The Allen Outlaws

By Edgar James.

A complete history of their lives and exploits concluding with the Hillsville Courthouse tragedy. When Patrick Henry, of Revolutionary days, arose in an impassioned speech and exclaimed with bated breath, “Give me liberty or give me death!” he perhaps voiced the sentiments of the Allen gang of mountains outlaws, although in a far more holy cause—but still the love of liberty prevailed su¬ preme to which curtailment of freedom, death was preferable. ' That same spirit of liberty has been carried down through the years to the Virginia mountaineer of today, and whether right or wrong in his life and its precepts, there is one thing he holds dearest and best among it all and that is freedom. Captured and imprisoned, like the mountain eagle, he soon languishes and dies, a victim of captivity. Reared in an atmosphere of freedom, raised in an altitude where the people live in the open air and ar.e imbued with the idea that no matter what a mountaineer may do, his freedom is still his own. The legality of the government collecting tax on whiskey, they are unable to comprehend, hence the “moonshine still,” which, while it has been largely diminished by the vigilance of the United States revenue officers, many of whom have lost their.

Baltimore: Phoenix Pub. Co., 1912. 191p.