6" x 9", 135 page trade paperback titled KANSAS BOOTLEGGERS by Patrick G. O'Brien and Kenneth J. Peak/ Sunflower University Press, ISBN # 0-89745-139-2, First printing (unstated), Copyright 1991/ In selecting the southeastern corner of Kansas, Patrick O'Brien and Kenneth Peak chose an ideal setting to study early twentieth-century liquor trafficking. The wettest region in the driest state in the Union, the area known as the "Balkans" became infamous among antiliquor forces in Kansas who scorned the immigrant coal-mining population there. Much of the information contained in Bootleggers was gleaned from the federal Wickersham Reports, prepared in 1931, and the authors' interviews with several dozen persons who lived in Crawford and Cherokee counties during the 1920s. Based on these sources, O'Brien and Peak determined that state prohibition laws had nurtured a bootlegging culture among the coal-mining population by the turn of the century that subsequently thrived during national prohibition. Despite urgent attempts by state and federal officials to enforce the laws prohibiting the manufacture of whiskey, production in these two counties increased after 1920. Thousands of gallons of "Deep Shaft" were transported every year to consumers in other states. Economic necessity, O'Brien and Peak argue, drove many residents to distill mash, haul whiskey, accept bribes, or earn money in dozens of other ways from the illegal liquor traffic. The book is complete and in VERY GOOD condition with some overall wear that includes a lightly sun-faded spine and some cover edge wear.