Support for FDR's New Deal shifted Eastern Kentucky from being mostly Republican to staunchly Democrat, a trend that held until the Senate race where the Democratic candidate was soundly trounced in all Appalachian counties due in part to the perception that the Democrats had declared a "war on coal. Caudill chronicles the bare-knuckle political races of his day, including the tight Senate race between FDR's man, incumbent Alben Barkley, and Governor A. Chandler had gained support in the mountains and looked like he might win until Barkley spread false rumors of a mahogany-furnished bathroom in the Governor's mansion that Chandler built for himself and would not let his own wife use.
Caudill both bemoans and encourages subsidization of the migration from of the hills. Entire graduating classes of some of the high schools reportedly moved away. Kentucky's low budget for infrastructure made highways and maintenance sparse, as engineers were drawn away into private sector jobs.
Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area
Since the roads were not funded nor no longer maintained by the private coal companies, mine roads fell into disrepair. Caudill remarks that despite the mass migration of high school graduates, who at the time could automatically obtain enrollment at schools like the University of Kentucky, tey were largely "poorly educated" and unable to keep up with their peers. He cites a study by UK stating that high school students in Harlan County were three years behind their peers nationwide in reading, math, and science.
He remarks as a teacher that few students had read any classics or seemed to have the capability, most of them having studied under teachers who were locally trained at teachers' colleges. Math courses were too often taught by coaches who devoted most of their efforts to athletics. Caudill detests the money put into athletics, coaches, and stadiums over education-- oh what he'd say today! He argues at the end of the book for a Southern Mountain Authority, another TVA-like federal project to transform the region into a tourist hub by creating lakes and trails for visitors from the increasingly-crowded East Coast.
At the same time, he calls for subsidizing industrialization in some areas and revitalization of towns. Interestingly, he calls for the subsidization of migration away from Eastern Kentucky, arguing that the ex-miners would be better off if the government paid them to resettle in Ohio, California, Florida, and other places where industry might be booming and pay better, and to pay to retrain them for those jobs.
His argument against against criticisms that such a federal program is socialist is interesting and could have been written in Firms in every U. We also give foreign aid to prop up the monarchy in Saudi Arabia, where child slavery is legal and the monarchy rules like autocrats. Could some of those tax dollars not better be spent in creating a TVA for Kentucky? He is open to other ideas by "future students," but writes that the reader must understand the following when arguing for market solutions: There is no present industry moving in to support them at any wage. The skills they had were dependent on mining, and that's gone.
UK study showed Harlan Co. The county judge or magistrates have constitutional offices but little power in actual management. I wonder if Caudill would have been supportive of all the pork that Rep. Hal Rogers R has brought to the region, or simply would have complained of the resulting greater dependence on government. He likely would have favored the federally-subsidized industrial parks that now sit empty, and would probably shake his head to know that President Obama and the current Governor were thinking of new spins on old programs.
I suspect Caudill would be sympathetic to economist Paul Coomes' idea to combine counties, since Kentucky has so many for such a small population and many Constitutional offices require local taxes to support, discouraging commerce, and providing no benefit see the jailers without jails above.
Taxes are as hard to collect in some of the mountain counties as they were in All of the aid that goes into the region often subsidizes people just to live there. We're repeating history because we haven't learned from Caudill's. Jun 01, Tammy rated it really liked it. Although it is dated c. Among the best are: They were native North Americans with deeply engrained mores, habits and social outlook.
Whatever his degree of wealth it was a point of Although it is dated c. Whatever his degree of wealth it was a point of honor and courtesy to offer food, drink and shelter to any callers. These were weakening influences, whose effects were then beginning to be discernible to the keen-eyed observer, but the mountaineer with all his shortcomings was still a remarkably strong human type.
Though his land was thinning he was still well fed on simple but nutritious foods. His life had been spent in the outdoors and he was able to endure, without even a realization of discomfort, circumstances which our modern city dweller would consider grevious hardships. Relizing that he was being pilloried by society for maufacturing a product which that same society demanded and highly prized, he developed an abiding distrust of officals at all levels. He became deeply suspicious of the motives of government, both state and Federal, and cynical of its purposes in every field.
The notion sank into his mind that the men who preside over our public affairs are dishonest and hypocritical; that they may be too powerful to checkmate in a contest of strength between government and citizens, so that a man is justified in beating them by any trick, guile or deception. Dec 26, Ever rated it liked it. Caudill was still around to write about the way things are going now, and not just in Kentucky. I don't care much for his study of "the mountaineer", who is always described as illiterate and constantly a-fussin' and a-feudin' with his neighbors, and always seems to need outsi "History will never forgive this generation if it permits the fuel-coal industry in its terminal years to destroy past reclamation a large and potentially important part of the nation's land.
I don't care much for his study of "the mountaineer", who is always described as illiterate and constantly a-fussin' and a-feudin' with his neighbors, and always seems to need outside help in order to help himself as though the mountaineer lacks the capacity to instigate change.
However, it's a powerful and unforgiving study of the coal industry and its effects on the land and its people woe betide the present-day coal industry if this man was still around to see what they've been up to. I'd pair this with Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" - read them and weep over how much has and has not changed since their first appearances on bookshelves. Dec 07, Dennis Fischman rated it really liked it Shelves: This book's story ends just about the time I begin, and the closest I ever came to the coal mines of Kentucky was a couple of days working in Wheeling, West Virginia.
You might think I would be unable to find a footing in it at all. But Caudill's writing sings of sadness and love for the region and its people. He is no romantic. In fact, I winced sometimes at his emphasis on the illiteracy, intemperateness, and cultural backwardness of the people he describes. It is clearly an educated man's dis This book's story ends just about the time I begin, and the closest I ever came to the coal mines of Kentucky was a couple of days working in Wheeling, West Virginia.
It is clearly an educated man's dismay and horror--but it is a horror for his own tribe, not at them. His tribe clearly does not include black people or American Indians, however, and he makes racist assumptions about both. Some key things that I learned include: The later "feuds" we hear of, like the Hatfields and the McCoys, were on a scale to be a war of their own. Big companies bought rights to the forests and the minerals for a fraction of what they were worth. When the market for coal dropped to practically nothing, whatever good wages there were, were cut, and paternalistic benefits became a thing of the past.
The trees had been clear-cut, and there was nothing to hold the soil in place. Roads, schools, pensions, and benefits all really depended on who you knew and how you voted. Two people I respect both recommended this book. I'm glad I read it. But I vow not to mistake the map for the territory or reading about Appalachia for understanding it. Apr 17, Cody Sexton rated it it was amazing. Appalachia has a history of serving as whatever the counterpoint is to our contemporary definitions of progress.
The Cumberland Plateau has always been seen as an anchor dragging behind the rest of America. For example, right after the Civil War, when progress was built into ideas about modernization and the development of industry, Appalachia emerged as this backward place that could throw a wrench into the entire system by remaining primitive, even savage. This book has often been described as a Appalachia has a history of serving as whatever the counterpoint is to our contemporary definitions of progress.
