The situation was not improved by an increase in press coverage. Typical was the reporting of Charles Howell of the Pittsburgh Press. Howell spent some time with the McCoys and with Perry Cline and Frank Phillips but none with the Hatfields, and his stories reflected the fact. “There is a gang in West Virginia,” he wrote, “banded together for the purpose of murder and rapine. There is a gang in Kentucky whose … principle is the protection of families and homes…. An unresisting family has been deprived of five of its members, a father and mother of five of their children, their home burned, their little substance scattered to the wind.”
Then the two governors got into it. Wilson of West Virginia insisted that his state had been invaded by Kentuckians who had killed Bill Dempsey and that he would no longer consider extraditing anyone. Buckner wrote to Wilson that he was sending General Sam Hill to Pikeville to confer with Colonel W.L. Mahan, Wilson’s agent. Both governors ordered their state troops to prepare for possible duty along the Tug. Newspapers warned that war between the two states was imminent. Hill went at once to Pikeville but arrived after Mahan had returned to West Virginia. Hill reported to Buckner that West Virginians were responsible for the trouble and that Senator Floyd had made matters worse by urging Governor Wilson to refuse Kentucky extradition requests. Buckner wrote Wilson insisting that the Hatfields had caused the trouble and that Frank Phillips had gone into West Virginia only when he failed to get any response from Wilson to his requests for extradition. And so on.
Before the state troops could clash, Governor Wilson concluded that further dealings with Buckner were useless and sent Mahan to Frankfort to demand that Kentucky immediately release the nine West Virginians who had been seized illegally and were moldering in the Pikeville jail. Buckner said the courts, not the executive, had jurisdiction over release of prisoners. Wilson ordered Eustace Gibson, a former congressman, to initiate habeas corpus proceedings in the U.S. District Court in Louisville. Gibson argued that armed men from Kentucky had invaded West Virginia and without legal authority taken West Virginia citizens to the Pikeville jail, where they were in great danger of assassination.
Kentucky attorney general Parker Watkins (“Polly Wolly”) Hardin argued that since the case involved states, only the Supreme Court had jurisdiction. He also argued that if the court freed the prisoners, they would return to West Virginia and never face trial for their crimes. Judge John Barr held that it was not essentially a case between two states and ordered the jailer of Pike County to produce the nine men to the court in Louisville.
The appearance of the famed “mountain desperadoes” on the streets of Louisville caused great excitement, and reporters swarmed around the jail and the courtroom where the prisoners later were brought. Wall Hatfield, especially, became a favorite of the press and had a great time giving interviews, insisting, among other things, that he had only one wife (some reporter had gotten the idea that he had five) and that Devil Anse and his sons were responsible for the murder of the McCoy boys.
For weeks it appeared that the prisoners would grow old in jail before the court decided who had responsibility and jurisdiction. Eventually the question was taken up by the U.S. Circuit Court and finally by the Supreme Court of the United States, which, in its majesty and with Justices Harlan and Bradley dissenting, upheld the judgment of the lower court that the arrest and abduction of the prisoners were lawless and indefensible but that the authority of the governor of Kentucky was no grounds for charging complicity of the state in the wrong done to West Virginia. The outcome was that the Kentuckians shouldn’t have done it, but since they had there wasn’t much that could be done about it. Everyone assumed that the cases would go to trial.
Meanwhile, things along the Tug became almost ridiculous. With large rewards offered by West Virginia for the capture and delivery of various McCoys and their allies, and similar rewards offered by Kentucky for the capture of Devil Anse and his cohorts, bounty hunters and private detectives swarmed into the area, intent on getting some of the reward money. They were universally despised, and regional newspapers proposed that rewards be offered for their capture, in which case the Hatfields and McCoys would take care of them in short order and after a few good hangings peace would descend on all. This did not deter the detectives, who managed to capture Charles Gillespie, a minor figure in the burning of the McCoy cabin. Gillespie confessed that the assault on the McCoys was designed to “remove every material witness to the murder of the McCoy boys.” The detectives also captured Ellison Mounts, who managed to shoot one detective in the leg.
