Days of Darkness (5 page)

My Dear Sir:

We see from some of the Louisville papers that you have been asked to send troops up here in the mountains to capture us, and that the papers are full of slush about us being desperadoes, outlaws and thieves, murderers, cutthroats and God knows what else. In justice to ourselves and to the thousands of friends in Harlan and the surrounding counties, we cannot afford to let such outrageous falsehoods go unnoticed.

We will not pretend to give you a detailed account of the feud in this
county … but it began as far back as the war. There was a crowd of people in this town who wanted to be supreme rulers … and when any stranger would come to town … they did not like, they would try to run him off or have him killed, and did send many innocent men to their eternal home. [We were] selected by some unknown power to resist their attacks and became involved in the feud … and must bear the hardships we now bear, and must sneak around at night “like a galley slave, scourged to his dungeon.”

We are as anxious to give up and stand trial as men can be, but that would be like committing suicide, as old Judge Lewis and his crowd of bushwhackers of the “Law and Order” party say that if they get us in jail they intend to burn the jail and we know they will do it. We will give bail in the amount of $75,000 and … can get ¾ of the people in Harlan County to go on our bond. If we did give bond we would have to stay hid and would have somebody to fight all the time … they would try to kill us just as hard then as now…. One man can arrest both of us if we are guaranteed protection, but we will never give up to Judge Lewis and his bushwhackers … this is the kind of Law and Order Party the devil has presiding in Hell.

No one has ever asked us to surrender, and no attempt was ever made to arrest us, but on occasion they have come and fired on us, as they did this time, and then we would fight, and usually whip the hell out of them. Judge Lewis and his crowd slipped up to about 20 yards of where we were and fired on us, hitting one innocent boy by the name of Bird Spurlock, and then fled. Wilson Howard was the only one that fought them, and he whipped the entire ten bushwhackers [This would indicate that Lewis had a posse of only nine men, as E.B. Allen stated]. If there had been one man in the party with the least bit of bravery or manhood he could have killed Howard, as he stood out open and sent the lead sailing into them as they ran like the cowardly curs they are.

With reference to the people in this section, they are quite law-abiding people, are never molesting anyone. As there is a just God … they will have to answer for the unjust assault made on these people, whose only fault is they let us stay amongst them.

As to the charges they lay to us in Missouri, we desire to say that if your excellency will pardon us for the indictments in Harlan County against us we assure you that we will come as fast as the first train can carry us. Judging from the papers, you may imagine that we have 40 or fifty men with us. This is not so. We are alone, living as best we can. About three weeks ago Mr. Sam Kash, of Clay County, the deputy collector for this district, was up here on business and … he saw the majority of people in this county and … if you refer to him to tell you the sentiment of the people on this feud trouble. In closing we beg your excellency to consider and inquire well into this matter, and you will soon find where the blame lies.

Yours to command,

Will Jennings,

Wilson R. Howard

The Trap that Didn't Spring

Wilson Lewis should have felt fairly secure. The Turners owned much of Harlan Town, the county seat. Lewis was county judge, Mose Turner was sheriff. Furthermore, Lewis knew, though Wilse Howard did not, that the detective Imboden, who was trailing Wilse for the murder of the deaf-mute in Missouri, was closing in. Yet all Wilse Howard had to do was send word that he was going to burn down the town and Lewis fired off another letter to Governor Buckner, pleading for the protection of troops. Apparently Buckner finally got tired of the routine and on March 17, 1890, sent a company of militia under Captain Gaither of Harrodsburg and, to show his concern, sent General Sam Hill to report on the situation.

Lewis was delighted, but his joy was short-lived. General Hill interviewed as many people as he could persuade to talk and sent word to Wilse and Hezekiah Jennings that he wanted to see them. (Why he asked to meet with Hezekiah Jennings instead of Will is hard to understand. Perhaps it was because Hezekiah was older and had no charges against him.) At any rate, they met, “twelve miles out in the mountains,” according to the
Courier-Journal
story from “Harlan Courthouse,” which also reported the escape of three moonshiners and one murderer from the jail. “The jail,” added the report, “is not as secure as it might be.”

