Days of Darkness Read Free

County could have been avoided many times had it not been for peculiar times and circumstances. Then there were the financial rivalries, the hangings of Abner and later William Baker, both of which contained the poisonous seeds of injustice. Abner was crazy and should not have been hanged. William was innocent, apparently protecting his wife. The involvement of Garrards and Whites on opposing sides of these cases cast a dangerous pall over the county. Add to this the violence of the times, the bitterness of politics in Clay, and the abuse of politics to handicap and deny justice to the losing opponent. Whiskey was an exacerbating factor.
    The Martin-Tolliver mess in Rowan County was simply a political and financial fight complicated by whiskey. In Breathitt County politics, money, brutal arrogance on Hargis’s part, and the emotional holdover from the Strong-Little Wars contributed to disaster. And again, whiskey played a terrible role.
    A common thread? Whiskey, perhaps. Pride in some cases, politics in most.
    Did heroes and villains emerge from the feuds? The answer depends, of course, on one’s definition. If there were heroes in the Hatfield-McCoy feud, they were probably the McCoy boys—Bud and Jim, who kept their senses in times of violence and prevented worse violence, and Calvin, who sacrificed his life to save his sisters and parents. It is hard to find anything admirable about the Hatfields, although Wall deserved better than he got. Devil Anse, Jim Vance, Johnse, and most of the other Hatfields were little more than thugs. I cannot find grounds for admiring Devil Anse, who not only engineered the two instances of brutal murder but lacked the backbone to commit them himself and sent his underlings out to do the slaughtering.
    Craig Tolliver was an interesting villain, and I wish I could have learned more about him. Boone Logan has been accorded the hero’s laurel in the Rowan County fight, but he was not one without flaws; he chose killing when he might have forced a surrender of the Tollivers. He didn’t stick around to help clean up the blood, and he let his co-warriors face the trials. I think Fred Brown was near to correct when he said, “There were no heroes here, no villains, just people.” But you have to admit that there were some pretty bad people.
    In the Turner-Howard feud, there were villains enough to go around, especially among the Turners, including Wilson Lewis and Mrs. Turner, she a bundle of hate. Wilse Howard was a violent man, but he had reasons to be. So did Will Jennings. Fult French was a villain. Joe Eversole and his wife Susan were heroes. That’s about it.
    The Clay County War? Take your pick. I suppose you have to list George and Jesse Barrett, Frank McDaniel, and James and Bad Tom Baker among the bad ones, although Bad Tom had mitigating characteristics. Lucy and George Goforth, Gardner and Thena Baker, and, above all, T.T. Garrard had streaks of nobility. Big Jim Howard will always remain an enigma. So will Chad Hall, if he indeed did the things he said he did.
    In Breathitt County, Jim Hargis, Ed Callahan, Curtis Jett, Tim Smith, John Aikman, Hen Kilburn, Bill Strong, and Jerry Little were killers or hired the killers. Beach Hargis was a nut. J.B. Marcum, the Cockrells, and Dr. D.B. Cox were victims. It’s hard to find heroes.
    Now, is there a characteristic, a trait of personality common to these people? Greed? A lust for money or power? A willingness to avoid or violate the law for advantage? A willingness to sacrifice for family or friends? Loyalty? A sense of fair play? Pride? Faith? About the only common trait I can see is a certain loyalty to family and friends, often a sense of pride.
    All of this leaves only one constant—the times—and that is uncertain as a causative factor. Time and circumstance, as the preacher said, affect them all: postwar violence, the growth of Democratic Party dominance, the slow growth of formal religion in an