Some took sides in the feuds that have been carried on throughout the
Blue Ridge Country and thereby got themselves enthralled, while others,
more tactful, managed to keep aloof and remain friends with the
belligerents.
There's Uncle Chunk Craft on Millstone Creek in Letcher County. Enoch is
his real name. There's nothing he likes better than to tell of the days
when he was one of Morgan's raiders. Then, when he was only twenty-two,
that was in 1864, Uncle Chunk slept in a cornfield near Greenville,
Tennessee, the very night General John Hunt Morgan, who had taken
shelter in a house a couple of miles away, was betrayed by the woman of
the house and shot to death by Unionists.
"We were tuckered out," he said, "had tramped through rain and mud and
finally rolled in our blankets, if we were lucky enough to have one, and
fell asleep wherever it was. I burrowed in with a comrade. But we didn't
get much rest. For, first thing you know, seemed I'd just dozed off,
someone come shoutin' through the cornfield that the General had been
killed. We shouldered our muskets and stumbled off through the field,
grumbling and growling that we'd 'tend to the ones that had betrayed
him. But even if the woman had been found I reckon we'd a-shunned
killin' her. There's a heap that goes on in war that a man don't like to
think on."
Uncle Chunk was proud to own, however, that he saw hard fighting through
Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky and was glad enough when the war was
ended. He came back, married Polly Ann Caudill, and settled down in
Letcher. It wasn't long until another war started. This time between his
neighbors. But with all the carryings-on between John Wright and Clabe
Jones in the adjoining counties of Floyd and Knott, Enoch Craft managed
to stay friends with both sides. Whichever side happened to round in at
his home, hungry and footsore from scouting in the woods for the other
faction, found a welcome at Uncle Chunk's and plenty to eat. "Fill up
the kittle, Polly Ann," he'd call to his wife, as he went on digging
potatoes. "Here comes some of John Wright's crew." Or, "Put on the
beans, I see Clabe Jones's men comin'!"
And fill up the kettle Polly Ann did.
After the belligerents had eaten their fill, Uncle Chunk would try to
reason with them to let the troubles drop. "A man thinks better on a
full gut than a empty one," he argued. And at last, through his help,
the Clabe Jones-John Wright feud ended.
* * * * *
In Bloody Breathitt in 1886, Willie Sewell was shot from ambush while
making molasses on Frozen Creek. That started feeling, for Willie had
lots of kinfolks. He himself was not without sin, for he had killed
Jerry South. The Souths were related to the Cockrells. But when Willie
Sewell, who was a half-brother of Jim and Elbert Hargis, was shot the
trouble, which became the Hargis-Cockrell feud, really began.
A quarter of a century after one of the most famous of Kentucky mountain
trials--when Curt Jett was tried for the assassination of James B.
Marcum and James Cockrell--the trouble was revived with the killing of
Clay Watkins by Chester Fugate. This uprising, it was said, started when
Sewell Fugate was defeated by Clay Watkins for the office of chairman of
the county Board of Education. Chester quarreled with Clay over a petty
debt. Three years before that time Amos, cousin of Chester, had shot and
killed Deputy Sheriff Green Watkins, brother of Clay. When an enraged
posse found Amos they filled him with bullets. Sixty years before, Hen
Kilburn, grandfather of Chester Fugate, was taken from the county jail
in Jackson and lynched for killing a man. It was the first time such a
lynching had occurred at the county seat.
On Christmas morning in 1929, Chester Fugate was taken from the same
jail and shot to death, but not in the courthouse yard. The posse took
him out to a farm some miles away. That was the second lynching in
Bloody Breathitt. There was a heavy snow on the ground, making a soft
carpet for the swiftly moving feet of the mob numbering more than a
score, as they hurried their victim away. Before entering Fugate's cell,
they had bound the jailer, S. L. Combs, to make sure of no interference
from that source.
Some miles from the county seat they stopped in a thicket on a farm.
That morning farmer Jones got up before daylight and with lantern on arm
went out to milk the cows and feed the stock. He halted suddenly in the
unbeaten snow for from a nearby thicket came a strange sound. At first
the farmer thought it the moaning of a trapped animal. Holding the
lantern overhead he stumbled on a few yards to find Chester Fugate in a
pool of blood that stained the snow all about the crumpled figure.