For a while, in the immediate wake of Night Comes to the Cumberlands, Harry Caudill thought his book would help him save Appalachia. He had credibility and the nation's attention. Surely he could use that to build something great, something permanent. But he became disappointed with the slow pace of change and disillusioned that the people did not themselves more actively seek reform. Caudill told reporters that "money alone" couldn't fix an ignorant rural culture that wouldn't bother itself to learn.
And because there are no impediments left, these sacrifice zones are just going to spread outward. There's no way to control corporate power. The system has broken down, whether it's Democrat or Republican.
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And because of that, we've all become commodities. Just as the natural world has become a commodity that is being exploited until it is exhausted, or it collapses. The type of leadership positions available at this level do not generally tend to attract the brightest candidates, as the more educated and intelligent members of the populace tend to move away, and as a result the people are burdened with leadership that is grossly incapable of making any real and lasting contributions to their communities.
As a result of this intellectual and creative paucity the people under their guidance inevitably suffer. The commissioners should then be directed to hire a county manager to conduct the fiscal affairs of the county under their guidance. By this means the number of officials could be reduced to a third the present number, and the resulting economies would make available to the remaining courthouses funds for essential projects which now receive little or no support.
No one is coming to save them and hope of a brighter tomorrow is only holding them back. But what concerns the author of this book should concern all of us. James novel by the same name, Children of Men, you are inevitably reminded of the phrase attributed to Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Zizek, but actually originates with H. Capitalism limits our dreams by claiming that it is the best possible system despite its imperfections. Culminating in a widespread belief that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative.
Global capitalism is simply accepted as a fact that you cannot do anything about. The only question is, will you accommodate yourself to it, or will you be dismissed and excluded by it? Jun 28, Angela rated it it was amazing. The culprit which keeps the region dependant on COAL. Jan 20, Samantha Shepherd rated it liked it Recommends it for: Henry Caudill is still a prominent figure in Whitesburg, KY, despite the fact that is he dead.
The library on Main Street is named in his honor. Educated in Letcher Co. I finally decided to figure out why. This book is non-fiction. It is the complete history up to the mids anyway of the Appalachias, told by an Appalachian. This book doesn't cut corners or pull-punches to make us look better. It tells the truth about how many people used to live Henry Caudill is still a prominent figure in Whitesburg, KY, despite the fact that is he dead. It tells the truth about how many people used to live.
It is really informative and helped me understand many things I wandered about. However, this is a stain on this book. It's racist-- sometimes overtly so. Caudill didn't intend it to be this way when he wrote it. The Civil Rights Movement hadn't really made it to our doorstep yet because we had, and still have, a low African American population. Still, some of his mids language will make some passages difficult to read for our 21st century minds. Sep 13, Jim rated it really liked it.
This is an excellent book about the area of eastern Kentucky that was once so beautiful, and is today so devastated. Mountain tops torn off, water that smells like sulphur; exposed veins of played out coal, and ground that will never again support a forest or trees. Trade Routes, Robber Barons and red-neck Bubbas getting wealthy with small coal mines and the people that work them. My sister used to work i This is an excellent book about the area of eastern Kentucky that was once so beautiful, and is today so devastated.
My sister used to work in a hospital near Painstville, Kentucky. Black Lung disease was the rule, not anything unusual. Caudill traces the history of this region very well. May 26, John Roche rated it it was amazing. The book is dated, and there are terms as assumptions that might make us blush today. For instance, his emphasis on some sort of inherited biological deficiency is a major stain in this book that can lead to one to some horribly untrue stereotypes.
Nevertheless, parts of this book with its commentary on the welfare state, the rape of appalachia with strip mining, and the need for education reform are all still valid today. Yes there's been progress, but there is still so much that needs to be do The book is dated, and there are terms as assumptions that might make us blush today. Yes there's been progress, but there is still so much that needs to be done. Jun 13, Dianna Ott rated it liked it Shelves: Written by my cousin Harry about the place where I grew up. This book is hard to read nowadays. Apr 10, Jud Barry rated it it was amazing.
Anyone who has dabbled in reading about Appalachia knows about this book, which is widely regarded as a definitive classic. I ordered a copy through interlibrary loan and dove into it with great anticipation. About halfway through, immersed in its rich story, I thought to myself, "It's as if eastern Kentucky were a person, and this is the biography.
It is a biography. That Caudill was able to achieve this stylist Anyone who has dabbled in reading about Appalachia knows about this book, which is widely regarded as a definitive classic. That Caudill was able to achieve this stylistic sensation so convincingly says a lot about the quality of his writing. He describes the historic stages in the life of the region: It is the latter part of the story that tells how the pursuit of private, short-term profit has the power to build, shape, and destroy landscapes and societies. It is this story -- alongside the story of slavery -- that should be known as a cautionary tale to every student of economics and politics.
The "profile" of the first-wave coal camp towns alone serves to show how private enterprise can organize an operation not just to extract a mineral, but also to exploit a captive workforce for every possible penny of profit from the feeding and housing of it. Finally, the situation seems to Caudill to be a degraded standstill: Federal and state taxpayers are already propping up the region with millions of dollars "not for the purpose of curing their ills but merely to sustain their existence," e. The "democratic" forces of localism--the good ol' boy network--will not change, because the source of its power and wealth is in keeping things the way they are.
The courthouses are too powerful and too conservative to permit significant changes. The status quo means numerous small counties, each with its swarm of intrenched, fee-paid officials. Public inertia at the local level an affliction from which Democracy has ever suffered , absence of coordination between such community development programs as are initiated, and lack of regional planning and petty rivalries between counties and communities are potent additional factors which prevent the Cumberlanders from effectively helping themselves.
While Caudill holds out some hope for a wiser use of coal for its "chemical and industrial byproducts" rather than its heating properties, he is not optimistic, believing that the mineral will be unavailable at current rates of wastage. Person and groups familiar with the problems and frustrations of the Southern mountains have realized that only such an authority, with ample funds, long-range planning and competent administration, can bring order out of the chaos created by sustained exploitation, a primitive agricultural system and the tenacious anti-intellectualism bequeathed by the frontier.
What follows has to do with topics of interest to me. The corruption of learning by athletics: During the first coal boom early 20th c. The miner learned quickly to escape from the dreary routines of camp life and coal digging into the exhilaration of a basketball gymnasium or a football stadium, and was far more interested in the hoopla of school sports than in the riddle of grammar and mathematics.
The only sector of the coal industry that "ever sought to return to the region any substantial part of the wealth it produced" was the UMW, whose "program of health, welfare and retirement benefits funneled back to the coal counties millions of dollars otherwise destined for the pockets of distant shareholders. Strikes against truck mines set off another wave of violence in the region. Conceived as an immense experiment in human and resource conservation and rehabilitation, the TVA accomplished genuine miracles. With hydro power incapable of meeting demand, the goal was met by burning cheap coal from strip and auger mines, which turned TVA into the handmaiden of the continuing, short-sighted pillage of eastern Kentucky coal seams.
