Illegal Odyssey

Except for their disagreement over distilling illegal whiskey, Kentucky’s moonshiners and revenuers, like Wheeler Stinson and Russell Stockton, had much in common. Both usually came from the sturdy Scot-Irish-English stock who settled the commonwealth and brought their distilling expertise with them.  Many of the outlaw distillers and lawmen lived in the same community, grew up sharpening their outdoor skills in tracking and hunting, traded at the same stores and perhaps even voted for the same politicians.  They had keen intellects with impressive retentive abilities and above average powers of observation.

Each pushed the envelope as far as possible in their confrontations. Both understood the political game of smoke and mirrors that allowed the moonshiners, to a certain degree, to operate and learned to live with it.

Moonshiners’ clever tricks, developed over centuries, enabled them to evade lawmen who, during and after Prohibition wore pointy-toed shoe whose tracks in the woods were a dead give away. The tailor-made cigarettes lawmen smoked gave off odors which announced their presence long before they were sighted.  Once the lawmen caught onto the game, they were even opponents.

Late twentieth century moonshiners and revenuers shared something else. They were the last of their kind and presided over, for all practical purposes, the passing of the world’s second oldest profession into the mist of history.

There was a special chemistry between Stockton and Stinson as they recalled their years of being the hunter and the hunted. Each man respected the other. Stinson spent about as much time tracking Stockton through the woods as the lawman did stalking the illegal distiller because he wanted to know what was going on if his still was in danger of being located. Stockton thought Stinson was one of the sharpest moonshiners he’d ever met. “If you were smoking a ‘tailor-made’ cigarette or wearing a pair of ‘pointy-toed shoes,’ as the old revenuers used to say, that was all for Wheeler; he would move his still on you.”

Stinson, with a sly grin, admitted he had plenty of practice tracking Stockton. “Just like he said, if you broke one limb that wasn’t supposed to be broken; I never quit until I tracked it down. I would have spent a week to run it down if it had been about my stuff. That’s why you get caught so much. That’s why I haven’t been caught no more that I have in that many years. When I started through the woods, I could tell Russell Stockton’s track anywhere I saw it. I had seen it so many times that I knew exactly how he operated. I’ve tracked him for miles and he never did know it. I don’t plan on doing anything else (making moonshine) so I don’t care to tell it.” Stinson confessed he sometimes knew when Stockton left his home in Monticello to search for his still.

The two men’s confrontations were on a level playing field. Physically and philosophically, the two men weren’t too far apart. Stinson, the smaller of the two, was sparsely built with twinkling blue eyes set in a sharply hewn face. Stockton stood around six feet and his weather-hardened face, under a mane of pewter-colored hair, attested to a lifetime spent in the outdoors. There was no pretense with either man, what you saw was what they were, mountain men whose belief in themselves had sustained them all their lives.

Both men grew up in the rugged country in Clinton and Wayne counties along the Kentucky-Tennessee border and shared the sturdy Scot-Irish-English ancestors who settled the region. Stinson learned to trap and hunt to make ends meet. He made his first whiskey in 1943, before joining the US Navy the next year. After the war, Stinson would always return to the illegal trade when times were hard. When Stockton arrested him a second time in 1978, Stinson found other work and, in 1987, was a successful small businessman with a farm and store.

The moonshine whiskey business lost a master distiller.

Stockton was reserved, shrewd, and methodical in his work but maintained a sense of humor. He could be like a mountain rattlesnake, unseen and unheard until he suddenly struck out of nowhere catching his prey unaware and unprepared. A favorite Stockton story illustrated his methods when he, Jack C. Miller, his long-time ABC agent partner, and other lawmen raided a bootlegging operation in the mountains. Stockton obtained a rental truck, with a roll-out ramp, and backed it up to the dive’s rear door. When Miller and the other officers made their presence known coming through the front door, an immediate stampede went out the back door that led, not to escape, but into the truck. Stockton, casually leaning against the truck, smiled and said, “Step right in gentlemen, we’ve got your ride all ready for you.”

After serving in the US Army and fighting all the way from Anzio Beach (Italy), where he was wounded, to Berlin, Stockton was called back for the Korean Conflict. When he returned to Wayne County, he went into law enforcement working in the sheriff’s office and the Monticello police department. He said when moonshine was discussed in the sheriff’s office, Stinson’s name was always the first mentioned. In 1968, Stockton became an ABC agent.

Stockton also understood hard times. He remembered busting rocks as a young man for seventeen cents an hour. He understood why men, in desperate economic situations, turned to the illegal whiskey trade. Yet, he didn’t hesitate to uphold the law.