Days of Darkness (26 page)

Like the Garrards, the Whites had rushed to the colors, but perhaps the most unusual volunteer was Boston Bob Baker, who, at sixty-three, joined the Union army and was said to be the man who, fighting in the command of T.T. Garrard, shot and killed General Zollicoffer at the Battle of Mill Springs. Alexander White also served with distinction and came home a colonel. What he thought of the proclamation freeing the slaves is not recorded, but it cost both families dearly.

As have returning veterans since Ulysses, they found conditions sharply changed. Union forces had come in during the war and blown up the wells to keep the salt out of Confederate hands. The Union officers assured the owners that they would be reimbursed for the loss, but they never were, though resolutions seeking repayment were several times introduced in Congress. Only four wells were in good enough condition to be restored. Furthermore, the discovery of salt domes farther west and on the Kanawha River sent prices plummeting,
and though the last Garrard furnaces were not abandoned until 1908, James and Daugherty White quit making salt in 1885. The foundations of the family wealth were shaken. Gradually, in the years following the war, fewer of the sons of the big families went off to college and came home to build the big homes. And the years between the war and the turn of the century saw more of them leaving the county for the Bluegrass, Ohio, or Indiana. The quality of life, for many members of the leading families and other Clay Countians, seemed to be eroding.

Some hostility remained from the war as Rebels and Yankees came home, but most of the Garrards, Whites, Bakers, and Howards had fought for the Union, reducing the grounds for conflict. Locally, the balance of power seems to have swung toward the Whites, who were taking more active roles in local elections than the Garrards, who more often concentrated on state or national office. Perhaps they concluded that, considering the Republican majority in the county, the Garrards had to concede courthouse supremacy to the Whites and Howards.

In any event, 1866 found Beverly White as county judge, John Ed White as commissioner of schools, and Will White as county court clerk. This was significant. State and federal offices held some prestige, but it was the sheriff, not the senator, who could arrest or fail to arrest a man in trouble. It was the tax assessor who could help a friend by lowering the assessment of his property, or hurt an enemy by levying a heavy tax on him.

In the first postwar years, it seemed for a while that hostilities had cooled, but then violence erupted. An argument broke out in the courthouse doorway between Sheriff John G. White and Jack Hacker. White accused Hacker of plotting the escape of two of his friends from the county jail and threatened him. Dale Lyttle joined Hacker to protest White's bullying. White was quickly joined by his brother Will and his cousin Daugh. The argument became loud and abusive, someone pulled a pistol, and Hacker and Lyttle fell dead in the doorway. The Whites were arrested, tried, and acquitted in short order. The Garrard-Baker clan was furious; Lyttle was a kinsman of the Bakers; Tom Baker had married Emily Lyttle.

John Ed White, now in his fifties, added a bizarre chapter to the county's record for violence when he got into a “difficulty” with George Stivers and threatened to kill him. Stivers was afraid that John Ed, with the protection of his family, would carry out the threat and fled to the home of a friend in Rockcastle County. John Ed, in company with his son Dillon and a man named Chestnut, went looking for him.

On the way to Rockcastle County they met seventy-five-year-old William “Booger” Benge and asked if he had seen Stivers. Benge said he had not and tried to joke about the situation, but John Ed was not in a joking mood and threatened to shoot him. Chestnut intervened, saying that John Ed should be ashamed to threaten an old man who had done him no harm. This so angered John Ed that he shot and killed Chestnut, as Benge looked on, horrified. John Ed later came across Stivers in Anse Baker's saloon in Manchester, and they had a drink and settled their differences, a little late for Chestnut. But some months later the two had another argument, and Stivers shot John Ed in the leg. It crippled him. Many wished it had killed him.

A Legacy of Violence

The years following the end of the Civil War were, not surprisingly, a time of violence in Clay County; it was a bloody time throughout Kentucky. Other states had debated the matter of slavery and had gone either free or slave. Kentucky had fought over the question for fifty years and finally tried to go both ways, tearing itself in two. The division and bitterness outlived the war.