This plaintive harp had a place in most houses and to its accompaniment were sung tales of love, war and death. Mar 21, Evangel rated it really liked it. In my quest to learn more about my new home state, I took this recommendation from a native Kentuckian. After finishing, I am left with a sense of sadness for the many trials of this beautiful land and her people. From the humble beginnings of former European indentured servants just trying to survive in their new rugged homeland, all the way to the people of today recovering from decades of land mismanagement, corporate greed and waste, and overall lack of good schools, roads, and government in In my quest to learn more about my new home state, I took this recommendation from a native Kentuckian.
From the humble beginnings of former European indentured servants just trying to survive in their new rugged homeland, all the way to the people of today recovering from decades of land mismanagement, corporate greed and waste, and overall lack of good schools, roads, and government integrity, this state has certainly endured more than her fair share of hardship it seems. The author, a former politician, chronicles the events that he felt when published back in the early 60's led to a low standard of living for Kentucky's residents in almost all areas including local government, infrastructure, medicine, education, and technology - implying that Kentucky was decades behind in regard to progress of all kinds when compared even to her neighboring states.
Caudill would be proud of the improvements made over the past 50 years, and though many issues still need focused attention, the friendly people here seem to be desirous of improving and making good use of their vast and beautiful land, while holding on to the traditions and ways of life that have been familiar for centuries.
I enjoyed the prodigious detail, especially in relating how the timber and coal industries and their far-reaching effects have shaped the culture of Kentucky. Oct 04, Giles Cox rated it it was amazing. Excellent book and a must read for anyone wishing to understand the development or actual "under development" of Southern Appalachia. Caudill's book details the character of the rugged, and often misunderstood denizens and inhabitants of these once beautiful mountains. The region has seen its culture and its people misrepresented in American popular lore. If you want to understand the insidious nature of Capitalism, then take a field trip to Southern West Virginia today.
Once you see the destroyed lives and the destroyed environment, maybe then it will occur to you just how destructive and rapacious this system actually is. Nov 05, Jan Notzon rated it really liked it. A very well-written book--now a bit dated since it was published in but a very, very interesting history of the Cumberland Plateau and the people who inhabit it.
It's got me curious to know what progress has been made since Caudill wrote it. In my estimation he does a fine job of laying out the problems of exploitative industries, welfarism, inbreeding and a patent cynicism concerning government and the vote. However, it strikes me that he makes an effort to be impartial or to at least tem A very well-written book--now a bit dated since it was published in but a very, very interesting history of the Cumberland Plateau and the people who inhabit it.
However, it strikes me that he makes an effort to be impartial or to at least temper his partiality. Strings of beans, rings of dried pumpkin and strips of meat hung drying in the smoke of every chimney. These crude delicacies were so succulent that, even in this age of supermarkets and deep-frozen foods, hundreds of mountain women diligently hang up strings of "shucky beans" and "pokes" of dried apples for frontier-style banquets at Thanksgiving and Christmas.
In Holland, Denmark and Scandinavia, and in portions of Germany, France and England, the science of soil conservation and replenish- ment was fully established and far advanced and even then a field was able to produce food and fiber generation upon generation. Wasteful agricultural methods were resorted to in New England and much of the land was speedily worn out, but this resulted in great measure from the abundance of land rather than from the lack of essential knowledge. After all, such conservative farming techniques were intensive in nature, requiring close care and persistent effort, a system not feasible with much land and little labor.
Doubtless many of the emigrants into New England were excellent farmers, long used to the soil and able to bring many tested and proven tech- niques to the New World. Soon Old World crops were growing side by side with the maize and squash of the Algonquins. Here, for instance, wheat remained the staff of life. The homely corn cake of the Indians was resorted to only when wheat was in short supply. But the people who came to the Blue Ridge were, for the most part, from the teeming and iniquitous cities of England, with a rich dash of Scotch and Irishmen.
These city dwellers, by and large, knew little or nothing about the agricultural way of life. Many of them had spent most of their lives on the cobblestones. Even our Scotch and Irish, while sprung from heath and moor, came certainly from areas on the fringe of European science and learning — areas by no means renowned for successful and remunerative agriculture. Nor were the years spent by many of them on the plantations of any instruction to them, because there the soil was literally mined for the cash crops that could be wrung from it.
Finding themselves upon the frontier, they were compelled to resort to the soil, and to the stream and forest, for their sustenance. Having no better teachers to learn from, they perforce learned from the Indians.
Night comes to the Cumberlands, a biography of a depressed area.
Since the Indians kept no livestock except the dog, they needed no cribs or barns. Their meat came from the wilderness. They wandered from place to place and seldom planted the same field twice. Usually the squaws planted clearings which had resulted from forest fires, or, finding none, created them by setting fire to the woods. So the white man who moved into the rich forests of the Cumber- land Plateau brought with him a form of Stone Age agriculture which, with the natural game, was able to provide him with all his essential needs.
Corn and meat were the staples — and the two were certainly of equal rank. With scalding water and a little salt his wife could take the pounded corn and bake a tough but nutritious bread. The grains were parched or made into hominy. Few other vegetables or grains found their way into his diet, but in the spring his wife picked "sallets" of crowsfoot, shawnee, poke and countless other wild greens.
The frontiersman and his wife had acquired a passionate addiction to tobacco, or as they sometimes called it, "the Indian weed. A not uncommon practice was to pack one's jaw with a heavy "chew" of the leaf before tamping and lighting one's pipe. The nicotine habit was passed on to children at an early age, and the frontier was fairly splotched with ambeer and wreathed in gray tobacco smoke.
The tobacco patch was planted close to the cabin and was tended with even greater care than was devoted to the foodstuffs. As the wild game declined the mountaineer turned to milk cows, hogs and sheep, and chickens began to roost in the trees about his cabins. The corn patches grew larger but the essential methods and attitudes remained. His agricultural techniques remained rooted deeply in the rudimentary Stone Age concepts, and with the same un- failing results. Tract by tract he was able to cut down the great forests, sometimes burning the trees for their value as fertilizer.
He possessed neither the knowledge nor the inclination to prevent any of his land from becoming exhausted or to renew the fertility of any that had already worn out. The transocean movement did not begin in earnest until the Church of England was already firmly established and its anti-papacy propaganda had found a deep root in the popular mind. If our shanghaied seamen, our street orphans and our insolvent debtors held anything in common besides their misery and resentment, it was likely to be a firm conviction that if heaven were to be acquired it must be reached by a road which avoided Rome.
Its spiritual blessings, such as they were, reached the lower classes largely by a process of downward osmosis. In Scotland the Calvinist Church, while rejecting much of the formality and dogma of Anglican and Roman orders, was nevertheless aloof from a great part of the proletariat. The point is that the Church — Calvinist, Anglican or radical sect — was wholly unprepared to follow the emigrant and his sons west- ward with the disorderly and rampaging frontier. The vicars, the parsons, the priests and the preachers would have recoiled from frontier conditions as fire withdraws from water, and the frontier was a hundred years old before any serious effort was made to give spiritual instruction to its sons and daughters.
