Appalachias Moonshine King

Appalachias Moonshine King

My name is Lewis Redmond, and chances are you have probably never heard of me, but during my lifetime, I was the most famous outlaw in America, more famous than any of my contemporaries like Billy the Kid, Frank, or Jesse James. That is right, I was known as the Appalachian moonshine King, and here is my story. I was born in the mountains of North Georgia in 1854, the youngest of three boys, and along with my nine sisters and our parents, we lived in a one-room cabin with a sleeping loft. My pa was just like all the other mountain men back in those days. Since there weren’t any jobs, he spent his days trying to raise enough food to keep his family fed, but times were hard, and before I was two years old, pa moved the family to Transylvania County, North Carolina, in an area called Middle Fork.

To be honest, times weren’t much better once we got there. The mountain soil was still rocky, and we had a hard time eking out a living. Pa was nearly 65 years old by the time I was 10, and his body was so worn down from the harsh life of a mountaineer that he could no longer do hard labor, so he turned to making moonshine. My ma was half-Cherokee, and all I remember about her is that she was always sick and bedridden. Because of this, I never had any schooling, and what little I knew about books, I had to learn it on my own, and one of my sisters taught me how to read and write. My brothers and I, we did nearly all the farming and tended to the animals by day, and by night we helped him and our father still. It was about this time that the war between the states broke out. Pa was too old to fight, but both my teenage brothers enlisted. Me? Now, I was too young to fight, so I was left home to help out pa on the farm and his blockade liquor business. Yet back then, you didn’t have to go far off to some foreign place to find a war because this conflict was everywhere. Every man in these hills had signed up to fight, and there were several Confederate camps close to our cabin. I was always the curious type, and I spent much of my time hanging around these camps. Before long, a few men began paying me to take care of their stills back home and keeping the camps supplied with a steady supply of liquor. Each fella had their own recipe for shine, and I spent a whole year working their stills every day, learning which techniques worked better than others, even incorporating some of my father’s secrets. Eventually, I set up my own still and I began making my own unique blend. One day, I brought my special shine back to the camp for the soldiers; it was an absolute hit. Everybody said it was the best they had ever tasted, and for my efforts, the men made me an honorary member of the company and began calling me major Lewis, and this turned out to be a name that would stick with me throughout my life. Now, you see, way back in the mountains where we lived, there wasn’t much money, and it was a long ways to where crops had to be hauled to sell them.

Corn, it grows easy enough on those hillside farms, but getting it to a market, now that is a different matter. Very likely, the farm was in a valley and the only exit was a mountain path. The corn would have to be carried over the mountain, and a wagon would probably have to be hired to transport it. This would eat all the value up in expenses by the time the corn reached the market, but on the other hand, a man could turn 10 bushels of corn into 20 gallons of whiskey, and at a dollar a gallon, the farmer would have enough money to buy all the little necessities that he couldn’t raise. Well, yeah, every man in these hills knew that there was much more money to make if you simply turned your corn into blockade liquor, and back then, the revenue officers never got up our way. We had heard about them, but we had never seen them, and as to making a little corn whiskey, of course, the people in this section, they couldn’t see any harm in it. By 1865, the war ended, but we never saw either of my brothers again. Turns out they had been killed in the war, and in a twist of fate, it was my apprenticeship in the fine art of making moonshine during the war that would become my full-time occupation for the next seven years. Pa and I perfected the craft of making good corn whiskey, and I don’t mean to brag, but we never had any trouble in disposing of it. We would load up a wagon full and make deliveries down through Bryant Gap on a regular schedule. While most folks could get a dollar a gallon for their product, we could get a dollar and a half, and we couldn’t keep it in stock. Outlaws and preachers alike would line up with money in their hands, and of course, before long, the revenuers got wind of our operation and they raided our cabin. I was able to make it out the back into the woods, but pa, he was caught and put in prison for illegal manufacturing, and back then prison wasn’t a place for an old man, so within a few months, my father died, and when ma got the news, she stopped eating, and within a few months, she was barely more than 80 pounds, and just like that, she died, and my childhood was over. After ma and pa died, I took care of all my sisters by continuing the family shine business. My best friend Amos and I became business partners, and soon our liquor was the most profitable and sought-after in North Carolina.

