The Hatfields and the McCoys Read Online Free Page A

of John Martin had hired him to kill Young and that Humphrey and Baumgartner had arranged details of the plot stirred up trouble again. The Tollivers kept Humphrey and the Martins, who vehemently denied the charges, under close surveillance. In July 1885 they fired into the Martin house near Morehead, killed one of the defenders, and flushed out Humphrey, who miraculously escaped injury although the attackers shot off most of his clothes. 5
    After further troubles, Judge Asher C. Caruth persuaded Humphrey and Craig Tolliver, the recognized leaders in the war, to leave Kentucky permanently. Humphrey, who until his term as sheriff had been outside the feud and widely respected, left and never returned. Tolliver, however, came back to Rowan County, where he gained control of the courts and the grand juries, made Morehead a wide-open town for whiskey, gambling, and other crimes, and instituted a reign of terror. He forced enemies of the Tollivers to leave Morehead, the population of which dropped from seven hundred in 1885 to less than three hundred in 1887, with some of the most respected citizens in the exodus. 6
    Craig Tolliver made a fatal mistake when, at his instigation, a sheriff’s posse killed twenty-five-year-old Billy Logan and his eighteen-year-old brother Jack, who lived a few miles from Morehead. The cruel slaughter of the two young men and the burning of their cabin aroused the anger of their cousin, young D. Boone Logan, a quiet, cultured attorney of Rowan County. Boone Logan himself received a warning from the Tollivers to leave, coupled with an insulting promise that they would provide his wife with employment as a domestic in order that she might support their children.
    Logan took the matter to Governor J. Proctor Knott, who explained the constitutional and legal barriers to his rendering any assistance. The young attorney allegedly then told the governor, “I have but one home and but one hearth. From this I have been driven by these outlaws and their friends. They have foully murdered my kinsmen. I have not engaged in any of their difficulties—but now I promise to take a hand and retake my fireside or die in the effort.”
    Boone Logan succeeded where seemingly stronger men had failed. He purchased Winchester rifles, pistols, and shotguns, with adequate ammunition, and had them shipped under the label of sawmill equipment to Gates station near Morehead. Quietly he then gathered his forces and on June 22, 1887, engaged the Tollivers in open battle in Morehead. At the end of two hours of fighting, Craig Tolliver lay dead, and most of his associates were either killed or wounded. Logan thereupon took control of the town and held it until state troops arrived. The battle was the last bloody clash between the opposing factions in Rowan County. Several of Logan’s associates were indicted for murder, but all were acquitted by a Fleming County jury. Logan himself was never tried. 7
    In 1888 an investigating committee of the Kentucky General Assembly visited Morehead. Its report, which traced the origins and development of the feud, declared that between August 1884 and June 22, 1887, twenty murders and assassinations had taken place and sixteen other persons had been wounded in the county. Yet, “during this period there was not a single conviction for murder, manslaughter or wounding, except for the killing of one Hughes, who was not identified with either faction.” Moreover, the committee found scores of persons charged with selling liquors without license, carrying concealed deadly weapons, disturbing religious worship, and other breaches of the peace, who had never been arrested or who had posted worthless bonds.
    The investigators declared that “county officials were not only wholly inefficient, but most of them [were] in the warmest sympathy with crime and criminals,” even going so far “as to rescue criminals from the custody of the law, being totally oblivious to