In the turbulent years after the American Civil war, Lewis Redmond became the most famous outlaw in the United States, outshining his contemporaries Billy-the Kid and Jesse James. Redmond developed and managed a bootleg moonshine network that ranged through Tennessee, North Carolina and South Carolina. He fought and eluded revenuers and marshals that were sent to capture him and gave money to poor Southern farmers to pay their taxes and save their family lands, earning him the reputation of an American Robin Hood. The Northern papers characterized him as a cold-blooded killer without morals, while papers in the South portrayed him as a noble defender of the people. Within his lifetime, however, he and his story would be forgotten. In The Outlaw Lewis Redmond, storytellers, folklorists, historians and descendants recover the memory of this forgotten folk hero, and seek the real Redmond within the wildly distorted historical record, granting a privileged view into a formative era of American history.