Bloody Breathitt

by T. R. C. Hutton

  The county’s nonwhite minority did not fit the outside world’s image of Bloody Breathitt as did the white “healthy bucks” who were natural “fighting men . . . big, powerful fellows [and] men of courage and fine marksmen; sometimes ignorant, wary and good shots, like the Boers.”185 And entrance into politics was eastern Kentucky’s chief means of harnessing this natural energy and aiming it toward useful purposes. “It is a fact in criminology of the mountains that the ‘tough customers’ are frequently reformed and become good citizens by elevating them to offices, and so there is no end of Deputy Sheriffs and Constables and Deputy Constables in Breathitt, Perry and Letcher Counties. It has had a salutary effect in many instances I hear and frequently Sheriffs, Jailers, County Attorneys and County Judges are ‘reformed’ bad men elevated to offices of dignity and power.”186 Even with Judge Hargis and Sheriff Callahan gone, most of the men who had been peripherally involved in their courthouse ring were still alive, and Pilcher was careful to spin their colorful pasts in as flattering a style as possible. More important, however, it was vital that political office be these “bad men’s” redemption. Pilcher framed the recent past’s problems as a social system worthy of envy.

  Pilcher’s interpretation of eastern Kentucky’s “fighting spirit,” and by implication the history of the feud, confirmed popular ideas about masculinity and the environmental construction of American humanity. His employment of the feud concept divorced violence from actual events, making it instead an abstract product of an inherent white mountain Volksgeist that stood as a model for all white Americans. Life in the Kentucky mountains was a Rooseveltian “strenuous life” all to itself and, combined with the people’s unsullied Anglo-Saxonism, provided a cure for the urban North’s enervating industrial life and ethnic pollution. Feud was now a useful artifact, one with a rakish façade and no mention of injustice; Pilcher never mentioned the widow Abrelia Marcum Tucker, remarried and still living in Jackson (though he erroneously identified her late husband as “Judge Marcum”), even though he did reference Callahan and Hargis. Actual death and suffering, the (in Hannah Arendt’s phrasing) “dead load which by itself time will bury in oblivion,” could be forgotten, replaced by a mountain “heritage” that toughened its descendants without causing any real harm.187 Ultimately, The Story of Jackson City was little different than the anthropological and fictional portrayals of eastern Kentucky produced by writers from the outside world.

  Men who had actually participated in violence did not take Pilcher’s booster role, but instead personalized Bloody Breathitt. None had more to say about this than Curtis Jett. By his own admission “as vile a sinner as ever came down the pike,” Jett was famously converted to Christianity while serving time at the Frankfort Reformatory (where, in an odd echo of his former employer’s role in William Goebel’s campaign, he challenged one of the convicted conspirators in Goebel’s death for the Penitentiary Christian Endeavor Society’s presidency).188 To help “put down Kaiserism,” he organized an in-prison Red Cross fund-raising effort after the United States’ entrance into World War I. Despite Abrelia Tucker’s efforts, he won an early release, thanks to his conversion testimonial and a one-prisoner crusade to have pool tables removed from the state penitentiary. He then began a new life as an evangelist.189

  Jett’s story of his evil path that led to the assassinations of 1902 and 1903 was a pat combination of nature and nurture, explaining Bloody Breathitt and his own role as a “feudist.” Now happily a Bluegrass resident, Jett confirmed many of the assumptions held regarding the section of his birth; his upbringing was nominally Christian but “weak along spiritual lines,” while his own love of “strong drink,” “pistol toting,” and cigarette smoking were learned from his “typical mountaineer” father and a “drunkard” neighbor.190 During his childhood in Breathitt County, he discovered that “every one in that section had an axe to grind,” and he and his impressionable young friends “were ambitious when we became men to become leaders of such a click, to take our chance in the mountain battles and some day to carry revolvers and Winchesters with notches cut to indicate the number of enemies we had outwitted and gotten the drop on.”191 Leaving Bloody Breathitt for incarceration in the more advanced Bluegrass, where he discovered a love of God, patriotism, and personal industry (as the penitentiary’s horticulturalist), was an integral part of Jett’s salvation. In Jett’s telling, the mountains were a natural training ground for violence, especially for an eager pupil such as himself. The exodus of an “old wild dog of the mountains” from “his former mountain days” was a spiritual journey but it was a geographical journey as well, confirming that Jett’s former sinfulness and eastern Kentucky were firmly entwined.192 Appropriately, after his release he attended seminary at Edward Guerrant’s Asbury College.193

