Days of Darkness

by John Ed Ed Pearce

  The men nodded, looking at the ground. Tom turned and joined the colonel, and the group walked into the courthouse. As they approached the doors leading to the courtroom they passed the office of Sheriff Beverly White, who looked up from behind the counter where already a half-dozen pistols lay, two in holsters. The colonel put three more pistols down and again led the way down the hall. Tom Baker gave no sign that he recognized the sheriff, whose brother Will he was accused of killing. He hesitated only a second when he saw, standing in the doorway of the tax assessor’s office, James “Big Jim” Howard, the man who had killed Tom’s father, Baldy George Baker. After two delays and a hung jury (the jury had reportedly voted 11-1 for acquittal), Howard had been found guilty by a Laurel Circuit Court jury but was free on appeal. Taller than Baker, wide in the shoulder, ramrod straight, well-dressed, and handsome, Big Jim Howard was imposing. For a second he stared without expression at the Bakers. Then a soldier came forward to hold the doors to the courtroom, and Williams and the Bakers went in.

  Jim Howard turned and went back into his small but neat office. The day was beginning to heat up, and he opened a window and stood for a minute looking out at the tents and soldiers on the lawn. In front of the line of tents stood the much-talked-about Gatling gun that the troops had brought aboard the special Louisville and Nashville Railway car from Frankfort, loading it with a great deal of sweating and cursing onto a wagon at the station in London for the twenty-five-mile trip over the mountain road to Manchester, the county seat of Clay County and the center of the feud that for half a century had slowly engulfed the county and its people.

  Along the walk men milled around the gun, admiring it, laughing at the rumor that either the Howards or the Bakers would bushwhack the troops and capture the gun before the soldiers could haul it back to London. They had already sized up the young city boys and decided that if they had to fight their way out of the county they would have little chance against the feudists.

  Shortly before noon a smart, one-horse buggy drew up, two horsemen riding before, two behind, and the Baker clansmen stepped back to make way for the dignified, white-haired man who stepped stiffly down. “All right, get back for the general,” one man said, and the others made way for General Theophilus Toulmin (T.T.) Garrard, hero of the Mexican and Civil wars, former member of Congress and the state legislature, grandson of a governor, and patriarch of the Garrard family that for fifty years had opposed, in commerce and politics and the degrading feud, the Whites and their followers. From his guard-surrounded, lonely, decaying mansion out on Goose Creek, the general had driven into town to lend his support to his Baker followers, just as old Judge B.P. White had come up to the courthouse to help the Howards, long allies of his family, in case of trouble. Now the general nodded his thanks and made his way into the courthouse.

  “Tom going to tell us when to come in?” asked one of the men. Another said someone would. Talking quietly among themselves, the men squatted or sprawled on the grass. Several lit pipes. One, without ceremony, stood up and urinated on a tree near the walk, earning the indignant attention of a young trooper.

  “There’s a latrine around back,” he said sternly. The man finished urinating, looked at him and said, “Go piss in it, then.” Red-faced, the soldier glared for a moment, then turned away. There was a muttering among the soldiers. The clansmen smirked.

  After what seemed a long time a man came to the door of the courthouse and said, “You can come in if you want to,” and the men filed into the courthouse. Inside, a deputy took their guns and placed them on the counter in the sheriff’s office. For a moment it seemed there might be trouble when a young man said he’d be damned if he was going to give Bev White his gun, but an older man standing behind him said, “Come on,” and the man handed it over.

  Quietly, not speaking, the men shuffled into the courtroom, filled the long benches. On the bench, on a platform elevated about eighteen inches above the floor, sat stern-faced Judge King Cook, up from Pineville, in Bell County, to fill in for Judge Eversole, who had asked to be excused because of illness in his family. Most people in Manchester believed that Eversole was simply afraid to hold court with both Jim Howard and Tom Baker in town and their families standing by. For that reason, Judge Eversole had asked for troops to keep order, and Judge Cook had underlined that act by forbidding anyone to come into the courthouse armed.