Bleeding profusely from thirteen gunshot wounds, Chester survived long
enough to give the names of at least six of his assailants.
It was another outbreak in the Hargis-Cockrell feud.
Five of the men in the mob surrendered. They were bound over and
released on bail. All were kin of Clay Watkins: Samuel J. was his
brother, L. K. Rice his son-in-law, Allie Watkins his son, and Earl and
Bent Howard were his nephews. The men signed their own bonds together
with Jack Howard, uncle of Bent and Earl. The name of Elbert Hargis was
also affixed to the bonds. The sixth man named by Chester Fugate before
he died was Lee Watkins, a cousin of Clay, who said he would surrender.
The trouble went back more than a quarter of a century when Curtis
Jett--his friends called him Curt--and others assassinated James B.
Marcum and James Cockrell. Curt was a nephew of county Judge James
Hargis, who was said by some to be the master mind behind the murders.
The state militia was called out to preserve order during the trial.
Things had been turbulent in Breathitt before. Back in 1878 Judge
William Randall fled the bench after the slaying of county Judge John
Burnett and his wife. However, the commencement of the Hargis-Cockrell
feud in 1899 was over a contested election of county officers. The
Fusionists or Republicans declared their men the winners, while the
Democrats were equally certain of triumph. James Hargis was the
Democrats' candidate for county judge, Ed Callahan for sheriff.
The leading law firm in all of eastern Kentucky at the time was that of
James B. Marcum and O. H. Pollard, but when the election contest arose,
the men dissolved partnership. Marcum represented the Republican
contestants, his former partner looked to the affairs of the Democrats.
Until this time Marcum had been a close personal friend as well as legal
adviser to James Hargis.
Depositions for the contestants were being taken in Marcum's office when
the two lawyers almost came to blows over Pollard's cross-examination of
a witness, with Hargis and Callahan sitting close by. Harsh words were
uttered and pistols drawn, and Hargis, Callahan, and Pollard were
ordered from Marcum's office. When warrants were issued for them and
Marcum also by police Judge T. P. Cardwell, Marcum appeared in court and
paid a fine of twenty dollars. But Jim Hargis refused to be tried by
Cardwell--the two men had been bad friends for some time. Then, instead
of attempting alone the arrest of Hargis, the town marshal of Jackson,
Tom Cockrell, called on his brother Jim to lend a hand.
It is said that when Tom went to arrest Hargis the latter refused to
surrender, drawing his gun. But Tom covered Jim Hargis first. Whereupon
Hargis's friend, Ed Callahan, who was close, covered Tom Cockrell and in
the bat of an eye Jim Cockrell, his brother, covered Callahan. Seeing
that the Cockrells had the best of them, both Jim Hargis and Ed Callahan
surrendered. That incident passed without bloodshed and Marcum himself
sent word to police Judge Cardwell that he didn't want to prosecute
Hargis and asked that the case be dismissed, as it was.
That same year there was a school election.
"Marcum flew in a rage," said Hargis, "when I accused him of trying to
vote a minor and he pulled his pistol on me but did not shoot."
Though that difference was also patched up, the families began taking
sides in the many quarrels that followed. Accusations were made first by
one side, then the other. Marcum accused Callahan of killing his uncle,
and Callahan in turn charged that his father had been slain by Marcum's
uncle.
In July, 1902, the flames of the feud were fanned to white heat.
Tom Cockrell, a minor, fought a pistol duel with Ben Hargis, Jim's
brother, in a blind tiger, leaving Ben dead upon the floor. Tom was
defended by his kinsman, J. B. Marcum, without fee. Tom's guardian, Dr.
B. D. Cox, one of the leading physicians in Jackson, was married to a
Cardwell whose family belonged to the Cockrell clan.
It was not long after Ben Hargis's death that his brother John, "Tige,"
was slain by Jerry Cardwell. Jerry claimed that it was in the exercise
of his duty as train detective.
"Tige was disorderly," Jerry said, "when I tried to arrest him."
