But the Tolliver noose was not quite tight. Hiram Pigman, H.M. Logan, and D.B. (Boone) Logan, lawyers and businessmen, joined county officials in asking Governor Knott for help. Governor Knott responded by sending Adjutant General John Castleman to More-head to see if he could determine the cause of the continuing violence. Castleman reported, in effect, that law enforcement in Rowan County was weak because it was in the hands of lawbreakers and that no one seemed especially interested in seeing law enforced. As a result, the leaders of the two camps were summoned to Louisville, where state officials worked out what they thought was a workable compromise. It was not.
Cook Humphrey, H.M. Logan, and Judge James Carey represented one side, generally Republican, while Craig Tolliver and Dr. Jerry Wilson represented the Democrats, if they can be so labeled. On April 11 both sides agreed to lay down their arms, obey the laws, and not attack the other. The agreement granted amnesty to all concerned for the riot. This, of course, pleased and encouraged the battlers, and for a while it seemed that the truce might hold. But not for long. General Castleman, at the conclusion of the truce talks, predicted that the truce wouldn’t hold. He was right.
Back in Morehead, Craig Tolliver, supported by County Attorney Z.T. Young, was elected town marshal over Robert Messer. Messer was then elected constable, with Tolliver backing. Ed Pearce, the Greenup gunman, was arrested in Greenup County and tried in Bath County for robbery. He was found guilty and sentenced to twenty years in prison, but before he left he sent for Z.T. Young and told him that H.M. Logan and Sue Martin had offered him and Ben Rayburn money to kill Young as well as Jeff and Alvin Bowling. Pearce later recanted, saying that Craig Tolliver had threatened to have him killed before he reached prison if he did not lie.
On June 11, Alvin Bowling was indicted in Mt. Sterling for the murder of a man named Gill. Ed Pearce, at the trial, testified that John Martin and Cook Humphrey had made a deal: Humphrey would collect the county taxes, Martin would then rob him and take the money, and together they would go West. The Morehead police judge, a Tolliver man, then issued a warrant for Humphrey, who was at the Martin house at the time. (Pearce later recanted this charge, too.)
Then began a period of open lawlessness. Tolliver heard that Cook Humphrey and Ben Rayburn were at the Martin home, and early on the morning of June 28, 1885, after surrounding the house during the night, the Tollivers attacked. Said Mrs. Martin:
Craig Tolliver and his gang came to my house early in the morning after Cook Humphrey and Ben Rayburn. At the time there was no one living at my house except women … myself, my daughters Susan and Annie, my little daughter Rena and my married daughter, Mrs. Tusser. My husband had gone to Kansas. He had received warning that he would be killed if he did not go, and we women folks persuaded him to leave. My sons, Will and Dave, had also been threatened, and they, too, had gone to Kansas.
It was Sunday when the Tollivers came. Cook Humphrey and Ben Ray-burn were at my house. The Tollivers found out he was there because the night before he had slipped in to Morehead after his Winchester…. they saw him and the next day they came after him. They hid in the bushes around the house. In the party were Craig Tolliver, Mark Keeton, Jeff Bowling, Tom Allen Day, John Day, Boone Day, Mich and Jim Ashley, Bob Messer and others I did not know. Tolliver was town Marshal of Morehead and claimed he had warrants for the arrest of Humphrey and Rayburn on the charge of attempting to assassinate Taylor Young, but they never had any warrants.
It was a lopsided fight. “The Tollivers came in the yard and demanded that Humphrey and Rayburn surrender,” said Mrs. Martin. “Craig Tolliver slipped into the yard and got inside the house. He was creeping up the stairway when Humphrey discovered his presence, seized a shotgun and discharged it into his face. Tolliver fell back down, and his friends rushed in and dragged him out of danger. He was badly scarred but alive. A half-grown boy was at work in the field, he approached the house and two shots were fired at him. The word got to Morehead but no one dared go to relief.”
Sue Martin, a spunky sort, made her escape but was met by Tolliver, his face covered with blood, who threatened to kill her if she went to Morehead. She made a dash through the bushes. Tolliver fired at her, but she escaped and hid in a ditch until nearly night, when she made her way into town. But when she reached the courthouse she was arrested by a deputy sheriff and put into jail. The Tollivers threatened to set the Martin house on fire if Humphrey and Rayburn did not surrender.