  Now Colonel Williams sat conspicuously to one side of the judge as a reminder to anyone tempted to start trouble. Sitting at the table to the left was General Garrard, the two lawyers he had brought from Lexington to help defend the Bakers, and Tom, who turned and watched as his kinsmen trooped into the courtrooms. The judge rapped for order, A.C. Lyttle asked to approach the bench, and the three lawyers and the prosecutor argued quietly for more than half an hour over the defense request to transfer the trial to another jurisdiction. It was after eleven o’clock when the judge told the Commonwealth’s attorney to proceed. For the next half-hour the man argued forcefully that the Bakers could receive a fair trial in Manchester and that if they were as innocent as they claimed, they should be glad to be tried by people most likely to be familiar with the facts.

  A.C. Lyttle rose to present the case for changing venue, but Judge Cook interrupted and announced a recess until two o’clock. Grumbling, the Baker followers filed out. They grumbled more loudly when they found that the sheriff’s office was closed and there was no way for them to retrieve their guns. On the walk outside, General Garrard and Tom Baker stood apart from the rest.

  “I want to thank you,” said Tom.

  “Not at all, not at all,” Garrard replied. “I suppose I should be getting on out home, nothing for me to do now. Too bad we got such a late start, but I think you’ll be able to finish up this afternoon. Lyttle says he has no doubts you’ll get a change of venue; Cook doesn’t want the trial held here, with everybody in town, afraid of what might happen. But you’ll probably have to stay the night here and leave in the morning. I’ll be here before you leave. Try to keep your men from getting into trouble. It’s my guess there are plenty of men around who wouldn’t mind a gunfight.”

  Tom, Jim, and Wiley ate dinner at the Potter House, smoked for a while, and returned to the courtroom, but were startled to learn that Judge Cook, after observing the Baker clansmen in the courtroom that morning, saw the possibility of an outbreak that could cost lives and ruin chances for a successful term of court, and ordered the court cleared. The Baker followers were outraged, stormed from the building, then came back to kick on the door to the sheriff’s office, demanding return of their guns. A bailiff came out of the courtroom and told them the guns would be given back as soon as court adjourned. Judge Cook didn’t want any shooting, inside or outside the court.

  A.C. Lyttle made a passionate plea for a change of venue, arguing that no man under God’s sun could find an impartial jury in Clay County to try Tom Baker and his kin. He pointed out that the county was under the control of the Whites and Howards, and that violence was sure to erupt if the trial of a Baker for killing a White were held in Manchester, troops or no troops.

  Looking at the soldiers and the Baker followers talking and gesticulating outside the courtroom window, Judge King Cook needed no reminder of the truth of Lyttle’s argument. Inside or within gunshot of the courthouse were the heirs of the long, bloody war that had gripped and scarred Clay County almost from the moment of its founding in 1806, when it was carved out of neighboring Floyd, Knox, and Madison Counties and named for Revolutionary War hero General Green Clay, of the famous Kentucky family.

  A rugged, scenic recess in the heart of the Cumberland Mountains of the Appalachian range, Clay County seemed doomed to trouble from its beginnings. In the early days the rough terrain made road-building so difficult and costly that settlers could seldom manage more than rocky trails, though every able-bodied man was required to work on the roads or contribute to their construction. This lack of roads helped to isolate them from the mainstream of America as th
e tide of settlement swept westward, and made it hard to develop trade with the booming towns of Central Kentucky.

  And Clay had wealth to trade. The wide, beautiful hills contained some of the finest virgin timber in the eastern United States—beech, oak, poplar, walnut, hickory, chestnut. Under the dark hills lay coal seams whose value had not been guessed. And along the banks of Goose and Sexton Creeks were wells that yielded water rich with salt, that mineral so precious on the frontier.

  It was the salt wells that drew the earliest settlers into Clay County. Jim Burchell, taxidermist and amateur geologist from Manchester, believes that Spaniards and possibly Welsh, who some believe were in the country long before Daniel Boone and his kind, were drawn there by Indian tales of great salt deposits. The first settler who made salt there was James Collins, a long hunter who in 1775 tracked some animals to a large salt lick on what is now Collins Fork of Goose Creek, and the following year returned to stake a claim. Word of his discovery spread slowly, partly because of the Revolution but chiefly because no one realized how much salt was there. But by 1800 settlers were beginning to sink the big salt wells along Goose Creek, and the fledgling state of Kentucky considered the salt so valuable that it built the first road into the county to get the salt out. It was not much of a road, but a road.

