“....Powerful steep and Laurely....”
“All this,” I apostrophized, “shall be swept away, tree and plant, beast and fish. Fire will blacken the earth; flood will swallow and spew forth the soil. The simple-hearted native men and women will scatter and disappear. In their stead will come slaves speaking strange tongues, to toil in the darkness under the rocks. Soot will arise, and foul gases; the streams will run murky death. Let me not see it! No; I will
“‘... Get me to some far-off landWhere higher mountains under heaven stand ...Where other thunders roll amid the hills,Some mightier wind a mightier forest fillsWith other strains through other-shapen boughs.’”
Wearily I plodded back to camp. No one had arrived but “Doc.” The old man had been thumped rather severely in yesterday’s scrimmage, but complained only of “a touch o’ rheumatiz.” Just how this disease had left his clothes in tatters he did not explain.
It was late when Matt and Granville came in. The crimson and yellow of sunset had turned to a faultless turquoise, and this to a violet afterglow; then suddenly night rose from the valleys and enveloped us.
About nine o’clock I went out on the Little Chestnut Bald and fired signals, but there was no answer. The last we had known of the drivers was that they had been beyond Thunderhead, six miles of hard travel to the westward. There was fog on the mountain. We did some uneasy speculating. Then Granville and Matt took the lantern and set out for Briar Knob. “Doc” was too stiff for travel, and I, being at that time a stranger in the Smokies,would be of no use hunting amid clouds and darkness. “Doc” and I passed a dreary three hours. Finally, at midnight, my shots were answered, and soon the dogs came limping in. Dred had been severely bitten in the shoulders and Rock in the head. Coaly was bloody about the mouth, where his first day’s wound had reopened. Then came the four men, empty-handed, it seemed, until John slapped a bear’s “melt” (spleen) upon the table. He limped from a bruised hip.
“That bear outsharped us and went around all o’ you-uns. We follered him clar over to the Spencer Place, and then he doubled and come back on the fur side o’ the ridge. He crossed through the laurel on the Devil’s Court House and tuk down an almighty steep place. It was plumb night by that time. I fell over a rock clift twenty feet down, and if ’t hadn’t been for the laurel I’d a-bruk some bones. I landed right in the middle of them, bear and dogs, fightin’ like gamecocks. The bear clim a tree. Bill sung out ‘Is it fur down thar?’ and I said ‘Purty fur.’ ‘Waal, I’m a-comin’,’ says he; and with that he grabbed a laurel to swing hisself down by, but the stem bruk, and down he come suddent, to jine the music. Hit was so dark I couldn’t see my gun barrel, and we wuzall tangled up in greenbriers as thick as ploughlines. I had to fire twiste afore he tumbled. Then Matt an’ Granville come. The four of us tuk turn-about crawlin’ up out o’ thar with the bear on our back. Only one man could handle him at a time—and he’ll go a good two hunderd, that bear. We gutted him, and left him near the top, to fotch in the mornin’. Fellers, I’m bodaciously tired out. This is the time I’d give half what I’m worth for a gallon o’ liquor—and I’d promise the rest!”
“You’d orter see what Coaly did to that varmint,” said Bill. “He bit a hole under the fore leg, through hide and ha’r, clar into the holler, so t’ you can stick your hand in and seize the bear’s heart.”
“John, what was that dream of yours?”
“I dremp I stole a feller’s overcoat. Now d’ye see? That means a bear’s hide.”
Coaly, three days ago, had been an inconsequential pup; but now he looked up into my eyes with the calm dignity that no fool or braggart can assume. He had been knighted. As he licked his wounds he was proud of them. “Scars of battle, sir. You may have your swagger ribbons and prize collars in the New York dog show, butthisfor me!”
Poor Coaly! after two more years of valiantservice, he was to meet an evil fortune. In connection with it I will relate a queer coincidence:
Two years after this hunt, a friend and I spent three summer months in this same old cabin on top of Smoky. When Andy had to return North he left with me, for sale, a .30-30 carbine, as he had more guns than he needed. I showed this carbine to Quill Rose, and the old hunter said: “I don’t like them power-guns; you could shoot clar through a bear and kill your dog on the other side.” The next day I sold the weapon to Granville Calhoun. Within a short time, word came from Granville’s father that “Old Reelfoot” was despoiling his orchard. This Reelfoot was a large bear whose cunning had defied our best hunters for five or six years. He got his name from the fact that he “reeled” or twisted his hind feet in walking, as some horses do, leaving a peculiar track. This seems rather common among old bears, for I have known of several “reelfoots” in other, and widely separated, regions.
Cable and his dogs were sent for. A drive was made, and the bear was actually caught within a few rods of old Mr. Calhoun’s stable. His teeth were worn to the gums, and, as he could no longer kill hogs, he had come down toan apple diet. He was large-framed, but very poor. The only hunters on the spot were Granville, with the .30-30, and a northern lumberman named Hastings, with a Luger carbine. After two or three shots had wounded the bear, he rose on his hind feet and made for Granville. A .30-30 bullet went clear through the beast at the very instant that Coaly, who was unseen, jumped up on the log behind it, and the missile gave both animals their death wound.
I washunting alone in the mountains, and exploring ground that was new to me. About noon, while descending from a high ridge into a creek valley, to get some water, I became enmeshed in a rhododendron “slick,” and, to some extent, lost my bearings.
After floundering about for an hour or two, I suddenly came out upon a little clearing. Giant hemlocks, girdled and gaunt, rose from a steep cornfield of five acres, beyond which loomed the primeval forest of the Great Smoky Mountains. Squat in the foreground sat one of the rudest log huts I had ever seen, a tiny one-room shack, without window, cellar, or loft, and without a sawed board showing in its construction. A thin curl of smoke rose from one end of the cabin, not from a chimney, but from a mere semi-circle of stones piled four feet high around a hole cut through the log wall. The stones of thisfireplace were not even plastered together with mud, nor had the builder ever intended to raise the pile as high as the roof to guard his premises against the imminent risk of fire. Two low doors of riven boards stood wide open, opposite each other. These, helped by wide crevices between the unchinked logs, served to let in some sunlight, and quite too much of the raw November air. The surroundings were squalid and filthy beyond anything I had hitherto witnessed in the mountains. As I approached, wading ankle-deep in muck that reached to the doorsill, two pigs scampered out through the opposite door.