“At about four oclock,” Mrs. Martin reported, “Rayburn made a run for the bushes. Several hundred shots had been fired. The two men, Rayburn and Humphrey, rushed out the eastern door, leaped the fence and dashed across the cornfield toward the mountain.”
The two men had gone about a hundred yards when Rayburn was hit. He rose, was hit again, fell and did not rise. Humphrey made it to the woods, and the gang, knowing he had a Winchester, did not pursue. The Tollivers then set the house on fire. Mrs. Martin and the girls ran out as the house and all its furniture went up in flames. Annie made her way into town, where she was arrested and put in jail with her sister Susan. Mrs. Martin and the other girls spent the night under a tree.
The next night Major Lewis McKee got off the train with 150 men and marched up the street to encamp on the courthouse lawn. The Martin girls were released from jail. There were no charges against them.
Craig Tolliver claimed that he had warrants for the arrest of Humphrey and Rayburn and had a right to use as much force as necessary to arrest them. But on July 3, A.J. McKenzie was appointed temporary sheriff, and a few days later Craig Tolliver, Jeff Bowling, John Trumbo, Boone Day, Robert Messer, James Oxley, and H.M. Keeton were arrested for the murder of Ben Rayburn. It looked bad for them. It wasn’t. They had to be given an examining trial before two magistrates. One was a Tolliver man, the other a Republican. The Tolliver magistrate declared that no cause for trial existed, and since it took two to vote for trial, all of the accused went free.
Jeff Bowling went to Ohio, where his mother-in-law had married a wealthy farmer named Douglas who, after a short time, turned up dead. Bowling was tried and sentenced to hang but got the sentence commuted to life, was paroled, and moved to Texas.
Meanwhile, back in Morehead, Craig Tolliver, now Marshal Tolliver, moved to consolidate his gains. C. W. Collins, a Tolliver man, was appointed temporary jailer. H.C. Powers sold his Powers Hotel to Craig. Some say he was forced to sell, since he got only $250 for it. Craig renamed it the American Hotel, opened a saloon, and again changed the name, to the American Hotel and Saloon. The law required that such enterprises be licensed, but since he was the law, Craig saw no reason to bother with such details. He also opened a dry goods store. Not long after the hotel sale, a mob stormed Powers’s home and shot it full of holes. Powers had had trouble with Jay Tolliver. He left town.
Following the fight at the Martin farm, Cook Humphrey resigned as sheriff, and William Ramey was named to the post. He was an honest officer but in no position to challenge the Tollivers, and late in the summer of 1885, when the court was clearly unable to function, Governor Knott again sent in troops. A few of the alleged killers were put on trial, and though only minor sentences resulted, many of the culprits decided to leave the county. A kind of peace settled over the town, and on August 8 the troops went home.
On the same day, Craig Tolliver was indicted for beating Sue Martin, John Day for burning the Martin house, and Humphrey and Pearce for conspiracy to kill. On November 10, 1885, Pearce was given seven years for a robbery in Greenup County. Alvin Bowling got twenty-one years for killing his father-in-law. The records imply that the others went free.
As usual, the peace was brief. In the following months, Wiley Tolliver was killed by Mack Bentley, and John G. Hughes was killed by an organization of men calling themselves Regulators, formed when law enforcement broke down. Early in 1886 Whit Pelphrey was killed by Tom Goodin, brother of S.B. Goodin, brother-in-law of Bud, Craig, and Jay Tolliver.
A curious note: Toward the end of 1885 C
raig Tolliver went to Cincinnati, where he was arrested and jailed for robbery but tried and acquitted. While he was awaiting trial, he was shot by Asbury Crisp “in a fit of jealousy.” Apparently Craig had been romancing the wrong woman. He got home in time for the elections, which caused trouble, as usual.
Though no longer sheriff, Cook Humphrey still rode at the head of a considerable force of men, and occasionally they would parade through Morehead as if to challenge the Tollivers. On July 2, 1886, Craig Tolliver handed Sheriff Ramey a warrant for the arrest of Cook Humphrey, who was in town for court day. Ramey found Humphrey at the store of H.M. Logan and attempted to arrest him. Humphrey apparently laughed at Ramey, one or the other drew a pistol, friends of both joined the fight, and bullets raked the street. When the firing stopped both the sheriff and his son were seriously wounded, and W.O. Logan, the young son of H.M. Logan, was dead.
