What do the granite mountains of Appalachia have in common with the vast backcountry of Alaska? Remoteness, of course, and a history of making illegal liquor. Appalachia has famously cranked out intoxicants with names like mountain dew or white lightning throughout the 1900s, while Alaska produced their locally named hooch in the 1800s. The ‘rednecks’ of Tennessee have enjoyed their bootlegging fame in the public eye thanks to shows such as Dukes of Hazzard and The Beverly Hillbillies, but the story of Alaskan moonshine has largely been ignored. Alaska, more than Tennessee, is the home to America’s first widespread moonshine craze. Up in the northern territory, natives made hoochenoo, bootleg liquor distilled from molasses and flour.
Alaska may seem an unlikely place for moonshiners to thrive, but a combination of colonization, remote location, and competition turned the indigenous coast of southern Alaska into a creole society of drunkenness and lawlessness. The first step in this confusing history was the original introduction of alcohol to the indigenous people of Southern Alaska.
By most accounts, the Eyak, Tlingit, and Haida tribes native to the South Pacific coast of Alaska had no knowledge of alcoholic fermentation prior to contact with Europeans, nevermind distillation. Certain apocryphal ethnographies claim that the original inhabitants of Vancouver brewed “a beverage of elderberry juice, black chitons, and tobacco,” but concrete evidence of a long-term tradition is lacking. Fermentation was almost definitely absent in the more remote northern reaches of Alaska.
Beer and liquor first washed up on Alaskan shores during the latter half of the 18th century. During this period, profit-hungry Europeans arrived on ships, seeking fish, furs, whales, and even sea cows. In the hulls of their ships, they invariably carried a supply of beer and rum. Natives, who naturally dealt in the very commodities that these merchants were seeking, began to exchange goods for booze.
The historian Morgan Sherwood claims that the French fur-trading ship La Flavie was the first to introduce strong spirits to Alaskan natives. If she did not, then any one the impending fleet of American whalers would have. Moreover, it was at the turn of the century that the Russians founded Novoarchhangelsk (New Archangel) at the present day city of Sitka and brought with them the thin, sour barley beer called kvass and an appetite for vodka.
Natives likely learned how to make the kvass from their new Russian colonizers and some evidence suggests that they learned how to build stills following Russian models rather than American ones. Regardless, the influx of Europeans into Alaska opened a floodgate for alcohol. Soon, alcohol was one of the most coveted commodities in the territory. The Tlingit and Haida people, living in the most accessible region of Alaska, became middlemen between Europeans and other natives living in the country’s interior. This trade, however, quickly became illegal, and the natives had to be resourceful if they wanted a drink.
In 1799, the Russian-American Company was chartered and Alexander Baranov was made its first Chief Manager. Russians quickly clashed with Tlingits, and the company tried to maintain control by illegalizing the sale of any spirits or firearms to native people. While this law may have been respected within the Russian community, the Alaskan landscape of this period made it difficult to enforce. Smuggling reigned.
The coast of this region was impossible to monitor. Dotted with hundreds of islands and inlets through which small vessels could pass undetected, the native demand for spirits was easily satisfied by opportunistic whalers or traders. On top of this, the canoes of local tribes rarely had to undergo inspection by Western officials, although some tribes may have policed their own people with such inspections. Sure, the laws were on the books, but Tlingit people could always buy some bootlegged liquor if they wanted.
In addition to the difficulties of policing the open ocean, the Russian policy of indigenous prohibition was damned by two brutally opportunistic neighbors–the British and the Americans. Ships from Vancouver, San Francisco, and Hawaii regularly brought in illegal spirits to take advantage of the gap in the Russian market. Natives were interested in buying, and neither the Americans nor the British particularly cared about the policy of the Russian-American Company.
The Russians were not blind to the widespread smuggling that occurred beneath their noses. In 1821, they went so far as to institute a trade ban on all non-Russian ships in the waters around Alaska. This move instigated both the Russo-American Treaty of 1824 and the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1825, which established boundaries to Russian Alaska and dictated trading rights. Meanwhile local tribes vied for favorable rights within Russian America, with the Tlingit maintaining control of trade with the interior Athapaskans.
Whatever the treaties did accomplish, they did not quench the Alaskan thirst for spirits. Once again, in 1840, the Chief Manager of the Russian-American Company, Adolf Etolin, illegalized all liquor sales in the territory. Learning from past mistakes, the company brokered a deal with their British counterparts at the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1843. The two administrations mutually agreed to the liquor ban.
While the Russians were in charge, alcohol was always an issue, but it was an issue of trade and smuggling. It was not until the 1867 purchase of Alaska by the Americans that the manufacture of spirits came to the land of the Tlingit in full force.
Building on the legacy of Russia’s apartheid prohibition, US congress banned the importation of liquors into the new territory in 1873. This was neither a unique policy in Alaska, nor anywhere else in the States. The Indian Intercourse Act of 1834 prohibited all trade of spirits to and among inidigenous peoples. With the Alaskan Purchase, the Tlingit, Haida, Athapascans, Yupik, and others would now be treated with discrimination equal to that of any other indigenous group in continental America.
American rule of Alaska would turn out to be slightly different than that of Russia. It took 17 years for the Americans to establish a civilian government in the new territory. Between 1867 and 1884, the Treasury Department, the Army, and the Navy took turns administering the region. With the influx of military personnel, the issue of alcohol in Alaska transformed.