This attempt was first made in the trans-Appalachian country by Methodists and other re- form groups after the turn of the nineteenth century. Consequently the frontiersman, in the Blue Ridge and in his wanderings across the intervening mountains to the Cumberland Plateau, had passed from five to ten decades out of contact with the Christian Church in any organized form. The King James Bible was relatively new when his fathers reached the New World, and the borderer retained a fierce respect for it as the Word of God.
But many cabins were without a copy, and few of the inhabitants could read it, so that its contents more often than not came down to the frontiersman in garbled snatches from the preceding generation. There was no religious dis- cipline, and the isolation of the frontiersman made it practically im- possible for any semblance of religious instruction to be transmitted. Even when a wandering preacher found occasion to pass a night in a cabin, he was likely to find his opinions resented and rejected because the frontiersman believed that one man knew as much about the road to paradise as another.
The tradition of the oral transmission of biblical lore is still encountered in the highlands, where one may hear an assertion that such-and-such a statement is "somewhere be- tween the covers of the Bible" — frequently a statement which not even the most diligent Biblical research can verify. While the Good Book occupied an honored place in many frontier households, in a society which was almost wholly illiterate it was seldom read. Thus the frontiersman was cast adrift in a wilderness with a garble of Christian tradition and half-remembered beliefs. The frontiersman had brought with him to the New World in- numerable Old World superstitions, and these were augmented by additions from Africa acquired from Negro slaves on the planta- tions.
To this mixture was added a formidable assortment of Stone Age superstitions acquired from squaw mothers and wives.
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In the loneliness and amid the brooding silences of the great forest, this hodgepodge of superstition was called upon to give the explanations of the mysteries and the consolations for the miseries for which man- kind has, in all ages, turned to his priests.
Much of life on the frontier had superstitious overtones, and count- less commonplace occurrences were carefully studied for meaning or portent. Witchcraft enjoyed widespread credence and misfortune was likely to be attributed to a spell. This in turn called for much conjecture on the question of the witch's identity. A staple of furniture was the four-legged, straight-backed, cane- bottomed chair.
This sturdy hickory implement was believed to have a singular role in the witch's nefarious activities. She had but to seize it by one of the upright posts, tilt it slightly forward and turn it round and round with only one leg touching the floor to cause the devil "to come a-runnin' " — and any child who absentmindedly indulged in this thoughtless gesture was likely to be sternly rebuked.
The mirror, too, had great potency, and seven years of bad luck were visited upon anyone so unwise or clumsy as to break one. Mir- rors in the bedroom were so arranged that a person in the bed could not see his reflection. It was well known that to see oneself in a "looking-glass" before arising was to risk incurring the harshest kind of ill luck until the next snowfall.
The black cat was, of course, an evil symbol, but his repute was only a little blacker than that of the owl. This feathered wanderer of the night was believed to be in the service of the devil, and his approach was viewed with dismay. Some thought he was a spy for the Evil One and he was not infrequently greeted with a charge of shot. Generally, though, it was thought best not to offend him. His conduct near a habitation was carefully remarked. If he flew off to the left of the cabin door, bad luck was in store. If the owl flew directly over the house, death was coming soon to one of its occupants.
But if the bird flapped his great wings and flew off to the right, the household was spared and a run of good luck was sure to ensue. Spider webs, on the other hand, were spun by creatures friendly to the righteous, and if a man rose in the dawn and found the filmy net stretched across his door, it was a warning that he must not cross the threshold until after sunrise.
In what was, perhaps, a curious blending of the superstitions of the white man with those of the aborigine, it was believed that a child born on certain days — Old Christmas January 6th or his father's birthday — was endowed with the power to understand the conver- sation of wild beasts.
In addition to the invisible bonds of superstitious ritual and ob- servances within which he dwelt, the frontiersman felt the influence of innumerable occult personalities and presences. His European forebears had believed in the existence of ghosts and banshees, and his associations with the Indians strengthened his own opinion that the "spirits" of the dead lived on to torment the living.
These ghostly presences frequented the forest trails and hovered near the fords of streams. Sometimes their unearthly cries could be heard at night from some windswept crag. Such mysterious manifestations, or the fear that they might be encountered, could give wings to the feet of a stalwart who, under other circumstances, and armed only with an ax or a butcher knife, would unflinchingly give battle to an enraged bear. Many a frontiersman or his wife had encountered such "spirits," and countless "hainted" places may still be pointed to by their descendants.
The devil, too, was a very real personage, capable of assuming tan- gible form. This evil one wandered the valleys and hills, his malev- olent eyes, red as coals and large as saucers. At lonely bends in a trail he would sometimes spring onto the rump of an agitated horse and accompany the unwilling rider for a mile or so — holding his victim fast all the while in his great black arms.
At other times he could be heard late at night passing the door of a lonely cabin, ac- companied by the bloodcurdling clank of the chains which he car- ded for his victim. They were believed to be "warnings" of things to come, imparted in some vague way by the spirits of the departed. To dream of muddy water was an omen of impending death. When encountered in dreams, a distinct signifi- cance was attached to fire, blood, birds and countless other things.
And "to dream of things out of season" would bring "bad luck out of reason. The phases of the moon were carefully noted and, to a considerable degree, life was regulated by its growth and decline. Some crops could be planted only when the moon was new, while others must be withheld from the soil until an old moon arrived. Meat would spoil even in the coldest weather if the animal was slain when the moon was new. If boards for a cabin roof were rived "when the moon is wrong," they would curl and split. The moon was even believed to influence the birth of children, and the frontier wife was likely to hope that her child would be born when the moon was a tiny crescent.
Such good timing was thought to insure strength and a good mind in the baby. Lacking medicines and physicians, the frontiersman was compelled to rely upon a combination of superstitions and Indian remedies for treatment of illnesses. Wild herbs, barks and roots were hunted and boiled as remedies for practically every ailment. But these "teas" and "poultices" were inadequate, and more potent supernatural medicines were frequently relied on. One of these curious formations, sometimes found in the stomach of a sheep or deer, if rubbed on the wound resulting from the bite of a dog was believed to ward off rabies.
Incantations were carefully remem- bered, and Huckleberry Finn with his dead cat in the graveyard was resorting to a remedy firmly believed in by thousands of highland- ers before and since Huck's time. A cult grew up about persons gifted with unusual powers. A seventh son sometimes had the power to cure the sick or injured by laying his hands on them.
Disease was sometimes banished by exiling the evil into some plant or seed. A person afflicted with rheumatism carried a buckeye or two about his person. In a little while the "trouble" would enter the buckeye and the aching joints would become well. If a person suffered from a painful sore which refused to heal, he could cure it by squeezing a drop of blood from the ulcer onto a bean. The bean was buried in the earth and by the time it sprouted the sore would heal. It was believed steel was abhorrent to pain, and when a woman entered the pangs of childbirth her husband was likely to place an ax under her bed "to cut the pain.
These and countless other folk remedies and superstitions provided the only safeguards against ill health for at least one hundred and fifty years. It is unlikely that any sizable portion of the original immigrants into the Blue Ridge were artisans or possessed of significant mechan- ical skills. Smiths, masons, wood carvers, weavers and the like com- manded decent wages in the Old World, but relatively few such mechanics were required on the plantations where raw labor was at a premium, and those artisans who came were prone to remain in the prospering ports of entry.
