A Country Rag Distilled Spirits

When things settled down, and hundreds of moonshiners (non-tax paying distillers) were arrested to be taken to trial all the way back east at Philadelphia, that's when G-G-G-Grandpa and other recalcitrant and rebellious poor settlers took their families, oxen and wagons loaded with as much as they could manage and headed west. The 1795 Greenville Treaty opened up Ohio to settlers, and western Virginia and the brand new state, Kentucky, became more attractive to those pioneers once the Indian wars had moved farther west. The migration was on, again, down the old military roads to the rivers and streams to the Shenandoah Valley, across the gaps and passes in the mountains, as far as eastern Tennessee and western Virginia and North Carolina where people were not so crowded, where a man could live his life freely, as God intended.

Great-Grandpa was among the thousands of tough, independent Scots and Scots-Irish (and Germans) who pushed farther west and south into the hills, mountains, and creek branches of the Appalachians. From the eighteenth century into the early decades of the twentieth, generations of these folk lived isolated from society and "progress," barely eking out existence in those remote mountains. News rarely seeped into those back roads settlements, up steep, narrow roads even horses couldn't negotiate. Families lived as they chose, uninfluenced by the outside world, though extreme isolation and poverty dictated a harsh life.

Great-Grandpa built a rude log cabin along a creek branch, nestled in the mountains just below the poplar range, and seldom traveled more than a few miles from home. He made a "tomahawk" claim by notching a tree at each corner of his land, then quickly began felling trees to build a house before winter. That temporary house, barely improved beyond rough logs and a plank floor, remained the family home for a generation. Windowless, the dark cabin was lit by daylight coming in the open door in summer and by what light seeped in through the chinks and drafty cracks between the logs in the winter. The drafts also were necessary to keep the smoke from the fireplace going up the stone chimney. But the drafts weren't foolproof against a contrary wind.

Up a creek, in a woods remote from his cabin, Great-Grandpa built a tiny lean-to shack, and in it a small "oven" where he could boil down his corn mash. After the mash had cooked about fourteen hours, with constant stirring, it was percolated through a spiral copper tube, called "the worm," from which crystalline drops of Appalachian "white lightning" whiskey were collected in glazed crockery jugs. The still had to be remote because of the distinct aroma of percolating mash, and to protect it from prying eyes of passing strangers or vindictive neighbors who might report on him. A felled spruce tree lay in front of the little shack, further camouflaging it.

Making their own whiskey was as necessary and natural to mountain folk as making soup. In a remoteness where they either made what they needed or did without, folks harvested their meager hillside corn crops and turned part of it into mash, to distill into whiskey. The remainder of the precious crop went for bread flour, and hogs and cows fattened themselves as best they could in the wild, until fattening time, when the spent mash was fed to the hogs. Whiskey was a natural supplement to a Spartan diet. It also constituted one of their few medicinal products, used for everything from antiseptic for cleansing wounds to anesthetic when setting broken bones. Back woods etiquette dictated that you offer a guests and visitors a gourd-cup of whiskey, much the same as any wedding ceremony included toasting the new couple by passing 'round the jug.

Whiskey was as elemental as water and air. There was no stigma attached to enjoying it, and no criminal behavior to making it until the government levied new taxes, during the Civil War. The war time government even made it criminal to convert much needed grains into whiskey. Even so, patriotic and loyal mountain men in those secessionist states volunteered in large numbers to fight for the Union, even when taxes on whiskey doubled and tripled. In later years, as the South went "dry," and later still during Prohibition years, mountain men insisted on their right to make their own whiskey, to sell it if they could. There was precious little else to sell, to pay taxes and buy necessities they couldn't make from natural resources at hand.

To enforce the whiskey excise or "revenue" laws, sheriffs and prosecutors were paid by the number of arrests they made and cases they won. Revenue collection agents similarly profited by prosecution (and persecution) of illegal distillers. Some of the revenuers took the job because it paid better than distilling, with which they were intimately familiar. (Sometimes the job gave a revenuer the opportunity to even an old feud with a rival family, too!) But the mountain man selling his home-distilled whiskey ran the blockades as his ancestors had done since the seventeenth century in England, prepared to defend his rights with a gun. He was merely pursuing his ancestral heritage and time-honored roles, like cattle rustling and blockade running. He was not, in those hills, called a moonshiner, but a "blockader."

There probably remain a few moonlight distillers of white lightning, hidden somewhere up remote "crick branches" where the water runs cold and clear. Except for a government which insists on taxing and licensing, many a mountain man would today be stirring his corn mash, collecting the distilled spirits in jugs and jars, continuing centuries old traditions.

In addition to "Mountain Light," Jim has seen the light in publishing otherwise as well, evidenced by his e-zine publications, recently including "Another Time, Another Place," at www.darkstormy.com. "AT,AP" also taps several recurring themes (young boys, extremely old women, and "magik"), and is likely to be included in an upcoming e-book anthology. It's equally likely to be resurrected soon as a finished novel.