In the end Kentucky stuck with the Union and sent almost three times as many men to the North as to the South. But the postwar conduct of federal military commanders, who tended to treat all Kentuckians as though they had been in rebellion, outraged people. Many who had stayed loyal to the Union now became hotly pro-Southern, leading one historian to declare that Kentucky was the only state in history to join the loser after the loss. So deep was the resentment against federal orders and officers that Democrats became overnight the majority party, and it would be thirty years before a Republican could be elected governor.

Returning Rebel and Yankee soldiers clashed. Duels were fought, homes burned. Freed slaves found themselves at loose ends, with no food, no money, and no place to live unless they were permitted to stay with their former owners, many of whom despised them or hated them for their role in bringing about the ruinous war. Patrollers, Regulators, Night Riders, and vigilantes terrorized the countryside by night, driving blacks across county lines, burning their homes, lynching those who resisted, and threatening to kill any whites who tried to help them. Blacks accused of crimes against whites were routinely hanged, usually without trial. Eighty blacks were reported killed in the Frankfort area in a single year. Near Frankfort a gang held up a train and tried to kidnap the black mail clerk for holding a job that a white man wanted. At one time the U.S. postmaster general refused to send mail into Kentucky unless provisions were made to protect black employees.

The near chaos presented an ideal atmosphere in which to settle
old scores, real or imagined, and in Clay County, as in other parts of the state, lawmen were often hard put to keep the peace. Most of the freed slaves attached themselves casually to their former masters, found menial jobs in town, or left for Louisville or Cincinnati. And the fact that most of the feudists had fought for the Union helped to keep the feud fires banked. But not for long.

Some deaths were attributed to the “wars” or feuds, but there is no solid evidence of this except that the fighting usually involved the Philpots, who sided with the Garrard-Baker clan, and the Griffins and Benges, who sided with the Whites and Howards. Some of the Philpots had fought for the South, which may have sparked conflict.

The departure of the slaves at the same time the salt business was declining dealt a heavy blow to the Garrards and Whites. Without the salt wells, they had no means of maintaining their growing families at the level of comfort to which they had grown accustomed. The old order was changing, and with the change a measure of frustration probably developed. The Reverend John Jay Dickey, the circuit-riding Methodist minister who arrived in Clay County in 1887, wrote often in his diaries of the lack of respect for law and the excessive drinking on the part of both families and among their followers.

But as the demand for salt declined, the need for lumber increased as America struggled to rebuild or repair the damages of the war. This was a break for the Howards and Bakers, who owned large tracts of timber on the hills above Crane and Sexton Creeks. Ironically, it was Boston Bob Baker who had sold to the Howards the land adjoining the Baker property from which they were taking a rich timber harvest. And, as in so many cases in Eastern Kentucky, it was the boundary lines between these pieces of property that created trouble.

From the end of the war until the late 1880s, relations between the Bakers and Howards were calm, if chilly. The Bakers had been Democrats from the beginning, supporting the Garrards in elections, and were generally considered allied with them since the Garrards had helped to defend Abner Baker in his murder trial. The Howards were just as closely allied with the Republican Whites. But for a time Tom Baker hauled logs to the mouth of Crane Creek for Israel Howard and was in a loose partnership with Bal Howard rafting logs down the Kentucky to sawmills at Beattyville or Frankfort.

At first this logging was considered mainly a winter sideline, something to do during slack months on the farm, but as demand grew and prices rose it became a main occupation, and a hard one. Usually a crew of three or four men manned a raft, one steering with a long sweep oar in the stern, another fending off obstacles and helping
to steer with a smaller sweep on the bow. It took between eight and ten days to float a raft from Crane Creek to Frankfort, and a lot of men lost their rafts or drowned along the way. If the crew tied up to the bank at night to get a hot meal and a dry bed, they often found next morning that timber thieves had taken their raft or broken it up and stolen some of the logs.

