“Hell with him,” said Tom. “Throw him over in the creek and let the turtles have him.” That they did, but that ended only the first phase of the story.
And on Crane Creek events were building toward a tragedy.
The Fatal Clash on Crane Creek
June 9, 1899. As Tom Baker sat in the Clay County courtroom, listening to the droning of lawyers arguing his fate, he found that he was listening without hearing, though the outcome of the talk could mean home or prison for him. More and more, as the morning ran on, he had found himself thinking back to Crane Creek and his home, how it had been to be a boy there, thinking of his mama and daddy, remembering days when he used to walk down the creek to the river. He remembered turning over the flat rocks in the shallows to catch craw-dads, remembered the sungrannies and redeyes around the ends of trees fallen into the river. He remembered standing on the bank, wondering where the river went, thinking he’d follow it down some day. How in hell did he get here?
He couldn’t remember too much about the Howards back then except that they lived up the creek a way. Pap had sold them their farm. He remembered James. Never did care much for him as a boy. Sort of a goody type. Never talked much. He’d always had the idea James Howard thought he was better than others, always wanting to move into town while the rest stayed out on the creek. And he found himself thinking about that day—that day—when they got the Howards. Damn. Well, he didn’t have much choice. They were going to get him, sure as hell. He sort of wished he hadn’t let Jim come along. And he wondered again if it couldn’t all have been gotten around if somebody had done something. Well, things happen. He turned to listen to the lawyer.
Accounts of what happened around Crane Creek during the month of April 1898 are so confused and contradictory that no one can say with any assurance who the villains were, who the heroes, if such there were. A possible, but just possible, key to the situation lies in an entry from Dickey’s diary of April 10: “This written by General T.T. Garrard: ‘My son James Garrard was the Auditor’s agent when Bal Howard failed as sheriff. As such, he sold Howard’s property and the state bid it in. It was the timber off this land that Tom Baker and the Howards fell out over. I understand that James Howard has threatened to kill my son James since this feud has come up because of his official work.’”
If this was accurate, it was the first time Jim Howard’s name was connected with any mention of violence. And if it was so, what did it mean? Apparently, when Garrard said that Bal Howard “failed as sheriff,” he meant that Bal (who was called Ballard, though his name, according to court records in Harlan County, where he was born, was Adrion Ballenger), when he was sheriff (before the election of Bev White), came up short in his collection of taxes and fees and was delinquent in forwarding the proper amounts to the state treasurer, who would have sent someone from Frankfort or designated someone in Manchester to act for the state to collect the amount in arrears.
But it is hard to understand why, with a Republican administration in Frankfort, the treasurer would have sent or named a prominent local Democrat such as James Garrard to proceed against a sturdy Republican, especially with a race for governor approaching in which the Republicans had some hope of success. One possible explanation is that Bal’s “failure” occurred during the administration of Democratic governor John Brown, who would have appointed a Democrat to impose a lien on Howard’s property in order to collect an amount equal to the delinquent fees.
James Garrard, if the appointee, might have tried to collect the delinquent funds by putting a lien on some of Howard’s timber and then hiring someone to cut and sell it. He would no doubt have relished the chance to embarrass a prominent opponent, and he seems to have done just that, hiring Tom Baker, bully boy of the Baker clan, to collect a debt from the head of the Howard family. If this is what happened, it was a calculated insult to the Howards, sure to hurt their dignity. Garrard was looking for trouble. He got it.
But is that what happened? Another version is that Bal Howard was in arrears on his fees, borrowed forty dollars from the local bank to make it up, and put up some timber as collateral, and that Tom Baker bought the note, or warrant, from the bank and demanded payment from Howard. If that version is accurate, the affront would have been even more direct. This would not account for Jim Howard’s alleged threat to kill James Garrard, however.
Another version of the controversy is worth consideration. The Howards and Baker owned adjoining timberland, and though they were not friendly they cooperated from time to time in cutting and selling the timber. Tom Baker hauled logs out of the hills to the banks of the South Fork for Israel Howard; it is possible that he cut and hauled logs for Ballard and that he cut more Howard logs than he delivered. This is quite possible; property lines were indistinct throughout the mountains and a constant source of trouble, violence, and litigation.
