Bootleggers of the Metolius
Prohibition came just in time the for the dry-land homesteaders of Grandview who were hanging on by their fingernails, trying to eke a living out of 160 acres that barely had enough forage for a cow or two. With a two-dollar investment in sugar and yeast a farmer could make enough money to put groceries on the table and pay the bills for a couple months.
In 1924 Gussie Foley shot her ever-violent husband, who was in a drunken rage. At the ranch the sherrif found a large still, 15 gallons of moonshine whiskey, 190 quarts of beer, and 4oo gallons of mash. As he lay dying, he told the sheriff "I had it coming", and "mother" wasn't to blame.
A bootlegger could put his still in an abandoned homesteader's cabin and watch from a safe distance until the batch was ready. People approaching the still who were not recognized as lawmen were ofter warned away with a rifle shot.
So well hidden were the moonshiners' cabins and dugouts that they were still being found decades later. Few were foolish enough to be caught, but a couple of prominent resort proprietors on the Metolius were arrested in April of 1926. When the 21st Amendment was repealed in 1933 hundreds of stills were discovered in abandoned and knocked-up shacks deep in the canyons and juniper thickets.
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My grandpa, Roland Price Shepard, moved to Bend sometime between 1920 and 1930. A restaurant owner, Ed Lydick, said that when he owned a restaurant in Bend during prohibition he bought liquor from a man named Shep. Through the conversation they figured out that Shep was our Grandpa and that he had a still at the headwaters of the Metolius. The police in Bend knew he was selling liquor but they did not bother him because he was using the money to raise his family. I was later told that my father had parts to the still in the attic in Mapleton but I was unaware. I live in Dallas and have been a resident of Three Rivers since 1988 |