With reference to the people in this section, they are quite law-abiding people, are never molesting anyone. As there is a just God … they will have to answer for the unjust assault made on these people, whose only fault is they let us stay amongst them.
As to the charges they lay to us in Missouri, we desire to say that if your excellency will pardon us for the indictments in Harlan County against us we assure you that we will come as fast as the first train can carry us. Judging from the papers, you may imagine that we have 40 or fifty men with us. This is not so. We are alone, living as best we can. About three weeks ago Mr. Sam Kash, of Clay County, the deputy collector for this district, was up here on business and … he saw the majority of people in this county and … if you refer to him to tell you the sentiment of the people on this feud trouble. In closing we beg your excellency to consider and inquire well into this matter, and you will soon find where the blame lies.
Yours to command,
Will Jennings,
Wilson R. Howard
The Trap that Didn’t Spring
Wilson Lewis should have felt fairly secure. The Turners owned much of Harlan Town, the county seat. Lewis was county judge, Mose Turner was sheriff. Furthermore, Lewis knew, though Wilse Howard did not, that the detective Imboden, who was trailing Wilse for the murder of the deaf-mute in Missouri, was closing in. Yet all Wilse Howard had to do was send word that he was going to burn down the town and Lewis fired off another letter to Governor Buckner, pleading for the protection of troops. Apparently Buckner finally got tired of the routine and on March 17, 1890, sent a company of militia under Captain Gaither of Harrodsburg and, to show his concern, sent General Sam Hill to report on the situation.
Lewis was delighted, but his joy was short-lived. General Hill interviewed as many people as he could persuade to talk and sent word to Wilse and Hezekiah Jennings that he wanted to see them. (Why he asked to meet with Hezekiah Jennings instead of Will is hard to understand. Perhaps it was because Hezekiah was older and had no charges against him.) At any rate, they met, “twelve miles out in the mountains,” according to the Courier-Journal story from “Harlan Courthouse,” which also reported the escape of three moonshiners and one murderer from the jail. “The jail,” added the report, “is not as secure as it might be.”
General Hill told Wilse that he had not come to Harlan to assess guilt but to find ways to bring about peace. He said he had read Lewis’s letters to the newspapers and to the governor but had also talked to a lot of people in Harlan, many of whom had spoken well of the Howards. He was convinced, he said, that there was blame on both sides, and he urged Wilse to get the Howards and their allies to lay down their arms.
“General,” Wilse said coldly, “if I put down my guns before Lewis and his bunch do, I’ll be dead by night. I guess we’re all sick of this; if you get the other side to put down their guns, we’ll put down ours. But we want Lewis to enforce the law the same for all, not one kind for us, another for the Turners. If he’ll do that, we’ll keep the peace. Not till then. I’d rather be in prison for killing them than in the graveyard for them killing me.”
General Hill agreed to talk with Lewis and later told Wilse that the Turners had assured him they would use their influence to see that everyone, Lewis included, kept the peace. Wilse promised him that the Howards would not be the first to break the truce, and the militia turned south for the trip down the valley to Pineville, where they caught the train for Frankfort.
Several weeks later, Wilse and Will hatched a plot that they thought would put an end to the Lewis threat. Will rode through the county and brought about twenty Howard sympathizers to Bud Spur-lock’s cave, where Wilse explained his plan to station them in an ambush on either side of the road through the narrow gap to Hagan, Virginia. Wilse then wrote a letter to Wilson Lewis, which he signed with the name of the county judge of Rogersville, Tennessee. According to the letter, the judge had in his jail two men, one claiming to be Wilson Howard of Harlan, Kentucky, whom he was holding awaiting identification. Lewis, wildly excited, quickly raised a posse and prepared to go to Rogersville and bring home their prize.
But old George Turner was not fooled. “We don’t know who wrote this,” he said. “Wilse Howard could have done it himself. You ride out there through Hagan Gap and they could cut you down like cornstalks.” He advised Lewis instead to send a rider on a fast horse to Rogersville, but by way of Pineville, to the south, avoiding Hagan Gap. As he suspected, the county judge at Rogersville had no knowledge of the purported prisoners, the rider rode back with the revelation, and the Howard trap was never sprung.