Within the hut I found only a slip of a girl, rocking a baby almost as big as herself, and trying to knit a sock at the same time. She was toasting her bare toes before the fire, and crooning in a weird minor some mountain ditty that may have been centuries old.
I shivered as I looked at this midget, comparing her only garment, a torn calico dress, with my own stout hunter’s garb that seemed none too warm for such a day as this.
Knowing that the sudden appearance of a stranger would startle the girl, I chose the quickest way to reassure her by saluting in the vernacular:
“Howdy?”
“Howdy?” she gasped.
“Who lives here?”
“Tom Kirby.”
“Kirby? Oh! yes, I know him—we’ve been hunting together. Is your father at home?”
“No, he’s out somewheres.”
“Where is your mother?”
“She’s in the field, up yan, gittin’ roughness.”
I took some pride in not being stumped by this answer. “Roughness,” in mountain lingo, is any kind of rough fodder, specifically corn fodder.
“How far is it to the next house?”
“I don’t know; maw, she knows.”
“All right; I’ll find her.”
I went up to the field. No one was in sight; but a shock of fodder was walking away from me, and I conjectured that “maw’s” feet were under it; so I hailed:
“Hello!”
The shock turned around, then tumbled over, and there stood revealed a bare-headed, bare-footed woman, coarse featured but of superb physique—one of those mountain giantesses who think nothing of shouldering a two-bushel sack of corn and carrying it a mile or two without letting it down.
Moonshine Still-House Hidden in the Laurel
She flushed, then paled, staring at me round-eyed—frightened, I thought, by this apparition of a stranger whose approach she had not detected. To these people of the far backwoods everyone from outside their mountains is a doubtful character at best.
However, Mistress Kirby quickly recovered her aplomb. Her mouth straightened to a thin slit. She planted herself squarely across my path, now regarding me with contracted lids and a hard glint, till I felt fairly bayoneted by those steel-gray eyes.
“Good-morning. Is Mr. Kirby about?” I inquired.
There was no answer. Instead, the thin slit opened and let out a yell of almost yodel quality, penetrating as a warwhoop—a yell that would carry near half a mile. I wondered what she meant by this; but she did not enlighten me by so much as a single word. It was puzzling, not to say disconcerting; but, charging it to the custom of a country that still was new to me, I found my tongue again, and started to give credentials.
“My name is Kephart. I am staying at the Everett Mine on Sugar Fork——”
Another yell that set the wild echoes flying.
“I am acquainted with your husband; we’vehunted together. Perhaps he has told you——”
Yell number three, same pitch and vigor as before.
By this time I was quite nonplussed. I waited for her to speak; but never a word did the woman deign. So there we stood and stared at each other in silence—I leaning on my rifle, she with red arms akimbo—till I grew embarrassed, half wondering, too, if the creature were demented.
Suddenly a light flashed upon my groping wits. This amazon was on picket. Her three shrieks had been a signal to someone up the branch. Her attitude showed that there was no thoroughfare in that direction at present. Circumstances, whatever they were, forbade explanation. Clearly, the woman thought that I could not help seeing how matters stood. Not for a moment did she suspect but that her yells, her belligerent attitude, and her refusal to speak, were the conventional way, this world over, of intimating that there was acontretemps. She considered that if I was what I claimed to be, an acquaintance of her husband and on friendly footing, I would be gentleman enough to retire. If I was something else—an officer, a spy—well, she was there to stop me until the captain of the guard arrived.
For one silly moment I was tempted to advance and see what this martial spouse would do if I tried to pass her on the trail. But a hunter’s instinct made me glance forward to the upper corner of the field. There was thick cover beyond the fence, with a clear range of a hundred and fifty yards between it and me—too far for Tom to recognize me, I thought, but deadly range for his Winchester, I knew. One forward step of mine would put me in the status of an armed intruder. So I concluded that common sense would better become me at this juncture than a bit of fooling that surely would be misinterpreted, and that might end ingloriously.
“Ah, well!” I remarked, “when your husband gets back, tell him, please, that I was sorry to miss him; though I did not call on any special business—just wanted to say ‘Howdy?’ you know. Good day!”
I turned and went down the valley.
All the way home I speculated on this queer adventure. What was going on “up yan”?
A month before, when I had started for this wildest nook of the Smokies, a friend had intimated that I was venturing into a dubious district—Moonshine Land. It is but frank to confess that this prospect was not unpleasant. Myonly fear had been that I might not find any moonshiners, or that, having found them, I might not succeed in winning their confidence to the extent of learning their own side of an interesting story. As to how I could do this without getting tarred with the same stick, I was by no means clear; but I hoped that good luck might find a way. And now it seemed as if luck had indeed favored me with an excuse for broaching the topic to some friendly mountaineer, so I could at least see how he would take it.
And it chanced (or was it chance?) that I had no more than finished supper, that evening, when a man called at my lonely cabin. He was the one that I knew best among my scattered neighbors. I gave him a rather humorous account of my reception by Madame Kirby, and asked him what he thought she was yelling about.
There was no answering smile on my visitor’s face. He pondered in silence, weighing many contingencies, it seemed, and ventured no more than a helpless “Waal, now I wonder!”
It did not suit me to let the matter go at that; so, on a sudden impulse, I fired the question point-blank at him: “Do you suppose that Tom is running a still up there at the head of that little cove?”
The man’s face hardened, and there came a glint into his eyes such as I had noticed in Mistress Kirby’s.
