Days of Darkness

by John Ed Ed Pearce

  Then, early one morning in the spring of 1888, Joe Eversole, on his farm out in the county, heard from one of his lookouts that Fult French and a large group of his men had camped the night before on the road from Mt. Pleasant to Hazard and were planning to attack the town. The Ever soles usually centered their forces in Hazard around the “fort” where the Beaumont Hotel later stood, but on this occasion they had withdrawn from the town and gone about their business, apparently feeling safe from action by the French forces.

  Calling his men together, Eversole selected a small group to go to Hazard, avoid confrontation, and gather what information they could. He went with the bulk of his forces to the southern section of the county, where he could count on a large body of sympathizers. Within hours, French and his army swooped down, somewhat surprised to find Hazard quiet, with a few people in the stores and almost no one on the street. They took over the courthouse, fortified their homes, and warned the few Eversole men they saw to leave town or face trouble. They left.

  Joe Eversole, staying with his men out on South Fork, heard the news and, taking five of his most trusted men, rode toward Hazard. On the way he picked up a dozen more. Late in the afternoon they reached Hazard and attacked the French forces, who fought back in spirited fashion. The fighting went on until dark, but with few results. One French gunman was wounded. Eversole said none of his men was hurt.

  Eversole and his men withdrew. Two days later a strange but not atypical thing happened. A reporter for the Cincinnati Enquirer, hearing that there was serious trouble in Perry County, took the train to London, hired a horse, and began the exhausting seventy-mile ride over the rugged mountain trails. Not far from Hazard he fell in with a lanky mountaineer, told him the purpose of his journey, and was delighted when the mountain man offered to escort him into Hazard and introduce him to feud members who could give him the facts about the terrible battles.

  They were French adherents, and what they gave him was a highly one-sided, wildly exaggerated version of what had been a fairly harmless clash; but by the time it appeared in the Enquirer, the mountains were made to appear dripping with blood. The mountaineers were not without a certain sense of humor.

  Ten days later, the two sides clashed again. This time there were casualties on both sides. Such sporadic fighting continued through the summer months, until people on both sides grew tired of the feud and began thinking of ways to stop it. Both French and Eversole were probably eager to quit. It was getting to the point where neither could afford to continue. Neither was a wealthy man, and the fighting was ruining their businesses. Some people had left Hazard. Others, out in the county, were afraid to come into town to buy. And the cost of keeping up their armies was beginning to pinch. French sent Joe Adkins to Eversole’s store to see if Joe Eversole would like to talk. Ever-sole said that he would.

  The two men met on Big Creek and drew up a formal truce under which both agreed to give up their guns. French promised to hand his over to the judge of Leslie County, who was a cousin, while Joe Eversole agreed to hand his over to Judge Josiah Combs, his father-in-law.

  When the news was announced in Hazard, there was a general feeling of relief, but the peace that descended was an uneasy one. Men from both sides now walked the streets, but some were still armed, they still eyed each other warily, and when one side was drinking in a saloon and members of the opposing camp entered, things tended to get rather quiet. Both French and Eversole needed some time to replenish their declining fortunes, but few people in Hazard seemed to believe that the truce would last very long.

  And it didn’t. French accused Eversole of regaining possession of his guns while Judge Combs was not looking. Eversole replied that French could not regain his guns because he had never surrendered them as he had promised to do. On September 15, 1887, Joe Eversole and Bill Gambrell met on the street in Hazard. Gambrell was a loudmouthed, gunslinging, part-time preacher, denouncing the demon rum one moment, peddling moonshine whiskey the next. Gambrell made what seemed to be a threatening remark. Eversole told him to keep his mouth shut or risk getting it shut permanently. Gambrell reached for his pistol. Eversole grabbed Gambrell’s pistol, pulled his own, and shot him. Gambrell was killed. He was a French man, and the feud was automatically restarted. By November 24 the Louisville Post was warning that “Perry County is again in a state of terror. The French and Eversole war has been renewed. Every man in the county almost has sided with either French or Eversole.”

