Days of Darkness

by John Ed Ed Pearce

After George’s trial, Frank was under a great deal of pressure. A grand jury had handed down indictments against Dewey Hensley, Little Tom Baker, and Frank McDaniel for burning the warehouse and murdering Alf Neal, but Frank refused to process them, as he was legally obliged to do. Judge Cap Stivers, Pitt’s father, and some of the Howards were demanding that he prosecute these cases. The Bakers were demanding that he revive some of the old cases against the Howards and Whites for the killing of Bakers. The strain was beginning to tell, and Frank confided to his mother that he had a premonition that he was about to die. When his brother Ben, the county attorney, became suddenly ill and died that summer, Frank stood by his grave and said, “I’ll be with you before long, brother.”

  Such was the situation when the September 1932 term of court opened. The Bakers were in town in force for the occasion, staying at what had been the Potter Hotel but now seemed to be the home of Wiley Baker; or he may have been operating it. The Webb Hotel down the street was said to be full of Howards, though it was never clear which ones or why they were there. Were the Howards worried because Frank might prosecute cases in which Howards were involved? If so, which ones? Or were the Howards harboring lingering hatred of the Bakers because of the deaths of Wilson and Burch Stores and the wounding of Bal?

  Or was this gathering the work of Big Jim Howard? After all, he had lost almost eight years out of his life and been forced to endure the ignominy of prison, and there is no doubt that he blamed the Bakers, who were in Frankfort at the time of Goebel’s killing, for implicating him in the assassination.

  The only outstanding Baker death that remained unsolved was that of Bad Tom, and that was not the work of the Howards.

  With Frank around the breakfast table on September 18, 1932, the morning court was scheduled to open, were his wife, his parents (Gard and Thena), Wiley and Shabie, Doc Hornsby, Bill Hensley, George Barrett, Frank Young, and Frank Brockman, a nephew of Frank Young who was originally from Breathitt County and was visiting from Cincinnati.

  Bill Hensley had argued with Frank the night before, contending that he was making a bad mistake in not acting on the indictments handed down by the grand jury for the murder of Pitt Stivers. He insisted that if the killers were not imprisoned they would kill Frank to keep the indictments out of court. Now Hensley as well as his parents begged Frank not to go to the courthouse. “I swear there are forty-five men in there waiting to kill you,” he said. “And a bunch of Howards among them.”

  “I can’t help that,” said Frank. “I was elected commonwealth’s attorney. I’ve got no choice.”

  So, after he finished breakfast, Frank Baker, accompanied by Brockman and George Barrett (some accounts say it was Jesse Barrett, but most specify George) left the hotel and started across the street to the courthouse. They had hardly reached the sidewalk when a hail of bullets cut down Frank and Brockman. Barrett somehow escaped. Shabie raised the window to call to Frank, and bullets smashed the glass around her head. Thena made one desperate effort to reach her fallen son, but bullets kicked sidewalk splinters into her face and thudded into the building behind her, and she retreated. Wiley ran from the back door and was shot, for some reason, by Dr. Porter, a pharmacist. Frank Young ran with him and was shot in the leg, a minor wound.

  Who killed Frank Baker? Again, no one knows. His body lay on the sidewalk for several hours because everyone in the hotel, his mother included, was afraid to retrieve it. By the time his family reached the body, the killers had, of course, left the courthouse. Some people, including Baker descendants, think the fatal bullets came for the rifle of Big Jim Howard, still trying to erase the memory of what happened that fateful day on Crane Creek. As his grandson said, it was not his style.

  Four years later, Bobby Baker, Bad Tom’s youngest son, who lived in Hamilton, Ohio, came to Manchester on business. He was staying at a hotel at Burning Springs and was having a beer with Lloyd Baker and Ed Manning. Two men at the bar heard Bobby say he was going into Manchester, and they asked for a ride. Bobby agreed, and the three of them started toward town. As they drove into Manchester there was a shot. Bobby slumped over and, as his white-faced passengers tried to grab the wheel, the car slammed into the curb. Bobby Baker was dead. No one was arrested for the killing. One of his passengers was a Garrard.

  The Baker-Howard feud was finally over.

  But bitter memories refused to die. One day in 1936 Thena Baker ran into Jim Howard on the Town Square in Manchester. Did she suspect Howard of the murder of her son Frank? Had she found the will to forgive him? Jim very studiously ignored her, but Thena blocked his way, looked at him steadily, and said, “Jim, we are getting old. I’ve found my peace with God, and I’d like to find my peace with you. Can’t we all forget the past and forgive?”

