Days of Darkness (16 page)

Isn't that a good story? You could make a movie out of it. There is only one thing wrong with it: It isn't true. It never happened. There never was any mountain temptress, any lovesick young man. A total fabrication. Where the tale started, no one knows.

But there was a French-Eversole War, waged in the years from 1887 through 1894 between the forces of Joseph C. Eversole and B. Fulton French, two bright, tough, aggressive lawyer-merchants who were in business in Hazard, the county seat of Perry County, Kentucky. The war almost destroyed Hazard, which wasn't much to begin with—about two hundred people trying to create a decent society in the isolated heart of Kentucky's Cumberland Mountains, a Main Street ankle-deep in mud half the year, some board sidewalks, a few stores, and a courthouse where judges were often afraid to hold court because of gunplay. There wouldn't be a railroad into Hazard until 1912, a hard-surfaced road until 1925. Life was plain and hard, diversions few, and culture almost nonexistent. People drank a lot.

Like most of the counties of central Eastern Kentucky, Perry was settled in the years following the Revolution, chiefly by Virginians
who came up through the Cumberland Gap and toward the center of the new wilderness territory. But instead of continuing into the Blue-grass area—the region of Harrodsburg, Boonesborough, and Lexington—they turned up the Kentucky River into the mountains and in small groups started dropping off and settling down in what are now Lee, Breathitt, Clay, Leslie, and Perry counties. They bore the same family names that can be found around Hazard today—Duff, Bowling, Wooton, Eversole, Combs.

Old Jacob Eversole built a cabin opposite the mouth of Lick Branch around 1800 that remained the family home until 1880. The Campbells went on upstream and settled at the mouth of Campbell's Creek. The Combses came in and settled in what would become Hazard after one of the family, Leslie, decided to stay in the Bluegrass; a grandson, Leslie Combs III, founded the beautiful Spendthrift thoroughbred horse farm. A great-grandson of the Combs branch that settled in Clay County became governor of Kentucky. Another notable Combs was known as Old Danger Combs; he had been and remained a Tory, unhappy that the colonies had left the mother country, later became a Democrat, and fought for the South in the Civil War. So did many of the Bakers, Caudills, and Walkers.

Perry wasn't even a county until 1819, when citizens living in Clay and Floyd counties decided they wanted one of their own and the legislature created Perry, with the county seat at Hazard, both named for Oliver Hazard Perry, the hero of the Battle of Lake Champlain in the War of 1812. John Duff laid out the town, and Jessie Combs was elected county clerk in 1822. He served until his death in 1878, which may be some sort of record. Hazard grew slowly but steadily until the Civil War, with new families—Holbrooks, Napiers, Amises, Mclntires, Pratts, and Olivers—settling in town or around the county. The town got to be something of a trading center, and after the war Joseph Eversole, a descendant of the pioneer family, and newcomer Benjamin Fulton French became leading merchants.

But then troublesome events began to take place. Timber had been the main product of the sharp, rocky hills, but there were thick veins of rich coal under those hills, and in the years following the Civil War outside companies began buying up large tracts of land or rights to the minerals under that land. Fulton French served as agent for one of the largest of these companies and soon established a reputation as a tough man and a hard bargainer, more concerned with getting cheap coal for the company than with getting a fair price for the mountain landowners. According to the
Hazel Green Herald
of August 12, 1887, “An English syndicate are buying mineral rights in
parts of our county. Poor, blind people, selling their vast wealth for a song, the finest coal land for fifty cents an acre. The same syndicate has bought in Perry County 130,000 acres of mineral rights.” Author Harry Caudill wrote later, “When Hazard attorney Joseph Eversole warned landowners that the mineral deeds were tantamount to fee simple conveyances, the purchasers sought to silence him; in the resulting war Fulton French, a lawyer for the land syndicate, was his leading opponent.”

