| Stories of Kentucky Feuds |
| Those Who Take Up The Sword |
| _____ |
| page(1) IT WAS A long and wearisome legal battle that James Hargis, county judge, and Ed. Callahan, sheriff of Breathitt, brought upon themselves by the slaying of James B. Marcum in 1903. Their arraignment before the courts in Lexington, Beattyville and Sandy Hook, where in five different instances the state tried to fasten the crime of murder upon them, sapped their bank accounts as well as their reserve. And it did even more. It turned some of their most trusted henchmen into implacable enemies. John Smith and others, who were mentioned by Mose Feltner in his confession made to the martyred Marcum as having been chosen as his helpers in the plot for the slaying, turned upon the clan leaders. The time came, also, when they were willing to tell their side of the Breathitt county happenings that had taken scores of lives, though with particular reference to the deaths of Jim Cockerill, Dr. Cox and Marcum. John Abner, named by Feltner, went to his death on the streets of Jackson one day, and from that time on John Smith ranged on the side that opposed Hargis and the sheriff. Stripped now of their offices these two, however, were not in the least disposed to let loose of their reins of political powers. Hargis still sat high in the councils of his party, while Callahan, always the lesser light, kept his fingers gripped upon county affairs. The criminal courts had failed to reach these men, but they were slowly but surely being made to pay by another. They' were being ground and broken upon the rack of Public Opinion. There were those who began to doubt that they were invulnerable. Even hero worship, of the sort, has its limitations, and when straw men begin to bend their thrones become tottery and shaken. Jim Hargis felt his power slipping-the searching 'denunciation of the Widow Marcum rang in his ears. He couldn't escape it. A relentless Fate was on his heels and he couldn't shake it off; a dozen ways he showed it before he was done to death by his own son in his store in Jackson in February, 1908. page (2) |
| And that broke the spirit, for a while, of the former sheriff. Callahan, the least impressionable of the two, began to dread the time when he, too, would be called upon for a reckoning and accounting. Shortly after the burial of Judge Hargis he was heard to declare on more than one occasion: " 'Taint wu'th it-I've a notion to sell ev'ything I've got en make tracks fo' Lexington whar I kin live my days out in peace en quiet:' Still he had valuable holdings in timber and coal lands. He had a store over the mountains some twenty miles from Jackson, the county seat. He had a large family to whom he owed the education that he craved and which he had been trying to give them. He had a love for the mountains that had nursed and nurtured him and several generations of forebears-to talk of tearing himself away from all of this was one thing, to do it was another. In the end Ed. Callahan kept putting off his resolution until there came a day when he forgot all about it. His political reins, too, kept slipping. He was still a power in his part of the county, but his hold on the offices within its boundary waned immeasurably from the range that it once had taken when he sat on the right hand of Judge Hargis. Most of these months he put in around his store at Crocketsville, a hamlet, scarce a village, on Long's Creek about a mile from the Middle Fork of the Kentucky River-but though the wings of the eagle had been clipped, it did not mean that he had been shorn of his dominance. There was one thing that they could not take from Ed. Callahan. He was the head of his clan. These adherents still looked up to him for advice and guidance-they were singularly but surely "his people" in every sense of the word. Peace, now, was his great desire. The specter of the dead Marcum might bother him and cry for justice, thoughts of the Widow Marcum might annoy him, but there was another arm of Fate which he could not shake off and which incessantly pursued him. Twenty years before, when Ed. Callahan was younger and more fit, he had builded a great future for himself. "Furriners," men from the level lands and the big cities to the North, were coming into the mountains for timber. The coming of the railway to Breathitt tapped virgin acres and there was money-more money page (3) |
| than some of the mountain men dreamed of-which came pouring in as a result of the timber taking. Callahan had been blocked in one deal by James Deaton and he did not purpose being outwitted again. Deaton and he were the biggest "loggers" in that part of the county, and though there had been inter-marriages which made them related, on the first occasion that offered Callahan picked out a cause for a disagreement that had the usual fatal ending. The Deatons never forgave him for that. The family was numerous and fairly well endowed with this world's goods. They could hate as deeply and as deadly as the Callahans, and when the former sheriff came back to his native haunts to spend his days there entirely it was they who derided, first, his shorn plumage. John Deaton had married a Callahan and, it appears, was the most violent in opposition to the former sheriff. First there came some lawsuits that had been dragging for years and from "Lawin' the clans came to "shootin'," One fine day in the early part of 1909 the foremost case at issue came up for adjudication in the county courts and the Deatons and the Callahans arrived in Jackson armed to the teeth. Only a little of the strong distillate of the corn was needed to fan the troublous spirits into action, and fireworks with