Bal and Tom also occasionally made up log rafts together and floated them downstream to the sawmills at Beattyville or Frankfort. On one trip Bal reportedly stopped at a store in Beattyville for supplies and, having no money on him (or possibly seeing a way to even a debt with Tom), told the clerk to charge it to Tom Baker. The clerk, knowing Tom, agreed. The next time Tom went downriver he was told of the debt, paid it, and later demanded repayment.
Whatever the facts were concerning the debt, it seems that Bal somehow owed Tom Baker some money, either fifteen or forty dollars. During the second week of April 1898, the two families were putting together log rafts at the mouth of Crane Creek. Tom, his son James, his brother Wiley, his cousin Jesse Barrett, and Charlie Wooten were hauling logs down from the hills to the lumber yard where the rafts were being lashed together. It had been raining off and on the previous week, and it was apparent that the South Fork would soon be high enough to float the rafts downriver.
Less than a hundred yards away, on the other side of Crane Creek, the Howards were putting the final touches on a raft of their own. With Bal were his sons Israel and Corbin, his adopted son Burch Stores (whom Bal had “taken in” when Stores’s Harlan County parents died), John Lewis, young kinsman of Bal’s wife, Mary, and two Shackleford boys. The work stopped when Tom Baker approached and faced Ballard.
“I’d like that fifteen dollars you owe me,” he said. This could indicate that the dispute had nothing to do with a shortage in Bal’s accounts as sheriff and concerned the debt in Beattyville; or it could indicate not one but two instances in which Bal owed Tom money. This is puzzling. The Howards were not poor. They owned a large farm. They were in the the logging business. Bal had been sheriff, and Jim was tax assessor. How did the head of the clan fail to have fifteen dollars? Or to be forced to borrow forty dollars from the bank?
“I don’t owe you fifteen dollars,” Ballard replied. “I don’t owe you nothing. You owe me. The way I figure it, you took off 300 more trees of mine than that warrant called for. [That would indicate that he did, indeed, borrow from the bank—but only fifteen dollars—and give a note on his timber, a note that Tom apparently bought.] You pay me for the 300 trees, I’ll give you fifteen dollars.”
As the two sides gathered quietly around their leaders, someone appeared to reach for a weapon. Tom threw an auger at Bal, who ducked and swung a peavy at Tom. Tom hit Bal a glancing blow with a pistol. Israel Howard then fired at Tom, giving him a slight flesh wound, but Corbin Howard and Jesse Barrett jumped in to separate the battlers before anyone was killed. The two groups, eyeing each other nervously, backed off.
There was no more trouble that day, but a fuse had been lit. The next day Tom Baker was standing in his yard, waiting for some of his men to arrive, when Hudge Allen came walking down the road. The two men nodded and exchanged greetings.
“Tell you what,” Allen said in a low voice. “I’m not looking to take sides or nothing, but if I was you I wouldn’t go down to the yard just now.”
“How come?” asked Tom.
“Well,” said Allen, “as I heard it, the Howards are hiding in the weeds down there, waiti
ng for you. Now, as I say, I don’t know that, it’s just as I heard.”
Tom nodded and went back to the house, but he decided not to go to the lumber yard just then. But just after dinner (the noon meal), as he was sitting on the porch, a shot was fired from the nearby woods, and a bullet slammed into the doorframe behind him. Bolting into the house, he grabbed his rifle and scanned the road and the surrounding woods but saw no one.
Tom stood there for a while, thinking. Then he went into the house and said to his wife, Emily, “The Howards are after me, that’s certain. We’re going to have to do something. We can’t just sit here and let them pick us off.”
Earlier that day Big Jim Howard, sitting in his tax assessor’s office in Manchester, had heard about the trouble out on Crane Creek and decided to try to head it off before it became bloody. In a move that his defenders later pointed to as evidence of his peaceful nature, Howard went down the courthouse hall to the office of George W. (“Baldy George”) Baker, county attorney and patriarch of the Baker clan, and proposed a truce.
