During Prohibition, some bootleggers took deception to a new level by wearing shoes carved to leave cow hoof prints instead of human footprints.

These disguises helped throw off lawmen and nosy neighbors, making it seem like only livestock had passed through the woods—certainly not someone running an illegal still.   (In some cases, the soles were even designed to face backward, sending pursuers in the wrong direction.)  It was a low-tech but wildly effective tool in the moonshiner’s kit, part of a broader culture of frontier ingenuity where outsmarting the law became a matter of survival.