by Lisa Alther
Several men surnamed Logan were indicted for planning an attack against two Tolliver supporters and were sent to the Lexington jail for their own protection. Two of these Logans, Jack and Billy, were released on bail, while their father remained in jail. Believing that they would testify for their father, whom Tolliver wanted convicted, he issued warrants for the boys and sent a posse to their house to rearrest them. Jack Logan was eighteen and studying to become a minister. Billy Logan, twenty-five, had tuberculosis.
The Tolliver posse shot out the windows of the Logan family home. The boys retreated upstairs, and Tolliver and another deputy followed them. Jack Logan shot the deputy with a shotgun, injuring but not killing him.
Then the posse set the house on fire. A deputy entered the burning building and assured the boys that if they came out, Tolliver would spare their lives. They exited with hands raised. The posse tied them up and took them to a nearby spring, where they executed them, severely battering their bodies to render them unidentifiable. On the ride back to town, Tolliver made everyone swear to confirm the story that the boys had been armed and resisting arrest.25
Boone Logan went to the burnt-out house in hopes of retrieving his cousins’ corpses. Tolliver told him that if he attended the boys’ funeral, he would be killed. He suggested that Boone leave the area, promising to hire Boone’s wife as a maid so that she could support their children.
Boone Logan and a couple of other outraged citizens started meeting in secret. Even though Tollivers patrolled all the roads out of town, the Logan sleeper cell managed to hop a train to Frankfort, where they met with the governor and described the dreadful situation. The governor sympathized but pointed out that he had already sent troops to Morehead three times and had spent $100,000 of taxpayer money—with no resolution to the conflict. Each time the troops left, violence resumed. Passing the buck, he said it was up to the citizens of Morehead to liberate their town from the thugs who had taken over.26
Boone Logan traveled to Cincinnati, where he bought fifty Winchesters and two thousand rounds of ammunition. Back in Morehead, he rounded up over a hundred men equally fed up with the Tollivers. He distributed the firearms, and the men encircled the town. The sheriff delivered to Tolliver’s hotel warrants against thirteen Tolliver supporters for the murder of the young Logan brothers. The Logan posse closed in, and Boone called for Craig to surrender.
Tolliver and his men started firing and dashed out of the hotel. Over the course of two hours, using fifteen hundred rounds of ammunition, Logan’s men shot almost all the Tolliver backers present, hunting down and killing even the wounded. Legend has it that Craig Tolliver, for reasons known only to him, had vowed not to die with his boots on. He removed them and was promptly shot in the head in his sock feet.
Tolliver’s fourteen-year-old brother, Cal, stood in front of the hotel, shooting a pistol in each hand, their twelve-year-old brother, Cate, beside him. When Craig fell dead, Cal grabbed his watch and wallet and crawled under a house, taking a bullet in his buttocks as he did so. He and Cate were the only Tolliver combatants spared that day.27
A stray bullet started a fire in the hotel, and a cask of moonshine exploded, spreading the fire to other buildings in town.28
The Tolliver corpses were delivered in a wagon to Craig Tolliver’s wife, said to be a mild-mannered woman who was devoted to her husband. Like Mafia wives, she seemed to have no idea what he did for a living. The other bodies were laid out by the courthouse for relatives to retrieve.29
Boone Logan called a town meeting and announced that he had been following the governor’s orders by executing the Tollivers and that free and fair elections would soon commence. The remaining Tolliver supporters indicted two of the Logan posse for murdering Craig Tolliver, but the jury of their deeply grateful peers found them not guilty.
