Moonshine, Murder & Mountaineers:: The Wildest County in America

Book Synopsis: Around the turn of the twentieth century, a rural county located in the backwoods of the Blue Ridge Mountains made national headlines as the most lawless place in America. Winner of the North Carolina Society of Historians' Willie Parker Peace HistoryBook Award, Moonshine, Murder & Mountaineers: The Wildest County in America recounts a time when moonshiners and desperadoes faced off against lawmen in epic battles that made national headlines. The book focuses on actual events from an area in western North Carolina that held the reputation as the wildest county in America. With a masterful blend of entertaining stories supported by historical documentation, the reader is given an exciting account of true events.
Moonshine, Murder & Mountaineers also provides readers with historical and genealogical reference points. The names of real people are used throughout the book. An index of names is provided for ancestry research. Old newspaper and court documents are quoted on numerous occasions and provide a solid historical reference point to the accounts. The book is written in a format to both entertain and inform. Entertaining and exciting stories are followed by a chapter documenting historically accurate research. This format takes the reader back in time through vivid short stories and allows one to make their own opinion of the events based on the facts. Moonshine, Murder & Mountaineers: The Wildest County in America will prove to be a fun and informative read!

Story Topics Include: The Mob Lynching of Holland English and Murder of Ellen CarrollThe Buladean Ballot Brawl of 1892Gunfight at Avery Parker StoreMonroe Garland-DesperadoAaron Wiseman, Moonshiner and Gun for HireThe Devil's Den - Story of the Outlaw Bill HoneycuttThe Blind Tiger - William Harrell's Battle with a RevenuerThe Bakersville Riot
If you love true sensational stories with an old-time mountain flavor then you are going to enjoy Moonshine, Murder & Mountaineers: The Wildest County in America!

Here are a few of the national headlines that inspired the book:

"FAMED FOR MURDERS, WICKEDEST COUNTY IN UNITED STATES IS IN NORTH CAROLINA WHERE SHOOTINGS ARE THE RECREATION OF ITS DESPERATE INHABITANTS...No other county in any state or territory of the union has been the scene of more murders and homicides than Mitchell County in the remote western part of North Carolina adjoining the Tennessee line. Most of the men served in the union army and between them and the ex-confederates, the county is also full of moonshiners, and they fight anybody and anything that interfere with their distillation of blockage whiskey..."

-Kansas Agitator, Kansas (1900)

"Mitchell is one of the far western counties, where blood runs fast and hot, where hip pockets are made for pistols, and the inhabitants know how to use them." (From article entitled, "Mr. Pritchard.")

-Daily Ardmoreite, Oklahoma (1904)

"Bakersville is the county seat of Mitchell County, one of the wildest districts in all this southern section of mountainous country. It is there that the illicit distiller of mountain dew has plied his vocation for years and defied all law." (From article entitled, "Killed in a Mob Battle.")

-The Sun, New York (1893)