Bottled Spirits

Kachinas are the Hopi Indians' holy spirits, sometimes personified by masked, dancers or represented by wooden dolls. Thus the Hopis protested when Kentucky's Ezra Brooks distillery hit upon the less than divine idea of marketing its bourbon in bottles shaped like kachina dolls. "How would a Catholic feel," asked Tribal Chairman Clarence Hamilton, "about putting whisky in a statue of Mary?"

The Indians enlisted the influence of Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, himself a noted collector of kachina dolls. While Brooks had meant to sell 5,100 of the bottles in Arizona, the distillers agreed to stop at the 2,000 bottles already shipped; with the company's cooperation, Goldwater personally shattered the mold from which the bottles had been made. With that the dictates of religious sensibility gave way to the laws of supply and demand. Their rarity guaranteed, the Brooks kachinas have become an Arizona collectors' item.

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