60S FOREST AND STREAM . [ Oct. 20, 1906. 
1 
Bs£88 
TOM TOMMOT 
The Mounta’n Moonshiner. 
III.— A Leaf from the Past. 
In the 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 of 
excise has been odious to the people of Eng¬ 
land.” Dr. Johnson, in his dictionary, defined 
excise as “A hateful tax levied upon commodities, 
and adjudged not by the common judges of prop¬ 
erty, but by wretches hired by those to whom 
excise is paid.” 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 with 
their ale, not yet having contracted the habit of 
drinking gin; but Scotchmen and Irishmen pre¬ 
ferred distilled spirits, manufactured, as a rule, 
out of their own barley, in small pot-stills (poteen 
means, 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 imme¬ 
diate 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 ex¬ 
terminate the English race. Parliament, alarmed 
at the outlook, then nassed an excise law of ex¬ 
treme 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 widespread became 
the custom of illicit distilling. The law was 
evaded in two different ways, the method de¬ 
pending 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 Lon¬ 
don and Edinboro and Dublin, the common 
practice was to bribe government officials. A 
historian of that time declares that “Not in¬ 
frequently the gauger could have laid his hands 
notice, so that by daybreak next morning ‘the 
boys,’ with all their utensils, might disappear. 
Now and then they were required to leave an 
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 un¬ 
common for a trusty messenger to be dispatched 
from the residence of the gauger to give due 
QUILL ROSE, EX-KING OF THE MOONSHINERS. 
Quill and his part-Indian wife, “Aunt Vice,” have lived 
for twenty-five years in the Eagle Creek wilderness, and 
to this day there is no wagon road, nor even a sled 
road, within five miles of their home. Quill has some 
notches on bis' gun stock; but he has turned over a new 
leaf, and is a jolly, 'good-hearted fellow. The portrait 
was taken when he was visiting us, one day last month. 
Photos by F. B. Laney and Horace Kephart. 
old and worn-out still in place of that which they 
were to remove, 30 that a report of actual seizure 
might be made. A good understanding was thus 
often kept up between the gaugers and the dis¬ 
tillers; 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 was carried on to 
a very great extent, and openly. Poteen was 
usually preferred, even by the gentry, to ‘Parlia¬ 
ment’ 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 moonshin¬ 
ing. 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 peo¬ 
ple 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, here a new factor, 
and a curious one, steps into our story. 
The north of Ireland, at the time of which we 
have been speaking, was not settled by Irish¬ 
men, but by Scotchmen, who had been imported 
by James I. to take the place of native Hiber¬ 
nians 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 for¬ 
eigners, also after the Irish fashion. By and by 
these Scotch-Irish fell out with the British gov¬ 
ernment, and large bodies of them emigrated to 
America, settling, for the most part, in western 
Pennsylvania. I hey were a fighting race. Ac¬ 
customed 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 resist¬ 
ance 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 Alle¬ 
ghany border, formed our rear-guard in the revo¬ 
lution, conquered that rough mountain region for 
cultivation, left it wdien the game became scarce 
and neighbors’ houses too frequent, followed the 
mountains southward, settled western Virginia 
and Carolina, and formed the vanguard westward 
mto Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, and so on¬ 
ward 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 pro¬ 
genitors of that singular race which, by an absurd 
pleonasm, is now commonly known as the “moun¬ 
tain whites.”* 
1 he first generation of Pennsylvania frontiers¬ 
men knew no laws but those of their own mak¬ 
ing. They were too far away too scattered, and 
too poor, for the crown to bother with them. 
hen came the revolution. The backwoodsmen 
were loyal to the new American government— 
loyal to a man. 1 hey not only fought off the 
*Absurd, because there is no such thing as a mountain 
black. I lie few negroes who hang about the valley rail¬ 
road towns are mountaineers in nothing. The native 
whites will haye nothing to do with them. In Swain and 
Jackson counties. North Carolina, are .some 800 mountain 
reds, still in possession of their aboriginal hunting 
grounds—genuine mountaineers, of whom more anon. 