Both sides retreated to their headquarters, and the town braced for another all-out fight. But the county judge, afraid of the gathering violence, had again wired Governor Knott for help, and as people peered from behind blinds, the state militia again marched down Railroad and Water Streets to the reassuring notes of the bugle. They remained through the session of Circuit Court.
Once again an effort was made to bring some sanity to the situation in Morehead. When Circuit Court convened, the state was represented by Asher Caruth, Commonwealth’s attorney of Jefferson Circuit Court in Louisville. Caruth took a long look at conditions and tried to find a compromise. In a letter to Circuit Judge A.E. Cole of Rowan Circuit Court, Caruth recommended that all charges against Craig Tolliver and Cook Humphrey be dropped, and that in return both men be required to sign an oath that they would leave the county, never to return except to attend a family funeral, and then only for the day of the ceremony. They would further be required to agree that, should they violate the agreement and return to Morehead, all charges against them would again be prosecuted.
Both men agreed. Tolliver signed the following document:
Asher G. Caruth
Commonwealth’s attorney pro tempore
14th Judicial District:—
I request you to suspend any further proceedings in the cases now pending in the Rowan Circuit Court against me, and promise that I will remain away from the county of Rowan permanently. Should I ever return to said county I am willing that the cases shall be redocketed and the trials proceed. I will leave said county on or before the 8th day of August 1886. In this agreement I reserve the right, in the event of the death of any of my immediate relatives, to return to attend their burial, but I must immediately thereafter leave the county to permanently remain away.
[signed] Craig Tolliver
Attest: D.B. Logan.
Cook Humphrey signed an identical document. It is interesting to note that Caruth had the documents attested by D.B. Logan, indicating that he was one in whom the authorities placed some trust.
Caruth’s efforts were well intended but naive. All the agreement did was relieve Craig Tolliver of the charges against him. Its fatal flaw lay in the assumption that both men would keep their word, which was a total misunderstanding of Craig Tolliver. Cook Humphrey, true to his word, left Rowan, saying he was going out West to start a new life. As far as the record shows, he kept his word. He returned to Morehead only after Craig Tolliver was dead, and then briefly on business. One version of the feud holds that Humphrey returned to marry Sue Martin, but there is no record of the marriage.
The Caruth agreement played directly into the hands of Craig Tolliver, who saw his opportunity and took it. With Humphrey out of the way, the anti-Tolliver faction crumbled, and after staying in Cincinnati until the indictments against him were dismissed, Tolliver rode back into Morehead and took over. He had agreed, of course, that when he returned, the cases against him would be redocketed, but there was no one who dared redocket them. Craig established himself as county judge, and though D.B. Logan managed to get elected police judge, John Manning, a Tolliver ally, was elected town marshal.
His enemies charged that Tolliver was operating the town without regard for law; his saloons were open and operating without the formality of licenses. He was accused of running the American Hotel as something of a whorehouse, but no one brought him to court on the charge. If anyone gave Craig trouble, the troublemaker was notified that the date of his funeral had been chosen; he usually chose to leave before that date arrived. But, as if to rebut his enemies, on June 6, 1887, Craig applied for a liquor license for the American Hotel.
Curiously, during all of this violence, Craig Tolliver maintained a home near Farmers, where his wife and children lived unaffected by the furor in Morehead. Mrs. Tolliver was said to be a mild-mannered woman, loving wife, and attentive mother, and Craig was known as a loving father and husband. Mrs. Tolliver apparently did not inquire too closely about his work.
And it should be noted that not everyone in Rowan County, by any means, was opposed to Tolliver. The citizens of Farmers, the county’s largest town, were satisfied with the way Craig ran things, as were most of the Democrats living out in the county. And the more fun-loving element in Morehead did not object to the wide-open manner in which the town was being operated.
But the lawlessness was taking a toll. At night, the Tolliver faction made a practice of shooting up the town, not to injure anyone necessarily but to show that there was no one to stop them. Gradually, business in Morehead withered. In 1883 H.C. Powers had planned to build a new opera house. A new high school was begun, and there had been talk of a new church. But between August 1884 and July 1887, twenty men were killed and more than half of the town’s population left. In 1885 Morehead listed more than 700 citizens; by 1887 that had shrunk to 296.
