Days of Darkness (12 page)

For weeks Marcum had been afraid to go outside his home, and in an affidavit he filed with the circuit court he declared that he was “marked for death.” He was. Even after some of the bitterness of the election contest wore off, Marcum seldom went to his offices without taking his small grandson with him, thinking that would-be assassins would not chance hitting the child. (Again, some say that Marcum took his baby son, not grandson, with him for protection.)

But on the morning of May 4 he went alone to the courthouse to file some papers in the election case. After filing, he walked from the clerk's office to the front door, where he stood talking to his friend Captain Benjamin Ewen. Suddenly there was a shot from the hallway behind them, and Marcum slumped forward. “Oh, Lordy,” he
moaned, “I'm shot. They've killed me!” Ewen turned and saw Curtis Jett raise his pistol and fire another shot through Marcum's head. Marcum fell forward, brushing Ewen, who ran from the doorway to avoid being shot. He testified that a few minutes later he saw Jett and Tom White near the side door of the courthouse and heard Jett “express satisfaction with his aim.”

Marcum's body lay in the doorway for some time (some witnesses later said it lay there an hour, others said it was only fifteen minutes), since his friends were afraid to approach the body and the local officers were paying no attention. At the time Marcum was shot, Judge James Hargis and Sheriff Ed Callahan were sitting in rocking chairs in the front door of Hargis's store, across from the courthouse, from where they had a clear view of the courthouse doorway where Marcum fell and of the hallway where the killer fired the shot. They looked on with some interest but without deserting their rocking chairs. It was generally assumed that they were not taken entirely by surprise.

Three weeks later, on May 21, 1903, Curtis Jett and Tom White were indicted for the murder of Marcum. White was a drifter who had come to Jackson a few days previously to get a job, he said, but he had applied only to Elbert Hargis. Also accused, but on the lesser charge of conspiracy to murder, were Mose Feltner, John Smith, and John Abner. But it was the case against Jett that drew national attention.

Tom Wallace, then a reporter for the
Louisville Times,
described the joys of covering the trial before it was transferred to Harrison County:

When we—the militia and reporters—arrived, not one light was burning inside any Jackson residence. Householders ate their evening meal while it was still light and sat in the dark till it was time to feel the way to bed. It was feared that the roystering young men who fired pistols in the streets at night might shoot at any residence light and kill someone sitting near it. Jackson sidewalks were made of plank. After dark people feared to walk on the sidewalks lest the rattling of a loose plank cause someone to shoot in the direction of the sound. The custom was to walk in the street where footfalls in the dust—streets were not paved—would be soundless. There was danger that two persons walking in the dark might collide. I know one man who carried a lantern swung about six feet from his shoulder on a pole. His hope was that if anyone should shoot at the lantern he would not be hit. On one occasion a warm controversy between a lawyer for the defense and the prosecutor was mistaken by the courthouse audience for a quarrel which might develop violence. Immediately the courtroom bristled with pistols drawn from under-arm holsters.

It would seem to have been a fairly open-and-shut case, but it created a sensation, even when transferred to Harrison County and the
court of Judge J.J. Osborne. For two hired guns, Jett and White were defended by a remarkable group of attorneys, including Judge B.F. French (a notorious survivor of the French-Eversole feud in neighboring Perry County), John O'Neal of Covington, Captain Ben Golden of Barbourville, prominent Republican James Black, J.T Blanton, and the firm of Rafferty and King.

Their efforts could not overcome the overwhelming evidence against the accused. Captain Ewen testified that he had seen Tom White pass him and Marcum in the courthouse doorway, staring at Marcum to make him turn so that he could be shot in the back. He also testified that after Marcum was shot, he (Ewen) turned and saw Jett holding a pistol in both hands and saw him take two steps forward and fire another shot through Marcum's head, and that later he saw Jett come out the side door of the courthouse.

Other witnesses testified that Jett had been seen with White before the killing and that, after the two shots were fired, White was seen to motion to Jett in the side courthouse door, and that the two of them left hurriedly. It took the jury only a short while to bring in a guilty verdict. Both Jett and White were sentenced to prison for life.