Anyway pistols were fired; Jerry was only wounded but Tige was killed.
His death was followed shortly by that of Jim Hargis's half-brother. The
shot came from ambush one night while he was making sorghum at his home,
and no one knew who fired it.
On another night not long thereafter, Dr. Cox, who was guardian of the
minor Tom Cockrell and the other Cockrell children, was hurrying along
the streets of Jackson to the bedside of a patient.
When the doctor reached the corner across from the courthouse and in
almost direct line with Judge Hargis's stable, he dropped with a bullet
through the heart. Another shot was fired at close range and lodged in
the doctor's body.
The evidence disclosed that at the time of the shooting Judge Hargis and
Ed Callahan were standing together in the rear of Hargis's stable from
which direction the shots came. The Cockrells stated that Dr. Cox had
been slain because of his family relationship with them and because of
his participation in the defense of young Tom Cockrell, his ward.
The story of Dr. Cox's death was still on many lips when Curt Jett, who
was Sheriff Ed Callahan's deputy, met Jim Cockrell in the dining room of
the Arlington Hotel where they engaged in a quarrel and exchange of
bullets. Neither was injured, but bad feeling continued between them.
Sometime during the morning of July 28, 1902, Curt and a couple of
friends concealed themselves in the courthouse. At noon that day, in
broad daylight, Jim Cockrell was shot dead on the street from a
second-story window of the building. Across the way, from a second-story
window of Hargis's store, Judge Jim Hargis and Sheriff Ed Callahan saw
the shooting.
Jim Cockrell had assisted his brother, the town marshal, in arresting
Jim Hargis and was the recognized leader of the Cockrell faction. He had
spared no effort in obtaining evidence in his brother's behalf when
young Tom was tried for killing Ben Hargis in the blind tiger.
Under cover of darkness Curt Jett and his companions were spirited away
from the courthouse on horseback and no arrests were made.
In the meantime the trial of young Tom Cockrell for killing Ben Hargis
was moved to Campton, but Judge Jim Hargis and his brother, Senator Alex
Hargis, declared that they'd never reach Campton alive if they should go
there to prosecute young Tom. So the case was dismissed. "Our enemies
would kill us somewhere along the mountain road," the Hargises declared.
Jim Hargis loved his wife and children. He idolized his son Beach, who
spent his days hanging around his father's store and squandering money
that the doting parent supplied.
Up to November 9, 1902, according to information supplied by J. B.
Marcum, there had been thirty persons killed in Breathitt County as a
result of the feeling between the factions and to quote Marcum's own
words, "the Lord only knows how many wounded."
After Marcum's assassination on May 4, 1903, his widow wrote the
_Lexington Herald_ that there had been thirty-eight homicides in
Breathitt County during the time James Hargis presided as county judge.
J. B. Marcum and his wife both had known for a long time that he was a
marked man. Indeed, ever since he had represented the Fusionists in
contesting the election of Jim Hargis as county judge, it was an open
secret that Marcum would meet his doom sooner or later. Added to this
was the animosity aroused on the Hargis side by Marcum's defense of
young Tom Cockrell for killing Jim Hargis's brother Ben.
Marcum made an affidavit which he filed in the Breathitt Circuit Court
declaring that he was marked for death. Others substantiated his
statement by swearing to various plots that had been concocted to
assassinate him. As a matter of fact while the feeling was raging high
in the contest case he was a prisoner in his own home for seventy-two
days, afraid to step out on his own porch. To protect himself against
bullets he had a barricade built joining the rear of his house with a
small yard. Whenever he left his home, which was seldom, he was
accompanied by his wife and he carried one of his small children.
Once he went to Washington and stayed a month. It was during that time
that his friend Dr. Cox was assassinated. A client of Marcum's by the
name of Mose Feltner came to his home to acquaint the lawyer with a plot
against his life. Mose told how he had been given thirty-five dollars to
commit the deed and a shotgun for the purpose. He also took Marcum to a
woods and showed where four Winchester rifles had been concealed by him
and his three companions. The guns, Mose said, were kept there during
the day but were carried at night so that if he or his companions met
Marcum they were prepared to kill him. The plot, so Mose declared, was
to entice Marcum to his office on some pretext or other. Mose was to
waylay him and pull the trigger. Mose went further. He told Marcum that
the county officials had promised him immunity from punishment if he
would carry out the plot and kill Marcum. When at last the election
contest furore had quieted down Marcum concluded it was safe to venture
forth to his law office and resume his practice.