  Big Jim Howard looked at her coldly. “Get out of my way, you bell-ringing old bitch,” he said.

  The feud had produced several outstanding characters, among them General T.T Garrard, Bad Tom Baker, and Big Jim Howard. And Gard and Thena Baker, those kind people who always seemed to be on hand when they were needed.

  Thomas Baker lay beside his father, George Baker, in the family plot on Boston Gap. T.T. Garrard was buried not far from where he had spent so many tumultuous years of his interesting, active, valuable life. A village in Clay County bears his name.

  And what had happened to James Ballenger Howard? Well, not much really, nothing sensational at any rate. After his release from prison, he returned to his home, his wife Mary, and their three children—James Jr., Earl, and Edna, who soon married and left home. For a while James Howard thought of returning to the family farm at the head of Crane Creek, but he had never been and was not a farmer. He became a salesman of shoes and trees—fruit and ornamental—traveling through the counties around Clay.

  “You could see him coming down the hill carrying a big sample case,” former governor Bert Combs recalled. “He was an impressive looking man, the impression of size emphasized by the long, black overcoat he wore.” Stanley DeZarn says that Howard was reputed to carry a “big, black .45” in that sample case, but Combs doubted that. For one thing, he said, Howard was never known to use a pistol, only a rifle. This was not entirely true, either. According to his grandson Jim Burchell:

  Grandaddy carried a .45 pistol, but not in his sample case. He carried it in a shoulder holster. Funny thing: One day in Manchester he bent over and that pistol fell out on the street. It took a strange bounce and went off, shooting him in the back or fleshy part under the shoulder. They took him up to the hospital and called Dr. Anderson, who patched him up and said, “Jim, we’ve got a nice bed here for you until that wound gets better,” and when Grandaddy heard that he jumped out of bed and did a jig, right there in the hospital room. And he told Doc Anderson, “Doctor, I’ll see you in a week. Maybe.” He believed that if he lay in bed, his blood wouldn’t circulate to the wound and heal it. He was a great believer in exercise, getting the blood circulating. He did what they call now aerobic exercises, four hundred a day. And he drank great amounts of water, kept a tall glass full by his bed, and would drink it if he awoke in the night. He walked a lot. Sure enough, he went back a week later and Dr. Anderson said he couldn’t believe it, said the would was hardly blue, completely healed.

  Ironically, Jim was in Georgetown, Kentucky, the day his old nemesis, Judge Cantrill, was buried, and was asked if he would like to attend. “No, thank you,” he said, “but I am willing for it to be known that his funeral has my hearty endorsement.” To the day he died, he denied guilt in the Goebel affair.

  “He never talked about it,” Jim Burchell told me, “but he did say he didn’t do it. He said the Democrats raised $100,000 to hang him; wasted their money.”

  “Grandpa wasn’t a violent man,” Jim continued. “I loved him. He was a quiet man, read a lot. Liked to read the Bible. That story of him shooting Baker twenty-five times was crazy. That just wasn’t his style.” But he added, interestingly, that Jim said, “I was going to Frankfort to do the job, and
was looking for a partner, but when I got there somebody had beat me to it.” That would support the legend, still popular, that Powers offered him a pardon if he would kill Goebel.

  We will never know. Dr. Thomas D. Clark, Kentucky’s eminent historian, said in 1992, “I doubt if even Jim Howard knew by the time he died. He had lived with the thing for so long, been accused of it, asked about it; I doubt that he could say for sure whether he did it or not.”

  Just before he died in 1954, Jim was visited by Allan Trout, the famed reporter for the Courier-Journal, who begged Jim to tell him the facts so that history could be kept straight, promising to sequester his remarks as long as Jim stipulated.

  “We were sitting on the porch,” said Trout, “and when I asked him that, Jim looked at me for a few seconds, and then looked away for a long time, as if he was pondering an answer. And finally he said, ‘I said all I have to say at that trial.’ No one ever got more out of him. But I will say that I wasn’t nervous about asking him. He was a very dignified man, very self-contained. But he wasn’t intimidating. I didn’t sense any violence in him.”

  Jim’s later years seemed placid. He and his wife usually attended church on Sunday. After she died in 1948, he lived for a while in Marcum’s boardinghouse. But people said he seemed lonely, often sitting on the porch or walking around the *own alone, and he finally went to live with his daughter Mary, who had married Toulmin Burchell. (Note that a man named Toulmin had married a Howard woman, as though symbolic of, or perhaps in memory of, the long-dead feud.) He lived there until 1954, when he died and was buried, without fanfare, in the small cemetery not far from the Clay County Courthouse in Manchester.