“Jedgmatically, I don’t know.”
“Excuse me! I don’t want to know, either. But let me explain just what I am driving at. People up North, and in the lowlands of the South as well, have a notion that there is little or nothing going on in these mountains except feuds and moonshining. They think that a stranger traveling here alone is in danger of being potted by a bullet from almost any laurel thicket that he passes, on mere suspicion that he may be a revenue officer or a spy. Of course, that is nonsense;[4]but there is one thing that I’m as ignorant about as any novel-reader of them all. You know my habits; I like to explore—I never take a guide—and when I come to a place that’s particularly wild and primitive, that’s just the place I want to peer into. Now the dubious point is this: Suppose that, one of these days when I’m out hunting, or looking for rare plants, I should stumble upon a moonshine still in full operation—what would happen? What would they do?”
“Waal, sir, I’ll tell you whut they’d do. They’d fust-place ask you some questions about yourself, and whut you-uns was doin’ in that thar neck o’ the woods. Then they’d git you to do some triflin’ work about the still—feed the furnace, or stir the mash—jest so ’s ’t they could prove that you took a hand in it your own self.”
“What good would that do?”
“Hit would make you one o’ them in the eyes of the law.”
“I see. But, really, doesn’t that seem rather childish? I could easily convince any court that I did it under compulsion; for that’s what it would amount to.”
“I reckon you-uns would find a United States court purty hard to convince. The judge ’d right up and want to know why you let grass go to seed afore you came and informed on them.”
He paused, watched my expression, and then continued quizzically: “I reckon you wouldn’t be in no great hurry to dothat.”
“No! Then, if I stirred the mash and sampled their liquor, nobody would be likely to mistreat me?”
“Shucks! Why, man, whut could they gain by hurtin’ you? At the wust, s’posin’ they was convicted by your own evidence, they’d only gita month or two in the pen. So why should they murder you and get hung for it? Hit’s all ’tarnal foolishness, the notions some folks has!”
“I thought so. Now, here! the public has been fed all sorts of nonsense about this moonshining business. I’d like to learn the plain truth about it, without bias one way or the other. I have no curiosity about personal affairs, and don’t want to learn incriminating details; but I would like to know how the business is conducted, and especially how it is regarded from the mountain people’s own point of view. I have already learned that a stranger’s life and property are safer here than they would be on the streets of Chicago or of St. Louis. It will do your country good to have that known. But I can’t say that there is no moonshining going on here; for a man with a wooden nose could smell it. Now what is your excuse for defying the law? You don’t seem ashamed of it.”
The man’s face turned an angry red.
“Mister, we-uns hain’t no call to be ashamed of ourselves, nor of ary thing we do. We’re poor; but we don’t ax no favors. We stay ’way up hyar in these coves, and mind our own business. When a stranger comes along, he’s welcome to the best we’ve got, such as ’tis; but ifhe imposes on us, he gits his medicine purty damned quick!”
“And you think the Government tax on whiskey is an imposition.”
“Hit is, under some sarcumstances.”
My guest stretched his legs, and “jedgmatically” proceeded to enlighten me.
“Thar’s plenty o’ men and women grown, in these mountains, who don’t know that the Government is ary thing but a president in a biled shirt who commands two-three judges and a gang o’ revenue officers. They know thar’s a president, because the men folks’s voted for him, and the women folks’s seed his pictur. They’ve heered tell about the judges; and they’ve seed the revenuers in flesh and blood. They believe in supportin’ the Government, because hit’s the law. Nobody refuses to pay his taxes, for taxes is fair and squar’. Taxes cost mebbe three cents on the dollar; and that’s all right. But revenue costs a dollar and ten cents on twenty cents’ worth o’ liquor; and that’s robbin’ the people with a gun to their faces.
“Of course, I ain’t so ignorant as all that—I’ve traveled about the country, been to Asheville wunst, and to Waynesville a heap o’ times—and I know the theory. Theory says ’t revenue is a tax on luxury. Waal, that’s all right—anything in reason. The big fellers that makes lots of money out o’ stillin’, and lives in luxury, ought to pay handsome for it. But who ever seen luxury cavortin’ around in these Smoky Mountains?”
MOONSHINE MILL—SIDE VIEW
The trails that lead hither are blind and rough.Behind the mill rises an almost precipitous mountain-side.Much of the corn is brought in on men’s backs at the dead of night.
He paused for a reply. Even then, with my limited experience in the mountains, I could not help wincing at the idea. Often, in later times, this man’s question came back to me with peculiar force. Luxury! in a land where the little stores were often out of coffee, sugar, kerosene, and even salt; where, in dead of winter, there was no meal, much less flour, to be had for love or money. Luxury! where I had to live on bear-meat (tough old sow bear) for six weeks, because the only side of pork that I could find for sale was full of maggots.
My friend continued: “Whiskey means more to us mountain folks than hit does to folks in town, whar thar’s drug-stores and doctors. Let ary thing go wrong in the fam’ly—fever, or snake bite, or somethin’—and we can’t git a doctor up hyar less’n three days; and it costs scand’lous. The only medicines we-uns has is yerbs, which customarily ain’t no good ’thout a leetle grain o’ whiskey. Now, th’r ain’t no saloons allowed in all these western counties. The nighest State dispensary, even, is sixty milesaway.[5]The law wunt let us have liquor shipped to us from anywhars in the State. If we git it sent to us from outside the State it has to come by express—and reg-lar old pop-skull it is, too. So, to be good law-abiding citizens, we-uns must travel back and forth at a heap of expense, or pay express rates on pizened liquor—and we are too durned poor to do ary one or t’other.
“Now, yan’s my field o’ corn. I gather the corn, and shuck hit and grind hit my own self, and the woman she bakes us a pone o’ bread to eat—and I don’t pay no tax, do I? Then why can’t I make some o’ my corn into pure whiskey to drink, without payin’ tax? I tell you,’taint fair, this way the Government does! But, when all’s said and done, the main reason for this ‘moonshining,’ as you-uns calls it, is bad roads.”
