Days of Darkness (4 page)

Judge Lewis, instead of trying to arrange a truce, began writing letters to the newspapers and the governor, condemning the Howards for their “attack” on the courthouse and the killing of Will, and asking for troops to save the county from outlaws. Finally Mrs. Hezekiah Jennings, Will's mother, called on Mrs. Turner and asked her to help end the trouble. Will went with her to show that the effort was sincere, but again Mrs. Turner refused. Walking to the front porch, she pointed to the spot where Will had fallen, dying from Howard bullets. “You can't wipe out that blood,” she said. “Either the Turners will rule or the Howards, but not both.” Strong words from the matriarch of the clan that, according to Judge Lewis's letters to the governor, wanted only peace.

For a few weeks there was an uneasy calm, but it couldn't last. Wilse heard that Little George Turner was following him, so he began to follow Little George. It was only a matter of time until they found each other, near Sulphur Springs, on August 4, 1889. As usual, there were several versions of the encounter. According to J.K Bailey, in one of the endless stream of letters to the governor, “This morning George B. Turner, Jr., was travelin on foot up Catrons Creek some five miles from this place [Harlan] when Wilson Howard the murderer and fugitive from justice overtook him and shot him dead. Howard the murderer had been informed this morning that young Turner had passed up the road … he set out in pursuit … meeting one Fields riding a mule, Howard demanded the mule, which Fields
reluctant surrendered. On this mule Howard was able to overtake young Turner at a spring.”

Whatever the role of the mule, Wilse came upon George drinking from a spring and shot him. George rolled behind a large rock and shot Wilse. They emptied their guns at each other until Wilse noticed that George had stopped shooting. He himself was badly wounded in the thigh, but he had hit George four times, the last shot almost taking off the top of his head. Limping down to the road, Wilse stopped a preacher, took his horse (or perhaps a mule?), and rode to a cave where Bud Spurlock was hiding, and stayed there until his wound healed. Either Fields, who allegedly had been relieved of his mule, or the preacher, who had been robbed of his horse, walked into town and reported that Wilse had killed Little George. This did not seem to worry Wilse much, since it was obvious that he had shot George in a fair fight.

Any idea of a truce died with Little George, and September 1889 became the month of not-so-belles lettres. Everyone who could lay pen to paper began begging Governor Simon Buckner to send troops to Harlan County. John Bailey wrote a flowery, if not entirely grammatical, letter deploring the murder of Little George Turner. On September 6, attorney David Lyttle wrote to say that court could not safely be held as long as the Howards and Turners had the county divided between them, but emphasized that he was taking no sides, and blamed both for the trouble. On the same day Commonwealth's Attorney A.N. Clark seconded the call for troops, blaming the Howards. On September 7, attorney John Dishman wrote, saying that law officials were afraid to try to arrest Wilse, and that only troops could save the day. Between times, Lewis was firing off letters to both the newspapers and the governor. Then Judge Robert Boyd wrote, telling the governor that, in his opinion, both Turners and Howards were to blame for the trouble, that the county was fairly evenly divided between the two camps, but that he was not afraid to hold court, regardless of what Wilson Lewis said. But, he added, jurors and witnesses might feel safer if troops were around, and Governor Buckner agreed to send them in. Earlier in the summer, both sides had sent long petitions to the governor, one claiming hell would erupt if troops were not sent in, the other declaring that Lewis was behind the trouble and no troops were needed. One petition said that Lewis was “a weak, ignorant, vacilating man who has been bribed,” apparently by the Turners.

At any rate, on September 7, 1889, Buckner ordered the troops in but notified the people of Harlan that they were coming only to protect the court, not to intervene in the Howard-Turner trouble or relieve
the elected officials of their duty to enforce the law and keep the peace. This did not please Judge Lewis, who continued to beg the governor to have the troops clean out the Howards. Court was held, apparently without interruption.

But no sooner had the troops departed than, on the morning of October 11, 1889, John Cawood was shot and killed from ambush near his home a few miles east of Harlan, and Hezekiah Hall, who was walking with him, was also killed. A few miles up the road Hiram Cawood was shot a minute later and died the next day. Soon after that Stephen Cawood was fired at, a mile below John Cawood's farm, but escaped, rode into town and reported the killings, adding that he had seen Wilse Howard and Will Jennings in the neighborhood “with twenty outlaws.”