On the morning of May 4th he had gone to the courthouse to file some
papers in the case. He lingered for a while in the corridor to greet
this one and that, then walked slowly through the corridor toward the
front door. From where he stood talking with a friend, Benjamin Ewen,
Marcum could see across the street Judge James Hargis and Sheriff Ed
Callahan sitting in rocking chairs in front of Hargis's store. When the
shots were fired that killed Marcum neither Hargis nor Callahan stirred.
Their view was uninterrupted when the lifeless body plunged forward.
They remained seated in their rocking chairs, looking neither to right
nor to left. They made no effort to find out who did the shooting.
"My God! they have killed me!" cried Marcum as bullets struck through
the spine and skull and he lunged forward dead.
Curt Jett, tall and angular with red hair and deep-set blue eyes, a man
of many escapades, was convicted of the murder and sent to the
penitentiary for life. The evidence of Captain B. J. Ewen, with whom
Marcum was talking when shot, disclosed that Tom White, one of the
conspirators, walked past Marcum glaring at him to attract his
attention. As he did so Curt in the rear of the hallway of the
courthouse fired the shots. Curt Jett's mother was a sister to Judge
Hargis, and Curt, though only twenty-four at the time, was a deputy
under Ed Callahan.
Nine years later on the morning of May 4, 1912, Ed Callahan, while
sitting in his store at Crockettsville, a village some twenty-five miles
from Jackson, the county seat, was killed. Callahan too was a marked man
and knew it. Connecting his house and the store he had built a stockade
to insure his safety as he passed from one to the other. There was a
telephone on the wall near the back window of the store and he had just
hung up the receiver after talking to a neighbor when two bullets in
quick succession whizzed through the window from somewhere across the
creek. One entered Callahan's breast, the other his thigh. Members of
his family rushed to his side and carried him, sheltered by the
stockade, to his home where he died.
The old law of Moses, "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" still
prevailed.
It is estimated that from 1902, when the Hargis-Cockrell feud started
over an election contest, to 1912, more than one hundred men had lost
their lives.
Like the feuds of Scotland, those of the southern mountains usually
found kin standing by kin, but sometimes they quarreled and killed each
other. In the Hargis-Cockrell feud, Marcum's sister was the wife of Alex
Hargis. Curt Jett's mother was a half-sister to Alex and Jim Hargis. His
father was a brother of the mother of the Cockrells, Tom and Jim. Yet
Curt was openly accused of killing Jim Cockrell. Dr. Cox, who was slain
early in the fray, was the guardian of young Tom Cockrell and Mrs. Cox
was a sister of the police judge of Jackson, T. P. Cardwell, Jr., who
was in office when he issued warrants for Marcum, Jim Hargis, and Ed
Callahan when they had quarreled in Pollard's law office at the time
depositions were being taken in the election contest.
Though Curt Jett, Mose Feltner, John Abner, and John Smith confessed to
the assassination of J. B. Marcum, saying Jim Hargis and Ed Callahan
planned the crime, Hargis and Callahan protested innocence. Even so
Marcum's widow got a judgment for $8000 against the two for killing her
husband. After John Smith confessed and was dismissed he turned bitterly
against Hargis and Callahan and their faction and was suspected of
attempting to assassinate Callahan a year before the deed was
accomplished.
Around the store of Judge James Hargis conversation turned often to the
troubles. If a woman came in to buy a can of baking powder she looked
stealthily about before gossiping with another. If a man entered to buy
a plug of tobacco or a poke of nails to mend a barn or fence, his swift
eye swept the faces of customers and loiterers and presently he'd sidle
off to one side and talk with some of his friends.