Meanwhile, back in Pikeville, things had taken a curious turn. After the assault on the McCoy home and the murder of Alifair and Calvin, Nancy McCoy, who had never lost her loyalty to her clan, left Johnse and went to live in Pikeville. There she met none other than Frank Phillips. They took to each other and, though both were legally married, started living together. As soon as they could obtain divorces, they got married.
No such happy ending awaited Rose Anna. Day and night she tended her mother, but while Sarah, a remarkable woman, slowly but steadily regained her strength, Rose Anna gradually faded. Sarah sent for a doctor, but he could find nothing medically wrong with Rose Anna, and she finally died quietly in her sleep.
On August 23, 1889, the trial of the Hatfield “gang” began in Pikeville. Ellison Mounts had confessed that he had been party to the murder of the three McCoy boys and named Devil Anse, Johnse, Cap, and Bill Hatfield, Alex Messer, Charles Carpenter, and Tom Chambers as those who fired the shots. Among the nineteen witnesses produced by the prosecution were eight named Hatfield, evidence that family lines were more blurred than writers have claimed.
To the surprise of many McCoys, Perry Cline appeared as defense attorney for Wall Hatfield, possibly in an effort to regain some of the money he had lost to the Hatfields in land deals. Old Randal proved a poor witness, unable to recall many events, but Sarah was articulate and precise. She spoke well of Wall Hatfield, however. Others also spoke well of Wall, but to no avail. The jury found him guilty and recommended life in prison. He appealed, and Judge John Rice granted him a sixty-day suspension of judgment. Alex Messer and Dock and Plyant Mahon were tried together, and they too received life sentences. When asked if he had anything to say about his sentence to life at hard labor, Messer said, “Hit’s mighty little work I can do, jedge. Hain’t been able to work none on any count for several years.” Spectators guffawed, but the sentence stuck. Dock and Plyant Mahon were granted appeals.
The rest of the accused were give life or lesser sentences, and for a while it seemed that the Kentuckians would be denied the hanging they had anticipated. Old Randal was so outraged that he reportedly attempted to raise a mob and take some of the defendants out and hang them, but, as with most of his plans, he failed. He was somewhat mollified when, on September 4, the jury returned a guilty verdict against Ellison Mounts and recommended that he be hanged. Mounts protested that he had been assured that his guilty plea and cooperation would get him a light sentence, and he tried to withdraw his guilty plea. The judge overruled the motion and sentenced him to hang on December 3.
On November 9, 1889, the Kentucky Court of Appeals upheld the convictions of Wall and the Mahons. Wall’s life sentence proved to be just that. Six months later he died in the state penitentiary. On December 3, Ellison Mounts was hanged on a hillside in Pikeville. Although state law required that such ceremonies be private and a fence had been erected around the gallows, the position of the gallows allowed the crowd of thousands to look down from the hillside on the final act. As the hood was placed over his head, Mounts cried, with considerable honesty, “The Hatfields made me do it!”
On November 19, 1889, Devil Anse Hatfield was fined $100 for moonshining in U.S. District Court in Charleston, West Virginia. Unlike most moonshiners, he was not given the customary year in prison. On the contrary, he was treated in Charleston as something of a celebrity. Reporters asked his opinion on all manner of topics and hung on his words. The ju
dge treated him with courtesy and respect and provided him with a guard to make sure he was not annoyed by bounty hunters or such low types. Old Anse had killed or caused the murders of practically all of the McCoys but paid none of the price.
By that time, most people had forgotten the feud. Frank and Nancy Phillips, who had become parents of a son shortly before their marriage, were said to deal in the manufacture and sale of whiskey, and on at least two occasions Nancy was in court for such enterprise. Neither she nor Frank mellowed much with age or parenthood. In 1894, at the age of thirty-six, Frank died in a gunfight. According to the Hazel Green Herald, he and detective William Blevins were chasing the Ricketts boys, West Virginia gun thugs who “had killed old man Ferrel in Logan County,” when the Ricketts ambushed and killed them instead. Three years later Nancy died of tuberculosis.
