It is not clear why Moore, the originator of the pills, was not taken into the new business or otherwise recognized in the agreement.  As we have seen, White claimed absolute ownership of Dr. Morse’s Indian Root Pills, but Moore evidently did not agree, for he continued to manufacture and peddle his own pills, at the same time denouncing those prepared by A.J.  White & Co. under Comstock control as forgeries.  Moore had previously been in business in Buffalo, at 225 Main Street, under his own name; an announcement in the 1854 Buffalo City Directory (the Commercial Advertiser) describes his firm as successor both to C.C.  Bristol and to Moore, Liebetrut & Co.  The same directory shows White as merely a clerk at Moore’s place of business, although he was made a partner sometime during 1854.

Cyrenius C. Bristol, whose business Moore took over, had entered the drug trade in 1832, initially in partnership with a Dr. G.E.  Hayes.  In the drug field his best known preparation was Bristol’s renowned sarsaparilla, and he is credited with having originated the patent-medicine almanac, along with other advertising innovations.  The patent-medicine business, however, represented merely one of his wide-ranging interests; he was also a co-owner of vessels plying the Great Lakes, a publisher, and a dabbler in such occult arts as Mesmerism, Phrenology, and Morse’s theory of the electric telegraph.  In 1855 he appeared as the proprietor of the Daily Republic, and it was perhaps his growing involvement in publishing that led him to turn his drug business over to Moore.

While we know this much about Moore’s antecedents, a very considerable mystery remains.  If Moore was the proprietor of his own apparently prosperous drug and medicine business in Buffalo in 1854, with White as one of his clerks, how did it happen that in the following year White represented himself to the Comstocks as the sole owner of Dr. Morse’s (Moore’s) Indian Root Pills?  And Moore, although he initially disputed this claim, left his own business in Buffalo and ultimately joined White and the Comstocks, not even in the capacity of a partner, but merely as an employee.

These events would seem, however, to date the origin of the Indian Root Pills fairly closely.  Moore was already manufacturing them in Buffalo prior to White’s initial agreement with the Comstocks, but as he did not mention them by name in his Commercial Advertiser announcement in 1854, it is a fair presumption that the pills were new at this time.  But they must have caught on very rapidly to induce the Comstocks to enter a partnership with White, under his name, when he contributed only the Indian Root Pills but no cash or other tangible assets.

[Illustration:  FIGURE 7.—­Wrapper for Dr. Morse’s Indian Root Pills, A.J.  White & Co., sole proprietor.]