firearms naturally followed this heavy drinking. For several days the feudists pot-shotted at one another around the stores and dwellings in the central part of the town that had witnessed so much gun play in the past. The casualties, however, were few-here and there a man shot in the arm and another in the leg-so when the boys got this out of their systems and the blood-lust had run its course, Callahan and Deaton were brought together and they signed terms of peace. This may have been a tinge of the opera bouffe, but to these feudists it was a solemn contract and kept to the letter for nearly two years, when John Deaton again proved the trouble maker and was said to have made an attack upon Callahan in their own country near the Twin Forks. This time he was armed with a butcher knife, and before the former sheriff could escape his right arm was nearly severed by the lunge that Deaton made upon him. Wilson Callahan, son of the sheriff and who resided with his father, was with him at the time that this assault was made. The younger Callahan whipped a revolver into action and before page (4) |
| Deaton could strike again he poured a deadly fire into him. This episode stirred up all of the old enmities. Callahan's store at Crocketsville became the storm center of attack. The Deatons rallied all of the men of their clan together and determined to make their ancient enemy pay dearly. It was decided upon, however, that warfare in the open was not the method that should be pursued. They had tried that on court day in Jackson and had not gained much, if anything at all, for their boldness. They intended to go about the man hunt in a far more subtle way. Callahan's store faced the road then a creek and further beyond this hill that was struggling to become a knob. One May morning in 1910, while Ed. Callahan was walking from his house, distant a few yards from his store, a couple of rifles in the hands of men perched upon this slight eminence blazed forth. Immediately the wounded man crumpled up, pitched forward, while other bullets whizzed over his head. Who did this shooting has always been a matter for conjecture, though adherents of the Deaton clan always bore the blame. Callahan spent weeks in bed recovering from this attack, but while he was fighting his way back to health he resolved never to be caught again. Much of his place at Crocketsville had been built like a fort, now it became a stockade. Posts and pailings were placed in position. A palisade was run up so that an entire shelter was afforded between the entrance to the house and the corresponding door to the store. Even the walls of this latter building were strengthened so that a high-powered rifle would have extreme difficulty in worming its way through the layers and thicknesses of logs, posts and lumber. The feudist surveyed all of this, when he was able to hobble about once more, with grim satisfaction. "They ain't goin' to get OL' Ed. Callahan 'ithout doin' some shootin'," he observed as he tried out the battlements that his sons and the "help" had put up under his direction, if not supervision. "Those thar high-powered rifles may be straight shootin' but they hev thar limitations. I kain't see, boys, how they kin pick me off-onless I'm fool enough to go out en invite 'em." The former sheriff was thinking of live men-he had not reckoned with the skeletons of the past. There were some that were page (5) |
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| dangling and dragging their bonds, struggling to leave their marks upon him. He had given no thought to John Abner, for instance-Abner the man named in the Mose Feltner confession and who had stuck true to Callahan and Hargis through their various trials and who had been protected by the code. Let it be said for Ed. Callahan that his crowning virtue was loyalty-loyalty to his henchmen as well as his kin, and John Abner had remained true to him in his hour of need before the courts, so, when others snuffed out his life, Callahan thought that they should be punished by the very courts that he flaunted and defied. "Red Tom" Davidson and Jase Deaton were the men accused of having done John Abner to death in the streets of Jackson. They, the former sheriff relentlessly pursued. The charges against them were transferred to the circuit court of Bourbon County. Skilled attorneys assisted in their prosecution, and there never seems to have been much doubt that it was the Callahan money that paid the fees. That was one back score in the Deaton book laid by for accounting. Jase Deaton, however, was called before a Higher Court for his final judgment, for, a short while after Callahan's recuperation he had the temerity to start a "fuss" in the home of Anse White, a known adherent of Callahan, and this ended disastrously for Jase. They carried him out feet foremost and arrested White. Once again the prosecution moved-the pressure this time coming from the Deaton side. White was taken before the Montgomery County Circuit Court, tried and acquitted. He was a Callahan man-now, Callahan financed the defense. And then a third tragedy occurred that was also entwined in this series of events. Jase Deaton and "Red Tom" Davidson were cousins, therefore nephews of James Deaton who was killed and John Deaton who was sorely wounded, and of a third actor in this drama, Fletch Deaton of Jackson, a man of some property and standing in that feud-ridden community. More and more those of the Deaton clan looked to Fletch as their adviser. In the spring of 1912 John Davidson, a brother of Red Tom's, and Levi Johnson were ambushed, and killed near Buckhorn in |
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