A brief review of the history of Kentuckians may assist the reader to
understand why they, a kind, hospitable people to the stranger, have
so long borne the reputation of ready fighters who often kill upon the
slightest provocation, and deserve that reputation in a large measure.
It is "bred in the bone" for a Kentuckian to quickly resent an insult
or redress an injury.
Long before the advent of the white man Kentucky, then Fincastle
County, Virginia, had been the vast hunting grounds of the Cherokees,
Creeks, Chickasaws and Catawbas of the South, and of the more hostile
tribes of Shawnees, Delawares and Wyandots of the North. These tribes,
when chance brought them together on their annual hunts, engaged in
conflicts so instant, so fierce and pitiless that the territory became
known as the Dark and Bloody Ground.
It was indeed a hunter's paradise. Dense forests covered the mountains.
Cane brakes fringed the banks of numerous beautiful streams, while to
the west lay immense undulating plains. Forest, cane brake and plain
were literally alive with bear, deer and the buffalo; the woods teemed
with innumerable squirrels, pheasants, wild turkeys and quail.
The fame of this hunting ground had attracted bold and adventurous
hunters long before Daniel Boone looked upon one of the most beautiful
regions in the world from the crest of Cumberland Mountain.
These hunters, upon their return home, gave glowing accounts of the
richness and fertility of the new country, and excited powerfully the
curiosity and imagination of the frontier backwoodsmen east of the
Alleghenies and of North Carolina.
To the hardy adventurers the lonely wilderness, with its many dangers,
presented attractions not to be found in the confinement and enfeebling
inactivities of the towns and little settlements. Daniel Boone visited
the new territory. He found that the descriptions he had received of
it were by no means exaggerations, and decided to remove thither with
his family. After some delay amid many difficulties the first white
settlement, Harrodstown (Harrodsburg) was established. Within a few
years other stations sprang into existence and population increased
with amazing rapidity. Immigrants crossing the Cumberland mountains
settled in the eastern and central parts of Kentucky, while those
traveling down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, generally located in
the northern, western and southern portions of the state.
This invasion by the white man was not accomplished, however, without
long-continued, bloody struggles with the savages. To maintain the
slender foothold Boone and his companions had gained, required great
courage and tenacity of purpose.
The man who shivered at the winter's blast, or trembled at every
noise, the origin of which he did not understand, was not known among
those hardy settlers with nerves of iron and sinews of steel, who were
accustomed from earliest childhood to absolute self-dependence and
inured to exposure and dangers of every sort.[1] Man in this connection
must include the pioneer women who by their heroism illustrated their
utter contempt of danger, and an insensibility to terrors which would
palsy the nerves of men reared in the peaceful security of densely
populated communities. Even children of tender years exhibited a
courage and self-composure under trying circumstances that at this day
seem unbelievable.
The life of the Kentucky pioneer and backwoodsman was one of long and
bitter struggle. Hunting, clearing the forest, plowing and fighting
were his daily occupations. Every "station" had its conflicts with
the savages who fought with relentless desperation when they found
themselves gradually but surely driven from their beloved hunting
grounds.
These armed hunters and farmers were their own soldiers. They built
their own forts, they did their fighting under commanders they had
themselves chosen. They fought the foe in his own style, adopted his
mode of warfare, and proved generally more successful than bodies of
troops who battled under time-honored military tactics.
The Indian understood the advantage of cover, and the white man copied
his methods. Thus most of the Indian fights became nothing more nor
less than ambuscades in which the side displaying the most skill in
placing them, won the victory. Boone, Kenton, Brady, Wetzel--all that
galaxy of pioneers and Indian fighters of the early West fought the
enemy from ambush.
There were few courts, and the justices presiding over them knew
but little law. If the law proved too slow, or courts were too far
away, the settlers tried criminals and inflicted the punishment. The
backwoodsman was prompt to avenge a wrong. He was grim, stern, strong,
easily swayed by stormy passions, and always a lover of freedom, to the
core. He had suffered horrible injuries from the Indians and learned
to retaliate in kind. He became cruel and relentless toward an enemy,
but was loyal to the death to his friends and country. He was upright
and honest. These pioneers were indeed cast in the heroic mold. Many
of them fell in the struggle; but there was no time for sentiment and
wailing. Over the prostrate bodies of the fallen civilization marched
triumphantly westward and gave to America one of the most attractive
regions, to the nation heroic soldiers, brilliant lawyers, men of
science and of art, and a womanhood whose beauty and accomplishments
are a byword everywhere.