“My father had discovered,” Howard wrote later, “that Tom Baker was giving him the worst of a deal by which Baker had contracted to take off some timber on shares [another version of the root of the trouble]. So I went down to George Baker’s and proposed that we settle our trouble by means of arbitration, before there was serious trouble. Baker agreed, and we reached an agreement which I thought was favorable to our family.”
Regardless of the terms, or who acted as arbiter (some say it was Judge John Wright), the two men reached an agreement, shook hands, and seemed relieved to have found a peaceful solution to the matter. Unfortunately, neither Howard nor Baker seems to have informed their families out on Crane Creek of the agreement, at least not at once.
Newspaper accounts at the time made Baldy George Baker appear to be something of a mountain saint while James Howard was depicted as a born killer, a feared marksman, and a man of violent temper. Actually, there is no record that either man had previously been involved in any act of violence. On the contrary, Baldy George, while a big, tough man, was the generally well liked father of fifteen sons whose main failing seems to have been a tendency occasionally to drink too much, a very common fault. It was told of him that, shortly after the war, he got drunk at a party, passed out, and was dumped into a coffin recently made by the host who, not knowing he was so ensconced, piled a bunch of harness on top of him. Awakening, George felt of his enclosure, concluded that the worst had happened, and cried in a woeful voice, “Dead! Oh, dear God, dead and in hell! And they’re going to hitch me up like a horse!”
“Big Jim” Howard, tall and broad-shouldered, was a quiet, somber thirty-two-year old former schoolteacher whose tight-lipped expression made him seem somewhat forbidding and who seemed to have little levity about him. Governor Bert T. Combs (1959-1963), a Manchester native, recalled in 1991 seeing Jim Howard, years before, walking down the street from his home, carrying a sample case like any other salesman.
“He was a tall, well-built man,” Combs recalled, “a handsome man. Wore dark gray suits and usually a bowler hat, and in the winter wore a long black overcoat that made him look even bigger than he was. I don’t remember hearing much about him one way or the other, except that he had been in some trouble. As a lot of people had. He had worked in a store in Manchester, and was a shoe salesman. He traveled all around the towns in the region. He’d take orders and send them in to the company to be filled. Polite, friendly man as far as I knew. We surely weren’t afraid of him.”
But word of the agreement between Jim and Baldy George had not reached Crane Creek when, the next morning, the Howards finished making up a raft and were preparing to shove off for Frankfort on the rising waters of the South Fork of the Kentucky. On the other side of Crane Creek the Bakers were pushing logs into position for a raft of their own. No one had made any move to resume the troubles of the day before, and when noon came the Bakers nodded cordially as they left for dinner.
But they were not concerned with the noon meal. With Tom as he arrived at his home were Charlie Wooten, Jesse Barrett, and Tom’s brother Wiley. Tom nodded to his wife and said to James, his eighteen-year old son, “Come on.”
“Where we going?” asked James.
“There’s something we have to do,” said Tom. But James seemed to sense what was afoot and complained that he had been feeling sick all morning. Tom looked at him for a moment, then turned and walked out, the others following. James lay down across the bed, but his mother came and stood over him.
“Get up from there, you sorry thing,” she snapped, “and go with your daddy.”
James got up. His mother handed him his rifle, and he followed the others, who were walking rapidly and silently up the road.
Back at the lumber yard, the Howards cast off the lines to their raft, and Israel, Corbin, and a man named Davidson waved and shoved off for the dangerous trip downriver.
“You be careful,” shouted Bal.
“You all the ones to be careful,” called Israel, leaning into the big sweep oar as the current caught the raft. In a minute, as the raft cleared the bend of the river, Bal, his son Wilson, Burch Stores, John Lewis, and the Shackleford boys got on their horses and started up Crane Creek toward the Howard home.
It was a bright, soft April afternoon, the trees in new foliage, the waters of Crane Creek filling the narrow valley with a spring sound. As the group cantered past the home of Gardner and Cythena (called Thena or Theenie) Baker, Thena came out and rang the bell that hung from the top of a tall pole in the front yard, the kind used to call workers in from the fields.
