Funny you mention moonshining. This is a true story from what my great-grandfather told me way back when I was a kid. Both sides of my family are from southern Arkansas originally, right at the foot of the Ouachita Mountains, an area called the Caddo Valley. Back during Prohibition there was a series of trails leading up into the mountains from the towns of Caddo Gap, Hopper, and Norman (formerly known as Womble)..always found that to be a interesting name for a town. Anyway, the mountains around that area back then were, and still are very rugged terrain. These mountains are also dotted by hundreds of small caves, not very deep caves, but from the stories we were told as kids, the Caddo Indians used them for storing goods. If you took off walking west thru the mountains from this location you wouldn't cross the path of any towns until well into the southeastern part of Oklahoma, it's very isolated. Some of my relatives and other people in the area took to setting up moonshine stills in the mountains in order to supply the city of Hot Springs, AR. The town of Hot Springs used to be a popular "vacation" place for gangsters like Al Capone, Bugs Moran, and Lucky Luciano. The demand for liquor was very high in Hot Springs, so there was a lot of moonshine coming out of the area where I grew up as it was only about forty miles as the crow files from Hot Springs. Well, eventually the Government got word of the influx of alcohol coming from our neck of the woods into Hot Springs and they decided to send in a group of IRS "revenuers" out of the Little Rock office to shut the operation down.
This group of eight revenuers met up at the post office in Caddo Gap, AR and armed with rifles, pistols, and intelligence they had received from a bootlegger they had caught transporting the moonshine to Hot Springs, they started up into the mountains, some of them on horseback, and the others in a horse drawn buggy. My grandfather, who lived right in Caddo Gap all of his life, told me that night there was a prolonged series of gunshots and what sounded like explosions up in the mountains just west of town. The next morning the post master arrived to open the post office in Caddo Gap and found the horse drawn buggy tied up to the post out front. In the buggy were the bodies of all eight revenuers, all shot several times, with a note proclaiming "They got two of us. Let this be the end of it." The story was also covered in an old historical magazine in that area called "The Looking Glass" but my grandfather, not given to tall tales, told me that the State Police took the bodies back to Little Rock and that was the end of it. No other revenuers were sent into the mountains, no follow up investigation was initiated, and no charges were ever filed against anyone. My grandpa never actually said who was involved as far as which families but he said it was no big secret to anyone in town. Coincidentally, this happened around 1930 which would have made my great-grandfather 20 years old at that time. I never thought to ask him if he was in on it, he never seemed the type that would hurt anyone, but from what my great-grandmother told me, he was not someone to trifle with when he was a young man..lol. I've always found that story interesting but also a bit chilling. Have a good week ma'am.