These skilled workmen were undei little temptation — in the language of an aphorism still current in the mountains — to "take off for the tall timber," and to lose them selves in the vast beckoning hinterland. So it came to pass that the influx to the Blue Ridge was composed almost entirely of the unskilled or the little-skilled. They were men and women who, with rare exception, had known little or no experience with artfully wrought things of beauty. They had not owned or lounged upon skillfully carved chairs or beds and, as a gen- erality, they were not people who had ever been called upon to main- tain or create graceful or attractive things.
They had lived in Europe in crowded, ill-lighted and rudely furnished hovels and tenements, and in the wilderness they found their red-skinned mentors dwelling in crude pole cabins little worse if at all. The white newcomer added a stool and later a roughly carved, straight- backed chair with a seat of woven cane strips or hickory withes. He contrived a simple bedstead laced with sinew ropes on which he laid a bed of corn shucks or feathers. He and his wife learned how to weave the red man's baskets in which to store shelled corn and chestnuts, but they never equaled the skill of the squaws in this re- spect.
His every effort at manufacture was crude in the extreme, and his descendants through the intervening generations have been unable to add either design or skill to his meager handicrafts. The women brought with them a knowledge of weaving, and they tended to repeat endlessly the same patterns remembered from the Old World.
Little of real beauty was added by them. And while in later generations they acquired the habit of patchwork quilting, their patterns most frequently were garish and overlarge. Their nee- dlework was never fine or intricate. The white man, however, enjoyed one skill which the aborigine wholly lacked, and that was the ability to do primitive blacksmith- ing. With charcoal made from the hardwood trees, and low-grade iron ore found here and there in the mountains, he could fashion hoes, knives, plows, nails and eventually even a facsimile of the deadly Pennsylvania rifle.
But this latter achievement, while an effec- tive "widow and orphan maker," as proved in the bloody Battle of New Orleans, was never the thing of beauty and fine inlays achieved by the "Dutch" gunsmiths. The forefathers of our mountaineers left Europe before even the foundations for universal education had been laid.
For the masses, the printed page was a mystery as deep as the Delphic Oracle. It is probable that the great majority of the men and women who were destined to become the forebears of the Southern highlander lacked the ability even to subscribe their names. Since they were brought to the New World to labor, it is unthinkable that they received in- struction in reading and writing arts on the tobacco coasts; and once removed to the Blue Ridge, they were in a world in which the printed page had never existed.
On the brawling frontier the cabins were too far apart, the struggle for existence too intense, to permit time and effort to be devoted to such learning; and besides, there was no one who could teach. Thus the mountaineer who reached Kentucky about was in most instances already removed from literacy by two or three genera- tions — assuming that his forefathers had been among the handful who had learned to read and write in the British Isles.
For most of them, literacy had never existed. These forces had been at work long before the mountaineer's an- cestors reached these shores, and for three or four generations before he had reached Kentucky. By they had accomplished their work. The twig had been bent. The tree had grown. The course of the mountaineer's development was determined. Consider then these forces in synopsis: The illiterate son of illiterate ancestors, cast loose in an immense wilderness without basic mechanical or agricultural skills, without the refining, comforting and disciplining influence of an organized religious order, in a vast land wholly unrestrained by social organization or effective laws, compelled to acquire skills quickly in order to survive, and with a Stone Age savage as his prin- cipal teacher.
From these forces emerged the mountaineer as he is to an aston- ishing degree even to this day. The roll- ing hillocks of central Kentucky were originally dotted with splen- did hardwoods, but these were too few to meet the needs of the growing towns and cities and at the same time to provide fuel against the cold winters. Besides, these trees, growing in relatively open country, were not the pencil-straight giants found in the mountains, and carpenters preferred the matured tulip poplar above all others.
These were rare in the Bluegrass. So timber buyers began to reach the tiny, widely scattered county seat villages on the edge of the plateau, looking for the best of the trees and tempting the mountaineer with the glint of gold. The mountaineer responded by chopping down some of the great yellow poplars and white oaks growing close to his creek banks. During spring "tides" or freshets he rolled them into the stream and let them ride the flood crests to the downriver markets. They were caught, most of them at Frankfort, in booms stretched across the river. Each mountaineer marked his logs with a distinguishing brand so they could be identified.
Sometimes the great logs were bound together in rafts and the mountaineer, with his sons and sons-in-law, rode them down to Frankfort or Louisville to revel in the fleshpots of those roaring towns. Thus began the break with the ancient frontier agricultural and hunting life, and the peo- ple embarked falteringly upon the road to a cash economy. Prices paid for these great trees were pitifully small. A poplar log measuring sixty or seventy inches in diameter at the butt was likely to bring no more than a dollar and a half or two dollars at Frankfort and a forty-gallon charred white-oak barrel filled with whiskey could be bought by one of the big-name distilleries for as little as twenty- five dollars.
Nevertheless the demand for such products was not great, and the supply was apparently unlimited, so the number of mountaineers who made these trips remained relatively small. For most of them the isolation and the loneliness continued nearly complete. How- ever, here and there a farmer began to prosper by the standards of the time. The number of slaves in the plateau slowly increased and some of the farmers owned a dozen or more such chattels.
For the most part the Negroes were owned by those fortunate landowners who lived at the mouths of the larger streams on the broad bottoms, while their kinsmen farther up the streams, on the narrower and less desirable lands, being unable to amass the money to buy them, were without slaves. The rich, densely wooded land could become valuable only as the labor was available to develop it.
Trees had to be felled and burned or floated down stream for sale. The fields must be plowed, planted and harvested and fenced with split rails against the inroads of wild hogs. If whiskey was to be sold to the burgeoning dis- tilling industry in the "settlements" the stills must be set up and operated and the barrels hewed out and fitted together by hand.
These tasks required immense amounts of hard, grueling labor — labor in such quantities as to be wholly beyond the capacity of the mountaineer and his family. But if from the initial sale of timber and whiskey, and perhaps hides, the mountaineer could acquire enough money to buy himself a sturdy black slave or two, then new possi- bilities lay before him. So it was that here and there across the Cumberlands there came to be a prosperous farmer whom his neighbors on less productive lands referred to as a "good liver," whose log house was bigger than most, sometimes containing four or five rooms.
This mountaineer had barns filled with corn and his crop lands were fenced. He owned two or three hundred wild hogs, their ears cut with identifying "marks," roaming on lands which he vaguely thought of as his own. And in lesser cabins near his own there lived a small company of Negro men and women who labored for him without compensation save for the rough clothes upon their backs and the coarse food which they ate.
These hapless souls reproduced new slaves whose numbers slowly swelled and whose value increased year by year. Though the number of slaves in the plateau was never large, amount- ing perhaps to no more than thirty-five hundred all told, their presence in the fateful years before the Civil War had the effect of dividing the mountaineers into two fairly distinct groups — the comparatively few who owned slaves, and their following of close relatives and friends, and, on the other hand, the greater mass of the people living in lesser cabins on inferior lands who could afford no slaves or who were too shiftless to work hard enough to acquire them.