The army did not have the best reputation for sobriety in the new territory. Officers were known to be drunk and even participated in liquor smuggling rings. Some soldiers allegedly instructed Russian children to run off to fetch whiskey for them. Thanks to such reputations, historical rumor has it that it was army men who taught the Tlingit people how to distill. Although it is likely some had learned to distill from the Russians earlier, it was not until American rule that hoochenoo, or Alaskan moonshine, became a major issue.
While the sale of alcohol to indigenous Alaskans was expressly illegal, molasses, sugar, and flour could not be banned. Natives, already privy to the fermentation of kvass, learned how to brew a mash from just about anything including potatoes, elderberries, apples, beans, rice, and hops with a sugar-rich base of molasses and flour. The fermented mash was refined in thrifted stills with pots made of coal-oil cans and columns assembled from scrap metal (perhaps even the hollow trunk of kelp). The bountiful raw ingredients would then become high-octane hoochenoo.
One contemporary newspaper describes the process, “These they put into a large caldron over a slow fire. Some of them have considerable mechanical ingenuity and they make a crude sort of a still out of tin. The pieces are cut out for the worm, one Indian holds them in place, while another with a bar of solder and a hot iron fastens them together. They patch on piece after piece until they have completed a rude sort of worm, and then their still is ready.” (Patriot (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania), August 1, 1887)
It was more common for distillers to operate in rural areas, as large purchases of the raw ingredients in the city of Sitka would arouse suspicion. Nevertheless, customs data suggests that the residents of Sitka consumed 110 barrels of molasses a month in the production of the spirit during 1885.
Suspicion could be dangerous. In 1879, the Navy destroyed 38 of the home hooch stills. Then, on January 28th, 1881 Captain Glass of the Wachusett confiscated 20 still along with 1,500 gallons of mash ready to be distilled. Such busts were not uncommon, and some indigenous communities even took part in them, destroying the stills of those in their own communities. Every so often, violence would break out between the American military and natives over the liquor issue.
From the southern end of Alaska’s coast up through the Copper River Delta, indigenous Alaskans were distilling moonshine beneath the discriminatory prohibition the US government had placed on native peoples. The resulting liquor fueled trade, celebration, and widespread intoxication. The Tlingit, the first people to come into contact with the Russians, were the beneficiaries of this trade. They would exchange furs for molasses from white traders, make hoochenoo, then trade the liquor to Athapascas for furs. The liquor was a currency of exchange.
Yet Hoochenoo was not all good for the Tlingit. Although biased, reports from settlers claim that the drinking habits of natives left them underprepared for winter scarcity. One Naval Lieutenant named Emmons alleged that half of the natives on St. Lawrence Island died during the winter of 1878 because they had been drunk throughout the summer. Perhaps such accounts only fuel stereotypes and act as justifications for the discriminatory liquor laws that were in place. But there was also interest from Tlingit leaders to control the production of hoochenoo for the sake of their communities’ health.
Early Alaskan-American history is drenched in moonshine, hoochenoo to be exact. The term is derived directly from the name of a tribe native to Admiralty Island and translated as “grizzly bear fort.” With the island and its people so close to Sitka, the center of all early Western settlement, perhaps the Kootsmoo were some of the first to learn the technology of distillation from white settlers. If not the first, they would surely be privy to its arrival due to their location.
But hoochenoo is only one version of this name. It has been rendered and re-rendered into English in a dozen different ways over the past 150 years. The modern phonetic spelling of the tribe reads “xutsnoowú.” The initial sound in the name is an h- or a k- explaining some of the variations: Hootzenoo, Koutznou, Hoodsnahoos, and Koo-che-roo.
These liberal spellings of the tribal name (and the name of the moonshine) underscore what was so central to the story of alcohol in Alaska–a misunderstanding of natives and their needs. Before alcohol was ever an issue in Alaska, just as it was first introduced in fact, prohibition was enforced upon the local population. This prohibition, born under Russian rule, was renewed again and again up through the actual era of Prohibition in US history. It was far more about controlling the natives than it was about doing something of moral value for them.
Nevertheless, the fact that liquor was illegal meant that Alaskans became accustomed to drinking outside of the law. At first via smuggling, but eventually via distilling, indigenous Alaskans never ceased to consume and trade in spirits. Thus, hoochenoo was born. In contrast, other Americans during the 19th century had no need to develop illicit beverages or a vocabulary to describe them. When the 18th Amendment was passed in 1919, hoochenoo was already well established as an outlaw spirit. Now living under Prohibition themselves, white Americans borrowed the term, abbreviating it to hooch. In short, Alaska is where we got the word hooch.
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Quakers have an interesting relationship with drink. The foundation of Quakerism involved the abandonment of wine as a sacrament. During the 19th century, Quakers would be prominent Temperance advocates. They even pushed hot chocolate and root beer as sober alternatives. Today, some Quakers may drink, but always moderately.
Most have heard of the worm in the tequila or mezcal bottle. Many have wondered what it’s all about. But a Google search does not do the tradition justice. The agave worm is an intriguing delicacy and has been used in Oaxacan cuisine for centuries. I went to the mezcal capital of the world to explore the culture of the mezcal worm. The practice of flavoring mezcal with the worm is likely quite traditional.
Imagine if New York City didn’t have clean tap water. Those folks selling bottled water on the street corner would make a killing.
South African Apartheid lasted from 1948 into the mid 90s, but segregation had deeper roots that came from the beer industry. Starting in European-owned diamond mines, Africans were not allowed to drink alcohol. Later, in Durban, the state came to monopolize native beer production and sales. Funds from beer sales paid for segregation infrastructures and bureaucracies. This system was copied in most of eastern South Africa.
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