“Bad roads?” I exclaimed. “What the——”
“Jest thisaway: From hyar to the railroad is seventeen miles, with two mountains to cross; and you’ve seed that road! I recollect you-uns said every one o’ them miles was a thousand rods long. Nobody’s ever measured them, except by mountain man’s foot-rule—big feet, and a long stride between ’em. Seven hundredpounds is all the load a good team can haul over that road, when the weather’s good. Hit takes three days to make the round trip, less’n you break an axle, and then hit takes four. When you do git to the railroad, th’r ain’t no town of a thousand people within fifty mile. Now us folks ain’t even got wagons. Thar’s only one sarviceable wagon in this whole settlement, and you can’t hire it without team and driver, which is two dollars and a half a day. Whar one o’ our leetle sleds can’t go, we haffter pack on mule-back or tussle it on our own wethers. Look, then! The only farm produce we-uns can sell is corn. You see for yourself that corn can’t be shipped outen hyar. We can trade hit for store credit—that’s all. Cornjuiceis about all we can tote around over the country and git cash money for. Why, man, that’s the only way some folks has o’ payin’ their taxes!”
“But, aside from the work and the worry,” I remarked, “there is the danger of being shot, in this business.”
“Oh, we-uns don’t laythatup agin the Government! Hit’s as fair for one as ’tis for t’other. When a revenuer comes sneakin’ around, why, whut he gits, or whut we-uns gits, that’s a ‘fortune of war,’ as the old sayin’ is.”
There is no telegraph, wired or wireless, in the mountains, but there is an efficient substitute. It seemed as though, in one night, the news traveled from valley to cove, and from cove to nook, that I was investigating the moonshining business, and that I was apparently “safe.” Each individual interpreted that word to suit himself. Some regarded me askance, others were so confiding that their very frankness threatened at times to become embarrassing.
Thereafter I had many talks and adventures with men who, at one time or other, had been engaged in the moonshining industry. Some of these men had known the inside of the penitentiary; some were not without blood-guilt. I doubt not that more than one of them could, even now, find his way through night and fog and laurel thicket to some “beautiful piece of copper” that has not yet been punched full of holes. They knew that I was on friendly terms with revenue agents. What was worse, they knew that I was a scribbler. More than once I took notes in their presence while interviewing them, and we had the frankest understanding as to what would become of those notes.
My immunity was not due to any promises made or hostages given, for there were none. I did not even pose as an apologist, but merelyvolunteered to give a fair report of what I heard and saw. They took me at my word. Had I used such representations as a mask and secretly played the spy or informer—well, I would have deserved whatever might have befallen me. As it was, I never met with any but respectful treatment from these gentry, nor, to the best of my belief, did they ever tell me a lie.
Ourterms moonshiner and moonshining are not used in the mountains. Here an illicit distiller is called a blockader, his business is blockading, and the product is blockade liquor. Just as the smugglers of old Britain called themselves free-traders, thereby proclaiming that they risked and fought for a principle, so the moonshiner considers himself simply a blockade-runner dealing in contraband. His offense is onlymalum prohibitum, notmalum in se.
There are two kinds of blockaders, big and little. The big blockader makes unlicensed whiskey on a fairly large scale. He may have several stills, operating alternately in different places, so as to avert suspicion. In any case, the still is large and the output is quite profitable. The owner himself may not actively engage in the work, but may furnish the capital and hire confederates to do the distilling for him, so that personally he shuns the appearanceof evil. These big fellows are rare. They are the ones who seek collusion with the small-fry of Government officialdom, or, failing in that, instruct their minions to “kill on sight.”
The little moonshiner is a more interesting character, if for no other reason than that he fights fair, according to his code, and single-handed against tremendous odds. He is innocent of graft. There is nothing between him and the whole power of the Federal Government, except his own wits and a well-worn Winchester or muzzleloader. He is very poor; he is very ignorant; he has no friends at court; his apparatus is crude in the extreme, and his output is miserably small. This man is usually a good enough citizen in other ways, of decent standing in his own community, and a right good fellow toward all the world, save revenue officers. Although a criminal in the eyes of the law, he is soundly convinced that the law is unjust, and that he is only exercising his natural rights. Such a man, as President Frost has pointed out, suffers none of the moral degradation that comes from violating his conscience; his self-respect is whole.
In describing the process of making whiskey in the mountain stills, I shall confine myself to the operations of the little moonshiner, becausethey illustrate the surprising shiftiness of our backwoodsmen. Every man in the big woods is a jack-of-all-trades. His skill in extemporizing utensils, and even crude machines, out of the trees that grow around him, is of no mean order. As good cider as ever I drank was made in a hollowed log fitted with a press-block and operated by a handspike. It took but half a day’s work to make this cider press, and the only tools used in its construction were an ax, a mattock in lieu of adze, an auger, and a jackknife.
It takes two or three men to run a still. It is possible for one man to do the work, on so small a scale as is usually practiced, but it would be a hard task for him; then, too, there are few mountaineers who could individually furnish the capital, small though it be. So three men, let us say, will “chip in” five or ten dollars apiece, and purchase a second-hand still, if such is procurable, otherwise a new one, and that is all the apparatus they have to pay money for. If they should be too poor even to go to this expense, they will make a retort by inverting a half-barrel or an old wooden churn over a soap-kettle, and then all they have to buy is a piece of copper tubing for the worm.
