True Crime Chronicles: A small Native American community in McCurtain County earned a moonshine reputation

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long the clear waters of the Mountain Fork River in what is now McCurtain County, the little settlement of Hochatown grew up on Choctaw land in the years after the Trail of Tears. A family of Choctaws named Hocha is the most likely source of the name, though local lore later preferred a simpler explanation. People started calling the place Hoochtown because of the white liquor that poured out of the hollows.

Prohibition had been in force across the Indian Territory since the 1820s. When Oklahoma entered the Union in 1907, its constitution kept hard liquor illegal, and the ban on whiskey lasted until 1959. Far from the reach of revenue agents in Muskogee or Oklahoma City, with fertile corn fields and pure water low in iron, the hills around Hochatown became ideal country for stills.

Named individuals from the early trade are scarce in surviving records. Most of the operators stayed in the hills and out of the papers. What does exist is a mix of family stories, court cases, and the photographs of seized stills that sheriffs posed with for the local papers.

One of the largest documented operations was raided in 1915. Revenue officers found a hidden still in the mountains near Hochatown capable of producing 184 gallons a day. They estimated it took more than fifty men to run it. No operators’ names appear in the accounts.

Around 1910, a still in McCurtain County carried the name The Tennessee Fountain of Youth, though the men who built and ran it are not identified. Family oral history points to Eagletown rather than the old Hochatown site itself. One resident later wrote that her grandfather and great-grandfather were infamous Eagletown bootleggers.

Other family accounts mention men who built stills or served time for the work, including a man named Ollie Butler remembered for the quality of the stills he made.

In 1953 Henry Walker of McCurtain County was charged with selling intoxicating liquor described as moonshine or wildcat non-tax-paid whiskey. The case reached the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals the following year after deputies entered his premises without a warrant.

Arrests and seizures occurred throughout the decades. In 1928, Sheriff Sam Sellers posed at the McCurtain County courthouse with a seized still. In the 1950s Sheriff Bud Murphy and deputies Rufus Fuller and Hartford Compton were photographed with another captured whiskey still.

Local papers in the late 1950s and early 1960s regularly ran photographs of busted stills. The county’s pictorial history noted that the sheriff was kept busy closing them down and that illegal whiskey-making was still booming in the 1920s and 1930s.

The nickname moonshine capital of Oklahoma came from the scale of production and the conditions that made it possible. The clear water of the Mountain Fork River combined with abundant corn and remote creek canyons that hid stills from revenue agents based in Muskogee.

A federal agent testifying in a Muskogee trial stated that the Hochatown area was the moonshine capital of Oklahoma. In 1934, the Daily Oklahoman devoted a full page to the moonshine industry in McCurtain and LeFlore Counties and specifically named Old Hochatown as that capital. The illegal trade supplied a dry nation during national Prohibition and continued to support the local economy after Oklahoma legalized beer but kept hard liquor illegal until 1959.

The volume of whiskey moving out of the hills, the size of individual operations, and the repeated testimony of federal officers produced the reputation that has lasted.

One early incident tied to the trade happened at the Hochatown Store in the years after statehood.

A man named Kincaid owned the store and the cotton gin that served the area. Working the gin was Levi Davis. One day Kincaid could tell Davis had been drinking the local shine and told him to go home. Davis took it as a firing. He came back demanding the money he was owed. Kincaid went home for lunch, was warned that Davis had said one of them would leave the world if he did not get paid, and returned with a .38 caliber pistol.

When Davis repeated the words Kincaid shot him. Davis fell on the steps. Kincaid walked up and shot him again. Davis died there. People who later worked in the store told of things moving with no one around and believed it was the ghost of Levi Davis. The original store now sits under the waters of Broken Bow Lake.

Old Hochatown itself disappeared in the 1960s when the lake filled. The church and cemetery were moved to higher ground. Bootlegging continued in the surrounding woods for years after Oklahoma finally legalized hard liquor. In 2019 agents of the Oklahoma Alcoholic Beverage Laws Enforcement Commission, working with McCurtain County deputies, raided a still near Eagletown after undercover buys at Short’s Beer to Go.

They seized two complete stills, mash, and more than a hundred containers of flavored moonshine from the property of Gary L. Branson, who was charged with operating a whiskey still without a distiller’s license.

In 2023 the same commission arrested Stephen Minchew and Becky Eeds after undercover purchases of quarts of moonshine. Court papers said they ran a still at their home, that Eeds helped deliver and collect payment, and that the couple’s teenage children assisted in the work. The liquor was traded for cash, drugs, or firearms.

Today the legal Hochatown Distilling Company, started by Tommy Blue McDaniel and his brothers, sits near the old ground and barrels the first legal whiskey made in the state. The clear water and the hills that once hid the stills are still there. So are the stories of the men who ran them and the officers who came looking.