The final body count for the three-year bloodbath clocked in at twenty killed and sixteen wounded.30
The Turner-Howard Feud
The Turner-Howard feud began in 1887—just before the Hatfield-McCoy New Year’s Night Massacre—in a town originally, and ironically, named Mount Pleasant, later known as Harlan Courthouse. Hostilities erupted when Wix Howard and Little Bob Turner were playing poker. Little Bob was drunk. While he napped, Wix set his hair on fire.31
When they met in the street the next day, Little Bob Turner shot Wix Howard in the arm to repay him for his prank. So Wix fired his shotgun into Little Bob’s chest, killing him instantly. Wix was acquitted of the murder on grounds of self-defense and had no further role in the feud about to flare up between his family and that of Little Bob Turner.32
Wix Howard’s aunt Alice made whiskey, selling it at her store in Harlan. Little George Turner demanded that she stop selling it to his father, who drank too much. Aunt Alice told Little George that they should tell his father not to buy it. Then Little George “spoke badly to Mama,” as her son Wilse Howard later put it.
The following week on a rural road, Wilse Howard ran into Will Turner, known as “the bulldog of the Turners.”33 They insulted and shot at each other because Wilse was mad that Will’s brother Little George Turner had insulted his mother, and Will Turner was mad that Wilse’s cousin Wix Howard had set Will’s brother Little Bob Turner’s hair on fire and then killed him. That night the family bulldog, Will Turner, led a gang in an attack on the Howard home in which Will Turner was wounded. He left town in order to heal.34
While Bulldog Will Turner was gone, a well-meaning citizen tried to negotiate a truce between the two families. But the Turner matriarch replied, “I’d rather have my boys brought home on blankets.”35
Once Bulldog Will Turner got home, his wound healed, he proposed that the Howards meet the Turners at the Harlan courthouse in order to “decide by the arbitraiment [sic] of blade and bullet who has the better right to rule the county.”36
The Howards agreed. At dawn on the appointed day, the Howards took up strategic positions in and around the courthouse. Not realizing that the Howards had already arrived for the rendezvous, the Turners were strolling toward the courthouse after breakfast when hell broke loose.
Bulldog Will Turner was shot in the stomach. His friends carried him onto the porch at his house. As he lay there screaming, his mother, who had already expressed a preference for having her sons brought home on blankets, marched out and said, “Stop that! Die like a man like your brother [Little Bob Turner] did!” He soon died, in obedient silence.37
Meanwhile, back at the courthouse, a few more men were shot, none seriously. The Howards came out and smoked cigarettes, as though after a bout of lovemaking in a French art house film. Then they mounted their horses and went home, having established for the time being who was boss of the county.
Not content to let this verdict of bullets stand, Little George Turner started stalking Wilse Howard, and Wilse responded in kind. Wilse found Little George drinking from a spring and shot him. Little George returned fire, and they emptied their guns into one another, until Wilse Howard was wounded in the thigh and part of Little George Turner’s head had been partly blown off. Wilse Howard holed up in a cave while his thigh healed.38
Governor Buckner, who had already intervened in the Hatfield-McCoy feud, sent state militia troops to Harlan to protect jurors and witnesses as ordinary courthouse business was conducted. After the troops departed, Wilse Howard and some twenty followers shot three Turner backers.
Judge Wilson Lewis, related to the Turners and wanting to take over Aunt Alice Howard’s whiskey trade, assembled a posse and went to the Howards’ house to demand the surrender of the Howards who had shot the Turners. In reply, the Howards killed three of Judge Lewis’s deputies, wounding three more.
Wilse Howard and his uncle decided that it was a good time to see America. Once out West, they took part in several gunfights and spent some time in jails and brothels. After killing a deaf-mute in Missouri, Wilse Howard jumped
bail and, for reasons unknown, went back home to Harlan Courthouse.39 Judge Lewis raised another posse to welcome him. As the posse tried to burn down Wilse’s house, two of them were shot, and the rest fled.
Wilse Howard escaped to the West again, this time to California, where he robbed a stagecoach and went to prison under an assumed name, possibly as a ploy to escape prosecution in Missouri for killing the deaf-mute. Someone in prison recognized his face from a wanted poster, and a detective who had been tracking him was summoned.40
Wilse Howard was taken to Missouri. His bootlegging mother, Alice Howard, and his sister came to St. Louis to be with him during the trial. He was found guilty of killing the deaf-mute. He admitted to killing five men, though not the deaf-mute. Researchers have assigned him a body count closer to seventeen. His mother, Alice Howard, clung to him and wept as he boarded the train that carried him to the gallows. Wilse Howard was hanged in 1894.
