Bloody Breathitt by T.R.C. Hutton

Author:T.R.C. Hutton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2013-09-05T16:00:00+00:00

“A killing in Breathitt always seems to be big news”

In Jackson, Kentucky, the news of 1891’s peace between the Hatfields and McCoys was received as it was everywhere else: a telegraphed half column in the newspaper with references to the Middle Ages, gross exaggerations of the conflict’s length and death toll, and a general oversimplification of the facts. “The Hatfield-McCoy feud which has lasted nearly twenty years, and caused the death of 100 persons [in] Logan county W. Va., and Pike county Ky., has at last ended. Like the ‘War of the Roses’ it was terminated by a marriage. A truce was proclaimed, a Hatfield married a Miss McCoy, a peace congress was call and terms amicable to both parties were agreed upon. Thus ends one of the most bloody feudal wars of modern times not equaled in ferocity and fatality, perhaps, by the wars of the Scottish Highlanders.” John J. Dickey received the news with foreboding. Noting the recent heightened national attention on eastern Kentucky as a whole, Dickey dourly predicted that fact and fancy would become intermingled in written accounts of his adopted section’s “feuds.” “The feudal wars of Eastern Kentucky will no doubt be utilized in coming years by writers of fiction,” read a Jackson Hustler editorial. “It is in this form, perhaps, they will go down to posterity as no historian feels like chronicling the naked facts, and incorporating them into local history. Already two novels have been written to celebrate the deeds of the Hatfields and McCoys.”130

The missionary journalist’s concerns reflected a passion for historical accuracy that shone through the oral histories that filled hundreds of pages in his immense diary. Breathitt County was home not to one iconic famous feud but to a series of marginally well-known spates of lawlessness dating back to the war, making the truthful recording of its past a task so byzantine as to be almost impossible. Since his arrival Dickey had touted the county’s improvements over other eastern Kentucky trouble spots and protested what he considered unfair media misrepresentations.131 He had tried to be fair to Breathitt County in his own recording of its “naked facts,” and he was concerned that other writers would not. And he was correct; eastern Kentucky feud narratives almost always subordinated facts to colorful façade, and descriptions of events in Bloody Breathitt were no exception. A little over twenty years after Dickey made his prediction, one daft author placed “a family feud between the McCoys and the Hatfields” in Breathitt County.132

The Hatfield-McCoy feud’s end coincided with the Kentucky Union Railroad’s arrival in Breathitt County. The railroad’s eminence in the lives of Jackson’s residents represented an opportunity not afforded to the residents of the more isolated Tug River Valley to the northeast. It offered Breathitt an opportunity to divest itself of an image that dated back to the 1870s. If white intraracial violence was a product of isolation and “family feuds,” as had been said for years, the railroad was a sure cure. But just

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