  In From Prison to Pulpit: Life of Curtis Jett (1919), Jett depoliticized the feuds of his childhood. He noted the fighting between William Strong’s Red Strings and Edward Callahan’s Ku Klux in the 1890s (which he referred to it as the “Strong-Callahan feud”). By the end of his incarceration in 1919, he had absorbed enough written and spoken feud lore involving honor and Anglo/Celtic determinism to make it part of his description.

  Many of the leaders of the feuds were men of good circumstances and of fine intelligence. They were kind and courteous to their friends, but they came from a race of people beyond the sea who, for centuries, had not looked to the courts for protection, but had taken their affairs into their own hands. With them it was perfectly honorable to defend themselves and take the life of any they suspected of having ill will toward them. The leaders of the mountain feuds were something like the old Scottish Chieftains who gathered their clans about them and fought their misunderstandings to a finish.194

  His retelling of his own participation in the Hargis-Cockrell feud was circumspectly apolitical, dwelling more on remembrances of his own personal failings than on the circumstances that brought him to be one of Sheriff Callahan’s deputies.

  There was much animosity and ill feeling which culminated in several deaths on both sides of the feud. So far as any part I may have had in these unfortunate affairs is concerned that has been thoroughly threshed out in the civil and criminal courts of the State, and I could not add anything which would involve anyone who has not already been involved in the courts. I did not participate in these for any price or cause except for the love of my people and the unfortunate spirit of revenge in my own heart. A merciful God has granted my forgiveness which I feel toward all men and believe it would be unwise for me to enter into any further discussion of the matters.195

  Throughout his book, filled with his poems and his own and others’ verifications of his redemption, he never once mentioned James Hargis or the men he was convicted of killing, nor his then role as deputy sheriff. His “love of [his] people” and “unfortunate spirit of revenge” gave a personal and communal basis to his behavior when he had been a killer, and implicitly placed his actions within a much longer narrative of inherent violence. “The feud” Jett had participated in was now an organic thing all to itself, devoid of factual details.

  Another son of “typical mountaineers” who parlayed his connection to Bloody Breathitt into an evangelical style employed feud in a way that Jett could not. Wolfe County native Charles “Bulldog Charlie” Wireman, fifteen years Jett’s junior, echoed his illustration of a rowdy, undisciplined, and armed adolescence. He credited Bluegrass Kentuckians with bringing a more enlightened Christianity to the “purest Anglo Saxon blood to be found on the American Continent.” Even though he had once served as a deputy sheriff, his career had no discernible connection to political struggles or any conflict deemed organized into a feud proper. Yet Bloody Breathitt was still available to him as a foil for his own story of salvation although, as of 1950, Wireman’s readers were more familiar with the Hatfield-McCoy feud, and he began his book with it rather than with anything that had happened to him personally.196

  Feud, as long as it was in a distan
t enough past, was a useful memory, especially in conversion narratives that depend upon a stark division between a wicked past and a virtuous present. Accounts of Bloody Breathitt written outside of the county were not as consistent in employing this stark division; it depended upon whether or not the storyteller wished to portray a space that was inherently violent or progressively developed (by the passage of time or the contingency of positive exogenous forces) to a point where violence no longer took place, at least in an archaic “medieval” form like a blood feud. In contrast, local accounts like those of Pilcher, Jett, and Wireman left violent inherency in the past, but for different purposes. However, what they shared was a commitment to sustaining Bloody Breathitt’s memory as the site of an undeniably horizontal dispute or series of disputes, one defined by revenge and lawlessness rather than struggles over public power. For the last generation to have witnessed or taken part in Breathitt County’s feuds, the specifics of the past were best left in the past. If there were “deaths on both sides of the feud,” as Jett concluded, then no one was denied justice by this omission. The possibility that this might not be the case was left roundly unconsidered.