The Turner-Howard feud had lasted some seven years, the death toll estimated to run between twenty-five and fifty.
The French-Eversole War
A merchant and attorney in Hazard, Kentucky, Fulton French became an agent for a large coal consortium and began buying up land and mineral rights from local landowners. Also a merchant and attorney, Joseph Eversole descended from one of the first settlers in the area and felt that French was fleecing the mountain people on behalf of the English syndicate he represented.41 Both men armed themselves and their cohorts and hired gunmen.
Eversole was at his farm in 1887 when he learned that a band of French supporters had gathered on the road to Hazard, planning to attack the town. When the French gang reached Hazard, they were disappointed to find no one barring their way. They took over the courthouse and ordered all Eversole supporters to clear out, which they promptly did.
Eversole and seventeen of his men proceeded to Hazard and attacked the French faction, fighting them until dark, with no casualties on either side. The two groups clashed sporadically for several months after that, with deaths on both sides,42 until they all grew bored.
Fulton French and Joseph Eversole were running out of money to support their private armies, in any case. Their dry goods stores were suffering because many citizens had left town, and those in the countryside were afraid to come into town to do their shopping. So the two men drew up a truce, agreeing to hand over their weapons to two judges. Few who knew them believed they would.
They were right not to. French accused Eversole of retrieving his guns when his judge wasn’t looking. Eversole accused French of never relinquishing his in the first place.43
To lead his team, Fulton French signed up Bad Tom Smith, a big-boned epileptic widely known for rescuing friends under attack by hitting one gunman over the head with a rock, grabbing his gun, and shooting the other two attackers. Before the French-Eversole feud, Smith had robbed a man of his watch. The man took him to court, where Smith was fined. A few nights later the house of the man’s mother burned to the ground.
Bad Tom Smith had also stolen a horse belonging to Joseph Eversole’s brother-in-law. After Eversole took him to court over it, Bad Tom threatened to kill the judge, jurors, witnesses, and attorneys. Ever after, he regarded Joseph Eversole as his enemy. But he told a reporter that his loyalty to Fulton French stemmed from the fact that Eversole, having heard a rumor that he was a French adherent, knocked him down with the butt of a gun and kicked him into the street, whereas Fulton French had always treated him with kindness.
Smith and another French gunslinger became best friends and committed several murders together. But one day at Bad Tom’s house, they started drinking and ended up arguing, so Bad Tom killed his best friend.44
In the spring of 1888, Joseph Eversole and two others were riding down a country road. As they rounded a bend, rifle fire from the woods struck Eversole and Nick Combs eight times apiece. The third man reported that, as he fled, he saw Bad Tom Smith and another man emerge from the woods, shoot the bodies several more times, and go through their pockets. Nick Combs regained consciousness long enough to ask Bad Tom why he had shot him. By way of reply, Bad Tom shot him in the head.45
Eversole supporters came out from Hazard to retrieve the bodies. Fifty armed men guarded the funerals.
John Campbell took the place of the murdered Joseph Eversole as head of the Eversole faction. He posted sentries around town and instructed them to shoot anyone who tried to enter without knowing the secret password. Unfortunately, Campbell himself entered town one night, and the sentry, who had been asleep, got so confused about the secret password that he shot and killed Campbell.
Shade Combs next assumed command of the Eversoles. His plan was to end the feud by assassinating Fulton French. But he had to deal first with Bad Tom Smith, who had warned Combs to leave the area or his family would be killed and his house burned down. Combs and two henchmen tried to ambush Smith, but he ambushed them instead, killing one of Combs’s men.