However, it is doubtless true that in a vague way some of these poorer mountaineers, fiercely independent as they were, found some- thing abhorrent in the ownership of one person by another. And this uneasy conviction added to their economic resentment against and envy of their wealthier neighbors. Sometimes, perhaps, when those who "have not" live in association with those who "have," antago- nisms develop which, when they come into the open, are likely to be justified on lofty moral grounds.
Now the social fabric woven on the cruel and democratic frontier was rent. Settlers on a stream in what is now Leslie County found hundreds of ancient trees which had died of old age. There were so many of them that it was called the "Thousand Sticks Creek," by which name it is still known to this dav. In the early months after Fort Sumter, the conviction crystallized in the mountaineer's mind that he must fight for his slaves or lose them. As a highland slaveholder recruiting troops for the Confed- eracy once told a group of his fellow mountaineers: Many of these sympathizers were willing to support the Con- federate cause and even to join its army with the sons of their wealthier neighbors.
But the great majority of the highlanders were, from the outset, sympathetic with the Union. Their reasons were not so simple or so easily defined as were those of their Rebel fellows. The inevitable and very human element of envy and resentment against their more successful neighbors was important and, in many instances, the real cause for their enmity to slavery.
Nevertheless there is no doubt that Chad, the hero of John Fox's Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come, was not the only mountaineer to risk or endure death on the battlefields because of a sincere desire to see the shackles stricken from millions of men and women. Perhaps the most important factor causing the mountaineer to enter the army, regardless of the side to which he gave his fealty, was boredom with his monotonous and innately melancholy existence. He and his forefathers had dwelt amid the primeval quiet of a great forest for generations.
Life had flowed on in the same primitive routine for so long that a subconscious and deeply felt yearning for a break with his environment had come to beset him. As rumors began to filter in about the great events transpiring in the "outside world," they brought a craving to burst through the forest walls and to escape into the adventure and color of a realm which most of them had never seen and had sensed only from an almost impassable distance. They had known the discomforts of cold and heat, and sometimes of hunger and thirst, since boyhood.
They could walk tirelessly for many miles and the use of the rifle came almost by instinct to their hands and eyes. No great bridge between their life and the hardship of camp and battlefield had to be crossed, and it was with ever- quickening excitement that they heard tales of "the War. The world may not see again the match for these men as soldiers.
Indefatigable afoot or in the saddle, they fought on practically every battleground, ignoring the legisla- ture of their state — which solemnly declared Kentucky to be neutral in the great struggle. The fierce cry that became famous as the blood curdling "Rebel Yell" had been learned by their forefathers from In- dian warriors, and was now carried North and South by soldiers from the Southern mountains. But to their soldierly virtues was added a grave defect — an unrelenting hatred of discipline and order. The highland soldier wore the collar of military discipline with poor grace, frequently deserting when an officer "got too big for his britches.
Cous- ins took opposite sides, and sometimes brothers and even fathers and sons splil on the issue. Such partings in the early stages of the war were relatively friendly, but it could not remain so for long. As the months passed wounded and crippled men began to return, and they brought reports of the deaths of others. These were simple people lacking complexity in emotional or mental makeup.
And within a short time there grew up within the confines of these valleys a war in min- iature, fought by the people back home, neighbor against neighbor, kinsman against kinsman. By the end of practically every household was involved in the struggle, at home or on the great battlefields of Virginia. At first the two camps simply drew sullenly apart from each other; but, in an atmosphere charged with the electricity of ever-deepening hatred, outbreaks of violence were inevitable.
They were not long in coming. Sometimes the immediate cause was some trifling local incident. A man might find one of his hogs dead and jump to the conclusion that his neighbor of the opposite camp had killed it. Or a moun- taineer might conclude that his former friend across the ridge had shot his missing hound. Such trifling sparks set fire to emotional powder kegs, and the battlefield in the mountains came to be almost as tragic as the ones developing before Vicksburg and Gettysburg. Men were killed from ambush when they left their cabins in the early dawn.
They were ambushed on the trails and shot from the sheltering forests. Sometimes a cabin was attacked under cover of dark- ness and set afire, and the family shot as they fled the flames. Still children of the frontier, with traditions of warfare acquired in the cruel border struggles, they fought each other now with the same brutality and disregard of chivalrous restraints with which their grand- sires had fought the hated Cherokee, Shawnee and Choctaw.
When men were killed in this harsh land women were left to till the land and raise children. They must plow and plant and harvest without help except for the small hands of those whom they toiled to feed. And all too frequently, when a crop had been raised and when a widow had butchered and salted her hogs with her own hands, par- tisans of the hated enemy swooped down and carried away her treasures. Sometimes the longest-lasting hatreds were planted in the bosoms of these bereaved women and of the children whom they sought to rear.
Thus the land was sowed with bitterness, from which crops of bloodshed were to be harvested for generations to come. As a child I heard my paternal grandmother tell countless tales of her wartime childhood. One day while he was at work in his field a half-dozen pro-Union guerillas swept down on him.
Seeing that escape was impossible and resistance futile, he attempted to surrender. But the guerillas were implacable and riddled him with bullets. His teen-age daughter held his shattered head while his brains ran out onto her aproned lap. To the day of her death she was an unreconstructed Rebel, and her eyes glinted and her lips tightened into a thin line at the merest mention of even the grandchildren of her father's killers. The "war tales" still remembered and retold by the old bring into focus a vivid tableau from this most bitter of battlefields.
In genera- tions of retelling they have lost little of the hatred and vengefulness which flamed so intensely a century ago. In a ninety-year-old mountaineer led me and my father to a "sinkhole" on a hillside near his family cemetery and pointed to the spot where, nearly eighty years before, he and his fifteen-year-old brother had buried the body of a Yankee cavalryman.
It was a still, droning day in July, and in the rich bottom beyond his house his grandchildren were dutifully "hoeing out grandpapas com patch. Pap warn't no nigger lover and on t'other hand he didn't hate 'em. But he thought hit was right to own 'em because they are skasely human ac- cordin' to th' Bible. So when the war started pap got ready and went off to fight fer the South. Me and my brother was left at home to take keer of things. He was five years older than me and he sort of run things about the place. Ma and the girls worked, too, and we got along all right till the damned Yankees started stealin' everything a body could raise.
Well, about two years after the war started, about this time of year, a gang of Union soldiers come through this here country. They was camped at the Cumberland Gap and had to just take things to eat away from folks. They went through the country robbin' widders and orphans, and payin' 'em with greenbacks if they was on the Union side and nothin' atall if they was Democrats. They was about fifty in this gang and they was ridin' horses.
They had a herd of cattle they had stole and was drivin' 'em to the Cumberland Gap. They called their robb'ry "foraginV They camped right thar in that bottom and cooked supper. The next morning they left afore daylight and took all our cattle and work stock with 'em. Their captain said he didn't have to pay us a cent fer nothin' because pap was a traitor.