Will and Wilse sensed that their luck was running out. Wilse rode into Harlan that night and told his mother goodbye, and once more he and Will headed West. This time, for some reason, they went separate ways. Will went to Missouri, where he was arrested, sent home, and imprisoned for killing John Bailey. Wilse, who was wanted in Missouri for killing the deaf-mute, said that he had always wanted to see California, and now he fulfilled his dream.
But apparently Wilse was running out of money, for in California he was arrested in June 1893 for robbing a Wells Fargo stagecoach and was tried and sent to prison. He was traveling under the name of Brown when arrested, and it is possible that he got himself imprisoned as Brown as a way of dropping out of sight and avoiding trial for the deaf-mute murder. It is also possible that by this time he had been warned that Imboden was on his trail. If that was his strategy, it didn’t work. Someone in prison spotted him from a Wanted poster, Imboden came to the prison and identified him, and Wilse was taken back to Missouri to stand trial for killing the deaf-mute, a man named McMichaels.
As he surrendered to the sheriff who took him back to Missouri, he said, “I am Wilse Howard, of Kentucky, the man you are looking for.” On the stand he recited without emotion the names of the men he had killed during the feud—Bob Craig, Will Turner, George Turner, George Hall, and John Bailey. He made no mention of the killings of the Cawoods and Hezekiah Hall, and to the end he maintained his innocence of the killing of the deaf-mute.
Throughout his trial and conviction, Wilse remained composed. Alice Howard and Rebecca, Wilse’s sister, made the trip to St. Louis to be with him during his trial. Like Wilse, they received the jury’s verdict of guilty, and the sentence of death by hanging, with a dignity mentioned in the St. Louis newspapers.
At his trial, the courtroom was packed and St. Louis papers carried detailed stories about the famous Kentucky mountain feudist. Wilse was surrounded by reporters, who took down every word he spoke as if it were of huge importance. Wherever the train stopped on his last journey, crowds thronged the platform, hoping for a view of the desperado, a title that amused Wilse but angered his mother and Rebecca.
Both women showed their usual composure until the last morning, when Wilse was taken, heavily shackled, to the train. The accompanying sheriff permitted Alice and Rebecca a final few minutes with their son and brother, and it was then that Alice finally broke down, sobbing and clinging to Wilse as he tried to console her. The sheriff eventually had to pull her away. Rebecca tried to smile, embraced Wilse, and patted him affectionately on the back. “I won’t say goodbye, brother. I’ll see you soon in a better world.”
On the train taking him to Lebanon, Missouri, where he was to be hanged, Wilse met Imboden for the first time, looked at him coldly, but then relented and shook hands, saying he bore him no ill will. In his jail cell he showed his cellmates a knife he had hidden under his belt with which to stab Imboden, but he said that at the last moment he felt no desire to kill him.
On his last evening, Wilse sipped a glass of port to steady his nerves but told a reporter, “Let me tell you something: I am not going to die game. I don’t believe in this business of bravado. But I will die like a man, and an innocent man. So, now, goodbye.”
On the gallows on the morning of August 4, 1894, Wilse, asked if he had anything to say, said, “Only that I hope to meet you all in heaven.”
&nbs
p; Back in Harlan, the hatreds that had fueled the feud eventually cooled if they never actually burned out. Life returned to something approaching normal. The Howards were eager to forget the feud. In the 1910 Harlan Business Directory, four doctors were listed in the town—a Howard, a Cawood, a Martin, and G. Pearl Bailey. Listed as teachers in the public school were a Howard, a Turner, and two Ca-woods. A Hall and two Howards were listed as engineers, and there were two Turners, three Howards, and a Hall among the lawyers. A haircut could be had from John Hall or from Daniel or Elijah Howard. In 1915 Dr. W.P. Cawood and Dr. E.M. Howard built a two-story building on the corner of Second and Mound Streets now known as the Smith-Howard Building.
A century after the Turner-Howard feud ended, few of the old resentments remained. Life had taken its course. Turners, Howards, Halls, and Lewises had intermarried. Except for genealogist Holly Fee, it is hard to find anyone who remembers who Devil Jim Turner was. Or Wilse Howard, for that matter.