Many of those who remained were enemies of the Tollivers, and Craig Tolliver seemed determined to get rid of them. Mrs. Martin was indicted for sending a poison turkey to a friend of the Tollivers. H.M. Keeton, Morehead constable, was shot and killed by Bud Tolliver. W.N. Wicher was shot and killed by John Trumbo, a Tolliver ally. In February 1887, Dr. Henry S. Logan, R.M. McClure, John B. Logan, W.H. Logan, and Lewis Rayburn were indicted for conspiring to murder Judge A.E. Cole and Z.T. Young, both known to favor the Tollivers. All the indicted men were hustled off to the Lexington jail for “safekeeping.”
The indictments were part of a pattern. Craig Tolliver had apparently decided that D.B. Logan was the man in the county most likely to give him trouble. He began to move against him but overplayed his hand in a bit of viciousness that outraged the county.
While John Logan remained in jail in Lexington, his two sons were released on bail and returned to their home a few miles outside of Morehead. Eighteen-year-old Jack Logan was studying for the ministry; twenty-five-year-old Billy was ill with tuberculosis. Knowing that the boys would be their father’s chief witnesses at the trials of the Tollivers and their allies, Tolliver decided to get rid of them. On June 7, 1887, Hiram Cooper, a vagrant drunk and Tolliver hanger-on, swore out a warrant charging the two Logan boys with conspiring to murder him. Craig Tolliver issued the warrants to marshal John Manning, who rode with a posse of ten men out to the Logan home. In the posse were Deputy Sheriff Hogg, Hiram Cooper, and Jay, Bud, Cal, and Craig Tolliver.
The Logan boys had their first warning of danger when the posse began shooting out all the windows of the house. Terrified, the boys crept upstairs, but when John “Bunk” Manning and Craig Tolliver went after them, Jack grabbed a shotgun and shot Manning, injuring but not killing him. Tolliver helped Manning outside, and the posse set fire to the house. Deputy Hogg then went into the house and told the boys to surrender or burn to death, assuring them that Craig Tolliver had promised that their lives would be protected. With this assurance the boys came out with their hands up.
It made little difference. They were going to die one way or another. Once outside, their hands were tied, they were marched to a spring about fifty feet from the house, and there their bodies were riddled with bullets. Manning then tra
mpled the bodies, probably trying to make them unidentifiable, and the posse rode back to More-head. On the outskirts of town, Craig Tolliver halted the posse and ordered every man to swear that the boys had been armed, had been shot resisting arrest, and that their killing had been absolutely necessary.
The next day D.B. Logan, along with Hiram Pigman and Apperson Perry, went to the Logan home and retrieved the boys’ bodies for burial. When they returned to town they received warning that they would be killed if they attended the boys’ funeral. D.B. Logan was told to leave Rowan County. He was promised that if he left peacefully his wife would be made a domestic servant in a Tolliver home so that she might support their children. That was too much for Boone Logan.
He, Pigman, and Perry quietly began enlisting the support of citizens throughout Rowan County who were outraged by the Tolliver conduct. Logan made it a point that the three of them were never to be seen together, and for several days they met secretly, often in the evening. Logan swore out warrants for all members of the murderous posse but could not get them served.
The Tollivers had every road patrolled, but on the night of June 16 Boone Logan and Ap Perry managed to slip through the cordon and catch the train for Frankfort, where Logan obtained an audience with Governor Knott. In precise, legal detail, he recounted the crimes and depredations of the Tollivers, pointing out the murders of his own kin, the unreported or unsolved killings, and the flight of most of its inhabitants from Morehead. It was an impressive presentation. There was only one trouble: Knott had heard it before and, as he reminded Boone Logan, he had several times sent troops into Rowan County, had spent more than $100,000 of the taxpayers’ money, and had accomplished nothing. As soon as the troops left, the violence commenced all over again. Troops, he said, could do little in the face of corrupt officials, lawless lawmen, corrupt juries, and corrupt judges. The people of Rowan County, he added, would have peace and justice as soon as they threw out the crooks and elected honest men.
Days of Darkness Page 14