Part 10

Uncle Dyke chose also his own grave site in the family burying ground overlooking the house where he'd lived seventy-one years. Often he had visited the spot and picked out the place beside him where Miss Sallie should be laid to rest. His life had ended almost where it began. The house in which he was born stands only a few miles from that in which he died.

"He built this house his own self," Aunt Sallie quietly reiterated that evening as some of us lingered to comfort her. "We came here to Big Creek soon as we married. We've lived here seventy-one year." Through brimming eyes she gazed toward the new-made grave. "We traveled a long way together, me and Dyke--" a sob shook the frail little body--"and now, I'm goin' to be mighty lonesome."

Big Meeting is still carried on just as Uncle Dyke wished it.

In September, 1940, I went again to mingle with the hundreds who show their reverence for the Good Shepherd of the Hills by keeping fresh in memory his teaching through their prayers and hymns at the Big Meeting each autumn. And here again a worthy follower of Uncle Dyke Garrett eulogized his deeds and mourned his loss. And close by, for all her ninety-two years, his beloved Miss Sallie, with a trembling hand on the arm of a kinsman, listened intently while those who knew and loved him extolled her lost mate.

And now Miss Sallie is gone too. She died on July 28, 1941, at the age of ninety-three and loving hands place mountain flowers on her grave and that of Levicy Hatfield far across the mountain.

TAKING SIDES

Some took sides in the feuds that have been carried on throughout the Blue Ridge Country and thereby got themselves enthralled, while others, more tactful, managed to keep aloof and remain friends with the belligerents.

There's Uncle Chunk Craft on Millstone Creek in Letcher County. Enoch is his real name. There's nothing he likes better than to tell of the days when he was one of Morgan's raiders. Then, when he was only twenty-two, that was in 1864, Uncle Chunk slept in a cornfield near Greenville, Tennessee, the very night General John Hunt Morgan, who had taken shelter in a house a couple of miles away, was betrayed by the woman of the house and shot to death by Unionists.

"We were tuckered out," he said, "had tramped through rain and mud and finally rolled in our blankets, if we were lucky enough to have one, and fell asleep wherever it was. I burrowed in with a comrade. But we didn't get much rest. For, first thing you know, seemed I'd just dozed off, someone come shoutin' through the cornfield that the General had been killed. We shouldered our muskets and stumbled off through the field, grumbling and growling that we'd 'tend to the ones that had betrayed him. But even if the woman had been found I reckon we'd a-shunned killin' her. There's a heap that goes on in war that a man don't like to think on."

Uncle Chunk was proud to own, however, that he saw hard fighting through Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky and was glad enough when the war was ended. He came back, married Polly Ann Caudill, and settled down in Letcher. It wasn't long until another war started. This time between his neighbors. But with all the carryings-on between John Wright and Clabe Jones in the adjoining counties of Floyd and Knott, Enoch Craft managed to stay friends with both sides. Whichever side happened to round in at his home, hungry and footsore from scouting in the woods for the other faction, found a welcome at Uncle Chunk's and plenty to eat. "Fill up the kittle, Polly Ann," he'd call to his wife, as he went on digging potatoes. "Here comes some of John Wright's crew." Or, "Put on the beans, I see Clabe Jones's men comin'!"

And fill up the kettle Polly Ann did.

After the belligerents had eaten their fill, Uncle Chunk would try to reason with them to let the troubles drop. "A man thinks better on a full gut than a empty one," he argued. And at last, through his help, the Clabe Jones-John Wright feud ended.

* * * * *

In Bloody Breathitt in 1886, Willie Sewell was shot from ambush while making molasses on Frozen Creek. That started feeling, for Willie had lots of kinfolks. He himself was not without sin, for he had killed Jerry South. The Souths were related to the Cockrells. But when Willie Sewell, who was a half-brother of Jim and Elbert Hargis, was shot the trouble, which became the Hargis-Cockrell feud, really began.

