72 8 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
[Nov. io, 1906. 
tern 
r TOMB SKM1SKI ah tmuimto 1 
The Mountain Moonshiner. 
V.—A Few Hard Fads. 
We come now to the time when our govern¬ 
ment began in dead earnest to fight the moon¬ 
shiners and endeavor to suppress their traffic. 
It was in 1877. To give a fair picture, from the 
official standpoint, of the state of affairs at that 
time, I will quote from the report of the Com¬ 
missioner of Internal Revenue for the year 
i 8 77-78 : „ , 
“It is with extreme regret,” he says, ‘ I find 
it my duty to report the great difficulties that 
have been and still are encountered in many of 
the southern states in the enforcement of the 
laws. In the mountain regions of West Virginia, 
Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina. 
Georgia and Alabama, and in some portions of 
Missouri, Arkansas and Texas, the illicit manu¬ 
facture of spirits has been carried on for a num¬ 
ber of years, and I am satisfied that the annual 
loss to the government from this source has been 
very nearly, if not quite, equal to the annual ap¬ 
propriation for the collection of the internal 
revenue tax throughout the whole country. In 
the regions of country named there are known to 
exist about 5,000 copper stills, many of which at 
certain times are lawfully used in the production 
of brandy from apples and peaches, but I am 
convinced that a large portion of these stills have 
been and are used in the illicit manufacture of 
spirits. Part of the spirits thus produced has 
been consumed in the immediate neighborhood; 
the balance has been distributed and sold, through¬ 
out the adjacent districts. 
“This nefarious business has been carried on, 
as a rule, by a determined set of men, who in 
their various neighborhoods league together for 
defence against the officers of the law, and at a 
given signal are ready to come together with 
arms in their hands to drive the officers of in¬ 
ternal revenue out of the country. 
“As illustrating the extraordinary resistance 
which the officers have had on some occasions 
to encounter, I refer to occurrences in Overton 
county, Tennessee, in August last, where a posse 
of eleven internal revenue officers, who had 
stopped at a farmer’s house for the night, were 
attacked by a band of armed illicit distillers, who 
kept up a constant fusillade during the whole 
night, and whose force was augmented during 
the following day till it numbered nearly two 
hundred men. The officers took shelter in a log 
house, which served them as a fort, returning 
the fire as best they could, and were there be¬ 
sieged for forty-two hours, three of their party 
being shot—one through the body, one through 
the arm, and one in the face. I directed a strong 
force to go to their relief, but in the meantime, 
through the intervention of citizens, the besieged 
officers were permitted to retire, taking their 
wounded with them, and without surrendering 
their arms. 
“So formidable has been the resistance to the 
enforcement of the laws that in the districts of 
5th Virginia. 6th North Carolina. South Carolina, 
2d and 5th Tennessee. 2d West Virginia, Arkan¬ 
sas, and Kentucky, I have found it necessary to 
supply the collectors with breechloading carbines. 
Tn these districts, and also in the states of 
Georgia. Alabama, Mississippi, in the 4th dis¬ 
trict of North Carolina,. and in the 2d and 5th 
districts of Missouri, T have authorized the or¬ 
ganization of posses ranging from five to sixty 
in number, to aid in making seizures and arrests. 
the object being to have a force sufficiently strong 
to deter resistance, if possible, and, if need be, 
to overcome it.” 
The intention of the revenue department was 
certainly not to inflame the mountain people, but 
to treat them as considerately as possible. And 
yet, the policy of “be to their faults a little blind” 
had borne no other fruit than to strengthen the 
combinations of moonshiners and their sym¬ 
pathizers to such a degree that they could set 
the ordinary force of officers at defiance, and 
things had come to such a pass that men of wide 
experience in the revenue service had' reached 
the conclusion that “the fraud of illicit distilling 
was an evil too firmly established to be uprooted, 
and that it must be endured.” 
The real trouble was that public sentiment in 
the mountains was almost unanimously in the 
moonshiners’ favor. Leading citizens were either 
directly interested in the traffic, or were in active 
sympathy with the distillers. “In some cases,” 
said the Commissioner, “state officers, including 
judges on the bench, have sided with the illicit 
distillers and have encouraged the use of the 
state courts for the prosecution of the officers of 
the United States upon all sorts of charges, with 
the evident purpose of obstructing the enforce¬ 
ment of the laws of the United States. * * * 
I regret to have to record the fact that when the 
officers of the United States have been shot down 
from ambuscade, in cold blood, as a rule no 
efforts have been made on the part of the state 
officers to arrest the murderers: but in cases 
where the officers of the United States have been 
engaged in enforcement of the laws, and have 
unfortunately come in conflict with the violators 
of the law, and homicides have occurred, active 
steps have been at once taken for the arrest of 
such officers, and nothing would be left by the 
state authorities to bring them to trial and pun¬ 
ishment. Two cases occurring in the state of 
South Carolina forcibly illustrate this position: 
Tn April last [1878I, Rufus H. Spriggs, a U. S. 
deputy marshal, accompanied a nosse of deputv 
collectors in their search for an illict still among 
the foothills of the Blue Ridge. Without the 
slightest provocation, or any overt act of his 
against the person of his assassin, he was fired 
uoon from ambush and instantly killed. This 
deed scarcely created a ripple upon the surface 
of the public mind. There has been no attempt 
on the part of the state authorities to ferret out 
the murderer or to bring him to trial and punish¬ 
ment. The murdered man was an excellent officer, 
of unimpeachable personal character, and left a 
widow and one child. 