I was just 21 years old, but I had 10 men working for me, and our distribution reached all the way down in South Carolina and Northern Georgia, and as far west as East Tennessee. The government had tried multiple times to catch me over the past two years since they killed my pa, and they put a 300 dollar reward on my head, but you see, I had a habit of helping out my neighbors. There was a widow up the street who was about to lose her farm because of some unpaid taxes; you could have knocked her over with a feather when I gave her 13 dollars cash to pay the debt in full. Joe Watkins was about to lose his mill, and Frank Elroy almost lost his blacksmith shop for the same reason, yet I paid all their taxes too. I had done this several times; I just couldn’t stand to see anyone lose everything they had ever worked for just to pad some politician’s pocket with a tax they had simply invented out of thin air. No sir, I saw it as a breach of the god-given right to a man’s individual liberty, and I wasn’t the only one who felt this way. All of us hill folk felt this way, and we saw right through the tyranny, and while those folks up there in those northern states might have been willing to give up their money to some fast-talking elected king, there was no shortage of mountain men who would resist all thievery that came calling in the name of the government. Needless to say, not one man in North Carolina took the feds up on their 300 dollar reward, since folks around here considered me a hero and a modern-day Robin Hood. It was about this time Amos and I were hauling a wagonload of shine in Transylvania County when suddenly a man stepped out on the trail in front of us with a pistol pointed at me. Major Lewis, stop right where you are, you are coming with me, I got a warrant for your arrest, the stranger said. I put my hands up and I tried to reason with him. Well, what have I done to be arrested? I asked. You know why I’m here, I am a United States deputy marshal and I know what is in that wagon, I am here for that reward and you are coming with me. Okay, okay, deputy marshal, I’ll come with you. I am unarmed, sir, you can put your pistol away and you have my word I won’t resist. Nobody has more respect for the United States government than me. Seeing my apparent sincerity in my dark blue eyes, the lawman holstered his pistol, but you see, that was a mistake. I quickly grabbed the one-shot Derringer pistol that Amos had sitting on the seat next to him, and in a split second, the deputy marshal and I fired at the same time.

His bullet grazed the top of Amos’s head, but mine went right through the windpipe of the officer’s throat. His eyes widened as he gasped for air and fell to his knees, and in a few moments, he was dead. Just like that, I had killed a US marshal, and a 1,000 dollar wanted dead or alive reward was put on my head. My face was plastered across newspapers all across America. Folks up north called me an outlaw, but folks around the south, they called me a hero. The federal government sent a small army to arrest me, but I spent the next couple of years hiding in the mountains of North and South Carolina. I was constantly on the move, only staying one place long enough to run off a couple hundred gallons of liquid gold, and each time the law would discover our camp, they would be a day late and a dollar short, finding only an abandoned still and smoldering embers from last night’s campfire. Each place I went to, additional men would join my posse, and before you knew it, I had nearly 30 men armed to the teeth standing with me against the illegal taxes of the government, and several times we had skirmishes with the US marshals. Each time a gun battle would erupt, we overwhelmed them with our superior knowledge of mountain guerrilla warfare tactics. We shot several lawmen, and many times we turned the tables and hunted them, going to their homes and robbing them of their confiscated tax dollars and turning around and giving their money and their horses to families in the community. In Pickens County, South Carolina, we raided a local jail and freed every man who was being held for unpaid taxes. One newspaper printed an article that said the trigger finger of Lewis Redmond’s right hand is stronger than the arm of the law. Knowing that they couldn’t tame the men of Appalachia, in 1878 the government made an about-face and suddenly said that they would no longer use violence to try and arrest moonshiners and that they would just drop all charges if each man would simply register their liquor operations with the government and began paying taxes. Well, nearly overnight there were 200 legal distilleries in South Carolina alone, with men taking the government up on their offer. Not me and my men, though. You see, the government didn’t extend that offer to me. It didn’t matter, though. I vowed to never pay taxes and I continued making untaxed liquor for the next few years, but there was still that matter of the 1,000 dollar bounty on my head, and those lawmen tried and failed for the next three years to catch me, until one night in the winter of 1881. The day started off usual enough. I had an order for a wagonload of liquor to deliver, and the deal was to make the exchange at an abandoned house in the woods at night.

Amos and I got there early in the day to scout out the surrounding woods and to make sure there was no trickery involved. Satisfied that the deal was legit, we built a fire in the fireplace and decided to take a nap while we waited. Our feet were freezing cold from walking in the fresh snow outside, so we took off our boots to let them soak up the heat from the fire, and before long we were fast asleep. Just as the sun set, four men burst through the door with pistols drawn. Turns out our buyer was an undercover US marshal. They pistol-whipped Amos and began kicking me relentlessly until they were able to use a long rope to tie our hands. The lawman took my coat and emptied my pockets, stealing over 100 dollars. All right, boys, let’s load him up and get him down to the Greenville jail, one of the marshal’s men ordered. Can I at least put my boots on before we go? I asked. Of course you can, we wouldn’t want you to catch cold now, would we? he replied as the officers laughed. But you see, as soon as he let go of that rope, I rabbit-punched him in the throat with my tied fist and I broke towards the exit. I bull-rushed right through the other two men and slid out that door like I was greased into the dark woods. I ran with nothing but my socks as bullets cut down tree branches all around me. Now, most men who found themselves standing in ankle-deep snow at midnight with no shoes, coat, or hat, and their hands tied, would have done all they could to get as far away from that abandoned house as possible, but I couldn’t just leave my best friend, and besides, those government bastards had just stolen over 100 dollars from me and a wagon full of my whiskey. Within a few minutes, I came across a small cabin, and the owner recognized me from the newspaper, and after I explained the circumstances, he gladly gave me some dry socks, boots, a coat, and his hat, oh yeah, and a double-barrel 12-gauge shotgun with two pockets full of buckshot. It was nearly midnight now, and I quickly set out for Pickle Gap. I knew the only road out of those woods went right through Skunk Holler and straight into the gap, and by the time they made it there, I was already locked and loaded, waiting on them. As the two wagons approached, I unloaded both barrels of buckshot on them, and complete chaos broke out as they returned fire wildly, since they didn’t know what direction I was located.

