Days of Darkness (19 page)

Every hand shot up. “That is beautiful,” said Tom. “It looks like what I shall see in heaven [which seems optimistic]. Again I say, live better lives than I lived. I die with no hard feeling toward anybody. There ain't a soul in the world I hate. I love everybody. Farewell till we meet again.”

Mary went across the scaffold, hugged Tom, and kissed him a last time. Then with the help of Sheriff Combs, she went back down the steps and, as the crowd parted to let her through, walked back to the jail to await her brother's body. She was joined by other members of the Smith family.

Bad Tom now launched into a long and loud prayer. On the scaffold several preachers, including the industrious and compassionate John Jay Dickey, prayed with him, as Bad Tom cried out for mercy and forgiveness. He then asked Dickey and a Reverend Hudson to sing a hymn, “Guide Me, Oh Great Jehovah,” and thousands in the crowd joined in. As the song ended, Bad Tom again dropped to his knees and prayed for mercy. As he rose, Sheriff Combs took him by the arm and told him it was time. “Oh, just one more dear hymn,” asked Tom, and Combs consented. Again the ministers climbed to the scaffold and sang “Near the Cross” as the crowd, knowing the end was near, grew quiet. Sheriff Combs, white-faced and shaken, motioned to his deputy to hand him the leather straps with which he fastened Bad Tom's legs and arms. Tom gritted his teeth and cast a last look at the hills standing bare and grim beyond the town. As the hood was drawn down over his head, he took a deep breath and shouted, “Save me, oh God, save me!”

At this, Sheriff Combs nodded, a deputy pulled the lever, and Bad Tom Smith fell nearly five feet before the noose caught him. The sound of his neck breaking could be heard above the crowd's gasp of horror. Many women whimpered and fainted. Suddenly the carnival atmosphere gave way to the grim reality of a man's death.

Bad Tom fell through the trap at 1:45. He was allowed to hang for seventeen minutes before he was taken down and placed in the coffin waiting nearby. His brother Bill drove the last nails into the coffin and went to the jail to get Mary, who walked with considerable dignity beside her brother to the wagon on which the coffin rested. Almost
five hundred people accompanied the body on its fifty-mile journey to the Smith home on Carr's Fork in Knott County, where Bad Tom was buried.

Following the funeral, Tom's widow, who had stuck to him throughout his tempestuous career, his loving, sturdy sister Mary, and Susan Eversole, widow of a man Bad Tom had brutally murdered, sat for a long time on the porch of the Smith home, talking. They were discussing the future of the now-fatherless children of Bad Tom. If this seems unusual, keep in mind that Tom's widow had been an Eversole. Furthermore, Susan Eversole, like her late husband, was a strong, responsible, and deeply moral woman and undoubtedly felt a deep concern for Tom's children. So it is not too surprising that, as the day wore on, the women agreed that the comfortable Eversole home in Perry County would be the best place for the children to grow up. The next morning, when Susan boarded her wagon for the long drive home, the children of Bad Tom Smith, drained of tears but still confused and frightened, rode with her.

It had been an unselfish decision by the Smiths, who, despite Tom's wild journey through the world, were poor but good, solid people. Even Tom, despite the bloody trail he left, deserves some understanding. Aside from the epilepsy that brought him ridicule and abuse, Tom had never been too bright and was easily influenced, often by those who used him for murderous purposes. Compared to Joe Adkins and Jesse Fields, who were simply killers, Tom was something of a victim.

It is too easy to designate a feudist as a villain, but if a villain is needed in this tale, Fulton French will do. As historian Allen Watts has pointed out, this was, particularly on the French side, a business feud. French was working for the big land companies against the small mountain landowners. Joe Eversole had a lot of power in Perry County because he was, in the final analysis, working for the common people; so was Josiah Combs, a true patrician. But they were no match for the financial power of French and of those backing him.

And if there was a heroine, it was surely Susan Eversole. One of the redoubtable Combs clan, she never wavered in the face of danger and tragedy. She saw her father killed, she saw her husband killed, she had to send her children away to live with relatives to escape the violence, but she never lost her courage, dignity or sense of morality.