  Surcease

  For a moment after Bobby Baker slumped, dead, over the steering wheel and his car slammed into the curb at the foot of the hill, there was a strange silence around the town square in Manchester, as though a century of violence and death, and the bitterness, hatred, grief, sorrow, fear, and pain that had torn at the hills of Eastern Kentucky and left behind a bloody trail of blasted lives and ruined reputations of both men and towns, had sent up one final cry of misery and then collapsed with a sigh that was itself a recognition of man’s futility.

  In that final act of what may be called the last and longest of the great feuds, there were echoes from other feuds: the plea of Sarah McCoy, battered to earth by a Hatfield pistol but still reaching out to touch her dead daughter; the screams of the Logan boys, gunned down and trampled by Craig Tolliver’s men; the dying cry of J.B. Marcum in the hallway of the Breathitt County courthouse as Curtis Jett’s bullets cut him down; the plea of Bad Tom Smith for one more hymn on the scaffold, the sound of his neck breaking as he fell through the trap. There were the pride and defiance of Mrs. George Turner of Harlan demanding that her son stop screaming and die like a man, as his brother had; the sobs of Alice Howard as her beloved son Wilse was led away to the gallows; the dignity of Susan Eversole as she took the fatherless children of Bad Tom Smith, the man who had killed her father and her husband, back to her own home to rear; the bravery of Sue Martin as she ran for help against the Tolliver gang burning her home; the surviving goodness of Thena Baker, imploring Jim Howard to let the dead past bury its dead; the struggles and piety of John Jay Dickey, praying, singing, preaching through the hills torn by bullets, drenched in blood.

  And with the dying echoes of gunfire, the questions keep echoing across the years: Why here? Why in those years? There can be, are, people who are simply, inherently bad, but what malign spirits brought so many, in such a short time, into this small cup of mountains? Men who are not bad are taken in an evil time, by forces beyond their grasp, and led to do evil things. Those who resort to violence are not always violent men.

  Was there something in the times, something in the circumstances and the stage of development of the nation that led it to internecine war, as adolescence must go through anguish to achieve maturity, a process that was echoed in the feuds? Was there a pioneer, immigrant dichotomy that at once longed for a new, beneficent order while recoiling instinctively from inherited memories of official oppression and cruelty in other places, other times, to which the new place, the new age, bore hope and promise of paradise? Was political freedom, the gift of political participation, wine too heady for people whose forebears had for centuries been denied such self-dominion?

  Trouble did not end with the feuds. For another half century Eastern Kentucky remained the victim of violence. Strife tore the mining towns, just as worsening floods tore the valleys. For many years the region’s homicide rates remained among the worst in the nation. But roads and colleges and parks have come to mark the mountains. The reputation for violence left by the feuds is now like old scars from some long-past, seldom-remembered accident of youth. Gradually, even the scars are forgotten.

  Yet there must be moments even now when in the mists of twilight the ghost of Wilse Howard rides once more the roads of Harlan; when Bad Tom Baker stands, defiant and doomed on the courhouse lawn; when Big Jim Howard strides the streets of Manchester with his sample case, remembering; or when little Cal Tolliver, in his fourteenth year, stands before the America Hotel of Morehead, a little boy facing death, in each hand a blazing .44.

  Sources

  As far as I know, this book represents the only attempt to compile a brief history of all, or at least the most important, of the feuds of Eastern Kentucky, and having attempted it I can see why. Writing the history of one feud is difficult; writing about all of them is almost impossible.

  When I began this I thought I would be able to get most of my information from previously published works on individual feuds. I was wrong. I found almost nothing published on the Turner-Howard feud of Harlan County, the French-Eversole War of Perry County, or, most important, the Clay County War that lasted almost a century and involved at least a dozen families.

  Of state newspapers, I found the Louisville Courier-Journal and the Hazel Green Herald the most extensive journalistic sources, but even these left a lot to be desired. For example, in publishing the account of the jailing of Bad Tom Baker, the Courier-Journal stated casually that “a dozen men have been killed the last month.” It fails to say who they were, where they were killed, or why, and I could find no record in the courthouse or in regional papers.