French had come up from North Carolina, married Susan Lewis, of a large, substantial Harlan County family, and settled on Cutshin Creek in what is now Leslie County before moving to Perry and going into the dry-goods business. His chief competitor was thirty-five-year-old Joseph Eversole, a member of another large, influential mountain family, a slender, handsome, popular young lawyer and businessman who had married Susan Combs, daughter of the prominent judge, state legislator, and educator, Josiah Combs. In the beginning the two men, both talented and ambitious, were on good terms, but Eversole came increasingly to resent French's sharp buying practices in acquiring land for the syndicate and what he considered French's disregard for the welfare of the mountain people. Like the Eversoles in general, Joe Eversole was a public-spirited man, generous with time and money, interested in improving the quality of life in his rugged mountain community. But, though small, he had a fiery temper and was known as a tough fighter.

Fult French was a hard, grasping man whose concerns were centered on his own pocketbook. As historian Allen Watts, himself a former resident of neighboring Letcher County, says, French was undoubtedly the villain of the piece; Eversole was trying to protect the small mountain landowner.

Eversole's disapproval gradually cooled to a sort of polite hostility, and it took only a disagreement over competition between the two stores to spark the gunplay that was more and more common as a means of settling disputes in the mountains during the post-Civil War era.

Something happened—who knows what?—that persuaded French and Eversole to start arming themselves and their employees. French, in mountain Mafia style, began hiring gunmen. Eversole may have hired some outsiders himself. According to the
Hazel Green Herald
of September 1, 1886: “Some weeks ago their rivalry led to a murderous fight in which French and his friends were driven out [of Hazard]. French began collecting a band with which he will move on Hazard. He makes Mt. Pleasant [Harlan] about thirty miles away, his
headquarters. He has recruited seventy men of desperate fortunes. They are paid $2 and $2.50 a day. Eversole, surrounded by an equally desperate gang, is fortified in Hazard. A fierce conflict is imminent.” This account may or may not be accurate. French lived in Leslie County; why would he have his headquarters in Mt. Pleasant—Harlan—a long, hard ride away?

The ambush killing of Silas Gayheart, a friend of French's, was the first overt act, but by the time he was shot, in the summer of 1887, mountain gun thugs such as Bad Tom Smith, Joe Adkins, Jess Fields, and Bob Profitt were walking around Hazard brandishing rifles and reportedly working for Fult French. A year or so later Old Claib Jones turned up and, by his own account in his “autobiography,” tried to bring peace by killing off one side or the other. It is not clear which side he was working for. He was not the world's most accurate reporter.

The Eversole people always denied killing Gayheart, and there was no apparent reason why they would want to. An ambush killing was always hard to trace; the killers struck and ran, usually killing all witnesses and leaving few tracks in the tangled woodland. There were accusations in Hazard that a dozen men, including two Ever-soles, were involved in killing Gayheart, but no one was ever indicted. Fult French, however, sent out his men to hire more gun-slingers, and though there had been no overt show of feud warfare, there was a great deal of tension in Perry County throughout the winter of 1887. There was a lot of shooting on the street at night, and people became reluctant to go out after dark. Everyone was edgy.

Then, early one morning in the spring of 1888, Joe Eversole, on his farm out in the county, heard from one of his lookouts that Fult French and a large group of his men had camped the night before on the road from Mt. Pleasant to Hazard and were planning to attack the town. The Ever soles usually centered their forces in Hazard around the “fort” where the Beaumont Hotel later stood, but on this occasion they had withdrawn from the town and gone about their business, apparently feeling safe from action by the French forces.

Calling his men together, Eversole selected a small group to go to Hazard, avoid confrontation, and gather what information they could. He went with the bulk of his forces to the southern section of the county, where he could count on a large body of sympathizers. Within hours, French and his army swooped down, somewhat surprised to find Hazard quiet, with a few people in the stores and almost no one on the street. They took over the courthouse, fortified their homes, and warned the few Eversole men they saw to leave town or face trouble. They left.

Joe Eversole, staying with his men out on South Fork, heard the news and, taking five of his most trusted men, rode toward Hazard. On the way he picked up a dozen more. Late in the afternoon they reached Hazard and attacked the French forces, who fought back in spirited fashion. The fighting went on until dark, but with few results. One French gunman was wounded. Eversole said none of his men was hurt.