Young Beach Hargis, upon whom his father doted, heard this talk. He knew
of the feeling of the different ones connected with the trouble. It was
talked not only around the store but in the Hargis home. When the father
wasn't about Beach and his mother mulled it over. Beach never was a lad
to work. "Why should I?" he argued. "Pa's got plenty. And I aim to get
what's coming to me while the old man's living."
If the father protested that Beach was squandering too much money, the
mother shielded her son and wheedled Jim Hargis into giving him more.
"He's been pampered too much, Louellen," Judge Hargis often remonstrated
with his wife. "Should we spare the rod and spoil the child?" And
sometimes Evylee, Beach's sister, would plead with her father to forgive
Beach once again for drunkenness and waywardness. Evylee had been away
to school at Oxford University in Ohio near Cincinnati. She loved the
nice things of life, particularly learning. Judge Hargis was an
indulgent father. He wanted his children to have the best, both in
education and dress. He wanted his boy Beach to go through college. But
Beach had no fondness for book-learning or fine clothes.
"I've give up trying to do anything with him, Louellen," said Jim Hargis
to his wife one day when they were together in the sitting room of their
home. "Look yonder there he goes." He pointed a condemning finger at
Beach reeling drunk along the sidewalk.
"Don't fret, Pa," Mrs. Hargis pleaded with her husband. "He's young.
He'll mend his ways. Don't forsake him."
That was the day before the homicide.
Next day Beach was still drunk. He swaggered into the store, leered
about for his father, and not seeing him stumbled on past the racks
where the guns lay, past the shelves laden with cartridges and shells,
on into the rear room where coffins were lined in a somber row. Judge
Hargis kept a general store that carried in stock most anything you
could call for from baking soda and beeswax to plows, guns and coffins.
Beach didn't notice the black-covered coffins or the guns. He stumbled
along to a corner of the wareroom where he slumped on a keg of nails.
There he sat a while mumbling to himself. His eyes were bloodshot, his
face swollen from a fall or a fight. "The old man punched me in the
jaw," he kept repeating, "and I'll--I'll--"
Frightened clerks hurried past him in waiting upon customers. No one
tried to listen or understand. Beach kept on mumbling. After awhile he
staggered out again. Later that same day he went to a barber shop for a
shave and haircut. Suddenly he raised up from the chair and leering
toward the street muttered at a man passing, "I thought that was the old
man going yonder." It was not Judge Hargis, the barber assured Beach, so
the drunken fellow settled back in the chair and the barber proceeded to
lather his face.
Beach's sister, who was married to Dr. Hogg, often took her drunken
brother in.
"Evylee's got no right to harbor Beach," Judge Hargis complained to his
wife. "He's tore up our home and he will do the same for Evylee and her
husband and for Dr. Hogg's business too. He's a plum vagabond and
spoiled. And put on top of that whiskey, and a gun in his hand, the Lord
only knows what that boy will do."
Out of one scrape into another, in jail and out, Beach Hargis went his
way. The mother pleading with the father to forgive him and let him have
another chance. The sister pleaded with Beach to quit drinking and
carousing.
On the 17th day of February, 1908, Beach, still maudlin drunk, went
again into his father's store. He didn't look at the guns in the racks
this time. He glanced toward the wareroom where the black coffins stood
in a row on wooden horses. "I'm looking for the old man," he muttered to
a clerk. Then he reeled toward the counter and asked the clerk to give
him a pistol. The clerk refused, saying he could not take a pistol out
of stock, but added, "Your Pa's pistol is yonder in his desk drawer. You
can take that."
Beach helped himself.
In the meantime Judge Hargis had come into the store just as Beach, with
the pistol concealed in his shirt, went out.
In the drugstore of his brother-in-law, Dr. Hogg, Beach terrorized
customers and the proprietor by pointing his pistol around
promiscuously. He reeled out of the place without firing, however, and
went back to his father's store. Someone later said all he had been
drinking was a bottle of Brown's Bitters.
From where Judge Hargis stood in one part of the double storeroom he
could see Beach sitting cross-legged in a chair near the front door.
Beach spat on his shoe and slowly whetted his pocket knife, scowling
sullenly now and then in his father's direction. He clicked the blade of
his knife shut and slipped it into his pocket and sat with his arms
dangling at his sides, head slumped on his breast.