When I hear the words “cow shoes” my mind automatically goes back to the 1962 episode of The Andy Griffith Show titled “The Cow Thief.” In this episode, local farmers complain about missing milk cows. Andy had not been able to arrest the thieves, so Mayor Roy Stoner, played by Parley Baer, called in “an interloper” from the state office to take over the investigation. In the end, Andy saves the day by capturing the thief without the help of the “interloper.”
Andy discovered only one person was involved and he had been covering up the thefts by putting boots on the cows he stole. However, Andy set it up so the near-sighted thief would mistake a bull for a milk cow; when he tried to put shoes on the bull, Andy caught him. The “interloper” from the state did not have a clue.
That was indeed a very interesting episode of The Andy Griffith Show, but I want to tell you about another set of cow shoes. These cow shoes were invented out of necessity by moonshiners and bootleggers. They used them in the Prohibition days to disguise their footprints and make it harder for the revenuers to find their moonshine stills.
During the prohibition of alcohol (1919–1933), the making/brewing, transportation, and selling of alcohol was prohibited, but this did not prevent the moonshiners from making their own brews. They went to extremes not to get caught. Stills were well hidden in forests, mountains, and any place they could hide a one.
My second great-grandfather and his son, my great-grandfather, along with other male members of the family, were moonshiners, they had stills from the Great Smoky Mountains to Jacksonville Florida and the revenuers never found any of their stills.
Many other people during that time were moonshiners and bootleggers. They took many precautions to ensure the illicit liquor was not confiscated. However, the revenuers could still locate their stills, many times by following their footprints in the dirt. That is when the moonshiners came up with an idea that kept their locations and stills private and safe from the revenuers, at least temporarily.
Many times, law enforcement had to track the alleged moonshiners on foot. The cow shoes were invented to help the moonshiners avoid capture. The thought behind the cow shoes was simple: a set of human footprints would have been suspicious, letting the law officers know that humans had traveled that way, which might have been indicative of people brewing or transporting the homemade brew, but if all the law encountered was hoof prints they would think nothing of it.
Get Linda Kay Baker’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
The “cow shoes” were made to alter the person’s footprints. This was to hide their path and keep the law away from their stills. The cow shoes made it appear as though animals had been in the vicinity, not humans. The moonshiners knew that if the law found human footprints, they would most likely follow them to a still.
Cow shoes were a new method of evading prohibition agents. They were made of a strip of metal tacked to a wooden block carved into the shape of cattle hooves and tacked to a metal strip. The strip was then attached to the bottom of the moonshiners’ and bootleggers’ shoes. A man wearing a pair of cow shoes would leave a trail that looked more like a cow had been walking there instead of a man.
A 1922 article from a now-defunct St. Petersburg, Florida newspaper called the Evening Independent carried a story about moonshiners wearing “cow shoes” to trick revenuers — rather than leaving suspicious footprints leading up to their secret stills, they would leave innocent-looking hoofprints in the dirt and grass. (From: “Cow shoes used by Moonshiners in the Prohibition days to disguise their prints”)
The newspapers and law officers believed the inventor of the cow shoes got his idea from a Sherlock Holmes story in which the villain put shoes on his horse that resembled a cow’s hoof to hide his horse’s prints.
Once the law discovered the use of cow shoes by moonshiners and bootleggers, the use of the shoes came to an end, but illegal moonshine was still made.
Information from: (“Bootleggers Used These Cow Shoes To Hide Their Tracks ”)
(“Cow shoes used by Moonshiners in the Prohibition days to disguise their prints”)