Moonshine Still in Full Operation
In choosing a location for their clandestinework, the first essential is running water. This can be found in almost any gulch; yet, out of a hundred known spring-branches, only one or two may be suitable for the business, most of them being too public. In a country where cattle and hogs run wild, and where a good part of every farmer’s time is taken in keeping track of his stock, there is no place so secret but that it is liable to be visited at any time, even though it be in the depths of the great forest, several miles from any human habitation. Moreover, cattle, and especially hogs, are passionately fond of still-slop, and can scent it a great distance, so that no still can long remain unknown to them.[6]Consequently the still must be placed several miles away from the residence of anyone who might be liable to turn informer. Although nearly all the mountain people are indulgent in the matter of blockading, yet personal rivalries and family jealousies are rife among them, and it is not uncommon for themto inform against their enemies in the neighborhood.
Of course, it would not do to set up a still near a common trail—at least in the far-back settlements. Our mountaineers habitually notice every track they pass, whether of beast or man, and “read the sign” with Indian-like facility. Often one of my companions would stop, as though shot, and point with his toe to the fresh imprint of a human foot in the dust or mud of a public road, exclaiming: “Now, I wonder whothatfeller was! ’Twa’n’t (so-and-so), for he hain’t got no squar’-headed bob-nails; ’twa’n’t (such-a-one), ’cause he wouldn’t be hyar at this time o’ day”; and so he would go on, figuring by a process of elimination that is extremely cunning, until some such conclusion as this was reached, “That’s some stranger goin’ over to Little River [across the line in Tennessee], and he’s footin’ hit as if the devil was atter him—I’ll bet he’s stobbed somebody and is runnin’ from the sheriff!” Nor is the incident closed with that; our mountaineer will inquire of neighbors and passersby until he gets a description of the wayfarer, and then he will pass the word along.
Some little side-branch is chosen that runs through a gully so choked with laurel andbriers and rhododendron as to be quite impassable, save by such worming and crawling as must make a great noise. Doubtless a faint cattle-trail follows the backbone of the ridge above it, and this is the workers’ ordinary highway in going to and fro; but the descent from ridge to gully is seldom made twice over the same course, lest a trail be printed direct to the still-house.
This house is sometimes inclosed with logs, but oftener it is no more than a shed, built low, so as to be well screened by the undergrowth. A great hemlock tree may be felled in such position as to help the masking, so long as its top stays green, which will be about a year. Back far enough from the still-house to remain in dark shadow when the furnace is going, there is built a sort of nest for the workmen, barely high enough to sit up in, roofed with bark and thatched all over with browse. Here many a dismal hour of night is passed when there is nothing to do but to wait on the “cooking.” Now and then a man crawls on all fours to the furnace and pitches in a few billets of wood, keeping low at the time, so as to offer as small a target as possible in the flare of the fire. Such precaution is especially needed when the number of confederates is too small for efficientpicketing. Around the little plot where the still-shed and lair are hidden, laurel may be cut in such way as to make acheval-de-frise, sharp stubs being entangled with branches, so that a quick charge through them would be out of the question. Two or three days’ work, at most, will build the still-house and equip it ready for business, without so much as a shingle being brought from outside.
After the blockaders have established their still, the next thing is to make arrangements with some miller who will jeopardize himself by grinding the sprouted corn; for be it known that corn which has been forced to sprout is a prime essential in the making of moonshine whiskey, and that the unlicensed grinding of such corn is an offense against the law of the United States no less than its distillation. Now, to any one living in a well-settled country, where there is, perhaps, only one mill to every hundred farms, and it is visited daily by men from all over the township, the finding of an accessory in the person of a miller would seem a most hopeless project. But when you travel in our southern mountains, one of the first things that will strike you is that about every fourth or fifth farmer has a tiny tub-mill of his own. Tiny is indeed the word, for there arefew of these mills that can grind more than a bushel or two of corn in a day; some have a capacity of only half a bushel in ten hours of steady grinding. Red grains of corn being harder than white ones, it is a humorous saying in the mountains that “a red grain in the gryste [grist] will stop the mill.” The appurtenances of such a mill, even to the very buhr-stones themselves, are fashioned on the spot. How primitive such a meal-grinder may be is shown by the fact that a neighbor of mine recently offered a new mill, complete, for sale at six dollars. A few nails, and a country-made iron rynd and spindle, were the only things in it that he had not made himself, from the raw materials.
In making spirits from corn, the first step is to convert the starch of the grain into sugar. Regular distillers do this in a few hours by using malt, but at the little blockade still a slower process is used, for malt is hard to get. The unground corn is placed in a vessel that has a small hole in the bottom, warm water is poured over the corn and a hot cloth is placed over the top. As water percolates out through the hole, the vessel is replenished with more of the warm fluid. This is continued for two or three days and nights until the corn has put forth sprouts a couple of inches long. Thediastase in the germinating seeds has the same chemical effect as malt—the starch is changed to sugar.
The sprouted corn is then dried and ground into meal. This sweet meal is then made into a mush with boiling water, and is let stand two or three days. The “sweet mash” thus made is then broken up, and a little rye malt, similarly prepared in the meantime, is added to it, if rye is procurable. Fermentation begins at once. In large distilleries, yeast is added to hasten fermentation, and the mash can then be used in three or four days; the blockader, however,havingno yeast, must let his mash stand for eight or ten days, keeping it all that time at a proper temperature for fermentation. This requires not only constant attention, but some skill as well, for there is no thermometer nor saccharometer in our mountain still-house. When done, the sugar of what is now “sour mash” has been converted into carbonic acid and alcohol. The resulting liquid is technically called the “wash,” but blockaders call it “beer.” It is intoxicating, of course, but “sour enough to make a pig squeal.”
This beer is then placed in the still, a vessel with a closed head, connected with a spiral tube, the worm. The latter is surrounded by a closedjacket through which cold water is constantly passing. A wood fire is built in the rude furnace under the still; the spirit rises in vapor, along with more or less steam; these vapors are condensed in the cold worm and trickle down into the receiver. The product of this first distillation (the “low wines” of the trade, the “singlings” of the blockader) is a weak and impure liquid, which must be redistilled at a lower temperature to rid it of water and rank oils.
