big during Prohibition?

Not really during Prohibition.

It's actually, there was a whole movement before that

called Temperance, which led up to Prohibition,

and that really led to a lot of small laws

that outlawed drinking and made states dry.

So it was really like 1860 to 1890

that cocktails were really big in the United States.

Why would Uncle Mike have been mixing up gallons of turn-of-the-century cocktails?

Is that was the April 90 was referring to?

What is this book?

David Wondrich is a drinks correspondent for Esquire magazine and the author of Imbibe!

and Punch.

We're meeting at the New York Distilling Company in Brooklyn.

Okay, so I figured this would be the perfect place

for us to meet, right?

I feel right at home here for some reason.

You feel at home, I feel at home.

- This is a good place.

- This is great, yeah.

Well, I'm excited for you to see this book.

Oh, let's have a look.

I don't see any distilling going on in here.

They're not taking fermented stuff like wine or beer and running it through something like this to extract the alcohol from it in the first place.

So this is what we call compounding.

And what is compounding?

Compounding is when you take grain alcohol, you know, very high proof, very pure, very cheap, and add flavors to it and dilute it and water it and stretch it out and kind of fake your own liquors.

Would somebody like a bootlegger be interested in compounding?

David says compounding was used in the 1920s, but often with cruder recipes.

But this seems a little elaborate to me.

The bootleggers weren't really interested in using 17 ingredients like some of these recipes.

They just wanted it quick and dirty.

You see quite a bit of it in the 19th century.

1890, 1891, this stuff was kind of at its peak.

You know, it's interesting that you say that,

because if you look on some of these pages,

I found some dates here.

- There's April 90, May 90.

- Oh, there you go, yeah.

So what do you think this is?

David thinks the book is from a different era of alcoholic lawlessness, decades before Prohibition.

New York in the 1890s was a wide-open town.

While in the rest of the country organizations like the Women's Christian Temperance Union worked tirelessly to sober up the masses, in New York, thirsty citizens could fill their cups at 8,000 crowded saloons.

A true sin city, New York was a center of prostitution, gambling, and rampant alcoholism.

For a while there we had Teddy Roosevelt as police commissioner and he tried to shut everything down and make people behave, but that didn't last very long.

It was the town where you could drink at all hours.

If you had an urban saloon of maybe not the highest caliber, you could get some cheap, old "bourbon," in quotes, that never really saw the inside of a Kentucky warehouse.

Did people notice the difference between it?

Yeah, they'd use the word "pizen," or poison, sometimes if it was badly compounded.

I mean, the things they put into this stuff... At its worst, ingredients such as wood alcohol sometimes killed the unlucky drinker.

More often, the compounded booze left a bad taste and a worse headache.

There would be hot pepper extract to make it taste like whiskey, to give it a little bite, sulfuric acid if you were really crazy.

And was it regulated?

Did you have to tell your clients?

Oh, hell no.

[ laughs ] It was always buyer beware.

This was the 19th century.

America was not heavily regulated.

In 1906, the Pure Food and Drug Act was passed, which was a major piece of progressive legislation saying it has to be in the bottle what it says on the label.

Well, if it's not a bootlegger that owns this book, who would?

My best guess is that this is a compounding book that was owned by a saloonkeeper or a liquor store owner from the turn of the 20th century.

In the nice parts, there were expensive saloons where you wouldn't get this kind of thing.

And then there were the dock areas, the Lower West Side, the Lower East Side, full of immigrants, and where every bar would have been serving exactly this.

If Uncle Mike did own this book, that means he had to have worked in either a bar or the liquor business.

Kevin said his Uncle Mike had worked in construction, but maybe he'd been a rough-and-tumble bartender years before he became the family's favorite uncle.

I think what I'm going to do is go online and start with census records and see if I can find any information about his occupation.

Mike was born in 1873, so I'm going to look at the 1900 and 1910 Census, when he would have been of working age.

Let's see what we've got.

Here he is, born in Ireland, living on the Lower West Side, just the place where David mentioned a less than savory saloon might be.

Here's the rest of the family.

His brother Tom... Ah, listen to this.

Okay, Kevin, so I brought you here to Bethune Street because why?

This is where Uncle Mike grew up.

This is where Uncle Mike and all his family grew up, right here in this beautiful house.

First, I want Kevin to taste the liquor we made from the book.

And it's afternoon.

It's time for a cocktail somewhere, right?

Whoa!

Go ahead, take a sip.

[ Elyse laughs ]

Who made this?

I did!

Because I can't offend all your hard work, I'll finish it.

Okay, that's better than me!

Now that I've loosened Kevin up, I'm ready to tell him what I found out.

What you have here is a compound book,

and what this book is is a book

that kind of teaches you how to stretch alcohol.

I tell Kevin that his Uncle Tom was not an illicit bootlegger.

In fact, the book is from 30 years earlier.

Incredible.

But it was still an era of alcoholic lawlessness.