Tried with them were Mose Feltner, John Abner, and John Smith. Feltner testified that he, Abner, and Smith had been hired by James Hargis, Ed Callahan, and Fult French to kill Marcum but had failed to do so. Abner and Smith supported his testimony. Charges against Smith were dismissed following his confession. He later became the bitter enemy of Ed Callahan and was suspected of an attempt to kill him. The others were acquitted.

Curtis Jett was only twenty-four at the time. Tall, red-haired, and blue-eyed, he had, according to reporter Tom Wallace, a mean, hard-eyed look, thin lips, and a short chin. He was a cousin of the Cockrell brothers but had been suspected of killing Tom Cockrell. Jett had an unenviable reputation. He had been in jail a half dozen times for shooting and disorderly conduct, twice accused of rape, and twice tried for shooting and wounding. In prison he proved to be an obstreperous prisoner until, according to his own testimony, he heard the call of heaven, accepted Jesus Christ as his savior, and “got religion.” He later became a preacher of sorts.

Judge James Hargis and Ed Callahan were indicted for complicity in the murder of J.B. Marcum but, after five trials, were acquitted. Interviewed by Tom Wallace, Hargis swore that he had nothing to do with any assassination and said that he did not approve of it “except when a man is so mean he deserves to die.”

“But who would be the judge?” asked Wallace.

“Who,” replied Hargis, “but them as knows him best?” That proved to be an ominous statement.

Though Hargis and Callahan escaped prison, Mrs. Marcum, widow of the slain J.B. Marcum, sued them for being instrumental in the death of her husband and was awarded eight thousand dollars by the court. They paid. If there was justice concealed in all this, it was well concealed.

The famed Hargis-Cockrell feud was, for all practical purposes, over. Two nights after Captain Ben Ewen testified against Curtis Jett, his home was burned. People in central Kentucky, led by the
Louisville Courier-Journal,
took up a purse to help him rebuild. He was also booked for a series of lectures in and around Cincinnati on the Breathitt violence, but drew smaller audiences than had been expected.

Judge Hargis at one point declared that he was sick of the violence that had marked his life and announced that he was preparing to sell his properties in Breathitt County and move to Lexington. Speaking for himself and his brother Alex, he told the
Lexington Herald:
“We began our business twenty years ago poor men, and we have accumulated wealth and position by dint of our industry. We own thousands of acres of land in this county, and lands and stores in other places. We never had any difficulty in our lives and we had no motive to assassinate Marcum or Cockrell or anyone else. Marcum was as intense a Republican as his uncle, Bill Strong, and he was willing to go to any extremity to further the interest of his party.”

Ben Ewen announced that if the Hargises did move, he might go back to Breathitt to live. But before Hargis could move—if he had ever seriously contemplated moving—he ran into trouble at home.

Hargis's son, Beach, was known as a bad drinker, erratic and probably unbalanced. According to
Kentucky Reports
(Vol. 135), Beach, on or about February 16, 1908, came into the Hargis store and asked a clerk to give him a pistol. The clerk refused but pointed out that there was a pistol in the drawer of his father's desk. Beach took it and left but turned up the next morning with a badly swollen face, telling the barber into whose shop he stormed that “the old man hit me.” This would not have been startling news. His father reportedly had beat him regularly as a boy, and even after he was grown would whip him with a rope or a pistol, and once beat his head on the floor.

Beach drank a bottle of Brown's Bitters, went to the drugstore of his brother-in-law, Dr. Hogg, and waved the pistol about, pointing it at several customers. He then went to his father's store and took a seat in a chair near the door. His father, seeing him, said to another man in the room, “He has gotten to be a perfect vagabond, and he is
destroying my business, and if Dr. Hogg lets him stay there he will ruin his business.”

After saying this, Judge Hargis walked toward Beach, who got out of the chair, walked behind a spool cabinet, and, as his father approached, shot him. Hargis shouted and grabbed him, and as they struggled Beach shot him four more times. By the time onlookers reached them, Hargis had Beach down, and had the pistol. “He has shot me all to pieces,” he said. He was right. He died a few minutes later.