General Hill told Wilse that he had not come to Harlan to assess guilt but to find ways to bring about peace. He said he had read Lewis's letters to the newspapers and to the governor but had also talked to a lot of people in Harlan, many of whom had spoken well of the Howards. He was convinced, he said, that there was blame on both sides, and he urged Wilse to get the Howards and their allies to lay down their arms.

“General,” Wilse said coldly, “if I put down my guns before Lewis and his bunch do, I'll be dead by night. I guess we're all sick of this; if you get the other side to put down their guns, we'll put down ours. But we want Lewis to enforce the law the same for all, not one
kind for us, another for the Turners. If he'll do that, we'll keep the peace. Not till then. I'd rather be in prison for killing them than in the graveyard for them killing me.”

General Hill agreed to talk with Lewis and later told Wilse that the Turners had assured him they would use their influence to see that everyone, Lewis included, kept the peace. Wilse promised him that the Howards would not be the first to break the truce, and the militia turned south for the trip down the valley to Pineville, where they caught the train for Frankfort.

Several weeks later, Wilse and Will hatched a plot that they thought would put an end to the Lewis threat. Will rode through the county and brought about twenty Howard sympathizers to Bud Spur-lock's cave, where Wilse explained his plan to station them in an ambush on either side of the road through the narrow gap to Hagan, Virginia. Wilse then wrote a letter to Wilson Lewis, which he signed with the name of the county judge of Rogersville, Tennessee. According to the letter, the judge had in his jail two men, one claiming to be Wilson Howard of Harlan, Kentucky, whom he was holding awaiting identification. Lewis, wildly excited, quickly raised a posse and prepared to go to Rogersville and bring home their prize.

But old George Turner was not fooled. “We don't know who wrote this,” he said. “Wilse Howard could have done it himself. You ride out there through Hagan Gap and they could cut you down like cornstalks.” He advised Lewis instead to send a rider on a fast horse to Rogersville, but by way of Pineville, to the south, avoiding Hagan Gap. As he suspected, the county judge at Rogersville had no knowledge of the purported prisoners, the rider rode back with the revelation, and the Howard trap was never sprung.

Will and Wilse sensed that their luck was running out. Wilse rode into Harlan that night and told his mother goodbye, and once more he and Will headed West. This time, for some reason, they went separate ways. Will went to Missouri, where he was arrested, sent home, and imprisoned for killing John Bailey. Wilse, who was wanted in Missouri for killing the deaf-mute, said that he had always wanted to see California, and now he fulfilled his dream.

But apparently Wilse was running out of money, for in California he was arrested in June 1893 for robbing a Wells Fargo stagecoach and was tried and sent to prison. He was traveling under the name of Brown when arrested, and it is possible that he got himself imprisoned as Brown as a way of dropping out of sight and avoiding trial for the deaf-mute murder. It is also possible that by this time he had been warned that Imboden was on his trail. If that was his strategy,
it didn't work. Someone in prison spotted him from a Wanted poster, Imboden came to the prison and identified him, and Wilse was taken back to Missouri to stand trial for killing the deaf-mute, a man named McMichaels.

As he surrendered to the sheriff who took him back to Missouri, he said, “I am Wilse Howard, of Kentucky, the man you are looking for.” On the stand he recited without emotion the names of the men he had killed during the feud—Bob Craig, Will Turner, George Turner, George Hall, and John Bailey. He made no mention of the killings of the Cawoods and Hezekiah Hall, and to the end he maintained his innocence of the killing of the deaf-mute.

Throughout his trial and conviction, Wilse remained composed. Alice Howard and Rebecca, Wilse's sister, made the trip to St. Louis to be with him during his trial. Like Wilse, they received the jury's verdict of guilty, and the sentence of death by hanging, with a dignity mentioned in the St. Louis newspapers.

At his trial, the courtroom was packed and St. Louis papers carried detailed stories about the famous Kentucky mountain feudist. Wilse was surrounded by reporters, who took down every word he spoke as if it were of huge importance. Wherever the train stopped on his last journey, crowds thronged the platform, hoping for a view of the desperado, a title that amused Wilse but angered his mother and Rebecca.