In moonshiners’ parlance, the liquor of second distillation is called the “doublings.” It is in watching and testing the doublings that an accomplished blockader shows his skill, for if distillation be not carried far enough, the resulting spirits will be rank, though weak, and if carried too far, nothing but pure alcohol will result. Regular distillers are assisted at this stage by scientific instruments by which the “proof” is tested; but the maker of “mountain dew” has no other instrument than a small vial, and his testing is done entirely by the “bead” of the liquor, the little iridescent bubbles that rise when the vial is tilted. When a mountain man is shown any brand of whiskey, whether a regular distillery product or not, he invariably tilts the bottle and levels it again, before tasting; if the bead rises and is persistent, well andgood; if not, he is prepared to condemn the liquor at once.
It is possible to make an inferior whiskey at one distillation, by running the singlings through a steam-chest, commonly known as a “thumpin’-chist.” The advantage claimed is that “Hit allows you to make your whiskey afore the revenue gits it; that’s all.”
The final process is to run the liquor through a rude charcoal filter, to rid it of most of its fusel oil. This having been done, we have moonshine whiskey, uncolored, limpid as water, and ready forimmediate consumption.
I fancy that some gentlemen will stare at the words here italicised; but I am stating facts.
It is quite impracticable for a blockader to age his whiskey. In the first place, he is too poor to wait; in the second place, his product is very small, and the local demand is urgent; in the third place, he has enough trouble to conceal, or run away with, a mere copper still, to say nothing of barrels of stored whiskey. Cheerfully he might “waive the quantum o’ the sin,” but he is quite alive to “the hazard o’ concealin’.” So, while the stuff is yet warm from the still, it is taken by confederates and quickly disposed of. There is no exaggeration in the answer a moonshiner once made to me when Iasked him how old the best blockade liquor ever got to be: “If it ’d git to be a month old, it ’d fool me!”
Photo by F. B. Laney
Cornmill and Blacksmith Forge
They tell a story on a whilom neighbor of mine, the redoubtable Quill Rose, which, to those who know him, sounds like one of his own: “A slick-faced dude from Knoxville,” said Quill, “told me once that all good red-liquor was aged, and that if I’d age my blockade it would bring a fancy price. Well, sir, I tried it; I kept some for three months—and, by godlings,it aint so.”
As for purity, all of the moonshine whiskey used to be pure, and much of it still is; but every blockader knows how to adulterate, and when one of them does stoop to such tricks he will stop at no halfway measures. Some add washing lye, both to increase the yield and to give the liquor an artificial bead, then prime this abominable fluid with pepper, ginger, tobacco, or anything else that will make it sting. Even buckeyes, which are poisonous themselves, are sometimes used to give the drink a soapy bead. Such decoctions are known in the mountains by the expressive terms “pop-skull,” “bust head,” “bumblings” (“they make a bumbly noise in a feller’s head”). Some of them are so toxic that their continued use might be fatalto the drinker. A few drams may turn a normally good-hearted fellow into a raging fiend who will shoot or stab without provocation.
As a rule, the mountain people have no compunctions about drinking, their ideas on this, as on other matters of conduct, being those current everywhere in the eighteenth century. Men, women and children drink whiskey in family concert. I have seen undiluted spirits drunk, a spoonful at a time, by a babe that was still at the breast, and she never batted an eye (when I protested that raw whiskey would ruin the infant’s stomach, the mother replied, with widened eyes: “Why, if there’s liquor about, and she don’t git none,she jist raars!”). In spite of this, taking the mountain people by and large, they are an abstemious race. In drinking, as in everything else, this is the Land of Do Without. Comparatively few highlanders see liquor oftener than once or twice a month. The lumberjacks and townspeople get most of the output; for they can pay the price.
Blockade whiskey, until recently, sold to the consumer at from $2.50 to $3.00 a gallon. The average yield is only two gallons to the bushel of corn. Two and a half gallons is all that can be got out of a bushel by blockaders’ methods, even with the aid of a “thumpin’-chist,” unlesslye be added. With corn selling at seventy-five cents to a dollar a bushel, as it did in our settlement, and taking into account that the average sales of a little moonshiner’s still probably did not exceed a gallon a day, and that a bootlegger must be rewarded liberally for marketing the stuff, it will be seen that there was no fortune in this mysterious trade, before prohibition raised the price. Let me give you a picture in a few words.—
Here in the laurel-thicketed forest, miles from any wagon road, is a little still, without so much as a roof over it. Hard by is a little mill. There is not a sawed board in that mill—even the hopper is made of clapboards riven on the spot.
Three or four men, haggard from sleepless vigils, strike out into pathless forest through driving rain. Within five minutes the wet underbrush has drenched them to the skin. They climb, climb, climb. There is no trail for a long way; then they reach a faint one that winds, winds, climbs, climbs. Hour after hour the men climb. Then they begin to descend.
They have crossed the divide, a mile above sea-level, and are in another State. Hour after hour they “climb down,” as they would say. They visit farmers’ homes at dead of night.Each man shoulders two bushels of shelled corn and starts back again over the highest mountain range in eastern America. It is twenty miles to the little mill. They carry the corn thither on their own backs. They sprout it, grind it, distill it. Two of them then carry the whiskey twenty miles in the opposite direction, and, at the risk of capture and imprisonment, or of death if they resist, peddle it out by dodging, secret methods.
This is no fancy sketch; it is literal truth. It is no story of the olden time, but of our own day. Do you wonder that one of these men should say, with a sigh—should say this? “Blockadin’ is the hardest work a man ever done. And hit’s wearin’ on a feller’s narves. Fust chance I git, I’m a-goin’ ter quit!”
And it is a fact that nine out of ten of those who try the moonshining game do quit before long, of their own accord.
One day there came a ripple of excitement in our settlement. A blockader had shot at Jack Coburn, and a posse had arrested the would-be assassin—so flew the rumor, and it proved to be true.