A quarter of a century after one of the most famous of Kentucky mountain trials--when Curt Jett was tried for the assassination of James B. Marcum and James Cockrell--the trouble was revived with the killing of Clay Watkins by Chester Fugate. This uprising, it was said, started when Sewell Fugate was defeated by Clay Watkins for the office of chairman of the county Board of Education. Chester quarreled with Clay over a petty debt. Three years before that time Amos, cousin of Chester, had shot and killed Deputy Sheriff Green Watkins, brother of Clay. When an enraged posse found Amos they filled him with bullets. Sixty years before, Hen Kilburn, grandfather of Chester Fugate, was taken from the county jail in Jackson and lynched for killing a man. It was the first time such a lynching had occurred at the county seat.

On Christmas morning in 1929, Chester Fugate was taken from the same jail and shot to death, but not in the courthouse yard. The posse took him out to a farm some miles away. That was the second lynching in Bloody Breathitt. There was a heavy snow on the ground, making a soft carpet for the swiftly moving feet of the mob numbering more than a score, as they hurried their victim away. Before entering Fugate's cell, they had bound the jailer, S. L. Combs, to make sure of no interference from that source.

Some miles from the county seat they stopped in a thicket on a farm.

That morning farmer Jones got up before daylight and with lantern on arm went out to milk the cows and feed the stock. He halted suddenly in the unbeaten snow for from a nearby thicket came a strange sound. At first the farmer thought it the moaning of a trapped animal. Holding the lantern overhead he stumbled on a few yards to find Chester Fugate in a pool of blood that stained the snow all about the crumpled figure. Bleeding profusely from thirteen gunshot wounds, Chester survived long enough to give the names of at least six of his assailants.

It was another outbreak in the Hargis-Cockrell feud.

Five of the men in the mob surrendered. They were bound over and released on bail. All were kin of Clay Watkins: Samuel J. was his brother, L. K. Rice his son-in-law, Allie Watkins his son, and Earl and Bent Howard were his nephews. The men signed their own bonds together with Jack Howard, uncle of Bent and Earl. The name of Elbert Hargis was also affixed to the bonds. The sixth man named by Chester Fugate before he died was Lee Watkins, a cousin of Clay, who said he would surrender.

The trouble went back more than a quarter of a century when Curtis Jett--his friends called him Curt--and others assassinated James B. Marcum and James Cockrell. Curt was a nephew of county Judge James Hargis, who was said by some to be the master mind behind the murders.

The state militia was called out to preserve order during the trial.

Things had been turbulent in Breathitt before. Back in 1878 Judge William Randall fled the bench after the slaying of county Judge John Burnett and his wife. However, the commencement of the Hargis-Cockrell feud in 1899 was over a contested election of county officers. The Fusionists or Republicans declared their men the winners, while the Democrats were equally certain of triumph. James Hargis was the Democrats' candidate for county judge, Ed Callahan for sheriff.

The leading law firm in all of eastern Kentucky at the time was that of James B. Marcum and O. H. Pollard, but when the election contest arose, the men dissolved partnership. Marcum represented the Republican contestants, his former partner looked to the affairs of the Democrats. Until this time Marcum had been a close personal friend as well as legal adviser to James Hargis.

Depositions for the contestants were being taken in Marcum's office when the two lawyers almost came to blows over Pollard's cross-examination of a witness, with Hargis and Callahan sitting close by. Harsh words were uttered and pistols drawn, and Hargis, Callahan, and Pollard were ordered from Marcum's office. When warrants were issued for them and Marcum also by police Judge T. P. Cardwell, Marcum appeared in court and paid a fine of twenty dollars. But Jim Hargis refused to be tried by Cardwell--the two men had been bad friends for some time. Then, instead of attempting alone the arrest of Hargis, the town marshal of Jackson, Tom Cockrell, called on his brother Jim to lend a hand.

It is said that when Tom went to arrest Hargis the latter refused to surrender, drawing his gun. But Tom covered Jim Hargis first. Whereupon Hargis's friend, Ed Callahan, who was close, covered Tom Cockrell and in the bat of an eye Jim Cockrell, his brother, covered Callahan. Seeing that the Cockrells had the best of them, both Jim Hargis and Ed Callahan surrendered. That incident passed without bloodshed and Marcum himself sent word to police Judge Cardwell that he didn't want to prosecute Hargis and asked that the case be dismissed, as it was.

That same year there was a school election.

"Marcum flew in a rage," said Hargis, "when I accused him of trying to vote a minor and he pulled his pistol on me but did not shoot."