Perry Cline died in 1891. He was only forty-four. Old Randal and Sarah never went back to Blackberry Creek. Randal got a license to operate a ferry on the Big Sandy at Pikeville. Sarah died in 1894. Randal lived on to the age of eighty-eight, still complaining about the injustices he had suffered, and in 1913 died of burns received when he fell into an open fire. In 1921, at the age of eighty-two, Devil Anse died and was given a big funeral.
The Woman in the Case
One story concerning the French-Eversole War in Perry County is about the woman who caused the trouble, or, more precisely, about the young man whose desire for this woman caused the streets of Hazard to run red with blood, to exercise hyperbole. The young man was a clerk in Fulton French’s general store when he met this woman. She drove him crazy. One night he came back to the store to get his hat, and there was this woman with his employer, French. Engorged with jealous rage, the young man decided to get rid of French, went one night to the home of Joseph Eversole, French’s chief competitor in the merchandise business, and warned him that French was planning to kill him. Eversole, alarmed, began arming his employees. French, hearing of this, armed his. It wasn’t long before the two sides clashed. But it was Eversole, not French, who was killed. The lovesick young man committed suicide.
Isn’t that a good story? You could make a movie out of it. There is only one thing wrong with it: It isn’t true. It never happened. There never was any mountain temptress, any lovesick young man. A total fabrication. Where the tale started, no one knows.
But there was a French-Eversole War, waged in the years from 1887 through 1894 between the forces of Joseph C. Eversole and B. Fulton French, two bright, tough, aggressive lawyer-merchants who were in business in Hazard, the county seat of Perry County, Kentucky. The war almost destroyed Hazard, which wasn’t much to begin with—about two hundred people trying to create a decent society in the isolated heart of Kentucky’s Cumberland Mountains, a Main Street ankle-deep in mud half the year, some board sidewalks, a few stores, and a courthouse where judges were often afraid to hold court because of gunplay. There wouldn’t be a railroad into Hazard until 1912, a hard-surfaced road until 1925. Life was plain and hard, diversions few, and culture almost nonexistent. People drank a lot.
Like most of the counties of central Eastern Kentucky, Perry was settled in the years following the Revolution, chiefly by Virginians who came up through the Cumberland Gap and toward the center of the new wilderness territory. But instead of continuing into the Blue-grass area—the region of Harrodsburg, Boonesborough, and Lexington—they turned up the Kentucky River into the mountains and in small groups started dropping off and settling down in what are now Lee, Breathitt, Clay, Leslie, and Perry counties. They bore the same family names that can be found around Hazard today—Duff, Bowling, Wooton, Eversole, Combs.
Old Jacob Eversole built a cabin opposite the mouth of Lick Branch around 1800 that remained the family home until 1880. The Campbells went on upstream and settled at the mouth of Campbell’s Creek. The Combses came in and settled in what would become Hazard after one of the family, Leslie, decided to stay in the Bluegrass; a grandson, Leslie Combs III, founded the beautiful Spendthrift thoroughbred horse farm. A great-grandson of the Combs branch that settled in Clay County became governor of Kentucky. Another notable Combs was known as Old Danger Combs; he had been and remained a Tory, unhappy that the colonies had left the mother country, later became a Democrat, and fought for the South in the Civil War. So did many of the Bakers, Caudills, and Walkers.
Perry wasn’t even a county until 1819, when citizens living in Clay and Floyd counties decided they wanted one of their own and the legislature created Perry, with the county seat at Hazard, both named for Oliver Hazard Perry, the hero of the Battle of Lake Champlain in the War of 1812. John Duff laid out the town, and Jessie Combs was elected county clerk in 1822. He served until his death in 1878, which may be some sort of record. Hazard grew slowly but steadily until the Civil War, with new families—Holbrooks, Napiers, Amises, Mclntires, Pratts, and Olivers—settling in town or around the county. The town got to be something of a trading center, and after the war Joseph Eversole, a descendant of the pioneer family, and newcomer Benjamin Fulton French became leading merchants.