Well, ma cried and begged him to leave us a mule to plow with but the captain said, "No, let yore old man quit fightin' his country and come home and work fer ye. All them other rascals just stood around and laughed. As soon as they got gone brother Oliver grabbed pap's old hog-rifle and went to the mountain, and me right after him.
He took a nigh cut and got ahead of them Yankees, so we could see 'em come in sight. Oliver put in a good smooth ball and a heavy charge of powder and waited. Pretty soon we seed 'em a-comin' and just waited real still till they was all out of sight except the last one. Then Oliver took good aim and shot him right betwixt his galluses.
He yelled and fell out of his saddle and me and Oliver took off back to the house. We stopped just long enough to clean the gun, then hung it up over the fireboard and started hoein' corn just like nothin' had happened. In about twenty minutes here come them Yankees with their dead buddy. They was awful mad and threatened to kill us fer shore. But the captain said we hadn't done hit and made his men leave us alone.
He went up to the graveyard and had his men dig a grave and bury the dead Yankee. Then he come down to the house and all the men got a drink from our well afore they left. The old captain sort of softened up and give us back a plow mule and warned me and Oliver to stay out of trouble. He said he had two young-'uns about like us back home. When they got plumb gone ma tol' me and 01 to go dig up that Yankee and git him outen our graveyard.
So we uncovered him and pulled him up the hill and buried him in a sinkhole where a big tree had turned up by the roots. We didn't git him very deep though, 'cause a hog rooted him up and carried off his head. Ma said that proved that hogs and other Yankees was the only things that could stomach a Yankee, dead or alivel Before the war ended conditions in the mountains defied descrip- tion.
Death, robbery, rapine and starvation were rampant and both civil and military authorities were helpless to restore order. At last the "Federals" established camps on the fringes of the mountains and urged victims of the war within a war to find refuge in them. One such camp was established at Stevenson, Alabama, and sheltered refugees from many parts of the Southern highlands. At Stevenson there was a large refugee camp, where many women and children and a few crippled or age-enfeebled men had sought refuge from attacks by murderous bands of guerrillas. These pretended soldiers, it mattered not which uniform they disgraced by wearing, were, almost without exception, robbers and murderers, who sought to enrich them- selves by plundering their defenceless neighbors.
They rode through the Southern highlands, killing men, burning houses, stealing cattle and horses. To-day a band of guerrillas, alleged Unionists, ravaged a moun- tain district. They killed their personal enemies, whom they said were Confederate sympathizers, and destroyed their property. Tomorrow other guerillas burned Union men's houses, and shot so-called Union men to death. This relentless, mountain warfare was exceedingly hard on women and children.
Agriculture was suspended in the highlands. No man dared to till his lean fields for fear that some hidden enemy might kill him. No stack of un thrashed grain or garner of com was safe from the torch. The defenseless women and children were starved out of their homes, and they sought safety and food within the Union lines. Our government established extensive camps for these war-stricken Southerners. Curious to see these people I spent a day in camp at Stevenson. I saw hundreds of tall, gaunt, frouzy-headed, snuff-dipping, pipe-smoking, un- clean women. Some were clad in homespun stuffs, others in calico, others in bagging.
Many of them were unshod. There were hundreds and hun- dreds of vermin-infested and supremely dirty children in the camp. Some families lived in tents, some in flimsy barracks. All lived in discomfort. All drew rations from the government. All were utterly poor.
It seemed that they were too poor to ever again get a start in life. Haggard, wind- and sun- and storm-burnt women, their gaunt forms showing plainly through their rags, sat, or lolled, or stood in groups, talking drawlingly. Their features were as expressionless as wood, their eyes lustreless. I talked to many of these women. All told stories of murder, of arson, of blood-curdling scenes.
One, gray-eyed, bony, square-jawed, barefooted, forty years old, clad in a dirty, ragged, homespun dress, sat on a log out- side of a tent sucking a corncob pipe. Her tow-headed children played around her. One day her hus- band, who was a Union man, was shot dead as he stood by her side in the door of their house. She buried him in a grave she dug herself. She and her children tended the crops. These were burned shortly after they gathered them.
Then her swine were stolen, and her cows and horse driven off. Finally her oldest son, a boy of fourteen, was shot dead at the spring, and her house and barn were burned in broad daylight, and she and her children were left homeless and without food on a desolate mountain side.
Many of her neighbors had been burned out the same day. They joined forces and wandered down the mountain, hungry, cold, with little children tugging at women's dresses, to a Union camp. From there they had been sent to Stevenson. Long before this woman had finished her story she rose to her feet, her face was white with intense passion, her eyes blazed with fire, and her gaunt form quivered with ex- citement as she gesticulated savagely. She said that if she lived, and her boys lived, she would have vengeance on the men who had murdered her husband and son, and destroyed her home.
As she talked so talked all. These women were saturating their children's minds with the stories of the wrongs they had endured. I heard them repeat over and over to their children the names of men which they were never to forget, and whom they were to kill when they had sufficient strength to hold a rifle.
The stolid manners, the wooden faces, the lustreless eyes, the drawling speech of these people, concealed the volcanoes of fire and wrath which burned within their breasts. It was easy to foresee the years of bloodshed, of assassination, of family feuds, that would spring from the recollections of the war, handed from widowed mothers to savage-tempered sons, in the mountain recesses of Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and Kentucky.
And long after the war closed rifles continued to crack in remote mountain glens, as the open accounts between families were settled. Here the mountains were like the walls of a great jail which shut in the combatants. After Appomattox it was as though mortal ene- mies had been locked in the same prison without taking away the deadly weapons they knew so well how to use. Perhaps in no other region of the United States except the South- ern mountains were the lives and property of a great number of pro- Union civilians lost in the war.
In Pennsylvania, Kansas and a few other border areas the people were subjected to occasional Confed- erate forays, but those areas were comparatively rich and the losses were soon restored. Thus the curtain rose upon one of the most fantastic dramas in American History — the ferocious Kentucky mountain feuds. Theii story has gone largely unchronicled, but in savagery and stark horror they dwarf the cattle wars of the Great Plains and, by contrast, make the vendettas of Sicily look like children's parlor games.
These dreadful interfamily wars constitute a truly astounding chapter in American history. A few statistics from the region will reveal the stark outline of their horror. During the half-century mentioned, the nineteen counties of the pla- teau achieved a maximum average population of about fifteen thou- sand people.
Careful research in the files of the Circuit Court Clerk's office in one of the counties disclosed that between and nearly one thousand murder indictments were returned by the local grand juries. Thus we know that twenty homicides per year occurred, and inevitably many killings must have taken place in which for one reason or another no indictments were made. Some of the feuds involved whole armies. A wandering Presby- terian preacher arrived in Hazard, the county seat of Perry County, to find the town in the midst of a roaring battle.
This feud, then called the "French-Eversole War," eventually caused an almost com- plete suspension of the law courts within the county. The preacher arrived at a time when the two factions were locked in mortal com- bat for the courthouse and its records. The Eversole clan had holed up in the structure, while the more numerous French faction fired at them from doors and windows of neighboring buildings.