  In the meantime the level of violence was automatically raised when Bad Tom Smith appeared on the scene. Just when, where, and why he got the name of Bad Tom is unclear, but from the time he was a boy on Carr’s Fork, in Knott County, Tom Smith was obstreperous, erratic, usually in trouble. He began his career as a brawler, then became a petty thief, stealing anything, from hogs and horses to merchandise. He would fight anyone and terrorized girls as well as boys in the neighborhood. In 1884, when he was twenty, Tom was walking into Hazard on election day when he saw some of his friends holed up in a livery stable and being fired upon by several gunmen lying in the weeds outside. Picking up a large rock, Tom knocked one of the besiegers unconscious, took the man’s pistol and shot the other two, ending the battle, relieving his friends, and winning considerable attention.

  But there was another aspect of Tom’s personality that needs to be considered: He was an epileptic, in a time and in an area where epilepsy and the seizures or “fits” that marked it were little understood and generally feared or regarded as a sign of insanity. It is likely that Tom was shunned, ridiculed, considered strange, and probably picked on as a boy, inclining him early on to be a fighter. He was big and strong, a little over six feet tall and weighing almost two hundred pounds, just dumb enough to be fearless, just bright enough to be dangerous, and a dead shot.

  Fult French knew of Tom’s handicap and took profitable advantage of it. Though Tom was married to a Lewis, as was Fult French (he later left her), Fult seemed to give him the dangerous, dirty jobs to do, and Tom did them.

  In 1885 he held up and robbed Ira Davidson of his watch. This was a more serious matter than it might appear today—a good watch was rare and expensive—and the Davidsons soon had Tom in court, where he was found guilty and fined. Davidson denounced Tom in very explicit terms, and a few nights later the home of Davidson’s mother burned to the ground. When the trouble between Eversole and French began, both sides tried to enlist Tom, but at first he showed no interest. Then he stole a horse belonging to Nick Combs, Joe Eversole’s brother-in-law, and the Eversoles had him arrested and hauled into court. Tom threatened to kill lawyers, the judge, witnesses, and anyone else associated with this breach of etiquette. Since the Eversoles had so insulted him, he joined the French forces, and from then on, while the French gunmen were under the orders of Fult French, they were led by Bad Tom Smith.

  Tom later gave a much different version of his affiliation with the French forces. “I was a poor boy,” he told a Hazel Green reporter on May 23, 1895, while in jail in Breathitt County, “and I worked for a living. I would first work for a French and then an Eversole…. Somebody reported that I was acting for the French party…. I went to Eversole’s store one day and he knocked me down with the butt of his gun, kicked me into the street and ordered me to leave the county. I then went to the French party and after a while they took me in. I fought it through with them. I joined that war on my own account.”

  Bad Tom fell in with another French gunman named Joe Hurt, a nervous, excitable gunman who admired Tom’s toughness, and the two of them were credited with several of the murders committed in 1887 in connection with the feud. Joe went to Tom’s home one day on some sort of business, but the two of them started drinking and an argument flared. Tom said that Hurt was no friend, that he had broken into Tom’s home and attacked him. In any event, Tom killed him.

  The Eversole men were warned to watch out for Tom. The warning was well founded. On April 15, 1888, Joe Eversole, his brother-in-law Nick Combs, and Judge Josi
ah Combs were riding toward Big Creek. It had been quiet in Hazard for several weeks, and people were beginning to hope that the feud had died down. But as the Eversoles rounded a turn on the road, they were hit by a burst of gunfire from a thick patch of woods above the bend. Joe Eversole was knocked from his horse, his body riddled by eight bullets. Nick Combs was similarly hit. Josiah Combs was nicked and had five bullet holes in his clothes but managed to escape. As he fled, he saw two men, neither of whom he could identify, run from the woods, fire repeatedly into the bodies of the fallen men, and then go through their pockets.

  It would later be revealed that the chief assassin was Bad Tom. After his victims fell, as Tom was rifling the pockets of young Nick Combs, Nick became conscious, turned, and asked Tom why he had shot him. Tom calmly pulled his pistol and shot him through the head, explaining to his startled helpers that they could not afford to have a witness hanging around, talking and making a nuisance of himself.