But then troublesome events began to take place. Timber had been the main product of the sharp, rocky hills, but there were thick veins of rich coal under those hills, and in the years following the Civil War outside companies began buying up large tracts of land or rights to the minerals under that land. Fulton French served as agent for one of the largest of these companies and soon established a reputation as a tough man and a hard bargainer, more concerned with getting cheap coal for the company than with getting a fair price for the mountain landowners. According to the Hazel Green Herald of August 12, 1887, “An English syndicate are buying mineral rights in parts of our county. Poor, blind people, selling their vast wealth for a song, the finest coal land for fifty cents an acre. The same syndicate has bought in Perry County 130,000 acres of mineral rights.” Author Harry Caudill wrote later, “When Hazard attorney Joseph Eversole warned landowners that the mineral deeds were tantamount to fee simple conveyances, the purchasers sought to silence him; in the resulting war Fulton French, a lawyer for the land syndicate, was his leading opponent.”
French had come up from North Carolina, married Susan Lewis, of a large, substantial Harlan County family, and settled on Cutshin Creek in what is now Leslie County before moving to Perry and going into the dry-goods business. His chief competitor was thirty-five-year-old Joseph Eversole, a member of another large, influential mountain family, a slender, handsome, popular young lawyer and businessman who had married Susan Combs, daughter of the prominent judge, state legislator, and educator, Josiah Combs. In the beginning the two men, both talented and ambitious, were on good terms, but Eversole came increasingly to resent French’s sharp buying practices in acquiring land for the syndicate and what he considered French’s disregard for the welfare of the mountain people. Like the Eversoles in general, Joe Eversole was a public-spirited man, generous with time and money, interested in improving the quality of life in his rugged mountain community. But, though small, he had a fiery temper and was known as a tough fighter.
Fult French was a hard, grasping man whose concerns were centered on his own pocketbook. As historian Allen Watts, himself a former resident of neighboring Letcher County, says, French was undoubtedly the villain of the piece; Eversole was trying to protect the small mountain landowner.
Eversole’s disapproval gradually cooled to a sort of polite hostility, and it took only a disagreement over competition between the two stores to spark the gunplay that was more and more common as a means of settling disputes in the mountains during the post-Civil War era.
Something happened—who knows what?—that persuaded French and Eversole to start arming themselves and their employees. French, in mountain Mafia style, began hiring gunmen. Eversole may have hired some outsiders himself. According to the Hazel Green Herald of September 1, 1886: “Some weeks ago their rivalry led to a murderous fight in which French and his friends were driven out [of Hazard]. French began collecti
ng a band with which he will move on Hazard. He makes Mt. Pleasant [Harlan] about thirty miles away, his headquarters. He has recruited seventy men of desperate fortunes. They are paid $2 and $2.50 a day. Eversole, surrounded by an equally desperate gang, is fortified in Hazard. A fierce conflict is imminent.” This account may or may not be accurate. French lived in Leslie County; why would he have his headquarters in Mt. Pleasant—Harlan—a long, hard ride away?
The ambush killing of Silas Gayheart, a friend of French’s, was the first overt act, but by the time he was shot, in the summer of 1887, mountain gun thugs such as Bad Tom Smith, Joe Adkins, Jess Fields, and Bob Profitt were walking around Hazard brandishing rifles and reportedly working for Fult French. A year or so later Old Claib Jones turned up and, by his own account in his “autobiography,” tried to bring peace by killing off one side or the other. It is not clear which side he was working for. He was not the world’s most accurate reporter.
The Eversole people always denied killing Gayheart, and there was no apparent reason why they would want to. An ambush killing was always hard to trace; the killers struck and ran, usually killing all witnesses and leaving few tracks in the tangled woodland. There were accusations in Hazard that a dozen men, including two Ever-soles, were involved in killing Gayheart, but no one was ever indicted. Fult French, however, sent out his men to hire more gun-slingers, and though there had been no overt show of feud warfare, there was a great deal of tension in Perry County throughout the winter of 1887. There was a lot of shooting on the street at night, and people became reluctant to go out after dark. Everyone was edgy.
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