Blockaders and Revenuers

Now I'd be doing these mountains a disservice if we drove clean around this cove and I never once mentioned moonshine. Because up in the folds and hollows all around this valley, making liquor wasn't a crime folks were ashamed of. It was a trade. Some would say a birthright.

Here's the economics of it, and it's pure mountain sense. Say you're a farmer up one of these coves. You grow a good crop of corn. But you're a long, hard haul from any market, over roads that'll break a wagon axle — how do you turn a wagonload of corn into money without ruining your back and your mules getting it to town? Easy. You don't sell the corn. You distill it. A whole cornfield boils down to a few jugs of clear liquor worth more than the raw corn ever was, and a jug rides a mule trail just fine. Corn you can carry in your saddlebags and sell for cash money. That's not vice. That's a business plan.

The government, of course, saw it different — they wanted the tax. So you got the long cat-and-mouse game between the mountain 'blockaders,' as the moonshiners called themselves, and the 'revenuers,' the federal tax men who came hunting the stills. The moonshiners tucked their operations way back up the branches where the water ran cold and clean and the laurel was too thick to see through, worked at night, and knew every deer trail on the mountain. The revenuers mostly didn't. You can guess how often the revenuers won.

I'm not telling you it was all harmless — bad liquor and bad blood killed plenty of men. But when you look up at those dark hollows ringing the cove, know that more than a little of the cash that kept these families going trickled down out of them, one jug at a time.