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