No one was arrested for the murders, but Wilson Lewis finally had a bloody shirt to wave. He redoubled his letter writing and implored Buckner to send back the troops. “After the murder of Cawood and Hall,” he wrote, “the remaining Cawoods and others fled to Harlan Courthouse for protection. Wilson Howard and Will Jennings organized a band of 25 armed desperadoes, left their stronghold on Martin's Fork, took possession of the home of E.M. Howard on Poor Fork and sent word to the good citizens of Harlan that they would do well to leave town, since the Howards were going to burn it down.” Apparently all Wilse had to do was threaten to burn the town and Lewis went into a major panic.

Buckner flatly refused, and he told Lewis that he had the power to drive the Howards out if the people wanted it done. He empowered Lewis to raise a posse comitatus of a hundred men if he felt unable to enforce the law with his usual forces. Lewis issued to Sheriff Moses Turner warrants for the arrest of Wilse Howard and Will Jennings for the Cawood murders, and sent out a call for a hundred men. (Harlan genealogist Holly Fee says Lewis raised sixty men; E.B. Allen, of Rockcastle County, says he raised only nine. A later letter from Wilse to the governor indicates that Allen was about right. If so, Lewis was foolhardy to attack the Howards in their stronghold with so few men.)

With whatever numbers, Lewis and his posse rode out to assault the Howards. Lewis called on the Howards to surrender. They declined, and a gunfight broke out that lasted for some minutes. The posse rode back to town, where Lewis fortified the courthouse in case of attack, and in yet another letter to the governor wrote: “We proceeded upon them in their stronghold; they refusing to surrender, were fired upon by our posse, we wounding eight, all making their escape with Howard and Jennings but three of the most serious
wounded. Howard and Jennings are now organizing over 100 desperadoes to get revenge.”

The letter doesn't make sense. If Wilse and Will had been unable to take three of their wounded men with them, why were the three not captured and jailed by Lewis? And if the Howards had been defeated and forced to “escape” so hurriedly that they could not rescue their wounded, why did Lewis rush back to town and fortify the courthouse against a feared attack? Other accounts say that out of Lewis's posse of nine, six were killed or wounded. A reliable account by Kentucky State Historian James Klotter says that the Lewis posse suffered three killed and three wounded. Wilse mentioned no losses, though in a later letter he mentioned that Bird Spurlock, a young boy, was injured when “they fired on us.”

Lewis renewed his plea for troops to capture the outlaws, and this time he added a request for the appointment of a new judge to take the place of Judge Boyd, asking for someone “who will be impartial and enforce the law”—in other words, someone who would convict Howards. This time the governor replied in tones that seem a little testy. Governors, he pointed out, had no authority to replace judges at will, and he added that Lewis had plenty of men “if the citizens really wanted to clean out law violators in your county.”

Whether or not he learned of the governor's cool response to Lewis, Wilse felt, with considerable justification, that they were up against a stacked deck.

“I'm tired of this,” he told Will. “If we don't kill them, they're going to kill us. If we do kill them, we'll get sent to the pen. Lewis can always kill us and say he is enforcing the law. I say maybe we ought to leave for a while and let things simmer down.”

“Leave for where?” asked Will.

“Go out West,” said Wilse. “I've always wanted to see that country.”

“That's an idea,” Will agreed, and the next day they announced that they were going to take a trip. When the Turners heard that they were leaving, some of them went down to Hiram Howard's to invite them to go along with Wilse and Will, but only Wilse's mother Alice was at home, and she met them with a rifle and told them to get off her property. (This part of the story sounds a lot like the earlier account of how the Turners incited Wilse's rage by telling Alice to quit selling whiskey to George, and “talking rough to her.”) When they left, Alice saddled a horse and rode through the rainy night to Ben Howard's, where Wilse and Will were spending the night. When Wilse heard of the Turner warning, he went into a rage. He and Hezekiah Jennings rode into Harlan (Will did not go, for some reason)
and at dawn the two of them attacked the Turner home, where sixteen members of the faction were having breakfast. That, at least, is the legend; it seems unlikely that they would have attacked the house alone, though Lewis later complained that Wilse “lay in ambush and killed Alexander Bailey.” Wilse testified at his final trial that he had killed John, not Alexander, Bailey and had done so by mistake; Will was sent to prison for killing John, though he had killed neither one.