  Considering the isolation of Clay County and the difficulty of transportation, the salt industry grew fairly rapidly. In 1802 there were two wells in the county, with an output of less than 500 bushels a year. By 1845 there were fifteen deep wells—some drilled to depths of a thousand feet—whose waters yielded a pound and a quarter of salt per gallon. With the accompanying furnaces, they were producing 250,000 bushels a year, and with salt selling for a dollar and a half to two dollars a bushel at the well, or as much as five dollars a bushel downriver, the producers soon became rich, influential men. This was at the time when a daily wage of twenty-five cents was common.

  There was also abundant game in the dark-hollowed hills—bears, elk, deer, wolves, foxes, and beavers, as well as rabbits, raccoons, squirrels, and sky-darkening flights of game birds. It was an elk hunt, incidentally, that in 1806 triggered the first burst of bloodshed in the region in what became known as the Cattle Wars.

  In that year Clay County was formed. Manchester, a rough village of about a hundred people, was chosen county seat, and plans were made to open roads west to London, south to Barbourville, and toward present-day Leslie, Owsley, and Breathitt Counties to the north. Wealthier settlers such as the Whites, Garrards, Baughs, and Johnsons had claimed or bought large tracts of land containing salt wells and developed a thriving industry employing dozens of white settlers as well as slaves brought in by the well owners.

  Map 3

  But hunting was still a popular way to replenish the family larder, and in the early fall of 1806 a group of men living on the South Fork of the Kentucky River (now Clay County) went over to the Middle Fork (now Leslie and Perry Counties) to hunt elk. They found not only elk but, on an upland meadow above the river, a herd of cattle, apparently abandoned or left to graze by Middle or North Forkers. Adopting the convenient view that finders were keepers, they killed and dressed one cow for food and were driving the rest home when North Forkers appeared and took exception to their casual roundup. A gun-fight ensued in which one man on each side was killed, several were wounded, and the South Forkers were obliged to retreat. But bitter resentment had been planted, gunfights between the two settlements continued for years, and until the Civil War travel through the area was often a risky business.

  It is hard to say how many people fell in the Cattle Wars, since the warriors seldom appealed to the courts, preferring to settle matters the way they began. In eastern Clay County there is a memorial highway named for John Gilbert, who led the South Forkers in the battle of Hanging Rock against North Forkers under the command of two men named Callahan and Strong, names that would later figure prominently in the notorious Breathitt County feuds. The South Forkers were reportedly headed for an ambush when Gilbert spotted the glint of sunlight on a rifle barrel in the brush above Hanging Rock, gave the alarm, and then led a flanking attack that saved the day. Like many of the mountain feudists who in old age repented of their wild ways, Gilbert later became a preacher, as did North Fork leader William Strong.

  There is no accurate list of casualties in either the Cattle Wars or the Clay County War, or feud, that reached a climax of violence near the turn of the century. Tom Walters, a Clay County native now a retired school official in Florida, has a list of fifty-five people killed in the northeastern part of the county alone, including some, he believes, killed in the feuds. Walters also has a list, compiled by a friend’s uncle, from memory in the early 1950s, of over one hundred people “all of them murdered” in the feuds. Stanley DeZarn, another Clay County native, now living in Hamilton, Ohio, estimates that “over one hundred” died in the feuds. And James Anderson Burns (“Burns of the Mountains”), who was himself involved in the feuds and who founded Clay’s Oneida Institute, declared that the feuds, not counting the Cattle Wars, took more than 150 lives. There were dozens of newspaper and magazine articles written about the feuds at the time, but most of them, especially those in the eastern press, were sensational to the point of being ludicrous, and invariably exaggerated the deaths.

  This was a time of great movement and ferment along the western border. Though the Appalachian frontier was still raw and primitive, substantial numbers of settlers were pushing their way into the hills and beginning to establish the institutions of stable society—churches, schools, public offices. The Indian wars were, for the most part, finished east of the Mississippi. Daniel Boone, Simon Kenton, George Rogers Clark, and their heroic kind had cleared the way and moved on. It was time for roads, towns, and the structure of law. But in Clay County, the Cattle Wars had left a poisonous precedent, creating an atmosphere of hatred and bitterness that invited violence, and establishing a pattern of conduct that made violence an accepted way of settling disputes and protecting property.