This siege lasted until the approach of a company of militiamen forced the be- siegers to flee. This epic clan war was fought out to its grim conclusion with all the characteristic savagery and tenacity the borderers had dis- played a century before in struggles with the Indians. The vendetta Drought the governments of the two states to the brink of war, and the correspondence between the governors on the matter reveals a situation so fantastic as to defy belief. During the war, according to a letter from West Virginia's gover- nor, E. Wilson, the families fought on different sides and relations between them became unfriendly.
In those days before voter-registra- tion, the Hatfields habitually crossed the border to vote in Kentucky elections. This unlawful franchise was resented by the McCoys and one of them, Tolbert by name, stabbed "Big Ellison" Hatfield to death at a voting precinct in Tolbert McCoy and his brothers Hurmer and Randolf were arrested for the slaying, and law officers undertook to deliver them to the jailer at Pikeville.
A dozen or more mounted men armed with Winchester rifles and Colt revolvers crossed the Tug river and, at gunpoint, took the prisoners from the custody of the officers. They were taken out into the mountains, tied to paw- paw bushes and shot. Their killers were led by Anderson Hatfield, a brother of "Big Ellison. Jim Vance and William Dempsey, Hatfield warriors, were killed on one of these raids and six captured Hatfields were carried back to Pikeville under guard.
Eyewitnesses reported that two of the surviving McCoy brothers shook hands in self-congratulation over the dead bodies of their enemies, and "crowed like roosters," while their father, Randall McCoy, vowed he would not rest until he had slain Anderson Hatfield with his own hands and had "cut a slice of meat from his body and broiled it and eat it.
They surrounded Randall McCoy's cabin at night and set it afire. Another son, Calvin, was slain in the gunfire that followed. The vengeance seekers this time turned their guns on women and children when they fled the cabin. Four of his sons died in the long vicious struggle. Both counties were occupied by militia- men time after time, and civil authorities were helpless and hopeless. Legend has it, however, that the feud at last ended happily in the marriage of two of the few survivors — a Hatfield youth to a McCoy girl.
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Hays had been a cavalry captain in the Confederate army and Jones a pro-Union, guerilla leader. When these two strong- willed men resumed the war in Knott County most of the popula- tion enlisted in one faction or the other and in a pitched battle at McPherson Post Office which later became Hindman, the county seat a half-dozen men were shot to death. Old Clabe Jones was renowned in song as a "booger," little less evil than the devil himself. This mountain baron was an ex-Confederate who was captured dur- ing the war and imprisoned in Ohio. He escaped and thereafter ac- quired a small fortune by repeatedly enlisting in the Union Army for the bounties which were paid.
With his roll of "Yankee green- backs" he returned to his Rebel unit, where he remained until the war ended. He and Hays were eventually able to decimate the Jones crowd and bring this war, at least, to a close.
One dreadful feud began when a family which had given its support to the Union buried the body of a little girl on land which a family of ex-Confederates claimed as its own. The latter unhesitatingly dug into the grave and pitched the coffined body across the fence onto land recognized as belonging to the offenders. This hideous act elicited murderous retaliation and plunged the county into a war that lasted more than two decades and cost unnumbered lives.
In conditions became so tumultuous in feud-riven Rowan County that a special committee of the Legislature was appointed to investigate the situation. The committee found no disposition on the part of the officials to enforce the law or on the part of the populace to obey it. Twenty "open murders and secret assassinations" had been committed in the county without a single conviction having been secured in the courts. In addition, sixteen other persons had been wounded in shooting affrays. And this in a county shown by the census of to have a population of !
But hardly a county was without its "war," and some had a whole series. The "troubles" in Breathitt won for that county the somber sobriquet of "Bloody Breathitt" and gained for its populace the shocked attention of the world. An eighty-year-old lawyer once re- lated to me the unique manner in which court adjournments were occasionally obtained in its Circuit Court.
A murder case was docketed for trial and numerous friends of the defendant appeared at the courthouse heavily armed and in a belligerent mood. When the judge called the case for trial, the defendant's father, a man of about fifty with huge handle-bar whiskers and two immense pistols, rose and walked to the judicial bench.
Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area by Harry M. Caudill | LibraryThing
Wringing the gavel from the fingers of the startled judge, the feudist rapped the bench and announced, "Court's over and ever'body can go. We ain't agoin' to have any court here this term, folks. When court convened at the next term the court and sheriff were bolstered by sixty militiamen, but by then the defendant was not available for trial. He had been slain from ambush. Nor was this incident the only one of its kind. Sometimes, though, the feudists were not satisfied with seeing a trial delayed or a judge run out of town.
At least four men have been shot to death on the lawn or within the walls of the crumbling, ancient Breathitt County Courthouse at Jackson. And at Hillsville, Virginia, not far from the state line, feudists in the "Allen-Edwards Wars," enraged by the out- come of a trial, entered the circuit courtroom and shot to death the circuit judge, commonwealth attorney, sheriff and three of the jurors. Clay County was the scene of the "White-Baker War," that terrible and prolonged war of attrition in which countless partici- pants died in grim gun battles, some of them on the streets of Man- chester, the dusty little county seat.
Union and Rebel forces fought for as- cendancy by seeking to capture local offices. In no more than four counties were the discredited ex-Confederates able to succeed. Else- where the "good old Union boys" elected their former comrades to fill the log courthouses and to run the counties. These backwoods politicians promptly set out to harass their old foes with indictments for wartime crimes. Long dockets accumulated in the Circuit Courts as Republican grand jurors charged defeated rebels with every im- aginable crime — murder, arson, rape, grand and petty larceny, trea- son against the Commonwealth, unlawful assembly, conspiracy to commit unlawful acts and "obtaining property by false tokens.
So formidable were the assaults made on them through the courts that the unregenerate Confederates were in grave peril. Their reaction was deadly. Jurors learned quickly that to convict a man was to risk prompt and certain death. Not all rebels could be imprisoned, and once court was over and the juror was at home his back became a target for rifles hidden on the hillsides that overlooked his cabin. Even rabid, vengeance-thirsty "Yankees" became slow to convict. The courtroom perpetuation of war and feud, though it imprisoned few people, added fuel to the fires of hatred and kindled new vio- lence on every hand.
Nor did conviction by a court and jury mean the sentences would be carried out. When officers attempted to convey prisoners to the state penitentiary at Frankfort they had to traverse the baronies of many heavily armed feudal lords. Often, indeed, these mountain chiefs "took pity" on the prisoners and, supported by small armies of retainers, demanded that the officers surrender their charges. Knott County's Clabe Jones acted as a one-man appellate court and freed many malefactors whose crimes were no greater than his own. He stirred up no little trouble by entering the bailiwicks of other war lords and rescuing men whose sad plight touched his ten- der heart.
During the feuds such a friend was infinitely more valuable to a defendant than any number of skilled lawyers. In at least one county, officials resorted to a unique device in an effort to preserve the life of the trial judge: By this means it was sought to lessen the danger of having the judge shot by an irate spectator or, perhaps, with a high-powered rifle from a wooded hillside.