“What’s Thena doing ringing the bell now?” Wilson wondered aloud as they rode past. They didn’t have long to wait for an answer. As they approached a turn in the road about two hundred yards past the Baker home, from the top of a low, brush-covered ridge a volley of shots suddenly crashed out.
Wilson Howard fell, riddled with bullets. Burch Stores had his head practically blown off. Bal Howard, hit in the upper chest, fell forward across the neck of his horse, which, fortunately for him, reared and bolted back down the trail, as following shots ripped through his clothes. As he fled, the ambushers reportedly ran from hiding and finished off Wilson and Stores, though Wilson, shot six times, lived for almost four hours and, according to the Howards, identified the Bakers as his murderers. The Howards also claimed that the Bakers robbed the bodies of their victims, but this is unlikely; the Bakers were not robbers.
Bal escaped, along with John Lewis and the Shackleford boys, but he was badly wounded, and as he reached Gardner Baker’s house he slipped from his horse and fell to the road. Jesse Barrett said later, “If old Bal hadn’t been riding that fast horse of his I’d of got him. He was the one I was after.” The killing, incidentally, did not seem to shock too deeply the reluctant young James Baker. He later killed his father-in-law, perhaps finding he had a talent for it.
And then a curious thing happened: As Bal lay bleeding in the road, Gard and Thena Baker hitched a mule to a wood-runner sled, went down to the road, and hauled him up to their house, where they bandaged his wounds as best they could and sent word to the Howards. (Years later Ernest Sester of Clay County said that his father, John Sester, coming down Crane Creek, saw Gard and Thena come down to help the wounded Bal Howard. “Thena set down there on the road and took Bal’s head in her lap while Gard went to get a sled to take him up to the house,” Sester said. “Bal opened his eyes and looked at her and said, Thena, tell me why you rang that bell.’ And Thena just looked away and said, ‘Some day I will.’” She never did.)
Thena and Gard later helped the Howards retrieve the bodies of Wilson and Burch Stores. Why would they do this, after Thena had obviously conspired in the murder by ringing the dinner bell? But then, why did she ring the bell? Gard and Thena Baker were religious, gentle people, fond parents, and trusted neighbors. Gard was a deacon in the Christian Church, and Thena was active in mission work. All four of their sons—Frank,
Horace, Lloyd, and Ben—graduated from the University of Louisville law school and established sound law practices. Stanley DeZarn tells of how neighborhood children loved to visit the Baker home to read the Courier-Journal and the Pathfinder magazine or to hear Thena tell stories of the early days. Perhaps it was a matter of family loyalty.
At any rate, they cared for the wounded Bal until Howards arrived to take him home. The Shacklefords took a roundabout way home to avoid the Bakers. At the time they thought Bal was dead.
Jim Howard was at work in the store when one of the Shacklefords rode into Manchester, leading Bal’s blood-stained horse, and told him the bad news. According to later reports, he told Jim that all three had been killed and that their bodies were lying in the road, where the buzzards or hogs might get to them. Jim was furious, not only because of the murder of his father and brothers but because he felt betrayed by Baldy George in a way that almost made him an accomplice to the murder of his own people. He and Baldy had reached an agreement and had shaken hands on it, a gesture not to be taken lightly. And that, Jim thought, had led his kinsmen, when they heard about it, to let down their guard. He did not know which Bakers were involved, but he had no reason to assume that Baldy George, head of the clan, had not taken part or given his consent to the ambush.
Early the next morning Jim rode out toward the family home on Crane Creek. Accounts of what followed were typical of newspaper and magazine stories of the time. According to Harold Wilson Coates: “For two days the bodies of the slain men lay in the roadway, their relatives and friends not daring to visit the scene of the encounter for fear of running into another ambush and sharing a like fate. It was at this time that Jim Howard determined upon action. Grabbing his rifle, he set out for the site of the ambush, his aim to avenge. …”
Munsey’s Magazine in 1903 offered a more lurid account:
Then Jim Howard, son of the head of the family, started forth to kill. He learned that Tom Baker’s father was away from home. The elder Baker was one of the most beloved and esteemed men in that part of the state. It was his boast that he never carried a weapon. Jim Howard knew it was safe to attack him.
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