Shade Combs raced home to protect his family. When he ventured into his yard to play with his children one day, a bullet from the woods killed him. Bad Tom Smith rode past the yard minutes later, smiling at Combs’s wife.46
Governor Buckner (again) sent in the state militia, this time to organize a company of local militia to maintain the peace in Hazard. But when the outsiders left, hostilities resumed because all the Hazard militiamen were feudists.
Grand juries handed down multiple indictments against Bad Tom Smith, but no one dared to enforce them. Bad Tom warned several town officials who supported the Eversoles to move away from Hazard, and they did.
At a meeting of the circuit court, both the French and Eversole factions brought about thirty men into town. They started shooting away at one another. The Eversoles seized the courthouse, and the Frenches the jail. The shooting continued for eighteen hours until the Eversoles ran out of ammunition. Two men were killed, and the courthouse was pocked with bullet holes. A few months later someone burned it down.47
Governor Buckner again sent troops, who rounded up gunmen on both sides, including Fulton French and Bad Tom Smith. Bad Tom was taken to another venue, tried, found guilty, sentenced to life in prison—and then released on appeal. Fulton French was tried, acquitted, and moved away from Hazard.
After his release from prison, Bad Tom Smith moved to another county, where he took up with a woman who ran a boardinghouse on Quicksand Creek. He began drinking heavily and killed a doctor.
Bad Tom was arrested, tried, and sentenced to hang. He started to saw his way out of jail, but another prisoner snitched on him. A circuit-riding Methodist minister helped him write his memoirs, to be sold for twenty-five cents a copy at his hanging. The sheriff had a crisis, though, because he didn’t have rope thick enough for a noose. When he telegraphed to Louisville for thicker rope, no one there had any either.
On the eve of Bad Tom Smith’s hanging, people crowded into the jail to sing hymns and pray for him. Reporters copied down his every utterance. His estranged wife brought their three children for a farewell. His girlfriend, who ran the boardinghouse on Quicksand Creek, was unable to comfort him because she was also in jail as an accessory to the doctor’s murder. The stress of it all triggered an epileptic seizure for Bad Tom.
The next morning Bad Tom Smith’s brother and sister walked with him to the gallows, near the spot where Hen Kilburn had been lynched. The crowd of three thousand fell silent, except for a few crying babies. Bad Tom explained to assembled reporters that he had, in fact, shot the doctor, but only because his girlfriend had told him that the doctor had twice tried to kill him while he was passed out from drinking. She had promised to take the blame because she believed no one would prosecute her.
“It was whiskey and bad women that brought me here,” Bad Tom concluded, “and I want to tell you boys to let them alone.” Then he admitted to five other murders, not saying whether bad women were also involved in those de
aths.
He urged the crowd not to do as he had done. He asked those who intended not to follow his example to raise their hands. Everyone raised a hand, and Bad Tom proclaimed himself pleased. He prayed out loud, asking God for forgiveness. Several preachers on the scaffold joined him. Then he led the huge crowd in singing, “Guide Me, Oh Great Jehovah.”
Bad Tom Smith dropped to his knees and prayed again for mercy. The sheriff tried to lure him to the noose, but Bad Tom begged for another hymn. The ministers returned to the scaffold and joined him in singing “Near the Cross.”
The crowd fell silent. The sheriff bound Bad Tom Smith’s arms and legs with leather straps and drew a hood over his head. “Save me, oh God, save me!” he cried out. The deputy pulled the lever at 1:45 p.m. on June 28, 1895. Many women in the audience fainted.
Thus ended the seven-year feud that had taken the lives of some seventy-four people.48
So what conclusions can we draw from these feuds? They certainly demonstrate that the Hatfield-McCoy feud was neither the longest nor the deadliest by a long shot—so to speak. They took place in towns as well as in the countryside. Some feudists were doctors and lawyers, merchants and businessmen, while others were subsistence farmers, herders, and loggers.
Stolen animals triggered hostilities in several feuds—cattle and horses, in addition to Ranel McCoy’s hog. Economic competition also played a role: in the salt trade, whiskey-making, timber-cutting, merchandising, doctoring, and lawyering.