Is it Mike's book?

Well, you had mentioned that Uncle Mike was very close

with Uncle Tom.

Ah, let's see what it says for Thomas.

Here he is, living with Uncle Mike.

He was an accountant in the liquor business.

So this book probably belonged to Uncle Thomas, not Uncle Mike.

I explained that I was able to compare the handwriting in the book to the letter he had given me written by Tom.

It's a direct match.

I mean, I can tell you by looking at handwriting...

- Okay, so it's his hand.

- You had the wrong uncle!

Yeah.

So it turns out that no one was a bootlegger.

He was actually an accountant.

That's a relief in some sense, and a letdown in another.

I'm really happy to understand what it is.

Let's go to a bar and get some real bourbon.

[ laughing ] EDUARDO: And now, in an encore presentation, meet Maya and Ada Rauch, two sisters from Castaic, California, trying to unravel a family mystery about silent movies, Lakota Sioux Indians, and a fated accounts ledger.

We found this in our great-grandfather's attic.

And my dad tried to throw it away.

I'm Eduardo Pagán, and I first met Maya and Ada in 2011.

I'm eager to see what you have for me.

It's this ledger we found in our great-grandfather's attic.

On the first page, it says "Indian Ledger" and "N.Y.M.P.

Corp.," and the date is November 6, 1915.

Do you know what N.Y.M.P.

stands for?

Our mom told us it was the New York Motion Picture Corporation.

Do you know what your great-grandfather did for them?

Well, all we know is that he was in the film industry, but besides that, we don't know anything more.

Their great-grandfather's name was James Rauch.

A lot of the names in here were really interesting, like Big Charger and wife, and also Big Owl and wife.

And we also wanted to know why it said "Pay Barten" on a lot of the pages.

I've never heard of Barten, but many of these names certainly appear to be Native American.

What questions can I answer for you, then?

We just want to find out a little bit more about our great-grandfather as a person, and what were they being paid for, and were they treated fairly?

Ada and Maya were right.

The New York Motion Picture Company -- later changed to corporation -- operated around 1909 through about 1917.

Its principal appears to have been a larger-than-life producer named Thomas Ince, who specialized in producing Westerns.

I can't find any records, but it looks like the company was absorbed by Triangle Films.

Here's a December 1915 publication called The Triangle.

It reads, "Spectacular Indian Productions Coming: Ince planning a thrilling historical drama using hundreds of famous Sioux tribe."

And here's mention of an imposing Indian named Two Lance.

I remember that name from the ledger.

Maya and Ada did some sleuthing...

Okay, so let's type in James Lee Rauch in census.

And learned that their great-grandfather, James Rauch, had worked for Triangle Films in 1918, the same company I found in my Internet search.

Silent-film historian Andrew Brodie Smith asks me to meet him at a theater in Los Angeles.

I'm very eager to show this to you.

Have you ever seen something like this before?

No, I haven't seen anything quite like this before.

I don't recognize any of the names in particular, but undoubtedly the folks were used in the production of motion pictures, and probably Westerns.

Well, what can you tell me

about the New York Motion Picture Company?

[ piano music plays ] They were known for the production of epic Westerns.

Westerns were always popular because they could be exported around the world, and they were cheap to make.

You could make them outdoors, so a lot of people were making them.

But that became a problem, Andrew explains.

By the 19-teens, Westerns saturated the market.

Critics declared them violent, cheap, and destructive.

And so the New York Motion Picture Company around 1911, 1912 responded by making Westerns that were more epic and historical in nature.

They hired a guy named Thomas Ince.

Andrew explains how Ince hired the legendary Miller Brothers' Wild West Show to bring greater authenticity to his movies.

The Miller Brothers' show had thrilled audiences across the United States with a full stable of horses, stagecoaches, and real-life Indians.

There were always a smattering of genuine Native Americans in motion pictures, but by and large, Indian characters would be portrayed by white actors in makeup.

So the degree that which New York Motion Picture Company was hiring Native Americans was pretty much unprecedented.

To house their actors, the New York Motion Picture Company leased 18,000 acres in California's Santa Ynez Canyon.

This massive outdoor studio became known as Inceville.

I have a clip from one of these films that I can show you.

It's called Custer's Last Fight from 1912.

[ ♪♪♪] The Inceville films may have been epic in scale, but for the most part, they also present the stereotypical images that would pervade Hollywood films for most of the century: Native Americans as villainous beasts, exotic others, and noble savages.

Well, at the time, it was thought that this was a realistic depiction, but it gives you an idea of the grandeur.

But Indian actors were largely uncredited.

Andrew says that's what makes this ledger so extraordinary.

There's a name that appears over and over again in this ledger.

It's the name of Barten.

Does that ring any bells for you?

I know Barten was an employee of the Miller Brothers' 101 Ranch Wild West Show, but I'm not sure exactly what his relationship was with New York Motion Picture.

I fill Ada and Maya in on what I've learned so far and ask them to come with me to talk to professor L.G.