Not that the feud did not exact a price. Like the other Eastern Kentucky feuds, it left an image, a reputation for violence, and the nickname “Bloody Harlan” that today is undeserved. In fact, it is a very hospitable town to visit.
BREATHITT COUNTY
A Talent for Violence
Almost a Romantic Journey
In the summer of 1780, while the Revolutionary War still raged along the American seaboard, a group of young Virginians walked and rode down the Shenandoah Valley, through southwest Virginia and the Pound Gap in the Cumberland Mountains into the wilderness of Kentucky. Though they were very serious in their search for a new life beyond the mountains, free of the strife between the restless colonists and the British crown, their journey had about it almost the air of a lark. They were very young—none was over twenty—and there was something youthful and romantic about their idealistic journey. Some had recently taken formal marriage vows, some had simply decided to set off together toward a new life in the mysterious, fabled territory of Kentucky.
Most were of the good English yeoman stock common on the frontier, with few possessions besides the skill of their hands, a few tools, and a blessed ignorance of the toils that lay ahead. Their surnames would be among those living in the mountains two centuries later: Nathan and Virginia (Neace) Noble; William and Enoch (strange name for a girl) Noble; Austin and Melinda (Allen) Neace; Henry Neace. Most were close kin. Others with them or following close behind bore other names still familiar in and around the region where they settled: Haddix, Combs, Hurst, Bach, Turner, Strong, Watts, Reynolds.
They were not the first white people to view what became Breathitt County. John Finley had crossed the Kentucky River near what is now Jackson in 1752. Christopher Gist, the Virginia surveyor, soldier, and scholar who later served as a guide for the young George Washington, came about the same time, probably in 1751. Washington himself may have come through the Pound Gap, though the indications are that they stopped north and east of that point.
Through the gap and what are now Letcher and Perry Counties they trudged, finally deciding, late in the summer, to settle along Lost Creek, Quicksand, and Frozen Creek. A group of them made a home that first winter in a rock house, a shallow cave actually, above Lost Creek, walling off the front with logs, building a fireplace—a remarkably dry, warm home until the men could get some cabins built. There, in November of 1780, young Virginia Noble gave birth to a baby girl. The baby died.
It was a rough land into which they had come, and one must wonder now why they stopped among the sharp, steep hills and narrow valleys of the central Cumberlands instead of going a little farther west into the rich and gentle Bluegrass region. From the first they faced the handicap of isolation. Until 1840, when a road was completed from the village of Jackson to War Creek, all merchandise had to be brought up the Kentucky River from a landing at Clay’s Ferry, near Lexington. Not until 1890 did the Kentucky Union Railroad extend its line from the Red River to Elkatawa, and in 1891 to Jackson, the county seat. As late as 1930 there was one black-topped road in the county.
From its founding in 1807, Breathitt County grew slowly. In 1809 it contained 8,705 people, in 1900, 14,320. It was not an easy place in which to make a living. The rich river bottomland was good for farming but flood prone, and settlers were soon clearing timber from the hills to create farmland and pastures. On the steep slopes grew more than a hundred species of trees, but the land made cutting difficult, and the logs had to be floated down the swift, swirling waters of the Kentucky River at flood tide to sawmills fifty miles away. When the big lumber companies such as Mowbray-Robinson finally arrived in 1908, they were warmly welcomed for the payrolls and purchases they brought, but they were not an unmixed blessing. They stripped the hills, leaving them prone to erosion that silted the creeks and added to river flooding.
When and why the fighting began that gave this scenic mountain land the unwanted nickname “Bloody Breathitt” is hard to pinpoint. But apparently it began with the Civil War. During that disastrous conflict, army officers, Union and Confederate, were often obliged to live off the land and sent foraging parties out into the countryside to round up whatever food they could find. According to law, they were supposed to pay or give promissory notes for what they took. In practice, they seldom did, taking what they could find and making foraging parties the dread of the mountain citizens, regardless of their sympathies. Such men were referred to as bushwhackers—they whacked the bushes to drive out livestock, cattle, sheep, pigs, chickens—which they then appropriated. Soon the name would be applied also to those who lay in the bushes and ambushed and robbed passers-by.