The day after the attack, Wilse, Will, and two Hall boys (who were probably with them in the attack on the Turner home) started out for the home of Judge Middleton to surrender for the killing of either John or Alexander Bailey, neither of whom was dead. But before they could reach the Middleton home they were fired on from ambush. They ducked behind a log and returned the fire, when suddenly—and stupidly—Pearl Bailey stood up to get a better shot at them. Instead, he got a bullet in his head, killing him. So the four rode on toward Middleton's, this time to confess also to killing Pearl Bailey, who was actually dead. But the Hall brothers lost their nerve and refused to surrender, so Wilse rode up the path to the house alone. As he neared the house, the door opened and Little George Turner stepped out. Wilse thought he had a gun and fired at him, but he missed and hit John Bailey, who was standing beside George. This time he actually killed a Bailey, though he did not know at the time that he had killed John. Ironically, Will was in prison for killing John when Wilse confessed to his killing. Wilse was tried and acquitted of the murder of Pearl Bailey on the grounds of self-defense.

Few of the Harlan gunmen stayed in prison long, as Will and Wilse well knew. Indeed, few gunmen of any county did. One possible reason why feuding and other violence flourished in Kentucky around the turn of the century was the practice of pardoning killers. Beginning in 1889, 131 killers were pardoned in a decade. Governor John Y. Brown pardoned 51, W.O. Bradley, 58, and J.C.W. Beckham, 11. The average killer served only seven and half years.

At any rate, Wilse and Will figured it was a good time to see the West. They rode down to Pineville and caught a train heading in that general direction. They had a good time, traveling from St. Louis to Kansas, Colorado, and on to New Mexico. They apparently had a gunfight in Kansas in which seven Indians were killed, but they paid little attention to it, though Wilse did mention spending some time in what he described as a “sorry type” of jail. They had a more pleasurable time in some choice whorehouses. But then Wilse got into real trouble and was arrested and jailed for killing a deaf-mute in Missouri. He jumped bail and headed for home, arriving in March 1890. But,
unknown to him, a detective named Imboden was on his trail. Imboden later got in touch with George Turner, who promised to help him run Wilse to ground. Wilse's time was running out.

Still, he felt great relief at being home. He had hardly been home a week when he received word from Judge Lewis that it would be better if he stayed out of Harlan Town. That irked Wilse, who sent back word that he had just moved freely through fifteen states and as many big towns, and figured he would exercise similar freedom of movement in his home county. Furthermore, he added, if anyone interfered, he might just burn down the town. Lewis and the Turners, alarmed, armed for battle. Raising another posse, Lewis rode out to capture the Howards. The posse surrounded the Howard home and tried to set fire to it. A gunfight ensued. Lewis reported that a dozen Howards were in the house; Wilse later claimed that only he, Bud Spurlock, and John Howard were there. But Wilse charged out of the house, and he and John drove off the attackers, driving three of them into the river. George Hall was killed. Bob Craig shot Bud Spurlock but saw Wilse approaching and ran.

“I jumped on my horse and took a short path to cut him off,” Wilse wrote later, “but he went through the woods and I did not catch up with him until he was crossing a field. I yelled to him to stop; he dropped his gun and fell down, but when he got to his feet he pulled a pistol. I told him to throw down his pistol but when he would not I killed him. I shot at him four times, but I was on my horse running and did not hit him but two or three times.”

Two of Lewis's men were killed, five wounded. The posses limped back to Harlan. (Some historians think this attack has been confused with the previous one and say that only one attack on the Howard home actually occurred. The results were quite similar, though Wilse's role, and the number killed, are different.)

Now Governor Buckner received another letter, and an intriguing one, this from Wilse and Will Jennings, interesting not only for its contents but for its grammar and rather literary tone, in contrast to the scribblings of Lewis and others, and because it indicates that Wilse was feeling a measure of desperation. Parts of it follow.