I reloaded and then unloaded two more barrels of hot lead on them. Drivers whipped the horses, and they fled into the night. I didn’t have a horse, so I ran beside the road trying to keep up with them. I could hear several men hollering, and it was clear that somebody had been hit. They stopped at the first house they came across and tried desperately to get medical attention for the wounded men, and in the confusion, Amos was able to escape and dart into the woods. Several more gunshots into random directions and the voices of men yelling, where is he, did you see him, which way did he go, and in that moment I knew Amos had escaped, so I fired into the air to let him know my location, and in just a few minutes we were reunited and on the run again. I just couldn’t get my mind right knowing that my 100 dollars was laying in that lawman’s pocket, so a few days later, I regrouped, and my posse of a dozen men surrounded the US marshal’s house who had led the attack on me. Amos and I shot every window out of his house until he finally came out and surrendered. Turns out he had deposited my money into his bank account, so I took his wife hostage right to the bank teller and I had her cash me a check in my name for 125 dollars, and I stole his best horse for my trouble. After that, we took possession of my wagon load of moonshine. I tipped my hat to the misses, and we were home on the run again. So you see, major Lewis Redmond had embarrassed the US federal government for a solid eight years. He had killed one US marshal and wounded several more, in addition to many more who were killed during the gun battles with Redmond and his men. Newspapers across the country credited major Lewis with all of their deaths, and his legend continued to grow. He was literally the most wanted man in America during the lifetimes of Frank and Jesse James and Billy the Kid, and by now the federal government was furious, and they sent an army of IRS agents and soldiers to capture him. They combed the mountains of East Tennessee, North and South Carolina, and the mountains of North Georgia until finally they had a tip on his whereabouts in Liberty, South Carolina. 24 men surrounded the cabin and demanded that Redmond and Amos surrender. Amos stepped out the front door at the same time as major Lewis stepped out the back, and both men opened fire. Redmond managed to escape into the woods, but Amos, his pistol misfired on the first shot, and the US marshal shot him down three times before he dropped to the ground a dead man.

The walls continued to close in on Redmond as he ran for another two years. By 1881, he had built a small cabin next to the Little Tennessee River, located just outside of Bryson City where the floodwaters of the Fontana Lake Dam are. It was here that major Lewis Redmond made his last defiant stand against the US government. IRS revenuers and US marshals had camped outside his cabin all night long, waiting for the fugitive to step out on his porch. When daybreak came, major Lewis heard his dogs barking, so he walked out his front door when he suddenly heard the words, it’s all over, Redmond, there is an army of men and it’s just you, surrender or you’ll be dead where you stand. And in that moment, the most notorious moonshiner who had led a band of outlaws among the mountains just as free as the air that nourished him, yelled out, I’ll never surrender to men who fire at my back, and he began to raise his shotgun in rebellion. An army of men opened fire upon him, ripping almost two dozen holes in Redmond’s overcoat and sending six bullets clean through his body. Mortally wounded, the outlaw broke and ran for one last time, but he only made it 150 yards before collapsing to the ground. Wailing tongues quickly spread the word that America’s most wanted man was dead, and the New York Times ran a story on his death on the front page of its newspaper. Yet what they didn’t know was that Lewis didn’t in fact die. You see, the lawman picked up his bullet-riddled body out of the woods, and they placed it on the kitchen table in his cabin. They quickly sent for a city doctor, but instead an old mountain woman who the locals called a granny woman arrived to Redmond’s house with little more than some plants, roots, and some oils that she had concocted, and somehow she saved his life. Redmond was tried and convicted on 12 counts of illegal moonshining, conspiracy, and assault charges. Strangely though, he avoided the murder charge of killing the US marshal because back then a lawman could only apprehend a criminal if he was in physical possession of the judge’s warrant, which it turns out the US marshal didn’t have in his pocket when Redmond shot him. Major Lewis pled guilty to all charges and was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison, yet at the same time most of America loved him and viewed Lewis as a hero, so much so that after serving less than three years, the president of the United States, Chester A. Arthur, pardoned major Lewis Redmond. The most ironic part of this story is that even the US government recognized that the outlaw who had defied them so defiantly and ran the most successful illegal moonshine operation in American history made some mighty fine moonshine, and indeed it was some good stuff, so good that the government that had once tried so hard to kill him hired Redmond and made him the overseer of their federal distillery in South Carolina, where major Lewis Redmond’s special blend became the most popular whiskey in America, and this time it was legal. And now you know the rest of the story on Appalachia’s moonshine king.