  Judge Combs rushed back to Hazard, got together a group of Eversole men, and retrieved the bodies. Despite the increased tensions, they were given a big funeral, with about fifty men with rifles guarding the cemetery ceremony.

  After that there was no way to control the killing. With Joe Ever-sole gone, John Campbell assumed leadership of the Eversole forces. He tried to instill some order and discipline into his haphazard ranks, showing them how to spread their forces in order to attack from many vantage points, and how to concentrate them to focus their fire. He posted guards on important buildings and sentries at the main entrances into town, with orders to shoot anyone approaching who did not know the password. Unfortunately, Campbell left town one afternoon and upon returning that night found the sentry sound asleep at this post. Campbell shouted a command, ordering the man to his feet. The man, fogged with sleep, leaped to his feet and shot Campbell. Killed him.

  The famous Shade Combs then decided to take a hand in matters, called a few of the Eversole gunmen into conference, and announced that they were going to stop the feud by assassinating Fult French and his top gunmen. He had it all figured out. His lieutenants listened to his plan and agreed enthusiastically. But they had first to overcome the obstacle of Bad Tom Smith. They never did.

  When Shade Combs took command of the Eversole forces, Bad Tom sent word to him that unless he left Perry County, he, and his wife and children would be killed and their house burned. It was then that Shade conceived his plan to ambush Bad Tom, took two trusted lieutenants, and rode out toward the French hideout. But they were the ones who were ambushed. One of his men was killed, and Shade fled. Worried for the safety of his family, Shade stayed close to home for several weeks until one afternoon he went out into the yard to play with his children. There was the crack of a rifle and Shade Combs fell dead. As Mrs. Combs wept and the children screamed, Bad Tom rode by slowly, smiling.

  On October 9, 1888, Elijah Morgan, a French man though a son-in-law of Josiah Combs, was killed from ambush as he and Frank Grace were on their way to Hazard to try to bring the two warring sides together and stop the feud. There had been rumors for weeks that he was marked for death, and no one was surprised when he fell. It was generally believed he was killed in retaliation for the death of Shade Combs.

  This was too much. Circuit Judge H.C. Lilly asked Governor Buckner to send troops to Perry and Breathitt counties to enable him to conduct trials. “French has thirteen or more men, well armed,” he lamented. The governor replied that he didn’t think thirteen gunmen should be able to terrorize a community and keep the sheriff and judge from discharging their duties. “Fears and alarms,” he wrote, had produced “nothing more than a vague apprehension in the public mind.” Rather snidely, the governor added that Judge Lucius Little of McLean County was willing to swap courts with him, and the Hazel Green Herald sneered that “the lily of the valley is sweeter than the Lilly of the mountains.” This was unfair to Judge Lilly, who knew the situation better than did the governor or the Hazel Green editor, and knew how difficult it would be to hold fair trials in a courthouse full of feudists.

  Eventually the governor sent the troops, under General Sam Hill, with Captain Sohan in charge. Sohan camped his troops about two hundred yards from the courthouse and offered protection to the court. In his report, he noted that “the judge, in charging the jury, passed lightly over murder.”

  General Hill’s report to the governor was even more discouraging. “Hazard contains about 100 people when they are all in their homes,” he wrote, “but only 35 were at home when we reached here. Ten men have died in the past two years and county authorities have failed to act with any degree of promptness or vigor. What this is all about I cannot say.” He went on to say that “there are no churches of any kind, few schools, and half the murders are never made known to the public. Many people live in poverty. More than 20 men have been killed in the feud, most from ambush.”

  Before the troops left, Captain Sohan organized a company of state militia in Hazard. This might have served to dampen the feud, for the people were impressed by the troops, who were proof that the state intended to enforce the law. But most of the militiamen were feudists, and as soon as the troops were withdrawn, the fighting resumed.

  Bad Tom was arrested and put in jail, but Fult French intervened and Tom was shortly released. Tom then went to Hindman, in nearby Knott County, and there, apparently on orders from French, shot and killed Ambrose Amburgey. This probably had nothing to do with the feud. Just a disagreement that had to be settled.