Both women showed their usual composure until the last morning, when Wilse was taken, heavily shackled, to the train. The accompanying sheriff permitted Alice and Rebecca a final few minutes with their son and brother, and it was then that Alice finally broke down, sobbing and clinging to Wilse as he tried to console her. The sheriff eventually had to pull her away. Rebecca tried to smile, embraced Wilse, and patted him affectionately on the back. “I won't say goodbye, brother. I'll see you soon in a better world.”

On the train taking him to Lebanon, Missouri, where he was to be hanged, Wilse met Imboden for the first time, looked at him coldly, but then relented and shook hands, saying he bore him no ill will. In his jail cell he showed his cellmates a knife he had hidden under his belt with which to stab Imboden, but he said that at the last moment he felt no desire to kill him.

On his last evening, Wilse sipped a glass of port to steady his nerves but told a reporter, “Let me tell you something: I am not going to die game. I don't believe in this business of bravado. But I will die like a man, and an innocent man. So, now, goodbye.”

On the gallows on the morning of August 4, 1894, Wilse, asked if
he had anything to say, said, “Only that I hope to meet you all in heaven.”

Back in Harlan, the hatreds that had fueled the feud eventually cooled if they never actually burned out. Life returned to something approaching normal. The Howards were eager to forget the feud. In the 1910 Harlan
Business Directory,
four doctors were listed in the town—a Howard, a Cawood, a Martin, and G. Pearl Bailey. Listed as teachers in the public school were a Howard, a Turner, and two Ca-woods. A Hall and two Howards were listed as engineers, and there were two Turners, three Howards, and a Hall among the lawyers. A haircut could be had from John Hall or from Daniel or Elijah Howard. In 1915 Dr. W.P. Cawood and Dr. E.M. Howard built a two-story building on the corner of Second and Mound Streets now known as the Smith-Howard Building.

A century after the Turner-Howard feud ended, few of the old resentments remained. Life had taken its course. Turners, Howards, Halls, and Lewises had intermarried. Except for genealogist Holly Fee, it is hard to find anyone who remembers who Devil Jim Turner was. Or Wilse Howard, for that matter.

Not that the feud did not exact a price. Like the other Eastern Kentucky feuds, it left an image, a reputation for violence, and the nickname “Bloody Harlan” that today is undeserved. In fact, it is a very hospitable town to visit.

BREATHITT COUNTY

A Talent for Violence

Almost a Romantic Journey

In the summer of 1780, while the Revolutionary War still raged along the American seaboard, a group of young Virginians walked and rode down the Shenandoah Valley, through southwest Virginia and the Pound Gap in the Cumberland Mountains into the wilderness of Kentucky. Though they were very serious in their search for a new life beyond the mountains, free of the strife between the restless colonists and the British crown, their journey had about it almost the air of a lark. They were very young—none was over twenty—and there was something youthful and romantic about their idealistic journey. Some had recently taken formal marriage vows, some had simply decided to set off together toward a new life in the mysterious, fabled territory of Kentucky.

Most were of the good English yeoman stock common on the frontier, with few possessions besides the skill of their hands, a few tools, and a blessed ignorance of the toils that lay ahead. Their surnames would be among those living in the mountains two centuries later: Nathan and Virginia (Neace) Noble; William and Enoch (strange name for a girl) Noble; Austin and Melinda (Allen) Neace; Henry Neace. Most were close kin. Others with them or following close behind bore other names still familiar in and around the region where they settled: Haddix, Combs, Hurst, Bach, Turner, Strong, Watts, Reynolds.

They were not the first white people to view what became Breathitt County. John Finley had crossed the Kentucky River near what is now Jackson in 1752. Christopher Gist, the Virginia surveyor, soldier, and scholar who later served as a guide for the young George Washington, came about the same time, probably in 1751. Washington himself may have come through the Pound Gap, though the indications are that they stopped north and east of that point.

Through the gap and what are now Letcher and Perry Counties they trudged, finally deciding, late in the summer, to settle along Lost Creek, Quicksand, and Frozen Creek. A group of them made a
home that first winter in a rock house, a shallow cave actually, above Lost Creek, walling off the front with logs, building a fireplace—a remarkably dry, warm home until the men could get some cabins built. There, in November of 1780, young Virginia Noble gave birth to a baby girl. The baby died.