So it’s the 1800’s and you’re not feeling so great. You’ve been doing a lot of hard
labour for very little money and your body is aching. But then you see a crowd of people all
gathered around listening to a man named Clark Stanley, or as he called himself, The Rattlesnake
King. You hear Clark tell the crowd about this incredible medicine he’s discovered, that can not
only relieve muscle pain, but sprains, bruises, sore throats, frostbite, insect bites and many
more different ailments. People in the crowd are queuing up to buy his snake oil medicine,
and so, desperate for some pain relief, you go and buy a bottle for yourself, and take a drink.
Welcome to the story of Clark Stanley, the original snake oil salesman.
In the present day, the phrase snake oil salesman is often used to describe a scammer who knowingly
sells fraudulent goods and tries to rip people off. In other words, a con man. And Clark Stanley
is the man responsible for that. But here’s the plot twist:
snake oil may have genuine medicinal properties. You see, snake oil was introduced to America by
Chinese immigrants who were brought in to build the railroads. After a hard day of backbreaking
labor, they would share their homegrown remedies with the other workers to help ease the pain in
their aching joints. Because back in China, oil obtained from Chinese water snakes had
been used in traditional medicine for centuries in order to treat joint ailments such as arthritis.
And some modern day scientific studies have backed this up - analysis of traditional snake oil showed
that it contained a very high percentage of omega-3 fatty acids, which help reduce
cholesterol, inflammation, blood pressure, and can improve cognitive functions. In fact researchers
in Japan found that mice fed with Chinese sea-snake oil showed a significant improvement
in their ability to learn mazes and swim. Now don’t get me wrong, snake oil is certainly not
some miracle medicine that’s going to make a lot of difference, but the point is snake oil didn’t
start out as some fake medicine to get people’s money, it was simply passed around by people as
something that was genuinely a little useful. So… why is snake oil nowadays
associated with shady scams? Well, here’s the thing. Because some people did
get benefits from this chinese snake oil, word of it spread like wildfire among the American working
class, and soon all over the country there was huge demand for this chinese snake oil.
There was just one problem, though. There obviously weren’t any Chinese water snakes
in America, and there was no way that Chinese immigrants could import enough oil from back
home to meet the ever-growing demand in the US. And so, since demand for Chinese snake oil far
outweighed the supply, this opened the floodgates for scammers to create their own version of snake
oil - which of course they claimed was just as good - if not better - than the real thing.
And this is where we meet our story’s intriguing protagonist, Clark Stanley.
Clark Stanley, the self-proclaimed “Rattlesnake King”, said that he came from Texas.
Clark claimed that whilst working as a cowboy for over a decade, he’d spent a good chunk of
the 1880s with the Hopi tribe in Arizona, and they liked him enough to entrust him with the secret
knowledge of how to make their special snake oil medicine, which he then improved, to turn
it into the most potent snake oil on the market. It was a good story - but it was just a story.
Nobody ever confirmed any of this, and there’s absolutely zero evidence of it.
What’s more likely is that Clark had simply heard that there was a high demand in America
for this chinese snake oil, and thus created his own fake version using rattlesnakes instead, which
were much more readily available in America, and then created a backstory to make it sound good.
But despite having no medical evidence to back up his claims, Clark proudly told everyone he met
that if you suffered from joint pain, or countless other ailments, then a bottle of Clark Stanley’s
Snake Oil Liniment was guaranteed to soothe you. Now at first, Clark was just another stereotypical
small-time shady salesman. He’d travel all over the United States peddling his
“miracle cure” one bottle at a time to the unsuspecting gullible masses.
And whilst Clark was the first to truly capitalize on the snake oil craze,
he certainly wasn’t the first person to sell useless concoctions disguised as medicines.
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Before the creation of the United States Food and Drug Administration, there was no
real regulation over the sale of medicine. Anyone could sell their product and claim
it had whatever medicinal properties they wanted, without fear of interference from the government.
As a result, many entrepreneurs with no morals began creating something called
patent medicines. These were typically advertised as treating a wide range of pains and illnesses,
but conveniently they never actually revealed what all of the ingredients were. It was always
a secret formula. Which really just meant they could contain pretty much anything, and thus
most of the time they were just a random mix of ingredients with little to no medical benefit.
Whilst the patent medicine industry began in England in the 17th century, by the 1800’s they
were being imported to many other countries. And pretty soon scammers in the US realized that it
would be much more profitable for them to just create their own tonics and elixirs,
instead of importing them. So yet more of these patent medicines popped up.
In fact if you’ve seen my video on the story of Coke,
you’ll know Coca-Cola actually started out as one of these patent medicines.
However, with so many different patent medicines being created in the 1800s, the market became
crowded, because all of them made massive claims about the many different ailments
they could treat. And so it became harder for these scammers to make their products stand out.
That’s why all of the most successful patent medicine sellers, including Clark Stanley
and his snake oil, had one thing in common: their sales pitch was more of a theatrical performance.
They’d enter a new town, set up shop on the main street, gather a crowd of onlookers,
and put on a show to attract an audience and entice people to buy their products. They’d
make sure the whole thing was a spectacle, so it was essentially part carnival, part sales pitch.