Once the loggers sold their raft they could treat themselves to a hot meal at one of the Frankfort boardinghouses or some relaxing whiskey at one of the riverside “blind tigers.” But this often led to fights or shootings and the loss of raft money. Most loggers pocketed their money, bought whatever they had promised their families, and began the long walk back home, a trip that took the better part of a week. Later they would ride the L&N (Louisville and Nashville Railway) to London and make the twenty-five-mile walk to Clay County. The roads were still primitive, one more factor in the sour mood that gripped the county as the 1880s began.

There were constant reports of gunfights between the Philpots and Griffins. There had been a fight between some of the younger Bakers and two Hall brothers. John Hensley killed John DeZarn and was himself killed by Sammie Howard; in court, Sammie admitted the killing but explained that he hadn't meant to, and was excused. Accidents will happen.

James Anderson Burns, one of the more colorful mountain characters of the time, returned to Clay County in 1882 after growing up in West Virginia, where his family had moved to get away from the feud violence (or so Burns wrote). A tall, dark-haired, craggy-featured man with the booming drawl of a revival preacher, Burns was something of a self-made legend who skirted around the edges of the feuds until 1899, when he claimed to get a message from God and founded the Oneida Baptist Institute, which still flourishes in the village of Oneida.

According to Burns's memoirs, the feuds had prompted his family's move to West Virginia, but as he grew to manhood he was seized with an urge to return, and upon the death of his father, who had forbidden it, back he went to Clay County. He found that things had not mellowed. The following account of his first days back in Clay County was probably embellished a bit—Burns liked to make a good story better—but there are reasons to believe the basic account:

I shall never forget the first feud battle I witnessed. It was election day. The feud leaders were extremely busy, keeping angry men apart, keeping them from discussing politics or drinking whiskey. Two small crowds of vengeful men were crossing the road in opposite directions, and about thirty feet
apart. A lad, about sixteen, in one of the groups suddenly pulled a pistol and fired a shot into the ground. Instantly there was a flash of weapons, a deafening roar, and three men lay lifeless on the ground, while several more were wounded. The lad had caught sight of the man who, years before, had slain his father. He fired the shot into the ground as a challenge to battle. He was seeking an opportunity to fire that other shot for which he had been training all his life. His opportunity came and he fired the shot with deadly precision. An old score was wiped out, but many new scores took its place. A feud was resumed which raged for years and in which a hundred fifty men lost their lives.

The idea that a feudist would warn an opponent with a shot into the ground is unusual. As James Watt Raine wrote, “The mountaineer sees nothing wrong in shooting from ambush, and believes there is no sense in hesitating to ambush a man who will shoot you in the back.” But there is reason to believe that this incident did take place. It probably involved young John Baker. The record shows that in 1886, when he was only ten, John saw his father, Garrard Baker, shot and killed by a man named Wilson at the Coldiron store near Collins Fork. At the time, John swore he would avenge his father's death, and this story indicates that he did just that. Not only did he kill Wilson, but the home of Wilson's widow was later burned and she felt obliged to leave the county. Both John and Bad Tom Baker were suspected but not arrested.

John grew to be a violent man. When James Howard was being hunted by the Bakers, he wrote that “every time I made the trip [to see his father, wounded by the Bakers] bullets were poured at me from the woods. Only once did I get a sight of my assailants, when John Baker fired at me from behind a log.” Later, John, in turn, was shot and killed.

Shortly after the election-day shooting described by Burns, Anse Baker, who ran a saloon in Manchester, was charged with killing a man named Davis but was not convicted. There was a fight at Pigeon Roost between the Philpots and the Griffins that lasted most of an afternoon and resulted in the death of three men and a horse. Again, there were no arrests.

Yet during these years Burns was establishing schools on Rader Creek and later on Crane, and he was doing it with the help of Thomas (Bad Tom) Baker, who was not only feared as a gunman but respected as a school trustee who was eager to bring better education to Clay County.

Setting up a school on Rader Creek was not just readin', ritin' and ‘rithmetic. Burns learned during his first week on the job that he was going to have to show that he could whip any boy in his school as
well as some of their parents before he could expect any kind of discipline, and some of his boys were in their twenties and as big as he was. He further found that some of the neighborhood cut-ups liked to ride past the school and fire off a few rounds.