  Later generations of people from Breathitt County also showed a need to separate past from present. In the 1930s Breathitt County high school students, assigned to collect family oral histories, accepted their county’s violent past with the adolescent’s temporal detachment. Two students’ grandfathers, now happy to freely discuss the Hargis-Cockrell feud (and possibly the 1908 election riot that followed the subsequent Republican victories) openly described their struggle’s political nature as well as evidence that the famous courthouse assassinations were only part of a larger effort on Hargis’s and Callahan’s part. “I had six brothers until one of my brothers Jim was murdered on the middle fork in the Hargis and Callahan battle,” one reported to his grandchild. “I was lucky to get out alive but me and Fletch never was even wounded during the time we were fighting. The Callahans were trying to run the county and who ever tried to get ahead of them they meraly shot them down and that was all. But they had a job trying to run us out.”197 Another student whose grandfather had died before his or her birth reported that “before [his death] a fuge came up between several parties and it was over politics.”198 Another elaborated, “It begun in 1902, and lasted until 1907, and after this period Breathitt county, was called bloody Breathitt. We people of Breathitt should be thankful for what our forefathers has done for us.”199

  Depression-era teenagers had no reason to shy away from admitting the political causality of a past generation’s violence, since it bore no reflection upon their own lives. To them, turn-of-the-century elections were practically as distant as seventeenth-century Scottish chieftains, and there was no need to create a temporal façade or apply a teenager’s ironic detachment. The misspelling “fuge” suggests a relative unfamiliarity with the word. However, another student, who was asked to comment on more recent violent crime, felt inclined to comment on what he or she considered the county’s distant past, particularly a communal “state of nature” that preceded politics. “We know that, from the first, the wilderness was their teacher and they obtained a kind of education which fitted them for a life in the rough, for it was gained through actual experience with their environment.”200

  Even though these high school students were presumably natives of Breathitt County and only a generation removed from the county’s last nationally reported account of egregious violence, their descriptions of crime and violence within their home territory employ the same language of foreignness used by “outsiders” since the 1870s. To say that “the wilderness was [the students’ forbears’] teacher” denied the historical nearness of violence in Breathitt County, placing it further back in history to a pioneer past. None of the students claimed any direct knowledge or experience in violence of any sort, let alone attempted to defend their home county against the mockery and criticism that it had long endured. With access to the enlightenment of national incorporation provided by New Deal programs, these students were now outside of the experience that had made Bloody Breathitt, and at least one refused to lay claim to it without invoking a nostalgic “wilderness” past. As Breathitt natives they had unique insights but, as was the case with most American teenagers in the 1930s, their local knowledge was mitigated by mass culture.

  “The dirty old Breathitt County courthouse still stands”