  In the Hatfield-McCoy feud, the Courier-Journal saw the fight as a case of Kentucky against West Virginia and took the side of Kentucky without apology (and often without great accuracy). The Cincinnati Enquirer frequently referred to the feud in Breathitt County as the Marcum-Hargis-Callahan-French feud, although there was no French in the Breathitt feud. Fulton French was involved in the French-Eversole War in Perry County.

  I probably got more information from interviews and correspondence than from books or newspapers, especially in the Clay County War, about which relatively little has been written. The late governor Bert Combs introduced me to Stanley DeZarn, of Hamilton, Ohio, who introduced me to descendants of the Bakers of the Baker-Howard feud in Clay County. Florence Baker, court clerk of Clay County, also helped me with county records, such as they are. The Clay courthouse fire of 1932 destroyed many of the previous records. Stanley also introduced me to James Burchell, grandson of James Howard, who was extremely generous and helpful. Bert Combs introduced me to John G. White, who confirmed some of what I had heard. All of these people were from Manchester.

  I am especially grateful, too, to Jess Wilson, an author from Possum Trot, in Clay County, who gave me access to his maps, excerpts from the Dickey diaries, and copies of his books When They Hanged the Fiddler and The Sugar Pond and the Fritter Tree, both of which deal with the feuds. Jess, who is himself a Baker, gave me valuable genealogies of the Baker family. I have not been able to get more (Clay County) Howard genealogy than that furnished me by Harlan genealogist Holly Fee, who gave me some Turner-Howard genealogy. But perhaps the best reference work on Clay County I found was the diaries of the Reverend John Jay Dickey. They were valuable for the Breathitt County wars
as well. I talked briefly to Richard Golden of Pineville, whose grandfather, Captain Ben Golden, was an attorney in feud trials in both Breathitt and Clay.

  Along with Stanley DeZarn and Jess Wilson, perhaps my best source of information was Tom Walters of Leesburg, Florida, who not only gave me the records of his grandfather, who was involved in the shooting of Pitt Stivers, in Clay County, but drew me a map of Manchester at the time of the feuds. He and his wife, Gail, were most hospitable and helpful.

  There are several short works that mention the Clay war. Alvin F. Harlow’s Weep No More, My Lady (New York: Whittlesey House, 1942) contains a treatise on “the hundred-year feud,” which is interesting but contains errors. Stories of Kentucky Feuds and The Great Truce of Clay, by Harold Wilson Coates (Knoxville, Tenn.: Darst Coal Company, 1923), contain much that is folklore. The Autobiography of Old Claib Jones, as written by J.W. Hall (Hazard Ky.: Hazard Press, 1915), is entertaining. Robert Ireland’s “Judicial Murder of Dr. Abner Baker, Jr.” (Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, Winter 1990) contends that Baker was tried twice for the same murder. I tend to believe that the first trial was no more than a competency hearing and could not have cleared him, but Ireland is an authority on the trial, and his treatise is certainly worth reading.

  Incidentally, the Courier-Journal for September 16, 25, and 26, December 5, 22, and 27, 1932, and January 9 and February 2, 1933, gives good accounts of the trials involved in the killing of Frank Baker. Curiously, the Courier-Journal of December 2, 1943, tells of the conviction of one of the Benges for barn-burning and states that fifty people had been killed recently in a continuation of the Clay feud. It did not say who the dead were or how far back that phase of the feud went.

  As far as the Hatfield-McCoy feud is concerned, you can take your pick. There are dozens of books and articles on the feud, all saying pretty much the same thing. Altina Waller’s Feud: Hatfields and McCoys and Social Change in Appalachia, 1860-1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988) is the most thorough study of the feud available (the title gives you an idea) but is more concerned with the times than with the feud. Waller also published a shorter but interesting view of the feud in the Register of the Kentucky Historical Society (Summer 1991), “Feuding and Modernization in Appalachia.” The best book on the feud itself is probably Otis Rice’s The Hatfields and the McCoys (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1982). The Courier-Journal files in the Louisville Free Public Library offer detailed accounts of the trials of the Hatfields in Louisville and the court battles between Kentucky and West Virginia over jurisdiction of prisoners taken in the feud. The Hazel Green Herald of April 26, 1894, had an account of the death of Frank Phillips, the Pike County deputy and general wild man. The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society for 1982 carried James Klotter’s “A Hatfield-McCoy Feudist Pleads for Mercy,” and the summer 1988 issue of the Appalachian Journal published Klotter’s “Hatfields and McCoys Revised.”