With the close of Indian hostilities came rapid development of the more
easily accessible portions of the state. Intercourse with the East
and North obliterated old habits and customs and primitive notions.
The fertility of the soil created wealth and with it came comfort.
With increasing prosperity came that high intellectual development
so essential to a sound, moral public sentiment, respect for the
law, and love of peace and order, the foundation stones of a happy
social structure. Schools and churches demonstrated their all-powerful
influence by the refinement and social purity of the inhabitants. The
_code duello_ which had formerly been resorted to almost universally in
settling personal differences, was made a crime by law and completely
disappeared.
In the mountains, however, development was slow. That section remained
isolated and practically cut off from intercourse with the more
populous and advanced portions of Kentucky and surrounding States.
Only in recent years have railroads begun to spread their iron network
through the mountains, tapping the almost inexhaustible coal veins,
mineral deposits of various kinds, wonderful forests of timber, until
now that section is become the richest in the State.
Education and refinement distinguished the Blue Grass Kentuckian at an
early date; he had long enjoyed the advantages of modern civilization,
while his mountaineer brother yet lived in the primitive fashion of
his forebears, and still remained a backwoodsman. He suffered the same
privations and possessed the traits of character of the early pioneers
of the Blue Grass.
For long years the mountain section remained a wilderness, with here
and there a small settlement. The inhabitants lived the lives of
frontiersmen and were generally poor. While many of them owned large
tracts of land, its productiveness scarcely repaid the labor spent in
cultivation. The great majority of these people were honest, upright
and hardworking, but the wilderness, the frontier, unfortunately
attracts the vicious, the violent, the criminal, the shiftless, the
outcast of better communities. Such characters have a pernicious
influence upon those with whom they come in contact, especially upon
the young and thoughtless fellows with a taste for viciousness.[2] The
mountains of the surrounding states of Virginia, West Virginia and
Tennessee offered admirable asylum to fugitives from justice of those
States. As like seeks like, individuals and families of that stripe
settled near each other, intermarried, and thus formed a dangerous
element in an otherwise good population.
Life in the wilderness, the frontier, is apt to bring out the true
nature of the man, and his qualities, good or bad, are accentuated.
The history of every frontier of this country is the same. The man who
leaves the restraining influence of civilization behind him, becomes
either _man_ or devil. If there is "dog-hair" in a man, the wilderness,
the frontier, will sprout it.
When the wicked element in a community had once gained a foothold,
it organized against possible interference. Once organization was
complete, all attempts to enforce law and order were promptly stifled
through terrorization which intimidated courts and overawed the
officers of the law. Under such circumstances the good element has but
one alternative--to lie supinely on its back and ask to be killed, or
to organize and strike back at the enemy, to destroy the vicious with
powder and shot, in open fight, if possible, from ambush if necessary,
as their sires fought in the days of the Indian. Herein lies the secret
of the long-continued, bloody internecine strifes which have made the
dark and bloody ground of the Indian days more dark and more bloody.
Herein we find the ready and clear explanation of the fact that many
men of unquestioned integrity and honor were thrown into the vortex of
bloody strife from necessity, to fight for preservation of themselves,
their families, their firesides.
Immigration into these remote mountain regions was almost nil and
intermarriage between the settlers became the rule. In this wise the
population of any county comprised but very few distinct families.
Everybody was of kin to everybody else, and therein we find the key to
the difficulties encountered by courts in dealing with crime.
The murderer, if a member of a prominent family, was certain to have
kinsmen among the officers. (We may as well use the present tense in
speaking of this, for the same conditions exist to-day, though less
pronounced.) His "family," man, woman and child, stand by him, aid his
escape or his defence in the court house. If the criminal, conscious of
the supporting influence surrounding him, disdains flight and boldly
faces trial, the next move is to secure a jury which will acquit him.
