| Stories of Kentucky Feuds |
| Guns Bark in Breathitt-part 1 |
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| BlOODY BREATHITT! What a background upon to limm the tracework of events that a well regulated and orderly community would class with the unbelievable! Yet, by what standards are the feudists of the early days of that county of Kentucky to be weighed? Surely not with the scales that will balance fifty years later. The Breathitt of today is not the Breathitt of yesterday. Education, good roads, modern living requirements have sunk deeper into this mountianous country in the last decade than did any such elements of uplift for a full century before. In order, therefore to get a correct perspective to the opening of this fragmentary record it is necessary to turn back the hands of the clock of time. Jackson, the county seat, is the hub of things in Breathitt. Here is a pen picture of Jackson, written by a man on the ground two days before Christmas in 1878. It is a sorry view and still, the very conditions under which the people then existed will explain much concerning the cause of the events that are chronicled here with. But now for the description: "It (Jackson) turned out to be much like the other places we had passed, a little cluster of houses on a small hill, surrounded on all sides by mountains of the most grotesque pattern. "There are probally thirty-five dwellings in the town, a couple of stores, a blacksmith shop and a saw mill. The population does not exceed three hundred. "The town boasts of no regular tavern, but there are several houses where the wayfarer is taken in and done for. These houses, which are the best in the village, are old and dilapidated, with scarcely an entire window sash, and without doors to that part of the house where the eating is done. All the houses are as uncomfortable as they could well be, and the people who inhabit them as squaid a looking set as could be found anywhere. " Women and children run about in this cold, December weather Page 2 |
| in their bare feet, with little more clothing on them than serves to hide their nakedness, and I don't think I encountered a whole suit of clothes among any of the men I was so fortunate to meet. " The people live from hand to mouth on hog and corn bread, and if they get a dollar ahead it is through some claim they established against the State. "There are a good many small farms about Jackson which afford their cultivators a bare living, but if there is an industry among the denizens of Jackson, outside of the blacksmith shop, grocery store and the sawmill, I have yet failed to see it. "The men stand around the store stoves shivering in their tattered and patched garments and hats, and do nothing that I can discover but talk about the shootings and killings that have occurred in the past, and that are liable to take place in the future. This talk goes on from morning till night, until to the stranger it becomes absolutely sickening. " They are a friendly set though, and do not hesitate to use any room a visitor may have as if it were their own. They come amiably in without knocking, stir up your fire according to their peculiar fancies, spit tobacco juice all over the floor, smoke stinking pipes, and revel in their stories of bloodshed just as if they were at home. A stranger from any great distance, particularly from so remote place as Cincinnati, is not likely to make any serious objection to this familiarity. " Ever since the organization of the county Breathitt has been recognized by the general Commonwealth as one of the outlaw countys of the state. It is not that the people are naturally vicious, or that they thirst for human blood, but they have been bred to the use of arms and to the requital of an injury or an insult to a relative, no matter how remote, to such a degree that it has become a matter of honor that if no nearer relative appears to take up the quarrel, a second or third cousin shall shoot down the man who shot my Cousin James or my Uncle William, I don't know which. " Then an intricate process of inbreeding prevails, so that it is impossible to get a court and jury together that will convict a native of the county of any alleged crime. " Since the close of the war (the civil war) there have been no less than twenty murders committed in Breathitt County. And yet in those fourteen years not a man has been convicted of murder in any degree. In all that time only three men have been sent to the Page 3 |
| penitentiary from Breathitt County, one for horse stealing, one for bigamy, and one for house breaking. " Men who have shot down their enemies in cold blood have laughed at the law, and in the farcical trials they have gone through, have been sustained by the full knowledge that either the prosecutor or the judge , or some one on the jury was either a relative or friend, and would see that they got through all right. " It is a matter of history that they got through all right, and it makes a man turn faint to hear the heroes assembled about Jackson at the present time, how , after a certain person had wantonly shot a man in the back and killed him, the "defendant" proved, on his final trial, that the deceased had threatened his life time and time again, and had a bowie knife out ready to plundge into his heart when he used his pistol, merely in self-defense." Twenty murders in fourteen years was the gory record that this old-time writer referred to, and the bulk of them were directly or indirectly traceable to the system of life-taking to satisfy personal wrongs or family slights. Animosities growing out of the War of the Rebellion also claimed their share. In fact, some of the bush-wacking bands either refused to recognize the fact or did not know that Generals Grant and Lee had agreed upon articles of peace. Up in these mountains were Union men as well as Southern sympathizers, and one of the bitterest feuds of post-war period had its origin from that source. This was what was known as the Strong-Army (some spell this "Amis" but names have peculiar twists in the mountain counties) embroglio that was to leave its trace and stain on down for two score years to follow. Cap'n Billy Strong had been a Union soldier during the war and so had the Amy boys, and it was while they were soldiers in the same company that their first disagreement occurred. Sometimes it is convenient to change one's politics in the mountain regions, even though there are dire consequences attached. Later this is what the Amys did. Cap'n Billy, who was a straunch Republican, it seems, 'lowed that they were nothing but "turn-coats" derided them bitterly for " training with the Demycrats,"and from hot words, threats of bodily violence shuttled backward and forward. Came a night in 1874 when the Amys determined to rid the county of Cap'n Billy. Backed by several of their kinsmen and familiars, they made an attack upon the lonely cabin of Captain Page 4 |
| Strong. The old guerilla was not caught napping and gave a good account of himself, for though he was wounded several times himself, two of the Amy adherents were left dead upon this field of battle. Such blood-letting tightened the ranks of the supporters on both sides. Men who were in no wise concerned in the original break between Strong and the Amys were drawn into the trouble. The feeble attempt on the part of the country authorities to fix the blame, and what little headway they did make, merely threw more fat on the fire. The Circuit Court eventually took a hand, only to have the skirts of justice woefully mauled and soiled. Shootings became promiscuous, the life of the judge was threatened and he was forced to flee from the bench in fear and dismay. It was this report from the circuit judge that drew the attention of the governor, who ordered two companies of the militia to be sent from Louisville to Jackson to restore order, and from September to December the soldiers encamped in Breathitt, guarded the court, brought in witnesses and executed capiases, but with the net result that none of the accused drew punishment that would prove a deterrent to further transgressions against law and order. That, briefly, tells the looseness in the administration of the statutes and the commencement of a long line of evasion that could only result in the courts being held cheaply. The mountain men found that punishment could be circumvented, even though the bench was protected by bayonets, and Breathitt was started on her way toward a carnival of homicide and murder that can be only thinly disguised by the excuse that many were laid under the sod died as victims of the feudists' code. Four years rolled by. There were shootings, plenty of them: some were fatal, but these were merely casual happenings that flared and died down without the outside world getting more than a peep behind the heavy, crimson curtains of Bloody Breathitt. And then one of the casual happenings turned into a tragedy. Jason Little killed his wife ! So it becomes really interesting to delve into the sudden taking off of Mrs. Jason Little. The two lived with their brood of children in a woe-begone little cabin near Jackson, and in the fall of 1878 Mrs. Little was found |