Next time you have a drink, be grateful that Carrie Amelia Moore Nation (1846-1911) is no longer around.  Formidably big, Nation smashed up saloons all over the nation in her self-righteous campaign to do away with “Devil Rum.”  On her historical marker in Kiowa, Kansas, it states that her first attack started there, an episode in which  she armed herself with stones, brickbats, full malt bottles, and one billiard ball.  Moving right along, she enlisted other teetotalers to her cause from the back platforms of trains, encouraging bigger-than-ever saloon-smashing with axes, and her signature weapons, hatchets and hammers — such as the vicious-looking Crandall hammer.

They say that a brief marriage to an alcoholic started Nation on her obsessive temperance tirade. Poor man, a wife like that could drive anyone to drink.