  In 1978, eighty-one-year-old Breathitt County native Harlan Strong expressed a similar resolve to remember Bloody Breathitt as a past enormously different from the present, and expressed mild reverence for the lost strenuousness of his childhood. “The horse and buggy days, they’re past and gone. Now it’s automobile and airplane and stuff like that. The Bible said they’d go weaker and wiser. People are certainly getting wiser but they’re weaker. They’re weaker in strength and wiser in knowledge. This day and time a kid 15 years old, I’d say twelve years old knows as much as I did when I was 25. That’s the truth. They see so much and know so much. That’s right. A lot of it is worthless, but still they know it.”201 The late nineteenth-century violence that Harlan Strong was aware of, probably from popular rather than personal memory, was far away and factually confused. He knew of the factional alignments designated by the “Red Strings” and “Ku Klux,” although he offered no elaboration on the larger Reconstruction-era contexts of these two names. He also erroneously recollected the 1884 lynching of Henderson Kilburn and Ben Strong as occurring in his lifetime (according to his own disclosure, Harlan Strong would have been born about 1896). He also seemed to recall knowing “Bill Strong,” who “belonged to what was called the Rebel and Yankee army,” even though the real-life Bill Strong had been killed in 1897.202 When asked to explain Bloody Breathitt’s origins, Harlan Strong reaffirmed the primordial foundations of a frontier society that many people both in and outside of the county had summoned up in the twentieth century, but augmented this by allusions to prevailing technological change. “The only difference now than back then is there’s just more people now. That’s why people can see so much more because they’re more people and there’s more to talk about. But they did just as bad in the early days when I was raised up as they’re doing right now. There just weren’t so many people. Mohegan law back in them days. An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. If you shoot me, I’ll shoot you. They abide by the law now. Sure do.”203 “Mohegan law” ascribed the past with qualities that 1970s white Americans associated with Native Americans, who (like feuding mountain whites) were cognitively tucked safely within a distant earlier historical period. A metaphor involving a savage Indian-related past, coupled with the biblical analogy of violent reciprocation, confirmed Bloody Breathitt’s persistence as a place and time of communal violence. The death of Native American nations and that of feuds could both be looked back upon as inevitable, since those looking back from a modern present could scarcely imagine it otherwise.204

  But Harlan Strong’s “prosthetic memory” of a lynching that took place before his birth, and others, demonstrates the continuity of a vague memory of political conflict.205 The ostensibly nonsensical “Rebel and Yankee army,” even if it suggested Harlan Strong’s ignorance of the Civil War, illustrated the political confusion of the era; as a member of the Yankee army, William Strong had indeed been a rebel within Confederate Breathitt County.206 A memory of the Red Strings and Ku Klux Klan confirmed the political foundations of the violence that took place before his childhood. Long after its characteristic events, Bloody Breathitt was still a usable past, and one that did not require the same level of conscious subterfuge and omission that Louis Pilcher had employed sixty-four years before. Nevertheless, as always, the causes for violence, the motivations for half-remembered killings, remained somewhere between hazy and absent. Meanwhile, the feud narrative, with or without the violence, was permanently wedded to Breathitt County.

  Were it not for one oral history project sponsored by the New York Times (the northern newspape
r that had once seemed reluctant to place feuds in the mountains rather than the state of Kentucky), Harlan Strong’s individual memory of Bloody Breathitt would have remained unspoken and unrecorded. The project had been inspired by a renewed interest in eastern Kentucky in the late 1950s based on the national recognition of Appalachian poverty. Allusions to Bloody Breathitt remained a useful tool for illustrating the region’s underdevelopment. During congressional hearings for the proposed creation of the Area Redevelopment Administration (ARA) in 1959, a Louisville paper’s article on Breathitt County was used as evidence for the section’s dire need for federal sponsorship.207

  This is the land of legends, the mountain country of eastern Kentucky where a century of time is thought to have somehow got lost. Blood feuds, moonshining, child brides, place names like Hell-for-Sartain, Shoulderblade—the stuff for a thousand tales. They were not all fictional.

  The dirty old Breathitt County courthouse still stands, the place where [James] Cockrell and J. B. Marcum were shot down in cold blood in the incredible Hargis-Cockrell feud that claimed upwards of fifty lives before it ran its course a half century ago. This courthouse was recently condemned, an act that serves as well as a symbol of the gradual passing of the life of the legends. Society is in transition [in Breathitt County], it is desperately trying to catch up with the 20th century.208

  The “stuff for a thousand tales” had been the subject of fiction for so long that, by the 1950s, it was reasonable to assume that nineteenth-century history had become more “legendary” than factual. Men killing other men for now-murky reasons had been replaced by the more recent memories of the battle of Blair Mountain and “bloody Harlan,” conflicts that could be more readily understood, and hardly denied, especially with John Lewis’s then hearty United Mine Workers of America around as a reminder.209