Wiley Oakley, his wife, and children gather on the porch of their Scratch Britches home at Cherokee Orchard with “Minnehaha.” Oakley always said, “I have two women: one I talk to and one who talks to me.”
National Park Service
Oakley was a park guide before there was a park. And in that role he nearly always wore a red plaid shirt. He developed friendships with Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller and became known as the “Will Rogers of the Smokies.”
In Horace Kephart’s own eyes, his greatest education came from the spirited breed of mountain man known as “blockade runners” or simply “blockaders.” These descendants of hard-drinking Scotsmen and Irishmen had always liked to “still” a little corn whisky to drink and, on occasion, to sell. But as the 1920s opened into the era of Prohibition, the mountain distiller of a now contraband product reached his heyday. He found and began to supply an expanding, and increasingly thirsty market.
Stealth became the keynote in this flourishing industry. Mountaineers searched out laurel-strangled hollows and streams that seemed remote even to their keen eyes. There they assembled the copper stills into which they poured a fermented concoction of cornmeal, rye, and yeast known as “sour mash” or “beer.” By twice heating the beer and condensing its vapors through a water-cooled “worm” or spiral tube, they could approximate the uncolored liquor enjoyed at the finest New York parties. And by defending themselves with shotguns rather than with words, they could continue their approximations.
In this uniquely romantic business, colorful characters abounded on both sides of the law. Horace Kephart wrote about a particular pair of men who represented the two legal extremes: the famous moonshiner Aquilla Rose, and the equally resilient revenuer from the Internal Revenue Service, W. W. Thomason.
Aquilla, or “Quill,” Rose lived for 25 years at the head of sparsely populated Eagle Creek. After killing a man in self-defense and hiding out in Texas awhile, Rose returned to the Smokies with his wife and settled so far up Eagle Creek that he crowded the Tennessee-North Carolina state line. Quill made whisky by the barrel and seemed to drink it the same way, although he was occasionally seen playing his fiddle or sitting on the porch with his long beard flowing and his Winchester resting across his lap. His eleventh Commandment, to “never get ketched,” was faithfully observed, and Quill Rose remained one of the few mountain blockaders to successfully combine a peaceable existence at home with a dangerous livelihood up the creek.
W.W. Thomason visited Horace Kephart at Bryson City in 1919. Kephart accepted this “sturdy, dark-eyed stranger” as simply a tourist interested in the moonshining art. While Thomason professed innocence, his real purpose in the Smokies was to destroy stills which settlers were operating on Cherokee lands to evade the local law. He prepared for the job by taking three days to carve and paint a lifelike rattlesnake onto a thick sourwood club. During the following weeks, he would startle many a moonshiner by thrusting the stick close and twisting it closer.
When Kephart led the “Snake-Stick Man” into whiskyed coves in the Sugarlands or above the Cherokee reservation, he found himself deputized and a participant in the ensuing encounters. More often than not, shots rang out above the secluded thickets. In one of these shootouts, Thomason’s hatband, solidly woven out of hundreds of strands of horsehair, saved this fearless revenuer’s life.