One last episode remained to be played out as a finale to the French-Eversole war. Fult French, though wealthy and a fairly prominent attorney, feared that he might still have enemies and took to wearing a bullet-proof vest. Conscience is a merciless master, and he
was still wearing it in the winter of 1913 when, in the entry hall of a boarding house in Elkatawa, he ran into Susan Eversole, the deaths of whose husband and father he had probably ordered. Mrs. Eversole was still in black, as was the custom of the time for widows, and was accompanied by her son Harry, a slender, one-handed man (he had shot himself in the hand, necessitating amputation). Startled, Susan stumbled slightly. French drew back with a slight bow. “Good morning, Mrs. Eversole,” he said and put out his hand. Susan stared, then turned her back on him. French turned to leave, but Harry pulled a pistol, and French bolted out the front door and jumped a low fence surrounding the yard. As he did, Harry shot him, hitting him just below the vest, apparently puncturing his liver or spleen. Harry's second shot missed, and French kept running. Since the shot had not killed French, Harry could not be tried for murder, so the judge fined him $75 for disturbing the peace. Susan paid the fine.

But in the strange if slow way in which the mills of justice sometimes grind, Fulton French died of the wound more than a year later.

A Nice Little College Town

Driving through Morehead, Kentucky, with its imposing university and attractive medical center, it is hard to imagine that there was a time when a feud almost destroyed this town and its county. For the Rowan County War has been almost lost to memory. Few people write letters any more, or keep diaries. The telephone has made written records almost archaic. That is too bad, because time tends to erase the footprints we leave on earth, and we need our records.

Recently the state built a bypass around Morehead that did, as intended, relieve downtown streets of traffic congestion. The trouble with bypasses is that too often they bypass the past. As Thucydides said, we need an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to our interpretation of the future.

The Morehead bypass erased a lot of footprints. For much of its course it was built on the bed of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway tracks, and to accommodate its right-of-way several old buildings were torn down, some of them more historic than most local people realized. The Rains Hotel, for example, and what was once the American House and Saloon, went down. They played important roles in that unhappy chapter in the history of Morehead and Rowan County that has come to be known as the Rowan County War. War is a better term for that grisly episode in Rowan County's history than the word feud, which many people employ.

Perhaps the clash between the Martins and the Tollivers could be said to constitute a feud. At any rate, it lasted more than three years, and historian David Williams counted twenty men killed and sixteen wounded in that time. Like other mountain feuds, it forced the governor to send troops into the county to restore order and permit the courts to operate. General Sam Hill, in charge of the troops, got so disgusted with the place that he suggested to the governor that he do away with Rowan County altogether and let surrounding counties absorb it. Fortunately, this was not done, and Morehead licked its wounds and survived.

Rowan County is typical of the northeastern section of Kentucky between Lexington and Ashland—hilly, wooded country drained by the north-flowing Licking River. About a third of the county is suitable for farms, a third is owned by the government, and much of the county is part of the Daniel Boone National Forest. Cave Run Lake lies along the southwestern border of the county and is a popular boating and vacation spot.

The first settlers came from Virginia in the years following the Revolutionary War, most of them claiming land grants for wartime service, but it was not until 1856 that Rowan was carved out of Fleming and Morgan Counties. It was named for John Rowan, a Kentucky legislator best remembered as the builder of Federal Hill, the picturesque Bardstown home now known as My Old Kentucky Home, where Stephen Collins Foster is supposed to have composed what became the state song.

The rural nature of Rowan County changed in the latter half of the twentieth century in response to the growth of Morehead State University, development of St. Claire Medical Center, and the growth of boating and tourism around Cave Run Lake. Before that the county had attracted unwanted attention because of a burst of violence.

What became known as the Rowan County War, or the Martin-Tolliver feud, was hardly a conflict of heroes. John Martin, though a member of a prominent Republican family, had had his run-ins with the law and had been arrested in 1877 for horse-stealing. Democrat Craig Tolliver, leader of the Tolliver clan, was big, ruthless, and clever but had little regard for law that got in his way. The Tollivers had come into Kentucky from North Carolina, most of them settling in Carter and Elliott Counties. Hugh Tolliver, Craig's father, was shot and killed by robbers who were after a large sum of money he had received from a North Carolina land sale, and Craig learned at an early age to carry a gun.