One of the most common tactics these patent medicine sellers used was to have fake plants
in the crowds who vouched for the product from personal experience, and strongly
encouraged others to try it for themselves. Everyone else in the crowd just assumed they
were genuine customers who loved the product, when really they were planted actors getting a
cut of the sales money. And then once the show was finished and they’d sold lots of
the fake medicine, they’d travel from town to town repeating the same con in a new place.
Now, there were many people who did this - but it’s believed Clark Stanley carefully
observed the tricks the most successful patent medicine sellers were using, and then decided
to create an attention-grabbing show of his own. It was at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago that
Clark Stanley got his first big opportunity. Back then, this was the largest public event
in the history of the United States, and Clark set up his own little stand at the fair where he
would fascinate the public by manufacturing his special formula right there in front of them.
Of course, he already knew the golden rule: put on a show.
So, Clark had brought with him a big bag of snakes. And he would snatch one from the sack, cut
it open right in front of his gawking audience, and plunge it into boiling water. He then skimmed
the fat off the top, mixed it with his own secret concoction of ingredients, and made his snake oil
right then and there in front of the crowd. It was an impressive show, and this over the
top display of cutting the snakes right in front of the audience gathered a lot
of attention, and thus Clark’s snake oil was immediately snapped up by the crowds
who gathered to see his grisly performance. Whilst Clark’s theatrics helped him get a lot
of initial customers, the other big breakthrough for Clark came when he used some of his profits
to open a factory in Beverly, Massachusetts to produce his snake oil in larger quantities. He
began operating on a much grander scale than any of the other patent medicine sellers of the time,
and this made his operation seem more authentic. By 1901, Clark had become the largest snake oil
salesman in the country, and had one of the most popular products on the market - and so
he opened an even bigger manufacturing plant. In fact, his product had become so popular
that Clark had to contend with knock-offs that purposely tried to imitate the look of
his bottle. Clark warned everyone not to be taken in by such “worthless imitations” sold
by shady traveling salesmen and street vendors. The irony of course is that this is exactly how
Clark himself started out. But as bizarre as it may seem, Clark had done such a good job
of marketing his fake snake oil, that people were now making fake versions of his product.
But despite the imitators, life was good for Clark Stanley, and his business was booming…
at least it was as long as he didn’t have to actually prove any of these claims he was making.
At the start of the 20th century, the United States Government finally decided it was
time to crack down on all these unchecked patent medicines. They passed the Pure Food
and Drug Act of 1906. This was designed to improve the quality of food and medications,
as well as punish offenders who mislabeled their products or operated in unsanitary conditions.
Although in reality, the act was mainly passed in response to public outrage over the appalling
conditions found in Chicago’s meatpacking industry, and so that was the government’s
first target. This meant that even though dodgy patent medicines were rampant in the
United States, it was not the government’s main priority, which allowed Clark even
more time to keep selling his formula. It wasn’t until a decade later that the
recently-formed FDA turned its attention to snake oil and the other patent medicines.
Of course, it made perfect sense to start by testing the most popular product on the market
- which was Clark Stanley’s Snake Oil Liniment. Now, it turns out that rattlesnake oil
contains less than half the omega-3 that traditional Chinese water snake oil had,
so despite Clark’s boasts and promises that his snake oil was the best that money could buy,
it was never even close to the genuine chinese snake oil in terms of effectiveness.
However, it gets much worse. When the FDA tested Clark’s product in 1916,
they found that there was not even any snake oil whatsoever in his medicine. It was mostly
just mineral oil, mixed with 1 percent beef fat, some chili peppers, and a dash of camphor
and turpentine to give it a distinct aroma. So basically, any health benefits people felt
from Clark’s supposed “miracle cure” were likely the result of the placebo effect.
Some may say the ingredients which Clark added to give it the distinctive smell
actually did incidentally have some minor health benefits, but what is clear is that
Clark’s wild claims of everything his product could cure were not true at all.
Now, if he’d been selling actual real chinese snake oil, then he’d have still been wildly
exaggerating the benefits, but at least he’d have been selling what he claimed.
But the reality was his product didn’t even contain snake oil of any kind. And
thus what most people don’t realize is that Clark Stanley wasn’t convicted for selling snake oil,
he was convicted for selling fake snake oil. In the end, the whole thing was a blatant
outright scam: claiming one thing, and selling another. And using showmanship and lies to fool
his customers. And thus, that is how the term snakeoil salesman was born, and of course,
lives on long after Clark Stanley is gone. The worst part though, is that even though
Clark had misled his customers for decades and made a fortune off his hopeful victims,
he was only fined $20 for misbranding his product. He was charged with “falsely and
fraudulently representing it as a remedy for all pain.”, but even accounting for inflation,
that’s only a fine of about $550 in today’s money. And thus, The Rattlesnake King evaded any severe
repercussions for his actions and got to ride off into the sunset with his ill-gotten gains,
thus literally and permanently giving snake oil salesmen a bad name.
Now, Clark Stanley may have put on a good show to trick people, but he wasn’t as impressive as these
guys right here. This is my mini series on some of the most infamous scammers and con artists,
including the much crazier stories of the Ponzi scheme, the con man who sold the Eiffel tower,
and the guy who robbed an entire country. Some of these are truly insane, so just click
on the playlist on screen now, and take your pick. I’ll see you there in a second. Cheers.