Coburn was a northern man who, years ago, opened a little store on the edge of the wilderness,bought timber land, and finally rose to affluence. With ready wit he adapted himself to the ways of the mountaineers and gained ascendancy among them. Once in a while an emergency would arise in which it was necessary either to fight or to back down, and in these contests a certain art that Jack had acquired in Michigan lumber camps proved the undoing of more than one mountain tough, at the same time winning the respect of the spectators. He was what a mountaineer described to me as “a practiced knocker.” This phrase, far from meaning what it would on the Bowery, was interpreted to me as denoting “a master hand in a knock-fight.” Pugilism, as distinguished from shooting or stabbing, was an unknown art in the mountains until Jack introduced it.
Coburn had several tenants, among whom was a character whom we will call Edwards. In leasing a farm to Edwards, Jack had expressly stipulated that there was to be no moonshining on the premises. But, by and by, there was reason to suspect that Edwards was violating this part of the contract. Coburn did not send for a revenue officer; he merely set forth on a little still-hunt of his own. Before starting, he picked up a revolver and was about to stick it in his pocket, but, on second thought, heconcluded that no red-headed man should be trusted with a loaded gun, even in such a case as this; so he thrust the weapon back into its drawer, and strode away, with nothing but his two big fists to enforce a seizure.
Coburn searched long and diligently, but could find no sign of a still. Finally, when he was about to give it up, his curiosity was aroused by the particularly dense browse in the top of an enormous hemlock that had recently been felled. Pushing his way forward, he discovered a neat little copper still installed in the treetop itself. He picked up the contraband utensil, and marched away with it.
Meantime, Edwards had not been asleep. When Jack came in sight of the farmhouse, humped under his bulky burden, the enraged moonshiner seized a shotgun and ran toward him, breathing death and destruction. Jack, however, trudged along about his business. Edwards, seeing that no bluff would work, fired; but the range was too great for his birdshot even to pepper holes through the copper still.
Edwards made a mistake in firing that shot. It did not hurt Coburn’s skin, but it ruffled his dignity. In this case it was out of the question to pommel the blackguard, for he had swiftly reloaded his gun. So Jack ran off withthe still, carried it home, sought out our magistrate, Brooks, and forthwith swore out a warrant.
Brooks did not fuss over any law books. Moonshining in itself may be only a peccadillo, a venial sin—let the Government skin its own skunks—but when a man has promised not to moonshine, and then goes and does it, why that, by Jeremy, is a breach of contract! Straightway the magistrate hastened to the post-office, and swore in, as a posse comitatus, the first four men that he met.
Now, when four men are picked up at random in our township, it is safe to assume that at least three of them have been moonshiners themselves, and know how this sort of thing should be done. At any rate, the posse wasted no time in discussion. They went straight after that malefactor, got him, and, within an hour after the shot was fired, he was drummed out of the county for good and forever.
But Edwards had a son who was a trifle brash. This son armed himself, and offered show of battle. He fired two or three shots with his Winchester (wisely over the posse’s heads) and then took to the tall timber. Dodging from tree to tree he led the impromptu officers such a dance up the mountainside that by the time theyhad corralled him they were “plumb overhet.”
They set that impetuous young man on a sharp-spined little jackass, strapped his feet under the animal’s belly, and their chief (my hunting partner, he was) drove him, that same night, twenty-five miles over a horrible mountain trail, and lodged him in the county jail, on a charge more serious than that of moonshining.
In due time, a United States deputy arrived in our midst, bearing a funny-looking hatchet with a pick at one end, which he called a “devil.” With the pick end of this instrument he punched numerous holes through the offending copper vessel, until the still looked somewhat like a gigantic horseradish-grater turned inside out. Then he straightened out the worm by ramming a long stick through it, and triumphantly carried away with him the copper-sheathed staff, as legal proof, trophy, and burgeon of office.
The sorry old still itself reposes to this day in old Brooks’s backyard, where it is regarded by passersby as an emblem, not so much of Federal omnipotence, as of local efficiency in administering the law with promptitude, and without a pennyworth of cost to anybody, save to the offender.
Inthe United States, moonshining is seldom practiced outside the mountains and foothills of the southern Appalachians, and those parts of the southwest (namely, in southern Missouri, Arkansas and Texas), into which the mountaineers have immigrated in considerable numbers.
Here, then, is a conundrum: How does it happen that moonshining is distinctly a foible of the southern mountaineer?
To get to the truth, we must hark back into that eighteenth century wherein, as I have already remarked, our mountain people are lingering to this day. We must leave the South; going, first, to Ireland of 150 or 175 years ago, and then to western Pennsylvania shortly after the Revolution.
The people of Great Britain, irrespective of race, have always been ardent haters of excise laws. As Blackstone has curtly said, “From its original to the present time, the very name ofexcise has been odious to the people of England.” Dr. Johnson, in his dictionary, defined excise as “A hateful tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged not by the common judges of property, but by wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid.” In 1659, when the town of Edinburgh placed an additional impost on ale, the Convenanter Nicoll proclaimed it an act so impious that immediately “God frae the heavens declared his anger by sending thunder and unheard tempests and storms.” And we still recall Burns’ fiery invective:
Thae curst horse-leeches o’ the ExciseWha mak the whisky stills their prize!Haud up thy han’, Deil! ance, twice, thrice!There, seize the blinkers! [wretches]An bake them up in brunstane piesFor poor d—n’d drinkers.
Perhaps the chief reason, in England, for this outspoken detestation of the exciseman lay in the fact that the law empowered him to enter private houses and to search at his own discretion. In Scotland and Ireland there was another objection, even more valid in the eyes of the common people; excise struck heaviest at their national drink. Englishmen, at the time of which we are speaking, were content withtheir ale, not yet having contracted the habit of drinking gin; but Scotchmen and Irishmen preferred distilled spirits, manufactured, as a rule, out of their own barley, in small pot-stills (poteenmeans, literally, a little pot), the process being a common household art frequently practiced “every man for himself and his neighbor.” A tax, then, upon whiskey was as odious as a tax upon bread baked on the domestic hearth—if not, indeed, more so.