When Craig became involved in the feud, he and his family were living in Farmers, the county's largest town, with a population of more than 1,000, the site of several sawmills and the center of regional farm trade. Morehead, about eight miles to the northeast, had around 700 people and was important only because it was the county seat. But several families, including the Logans and Powerses, had big plans for Morehead and regarded Tolliver as an interloper who wanted to use the town for his own political and economic profit.

Yet, as Fred Brown (co-author with Juanita Blair of
Days of Anger, Days of Tears,
probably the best work on the Rowan County feud) says, “There are no devils here, just men.” But some of the men were more
devilish than others and took advantage of the confusion in a tough rural community. Tangled political and business rivalries spawned a condition approaching chaos, and in the summer of 1883 Craig Tolliver decided this situation offered opportunity. It took him only about a year to take advantage of that opportunity, and for several years afterward he tended to act as though he owned the place. And since More-head was the county seat, he held authority over much of the county as well. His reign was ended, as was his life, by a lawyer who did not seem the type to unseat the powerful but who finally decided that he, and the town, had had enough.

Strangely, the trouble began over an election that should have had little direct effect on Rowan County. In 1874, nine years before the real trouble started, Democrat Thomas Hargis ran against Republican George Thomas for circuit judge. Thomas's backers charged that Hargis was not old enough for the office and had never passed the bar. When Hargis went to get supporting records from the county clerk, he found that they had been torn out of the record books. He cried foul, and the contest became bitter. The bitterness grew when Hargis lost by twelve votes.

The scars from the race remained deeper in Rowan than the usual Democrat-Republican differences and finally broke into open violence ten years later during the race for sheriff between Republican Cook Humphrey and Democrat Sam Goodin (or Goodan, or Gooden; Williams and author Fred Brown prefer Goodin). The August election day was marked, as usual, by drunkenness, gunfire, fist fights, and vote buying; the secret ballot had not been adopted in Kentucky, and people voted in public, their votes called out as they were cast, thus assuring that they would vote as they had been paid to. Free whiskey encouraged voting. And fighting.

But the violence that fueled the feud resulted from an accident of several days before. There had been a dance in Morehead, and during the evening Lucy, the wife of William Trumbo, got tired, excused herself, and went upstairs to what she thought was her room. It was not. By mistake she got into the room of H.G. Price, a wealthy timber dealer and owner of the steamboat
Gerty.
When Price returned to his room, he was pleased to find on his bed what seemed to be a bonus, and he attempted to make the most of the situation. Mrs. Trumbo screamed, fled, and told her husband of her horrible experience. This should not have been cause for trouble, but it was. Lucy Trumbo was a sister of Elizabeth, wife of prominent businessman H.M. Logan; she was also a cousin of Lucy Martin, John Martin's wife. Both the Logans and the Martins were families to be reckoned with.

On election day Trumbo sought out Price and demanded that he apologize publicly to Lucy. Price replied—not dishonestly—that he had done nothing wrong, had found Lucy on his bed, and had done what any man would have done under the circumstances. A fight broke out. Friends of the men joined in, to the cheers of drunken onlookers. When John Martin joined the fray, he was slugged by John Keeton. Allen Sutton, Morehead town marshal, demanded that the hostilities cease but was hit with a rock for his trouble. Acting sheriff John Day arrived and pulled a pistol to back his call for order. Instead, either on the street on in a barroom, Floyd Tolliver, brother of Craig Tolliver, swung at John Martin and knocked him cup over tea kettle. Outraged, Martin drew his pistol. Tolliver followed suit, and they banged away at each other. Bystanders joined in, and when the smoke cleared Martin was wounded, Solomon Bradley, a Martin follower and father of seven, was dead, and Adam Sizemore, who has gone down in history only as Adam Sizemore, was wounded. Floyd Tolliver was charged with killing Bradley and wounding Martin, and Day was charged with wounding Adam Sizemore. Tolliver denied shooting anyone, and a grand jury, unable to tell where the truth lay, indicted them all—Martin, Tolliver, and Sheriff Day.