It was assumed, of course, that the foragers would take the livestock and farm produce back to the troops. Again, it didn’t always work out that way. Frequently the leaders, especially leaders of the Home Guard (regular or irregular troops who were supposed to protect citizens of a stipulated area from enemy troops or robbers) simply rounded up the stock and divided it among themselves, with top dog getting the biggest bone. That is apparently what took place among the Union army units of the Home Guard representing Breathitt and neighboring counties. Captain William Strong, of Company K of the Fourteenth Regiment, had a falling out with Lieutenant Wiley Amis of Company I over such a divison of spoils. Wiley Amis and his men had been scouting the northern half of Breathitt, while Captain Strong, with other Amises and Wilson Callahan, were robbing the Lost Creek Section. According to his men, Captain Strong took more than his share, the Amises and Wilson Callahan protested, and the incident led to the Strong-Amis feud, which lasted well into the 1870s. It fairly well ended when John Amis, the leader of the family, was killed in 1873 and the other Amises, or most of them, moved out of the county. But before it ended, it involved the Littles, another large family, when a gunfight broke out in the Breathitt courtroom in which Bob Little, a nephew of Captain Strong, was killed and five others wounded. In that same year a fire destroyed much of the courthouse in Jackson, the county seat, including most of the county records. There are few things more convenient than a good courthouse fire.
Like many feud leaders, Captain Bill Strong was a curious combination of altruist and tyrant. Having served in the Union army, he apparently took the Union cause seriously and became known in the hill country as the protector of the newly freed slaves. On the other hand, he was a brutal enemy. After the war, when a man ran against him or his choice for office, Strong was apt to take it as a personal affront. If the offending party did not withdraw, he frequently wound up dead. Bill Strong wanted the law enforced to accommodate Bill Strong; he wanted his followers left alone, taxes on his land kept low, and land disputes settled in his favor.
But the worst aspect of his rule was his tendency to act as commanding officer long after the war was over. He is said to have held courts-martial and condemned to death those who challenged his control. These courts-martial, it was reported, were held at night with only a few trusted men present. There was no need for the accused to be on hand. Captain Bill would review the sins of
the offender, ponder the case and, in most cases, sentence the offender to death. Usually one of his trusted lieutenants was given the job of killing the condemned man at a convenient moment. No hurry. Sometimes it was months before the blow fell. But it fell, invariably. One day the doomed man would be riding along, going to work or to the store, probably not knowing he was doomed, when a shot would ring out from ambush.
Wilson Callahan, John Amis and two of his cousins, possibly others, went the way of the court-martial. The Amises fought back and are said to have claimed more than two dozen of the Strong forces. But Strong’s executions had an inexorable air about them, as if by fate decreed, and one by one Captain Bill whittled away the enemy. Soon, few men wanted to challenge him. But in the mid-seventies a series of violent incidents marked the beginning of the end for the captain.
The events of 1874 involved not only Bill Strong but the Littles, the Jetts, and the Cockrells (sometimes spelled Cockrill), large and determined families. In the early summer of 1874 Jerry Little, not the most popular man in the hills, started a rumor, probably motivated by jealousy, charging one of James Cockrell’s daughters with pregnancy or lack of chastity. A slur against the virtue of a female in the family could not be tolerated, and the Cockrells set out to avenge her honor. Two of Little’s allies were shot, one killed. But at about the same time, Jerry Little shot and killed Curtis Jett Jr. in a bar near the Jackson courthouse. In return, Hiram Jett, Curtis’s brother, shot but failed to kill Jerry Little. The fight persuaded the Jetts to join the Cockrells against the Littles.
Captain Bill Strong couldn’t keep out of it. While the Littles and Jetts were banging away at each other, David Flinchum shot and killed a Negro. Ordinarily this would have caused hardly a comment, but now Bill Strong had made himself the special protector of the Negro population. The Flinchums joined the Cockrells for protection, so Strong joined the Littles against the Cockrells, and the lines were drawn. But at that point Captain Strong threw the whole county into confusion and brought in state troops for the first time by staging a coup d’état. Marshaling about two dozen of his old wartime followers, Strong rode into Jackson and took over the courthouse without firing a shot. He just walked in, told people in the offices to leave, and took over.
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