Now, there came a time when the taxes laid upon spirituous liquors had increased almost to the point of prohibition. This was done, not so much for the sake of revenue, as for the sake of the public health and morals. Englishmen had suddenly taken to drinking gin, and the immediate effect was similar to that of introducing firewater among a race of savages. There was hue and cry (apparently with good reason), that the gin habit, spreading like a plague, among a people unused to strong liquors, would soon exterminate the English race. Parliament, alarmed at the outlook, then passed an excise law of extreme severity. As always happens in such cases, the law promptly defeated its own purpose by breeding a spirit of defiance and resistance among the great body of the people.
The heavier the tax, the more widespreadbecame the custom of illicit distilling. The law was evaded in two different ways, the method depending somewhat upon the relative loyalty of the people toward the Crown, and somewhat upon the character of the country, as to whether it was thickly or thinly settled.
In rich and populous districts, as around London and Edinburgh and Dublin, the common practice was to bribe government officials. A historian of that time declares that “Not infrequently the gauger could have laid his hands upon a dozen stills within as many hours; but he had cogent reasons for avoiding discoveries unless absolutely forced to make them. Where informations were laid, it was by no means uncommon for a trusty messenger to be dispatched from the residence of the gauger to give due notice, so that by daybreak next morning ‘the boys,’ with all their utensils, might disappear. Now and then they were required to leave an old and worn-out still in place of that which they were to remove, so that a report of actual seizure might be made. A good understanding was thus often kept up between the gaugersandthe distillers; the former not infrequently received a ‘duty’ upon every still within his jurisdiction, and his cellars were never without ‘a sup of the best.’... The commerce wascarried on to a very great extent, and openly. Poteen was usually preferred, even by the gentry, to ‘Parliament’ or ‘King’s’ whiskey. It was known to be free from adulteration, and had a smoky flavor (arising from the peat fires) which many liked.” Another writer says that “The amount of spirits produced by distillation avowedly illicit vastly exceeded that produced by the licensed distilleries. According to Wakefield, stills were erected even in the kitchens of baronets and in the stables of clergymen.”
However, this sort of thing was not moonshining. It was only the beginning of that system of wholesale collusion which, in later times, was perfected in our own country by the “Whiskey Ring.”
Moonshining proper was confined to the poorer class of people, especially in Ireland, who lived in wild and sparsely settled regions, who were governed by a clan feeling stronger than their loyalty to the central Government, and who either could not afford to share their profits with the gaugers, or disdained to do so. Such people hid their little pot-stills in inaccessible places, as in the savage mountains and glens of Connemara, where it was impossible, or at least hazardous, for the law to reach them. With arms in hand they defied the officers.“The hatred of the people toward the gauger was for a very long period intense. The very name invariably aroused the worst passions. To kill a gauger was considered anything but a crime; wherever it could be done with comparative safety, he was hunted to the death.”
Thus we see that the townsman’s weapon against the government was graft, and the mountaineer’s weapon was his gun—a hundred and fifty years ago, in Ireland, as they are in America to-day. Whether racial character had much to do with this is a debatable question. But, having spoken of race, a new factor, and a curious one, steps into our story. Let it be noted closely, for it bears directly on a problem that has puzzled many of our own people, namely: What was the origin of our southern mountaineers?
The north of Ireland, at the time of which we have been speaking, was not settled by Irishmen, but by Scotchmen, who had been imported by James I. to take the place of native Hibernians whom he had dispossessed from the three northern counties. These immigrants came to be known as the Scotch-Irish. They learned how to make poteen in little stills, after the Irish fashion, and to defend their stills from intrusive foreigners, also after the Irish fashion. By andby these Scotch-Irish fell out with the British Government, and large bodies of them emigrated to America, settling, for the most part, in western Pennsylvania.
They were a fighting race. Accustomed to plenty of hard knocks at home, they took to the rough fare and Indian wars of our border as naturally as ducks take to water. They brought with them, too, an undying hatred of excise laws, and a spirit of unhesitating resistance to any authority that sought to enforce such laws.
It was these Scotchmen, in the main, assisted by a good sprinkling of native Irish, and by the wilder blades among the Pennsylvania-Dutch, who drove out the Indians from the Alleghany border, formed our rear-guard in the Revolution, won that rough mountain region for civilization, left it when the game became scarce and neighbors’ houses too frequent, followed the mountains southward, settled western Virginia and Carolina, and formed the vanguard westward into Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, and so onward till there was no longer a West to conquer. Some of their descendants remained behind in the fastnesses of the Alleghanies, the Blue Ridge, and the Unakas, and became, in turn, the progenitors of that singular race which, by an absurd pleonasm, is now commonly knownas the “mountain whites,” but properly southern highlanders.
The first generation of Pennsylvania frontiersmen knew no laws but those of their own making. They were too far away, too scattered, and too poor, for the Crown to bother with them. Then came the Revolution. The backwoodsmen were loyal to the new American Government—loyal to a man. They not only fought off the Indians from the rear, but sent many of their incomparable riflemen to fight at the front as well.
They were the first English-speaking people to use weapons of precision (the rifle, introduced by the Pennsylvania-Dutch about 1700, was used by our backwoodsmen exclusively throughout the war). They were the first to employ open-order formation in civilized warfare. They were the first outside colonists to assist their New England brethren at the siege of Boston. They were mustered in as the First Regiment of Foot of the Continental Army (being the first troops enrolled by our Congress, and the first to serve under a Federal banner). They carried the day at Saratoga, the Cowpens, and King’s Mountain. From the beginning to the end of the war, they were Washington’s favorite troops.