It often happens that those interested in the prosecution secretly come
to an agreement with the accused and his friends to cease prosecution
provided he and his in their turn would do the same to them in cases of
their own. It is merely a case of "you scratch my back and I'll scratch
yours." Citizens who love peace are loath to antagonize an outlaw clan
so long as they or theirs are not directly concerned. They have no
desire to assist officers in doing their duty, should these wish to do
it. To indict men for crime is often a risky thing.
The criminal who has succeeded in defeating justice grows more bold,
continues to pursue his career with an enhanced contempt of the law,
until, at last, the cup runs over, and men, good and true, rise above
self, and for country's and humanity's sake take upon themselves the
task of restoring peace and order, and summarily cut short the life
cycle of the outlaw.
How far such organized bands of murderers have succeeded in overawing
the constituted authorities, is illustrated by instances recorded in
this volume, where the law, the government itself, actually compromised
with the outlaws, promised, yea, granted them immunity from past
crimes, only exacting a pledge of better behavior in the future. If a
man had committed but one little murder, he was in some danger of a
short term in the penitentiary. If he understood his business, instead
of stopping at one assassination, he simply continued his murder
mill in operation and the authorities would send special ministers
and envoys to "treat" with him as a power entitled to respect.
Exaggeration? No![3]
Officers of the law have actually aided in assassinations, or stood
idly by while murders were committed in their presence. Investigation
has proven that in every feud-ridden section the entire legal machinery
was rotten to the core, perverted to the end and purpose of protecting
particular men and of punishing their enemies. Is it any wonder, then,
that in such times and under such conditions preaching respect for law
is breath wasted?
Sifting the matter down, we find that the chief contributing causes
of these feudal troubles, wherever they have occurred, or may again
occur, are due directly:--to inefficient, corrupt and depraved
officials; to a want of a healthy moral public sentiment, through
lack of _proper_ education and religious training; to the fact that
the law-abiding element of the feud-ridden counties had so long
been domineered over by the criminal class and their parasites and
supporters in secret, that they are incapable of rendering any valuable
assistance in maintaining the law save in few exceptions, and these few
so much in the minority that a reformation is not to be hoped for if
left to their own resources; that during all the social chaos attending
feudal wars the promiscuous, unrestrained and illegal sale of whiskey
added fury, fire and venom to the minds and hearts of murderers. It
dragged into the terrible vortex of bloody crime many not directly
connected with the feud, but who took advantage of the disturbed
social conditions, the state of anarchy, to satisfy their own vicious
propensities without fear of interruption and punishment.[4]
The clannishness of the mountaineer has been the subject of much
comment. The student of sociology must, therefore, be interested in
learning that in a great measure the people of the Kentucky mountains
descended from the same stock that formed the noted Scottish clans
of old. One need only run over the names of the principal mountain
families to recognize their Scot origin. The Scots love the highlands,
and to the "highlands" of Kentucky many of them drifted. Scotland had
her feuds--those of the Kentucky mountains are nothing more nor less
than transplanted Scottish feuds, their continuation having been made
possible by the reasons heretofore given.
We believe it germane to the matter under discussion to add that not
only feuds, but mobs and the like, are, and ever have been, the direct
outgrowth of a lack of confidence of the people in their courts. The
shameful nightrider outrages in the western part of Kentucky a few
years ago, in a section which had boasted of a civilization superior by
far to that of the mountaineers, where schools and churches are to be
met with at every corner, were the outcome, so it is claimed, of the
failure of the law to deal sternly with the lawless tobacco trust, the
"original wrongdoer" in the noted tobacco war. If this were true, if
this justified the destruction by incendiaries of millions of dollars'
worth of property, brutal whippings, the indiscriminate slaughter of
entire families without regard to age or sex, the butchery of little
children (for aiding the tobacco trust, no doubt) then, indeed, is the
mountaineer feudist also innocent of wrongdoing; more so, for he, at
least, never made war upon suckling infants, nor have women suffered
harm, except in one or two instances. Nor is the cultured Blue Grass
citizen free to censure him, when he calls to mind the outrages of the
toll-gate raids, or takes into account the numerous lynching bees,
proceedings from which the mountains have always been practically free.
In view of all this we cannot go far from wrong when we say that the
law's delay, the failure to punish promptly, impartially and severely
its infractions, must shoulder the responsibility for all social
disturbances, and this is true in New York, in the West, as well as in
Kentucky.