  But Tom’s high jinks were getting too much for even the timid folks of Hazard, and the grand jury meeting in the fall of 1889 handed down multiple indictments against him, though without troops the indictments were useless. As the November 1889 term of court convened, Judge W.L. Hurst was named special judge. He was warned to leave town. Eventually he did, but before he left, what became known as the Battle of Hazard Courthouse took place.

  It was becoming apparent that Fult French ruled Perry County. The Eversole forces were badly depleted, and those surviving found it dangerous to oppose Bad Tom and his bloody bunch. Ira Davidson, an Eversole man who was Circuit Court clerk, was heard to say that the sheriff should bring Bad Tom and Joe Adkins to justice. Ira got word that he would be killed if he stayed in Hazard. He took his family and left. Abner Eversole, county school superintendent, was ordered to leave or be killed. He left. The grand jury indicted Bad Tom, but he ignored it.

  But at the fall 1889 meeting of Perry Circuit Court, the Eversole forces decided to take a stand against the French thugs and demand that the court do something about the murders. Both sides had collected as many men as they could round up—twenty or thirty on each side—and they milled about the courthouse waiting for someone to start something. They didn’t have to wait long. A man named Campbell, who was with a group of French men on Graveyard Hill, above the courthouse, began shooting, probably because he had been drinking. A storekeeper named Davidson saw him, got his gun, and killed him.

  Wesley Whitaker, an Eversole man, and Henry Davidson of the French forces got into an argument near the courthouse. Whitaker drew his gun, but Davidson ran and hid in the home of Jess Fields, another French warrior. They banged away at each other, but both were drunk and no damage was done. But the idea caught on with the crowd on Main Street, and soon the shooting became general. The Eversoles grabbed control of the courthouse. The Frenches took possession of the jail, only a few feet away. Jess Fields and Joe Adkins, who were in the courthouse, jumped out a window and made a dash for the jail, where they joined their fellow feudists. For hours the two forces blasted away at short range, doing remarkably little damage except to the courthouse, which was almost blown apart. Indeed, before it later burned, some citizens proposed that it be torn down, since it was so riddled with bullet holes that “it wouldn’t hold corn shucks.”

  Bad Tom and Jess Fields dug in on Graveyard Hill, where they could fire down on the courthouse, and for the next eighteen hours the firing went on fairly steadily until, arou
nd noon on the following day, the Eversoles ran out of ammunition and were forced to retreat.

  In this so-called “Battle of Hazard” only two men were killed and only a few wounded. Bad Tom, lying in a small depression intended as a grave, rested his rifle on a flat tombstone and kept up a steady fire. At one point Jake McKnight, an Eversole man, started across the street. Tom shot and killed him. As they ran low on bullets, the Eversoles tried to get away along the bank of the Kentucky River. Bad Tom, Jess Fields, and Bob Profitt went after them, hoping to wipe out the whole force and end the war, but Green Morris lay behind a fallen log on the river bank and shot both Fields and Profitt, wounding Fields painfully but not seriously. The other French gunmen held back, and the Eversole men got away.

  Court had adjourned, anyhow, but on the night of the fourth of July 1890, someone burned the courthouse, though most of the records were saved. Then another of the Eversole men, Bob Cornett, who had gone home and was trying to get some logs down to the sawmill, was shot and killed from ambush.

  Again there were demands that the French gang be brought to trial, but Judge Hurst, who had been holding court, was told to leave town or die, and left. That was the last straw. Circuit Judge Lilly wrote again to Governor Buckner, stating flatly that he would not try to hold court until the governor furnished him with protective troops. Governor Buckner again sent in the troops, this time under Captain Garthers (Gaither?) from Louisville. The captain rounded up a dozen gunmen from both sides and saw that they were tried for their crimes.

  At first Fult French tried to impress Gaither, presenting himself as a community leader concerned only with peace and development of the economy. Gaither was not taken in. Among those brought to trial was B. Fulton French. As can be imagined, the most famous defendant was Bad Tom Smith. Some of Bad Tom’s friends sent word to the court that Bad Tom would never be tried and that anyone who attempted it would be killed. Gaither was not frightened; as a matter of fact, so many of the dangerous French gunmen had been arrested that there were not enough left to attempt a rescue.