Moonshine Memories (Hardcover)

For 25 years, Tom Allison was a revenuer, a federal agent charged with enforcement of the nation's laws on taxation of liquor. His territory was the hills, hollows and deep woods of Alabama, and his quarry was the illegal whiskey makers. Agents were issued green work clothes, a pistol, a pair of handcuffs, a pocket commission, and a box of ammunition; they had to provide their own running boots and holster. Allison remembers the stake-outs in the brush, the undercover assignments, the long waits to catch the distillery operators red-handed, and, of course, the chases as he and his fellow treasury agents ran down fleeing moonshiners in the dark of night. This was a different era, and Allison's readable account is both history and folklore. While Allison is a natural story-teller, the characters who populate this history are too strange to be fiction. Perhaps the only thing more striking than the ignorance of many of the moonshiners is the craftiness of some others.