  As the frontier yielded, entrepreneurs were drawn into Clay. Prominent among these were the Garrards and Whites who, around 1809, began shipping salt, a vital mineral on the frontier for flavoring and preserving food, curing hides, and mixing home remedies. Until the great salt domes farther west were discovered, wells such as those in Clay County were veritable gold mines. Both Whites and Garrards made fortunes, built fine homes, sent their children away to college, and helped develop the community.

  These were not the one-gallus dullards of mountain stereotype. They were educated, enterprising, interesting people, the kind needed to make a frontier flourish. Daniel Garrard, the son of James Garrard, governor of Kentucky from 1796 to 1804, moved to Clay County around 1805 and in 1808 married Lucinda Toulmin, a New Orleans (and Mobile) belle whose father had been secretary of state under Governor Garrard. Daniel and Lucinda had six children, all of whom attended the grade school built near Manchester through the efforts of Garrard, Hugh White (who had thirteen children, one of whom married Mary Garrard), Thomas Johnson, and Abner Baker Sr., Clay’s first court clerk.

  Theophilus Toulmin (T.T.) Garrard, who was destined to play a major role in the development of Clay County, was the third child of Daniel and Lucinda. Born June 7, 1812, he attended the school near Manchester until, when he was twelve, his father bundled all the children off to Danville, where they attended Centre College, which at that time included the equivalent of high school and was considered the finest school in the South. While there, they boarded with the family of Josh Bell, who later became a noted state legislator and for whom Bell County, south of Clay, was named. T.T. was being groomed to take his place among the prominent men of Kentucky.

  When he was twenty, T.T. married Nancy Brawner. (A curious note: They were married in the home of Alexander White, implying that relations between the families were not as hostile as they would become, and possibly implying also that the county as yet had no church.) They had two children, one o
f whom died in infancy before Nancy herself died in 1838.

  T.T. was left at loose ends. An outgoing, action-loving man, he found the salt business boring, decided to get into politics, and in 1841 ran for state representative against Daugherty White. Like all of the Garrards, T.T. was a Democrat, just as the Whites were Whigs (Republicans after 1860). T.T. lost, but the loss didn’t stop him. In 1843 he ran against Josiah Combs for the state senate and won, and the next election he was elected without opposition.

  The 1841 election was the first instance of political rivalry between the Whites and Garrards, though it was not the first time their interests had collided. Beginning around 1815 the Whites started cutting the price of salt five cents on the bushel. The Garrards responded with a similar cut. The Whites cut another five cents, and so on, until the Garrards gave up the business and closed their furnaces. But they soon came back. The salt business was extremely profitable, and it was about the only industry in or around Clay. The family still owned a well when T.T. wrote his memoirs in 1899.

  Like the Garrards, the Whites had come to Kentucky shortly after the turn of the century. Patriarch John White, whose family had come over from Scotland and Ireland before the revolution, was given a land grant in Pennsylvania for his part in the war. But he was a slave owner, and when abolitionist pressure built in Pennsylvania, he moved his family to Virginia, where he farmed and made salt near Abingdon. From there he moved west to Tennessee and in 1803 moved north to Kentucky, settling on Yellow Creek in what is now Bell County. After hearing reports of the rich salt deposits on Goose Creek, he moved north again to what is now Clay County.

  There John’s son Hugh, who had been U.S. senator from Tennessee when the territory became a state, formed a partnership with his brother-in-law Samuel Baugh, making salt on Collins Fork. His son Alex went into the same business with Hugh’s brother James, and they made a fortune hauling salt across the mountains to southwest Virginia and floating it down the Powell River to Huntsville, Alabama, where it brought five dollars a bushel. With some of his profits, James bought a plantation in Arkansas and two more in Alabama, and at his death he was perhaps the richest man in Kentucky. The salt business was so attractive that young boys were apprenticed to well owners to learn the trade. In 1830, for instance, young Bowling Baker was bound to Daugherty White to learn the trade but got into a fight with Morgan DeZarn, killed him, and fled the county. A portent of things to come.