Moses.

He's written a book on Indian performers and wants to meet us at Topanga State Park.

We're here because this is the -- this is land reminiscent of Inceville; the filming of the Western movies and movies that had Indian actors would have been in terrain very much like this.

Do you recognize any of the names that you see here?

Quite a few, quite a few.

It's like a who's who of the show Indians.

Really?

He says the men are Lakota Sioux from the Oglala tribe at the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota.

Two Lance traveled many years with the Wild West shows, and also he did some work at Inceville.

Barten, I recognize that name as well.

Who was Barten?

Barten started as a teacher at Pine Ridge Day School, and then, after only a brief time in that role, he went to Gordon, Nebraska, and opened a store.

L.G.

explains that Barten spun his relationship with the Indians into a lucrative business.

It's 25 years after Wounded Knee.

The massacre of at least 150 Sioux men, women, and children in December of 1890 was the final chapter in the centuries-long war between the United States government and the Plains Indians.

So many of the governmental programs were directed at eradicating all aspects of Native culture, from clothing to hairstyles to the spoken word.

The one thing of value that many of these people had, the one thing that they could trade of value, other than their labor, was some of the material aspects from breastplates to robes, bows and arrows.

L.G.

says Barten took these artifacts in trade for credit at his store.

He then rented or sold the material to outfit wild west shows and movie Westerns.

This ledger indicates "pay Barten" and "Barten contract."

Here is a page that deals more specifically with certain aspects of this contract.

It has column A, "Weekly Wages," column B, "Due Barten each week."

So here is one instance where Lone Bear, he is to be paid $8 a week, due Barten each week $7 of that.

So in effect, he's working for $1 a week.

Was Barten a bad guy?

He's representative of his time and place.

So why would they keep coming back under these circumstances?

L.G.

suggests we ask a descendant of one of the performers.

I leave the girls and make some calls to Pine Ridge.

I'm eventually put in touch with Milo Yellow Hair, a grandson of one of the individuals in the ledger.

Take a look at the name right there.

Two Lance and wife.

This is my grandfather and my grandma.

Did you know that your grandfather was a performer in the movies?

No, I don't.

I knew that he was a performer in the wild west show,

the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show.

What do you remember about your grandfather?

When I got to know him

and I asked him about the name Two Lance,

he says this is a warrior in two worlds, he said.

One world is where the white man lives,

and the other world is where the Lakota lives.

And he said you have an obligation

to be the best that you can in both.

Milo shows me a picture of Two Lance in his Lakota regalia.

He was a handsome man.

Oh, yeah.

I'm sorry it didn't run in the family.

[ laughing ] Take a look at this ledger here.

The debits on one side, and there are credits on another side.

They have every appearance of being exploited.

Why do you think Two Lance and some of the other Indians would've participated under these circumstances?

Well...

I want to thank you for inviting me to be a part of this investigation.

It's been a very engrossing mystery.

I tell the girls their research confirms that their great-grandfather was part of the pioneering moviemaking of Thomas Ince, and he probably picked up the ledger as a memento of his time at the company.

Now, one question you had asked is why performers such as Two Lance would get involved in this kind of situation, and I've got something I want to share with you.

My grandfather did this in order to keep his family fed,

because in order to get a little bit of money,

they had to do something.

But Milo thinks Two Lance, the warrior in two worlds, had another reason.

Deep down, he probably knew why he was doing it.

It is a way for him

to pass on his historical ideas to the future.

And that's the best way he knew how, under the circumstances,

to preserve our way of life.

Hopefully by his participation in films,

somehow or another, a little bit about who we are and what we are

and the history that we come from

transposes itself into the future generations.

And this, I believe, is the biggest contribution

that Two Lance and his wife made to us.

And it's valuable.

That's a pleasant surprise.

And there's one other piece to this investigation.

I have someone I want you to meet.

EDUARDO: Come have a seat over here.

This is Milo Yellow Hair.

He is the grandson of Two Lance.

Milo, have a seat, please.

This is Maya, and this is Ada.

Hello, how are you today?

Nice to meet you all.

Nice to meet you.

Yeah, I'm very happy to meet you.

It's been a long road, especially for my grandfather.

And by participating in such things like the movies

and going out and seeing things,

that type of thing allowed him to preserve those things

that make us who we are as Lakota people.

And that's what I brought, a little example of that,

and I want to give it to you girls.

These are porcupine-quill earrings.

Oh, my god!

I just think it's really important, because, like you said, it preserved tradition.

I mean, I still don't like the fact that they were cheated out of money, probably, but I think it's really good that they were able to preserve some tradition.

Since filming, Maya and Ada have continued to research the ledger and the history surrounding it.

They learned that some Ince Indian costumes are stored at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and made a visit to see them.

They're considering donating the ledger to the museum.

ELVIS COSTELLO: ♪Watching' the detectives ♪ ♪It's just like watchin' the detectives ♪