Beach was indicted, tried, and sentenced to life in prison, though defended by a prestigious array of attorneys led by former Governor W.O. Bradley, Judge D.B. Redwine, J.J.C. Bach, Sam H. Kash, and Thomas L. Cope. After a few years he was paroled and returned to Jackson.

One score was left, and it was not settled for some time. Some had not forgotten the murders of Marcum and the Cockrells. John Smith, for one, had become an avowed enemy of Ed Callahan, and Callahan knew it. He took steps to protect himself from ambush, but on May 3, 1910, as he was standing in his store at Crockettsville, he was shot by someone standing on a bank opposite the building. He survived the wound and built a stockade around his home and store so that he could go from his house to his store without exposing himself to gunfire. But on May 3, 1912, he was shot while crossing the front room of his store by someone hidden in the same spot from which he had been shot exactly two years earlier. This time he did not survive.

There were other minor disturbances in Jackson in 1941, but the feuds had run their course, leaving in their wake a heritage of violence and the nickname “Bloody Breathitt,” which lingered long after any justification for it remained.

PIKE, PERRY, AND ROWAN COUNTIES

Mayhem Everywhere

No Romeo, No Juliet, No Heroes

Of all the feuds that tore the mountains of Eastern Kentucky during the nineteenth century, the Hatfield-McCoy feud was surely the strangest. It didn't amount to much—a dozen people killed over a period of eight or ten years—but mainly because of sensational coverage by press and magazine writers, it was blown out of all proportion. Today, thanks to folklore and legend, it is still thought of as a mountain bloodbath, a time of terror in the hills, or as the story of Romeo and Juliet in the mountains. It was none of these.

Actually, were it not for the legend and for the political problems that accompanied and helped prolong the feud, it would not be worth recounting, but it has been taken very seriously by historians and sociologists. Probably the best straightforward account of the feud is
The Hatfields and the McCoys,
written in 1978 by Otis K. Rice of West Virginia Institute of Technology. The most unusual—and thorough—survey of the feud is
Feud: Hatfields, McCoys and Economic Change in Appalachia, 1860-1900,
by Altina Waller of the State University of New York. Her work is more a study of the economic transition of the remote valley where the feud occurred than of the feud itself, but perhaps that puts the feud into a more logical context. If it hadn't happened when and where it happened, probably few people would have paid much attention. As it was, the killing associated with the feud was almost over before the press began its sensational coverage, which was usually full of error. And the latter half of what is called the Hatfield-McCoy feud was actually a battle between other men trying to use the feud to further their political and economic ambitions.

Waller's view of the feudists is more charitable than most, depicting both Hatfields and McCoys as solid mountain folk caught in economic and social changes brought about by the advent of industrialism in the form of railroads and mining. She sees Randolph (Ranel or Randal) McCoy as a moping failure who resented Anderson (“Devil
Anse”) Hatfield for his greater entrepreneurial success more than for the Hatfields' murder of his family. Tolbert McCoy stabbed Ellison Hatfield because of his feelings of inferiority, not because he was a mean drunk. And so on.

Waller may be right. Certainly hers is the most painstaking study of the feud. But the layman, lacking psychological or sociological expertise, might be forgiven for seeing the feudists as two groups of basically backward, mean-tempered people, by no stretch of the imagination mountain aristocracy. It is true that descendants of Devil Anse Hatfield, like the offspring of many of our frontier thugs and robber barons, rose to positions of prominence, as did some McCoys. But, again, it is hard to see Anse himself as much more than an illiterate, selfish killer and a rather cowardly one at that, a frontier Godfather who sent his minions out to kill off his enemies, and who let them go to prison and the gallows for it while he sat back and profited from the killings.

How did it start in the first place? Was it because of a hog, as some have claimed? Emotional holdovers from the Civil War? A romance shattered by family hatred? Was it a clash of modernism with mountain tradition? As Kentucky historian James C. Klotter has written, it is unlikely that there was one single cause. “In their time,” he says, “the Hatfields and McCoys fought for justice as they envisioned it.” And Otis Rice probably puts it succinctly when he says in his study of the trouble between the two families, “The conflict grew out of an accumulation of honest grievances and imagined wrongs” rather than a specific incident.