“In strong contrast with this case were the 
circumstances attending the arrest of Hugh P. 
Kane, Wm. Durham and R. P. Scruggs, in the 
same state. They were deputy collectors and 
deputy marshals who were intrusted with a war¬ 
rant for the arrest of one Amos Ladd, who had 
been long engaged in the business of illicit dis¬ 
tilling and formed one of a band of lawless men 
in Pickens county who had openly defied and 
attacked the officers of the United States. Ladd, 
resisted arrest, gun in hand, and the officers, act¬ 
ing as I believe upon a well-grounded apprehen¬ 
sion of danger to their own lives, fired uoon him 
and killed him. No sooner had this unfortunate 
art occurred than great excitement prevailed 
throughout the state. The local newspapers de¬ 
nounced the officers as murderers, and, though 
they [jtVj promptly surrendered to the nearest 
state authorities outside of Pickens county, where 
they- deemed their lives would be unsafe, bail 
was refused them and they were committed to 
jail. At the next sitting of the state court they 
were indicted for murder, and the state judge, 
in an elaborately prepared opinion, refused to 
recognize the transfer of their cases to- the U. S. 
circuit court.” 
These men remained for months incarcerated 
in the county jail, but the transfer of their cases ‘ 
was finally effected. 
There is no question but that this statement of 
the Commissioner is a fair presentation of facts; 
but when he goes on to expose the root of the 
evil, the underlying sentiment that made, and still 
makes, illicit distilling popular among our moun¬ 
taineers, I think that he is singularly at fault. 
This is his explanation—the only one that I have 
found in all the reports of the department from 
1870 to 1904: 
“Much of the opposition to the enforcement of 
the internal revenue laws [he does not say all, 
but offers no other theory! is properly attribut¬ 
able to a latent feeling of hostility to the govern¬ 
ment and laws of the United States still prevail¬ 
ing in the breasts of a portion of the people of 
these districts, and in consequence of this con¬ 
dition of things the officers of the United States 
have often been treated very much as though they 
were emissaries from some foreign country 
quartered upon the people for the collection of 
tribute.” 
This shows an out-and-out misunderstanding of 
the character of the mountain people, their his¬ 
tory, their proclivities, and the circumstances of 
their lives. The southern mountaineers, as a 
class, have been remarkably loyal to the Union 
ever since it was formed. Politics has never had 
anything to do with the moonshining question, 
so far as they are concerned. The reason for 
illicit distilling is purely an economic one, as I 
have shown in preceding chapters. If officers of 
the Federal Government have been treated as 
foreigners they have met the same reception that 
all outsiders meet from the mountaineers. When 
T came into these mountains I was astonished at 
hearing myself called a “furriner.” But I soon 
learned that this was not because I was a 
northern, or rather a western man. Everybody 
who is not mountain born and mountain bred is 
a “furriner,” whether he hail from Maine, Cali¬ 
fornia, Minnesota, or Louisiana. A citizen of 
eastern Carolina is a “furriner” in the Carolina 
mountains. There is no more prejudice against 
a Bostonian than there is against a Charlestonian 
—if, indeed, there be as much. If you ask a 
mountaineer what he calls people from oversea— 
whether they are “furriners” too—he will reply 
“Them’s the outlandishbut I think that only 
signifies an outlandish tongue. To him the word 
“furriner” means precisely what “barbarian” did 
to an ancient Greek. Ordinarily he is courteous 
to the unfortunate alien, though never deferential; 
in his heart of hearts he regards the queer fellow 
with lofty superiority. This trait is characteristic 
of all primitive peoples, of all isolated peoples. 
It is provincialism, pure and simple—a provincial¬ 
ism more crudely expressed in Appalachia than 
in Gotham or The Hub, but no cruder in essence 
for all that. 
The vigorous campaign of 1877 bore such fruit 
that, in the following year, the Commissioner was 
able to report: “We virtually have peaceable 
possession of the dictricts of 4th and 5th North 
Carolina, Georgia, West Tennessee, Kentucky, 
Alabama and Arkansas, in many of which formid¬ 
able resistance to the enforcement of the law has 
prevailed. * * * In the western portion of 
