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6 Entrepreneurial Spirits In Northern cities and towns they had kind of an illusion about the mountain moon and that helped make a market. They had read books and stories about mountain moonshiners, the gun-toting, hard-eyed mountain man. —Sherwood Anderson, Kit Brandon three of the hash children were hoeing corn down near the creek with their parents one summer morning in 1929 when a barrage of gunshots rang out on the other side of the hill looming above them. Minutes later, two men running at full speed, one of them carrying copper still parts in his hands, ran through the Hashes’ cornfield, hightailing it for cover in the woods on the other side of Runnett Bag Creek. The Hashes stood aside and braced themselves for the aftermath. But no one followed, and the two men—the Hashes’ neighbors from over the mountain—got away. As the moonshiners disappeared over the ridge, officers—they could have been federal, state, or county—found their still on the ridge above the Hash place and chopped it up with an ax and poured the liquor they found at the site out on the ground. The agents had what they were looking for and decided that pursuit on foot—their car was down at the road—was not in their best interest. How they found the still so well hidden from the road remained up for speculation . . . and suspicion. Well before 1929, still busts had become a regular part of the business of blockading in Endicott, and people had grown accustomed to hearing the sounds of the crushing blows of axes in the hollow metal bodies, sometimes accompanied by a few gunshots here and there. Some say Shooting Creek got its name because its water shoots out of the steep mountain down toward Smith River, but just as many talk about the moonshine-related rifle shots heard up in the holler. Suffice it to say that guns discharged there regardless of the name. Charlie Poole’s song about his need to take a Gatling gun and razor to visit the “best people in the world” up on Shooting Creek didn’t help to dispel any such rumors either. Regardless, 1929 was a significant year nonetheless. It marked not only the year of the stock market crash—which Entrepreneurial spirits 145 made nary a sound in Endicott—but it also marked one decade since Prohibition began. By that ten-year anniversary, a whole new pattern of supposed eradication had got underway nationally along with countless rackets to beat it. In Franklin County in 1928, Sheriff J. P. “Pete” Hodges had been elected and had got the conspiracy not so quietly under way, and it had been up and running full bore for a year by 1929. Despite the commotion at the Hash farm, those who have recalled life in the 1920s and ’30s in Endicott say there was little shooting back from their neighbors in the mountains. The moonshiners preferred running away to fighting, and the drivers preferred swerving to keep the pursuing officers behind them to shooting back at them from their cars. The gun battles, which may have been commonplace in some places and times, were mostly mythological in Franklin County, though of course some people still like to dwell on the violent. Most of the time, the mountain whiskey makers were outnumbered or outgunned, and as ironic as it sounds, most had no intention of being criminals. The late Gladys Edwards Willis wrote in Goin’ Up Shootin’ Creek, a personal recollection of the western Franklin County community in the 1930s, that despite stereotypes to the contrary, she didn’t “remember any shooting at the law or anyone else.” For one thing, she said, people valued their guns too much to take them to their stills where they could lose them to confiscation. Guns would also slow them down if they had to run. She did remember people back at home shooting off warning shots to let the stillers know the law was closing in, and that was about it.1 One of Horace Kephart’s informants told him around 1913 that “they used to shoot; nowadays they run.”2 According to the U.S. Commissioner of Revenue then, whom Kephart quotes extensively, the late 1870s did see a lot more shooting from both sides, but in the twentieth century much had changed. And as running often worked, it was much preferable to a murder charge. Because they knew the terrain, moonshine...

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