Eversole and his men withdrew. Two days later a strange but not atypical thing happened. A reporter for the
Cincinnati Enquirer,
hearing that there was serious trouble in Perry County, took the train to London, hired a horse, and began the exhausting seventy-mile ride over the rugged mountain trails. Not far from Hazard he fell in with a lanky mountaineer, told him the purpose of his journey, and was delighted when the mountain man offered to escort him into Hazard and introduce him to feud members who could give him the facts about the terrible battles.

They were French adherents, and what they gave him was a highly one-sided, wildly exaggerated version of what had been a fairly harmless clash; but by the time it appeared in the
Enquirer,
the mountains were made to appear dripping with blood. The mountaineers were not without a certain sense of humor.

Ten days later, the two sides clashed again. This time there were casualties on both sides. Such sporadic fighting continued through the summer months, until people on both sides grew tired of the feud and began thinking of ways to stop it. Both French and Eversole were probably eager to quit. It was getting to the point where neither could afford to continue. Neither was a wealthy man, and the fighting was ruining their businesses. Some people had left Hazard. Others, out in the county, were afraid to come into town to buy. And the cost of keeping up their armies was beginning to pinch. French sent Joe Adkins to Eversole's store to see if Joe Eversole would like to talk. Ever-sole said that he would.

The two men met on Big Creek and drew up a formal truce under which both agreed to give up their guns. French promised to hand his over to the judge of Leslie County, who was a cousin, while Joe Eversole agreed to hand his over to Judge Josiah Combs, his father-in-law.

When the news was announced in Hazard, there was a general feeling of relief, but the peace that descended was an uneasy one. Men from both sides now walked the streets, but some were still armed, they still eyed each other warily, and when one side was drinking in a saloon and members of the opposing camp entered, things tended to get rather quiet. Both French and Eversole needed
some time to replenish their declining fortunes, but few people in Hazard seemed to believe that the truce would last very long.

And it didn't. French accused Eversole of regaining possession of his guns while Judge Combs was not looking. Eversole replied that French could not regain his guns because he had never surrendered them as he had promised to do. On September 15, 1887, Joe Eversole and Bill Gambrell met on the street in Hazard. Gambrell was a loudmouthed, gunslinging, part-time preacher, denouncing the demon rum one moment, peddling moonshine whiskey the next. Gambrell made what seemed to be a threatening remark. Eversole told him to keep his mouth shut or risk getting it shut permanently. Gambrell reached for his pistol. Eversole grabbed Gambrell's pistol, pulled his own, and shot him. Gambrell was killed. He was a French man, and the feud was automatically restarted. By November 24 the
Louisville Post
was warning that “Perry County is again in a state of terror. The French and Eversole war has been renewed. Every man in the county almost has sided with either French or Eversole.”

In the meantime the level of violence was automatically raised when Bad Tom Smith appeared on the scene. Just when, where, and why he got the name of Bad Tom is unclear, but from the time he was a boy on Carr's Fork, in Knott County, Tom Smith was obstreperous, erratic, usually in trouble. He began his career as a brawler, then became a petty thief, stealing anything, from hogs and horses to merchandise. He would fight anyone and terrorized girls as well as boys in the neighborhood. In 1884, when he was twenty, Tom was walking into Hazard on election day when he saw some of his friends holed up in a livery stable and being fired upon by several gunmen lying in the weeds outside. Picking up a large rock, Tom knocked one of the besiegers unconscious, took the man's pistol and shot the other two, ending the battle, relieving his friends, and winning considerable attention.

But there was another aspect of Tom's personality that needs to be considered: He was an epileptic, in a time and in an area where epilepsy and the seizures or “fits” that marked it were little understood and generally feared or regarded as a sign of insanity. It is likely that Tom was shunned, ridiculed, considered strange, and probably picked on as a boy, inclining him early on to be a fighter. He was big and strong, a little over six feet tall and weighing almost two hundred pounds, just dumb enough to be fearless, just bright enough to be dangerous, and a dead shot.

Fult French knew of Tom's handicap and took profitable advantage of it. Though Tom was married to a Lewis, as was Fult French (he
later left her), Fult seemed to give him the dangerous, dirty jobs to do, and Tom did them.