Kentucky Lawyer

Look to the hills

11 Mac Swinford Look to the hills The instances of the drama and romance of the bar of Kentucky are confined to no section or part. All have their local and colloquial tales and accounts of the prowess , humor and skill of their orators and lawyers. One section, however, may have been somewhat neglected in the matter of record and eploitation because of lack of roads and the usual means of communication and intercourse with the rest of Kentucky. I refer to that charming, historical and vast territory known as the mountains. For this part of our state and her attractive and intelligent people I have a deep and abiding affection. No more fitting tribute could be paid than that which is set forth in ecerpts from the following address presented at the meeting of the Kentucky State Bar Association at Frankfort in 1933 by a distinguished eastern Kentucky lawyer and, at that time, Attorney General of the Commonwealth , the late Honorable Bailey P. Wooten. To attempt to paraphrase his remarks would endanger its historical value and detract from its eloquence. “Let us go back some thirty odd years to a time near the close of the last century and the beginning of the present, to a remote part of the Commonwealth , where highways and railroads were unknown and the beauty of the hills had not been desecrated by their heedless touch; where bridle paths up creeks and over mountains, down rivers and trails lead you through sparsely settled country from one county seat to another; where laurel and rhododendron bloom in spring, and 113 Kentucky Lawyer golden leaves glimmer in autumn sun; where the hush of silence is broken only by chattering birds and barking squirrels; and where friendships are measured in terms of life or death. “In December, 197, when Judge W. F. Hall closed his last court at the epiration of his term of office as Circuit Judge of the old th District at Hazard, Kentucky, there was not a foot of railroad nor a mile of improved dirt road in all that vast territory embraced by Harlan, Leslie , Clay, Owsley, Perry, Knott, Letcher, Pike, Floyd, Magoffin and Jackson Counties, a territory of 10 miles across from railroad to railroad. It embraced the headwaters of the Big Sandy, the Cumberland and the three forks of the Kentucky River. The largest county seat within it had fewer than five hundred people. “The lawyers attending the courts within this territory at that time travelled the circuit on horseback, as those in the days of Ben Hardin , John Rowan, and others less renowned, had travelled before railroads and modern highways were ever thought of, and when horseback travel from court to court was the only means of conveyance. “In that day, and until the last of this great wilderness was penetrated by railroads up the Big Sandy in 199, the Cumberland in 190, and the Kentucky in 191, which marked the passing of the circuit riders, the last of their tribe in America, there travelled through this wilderness 11 Mac Swinford such men as Walter Harkins, Jim Marrs, King Cook, Logan Salyers, Jim Fitzpatrick, Crit Bach, Ed Hogg, Dan Fields and others who regularly rode the circuits embraced by these counties. They were joined at intervals, attention to their private feuds permitting, by Jim Marcum, Boone Logan and Fult French. “The time of this story is the early part of the present century; the place may be anywhere within this great circuit; the scene a court house; time three o’clock p.m. Darkness comes early in the mountains in these December days. The jury is dismissed, the sheriff adjourns court until court in course. The gavel falls, and the judge, Commonwealth’s attorney, and visiting lawyers are in a commotion to get started to the net place of holding court, anious to cover a part of the forty or fifty miles before pitch dark, that the rest of the journey may be more easily negotiated on the net day, Sunday following. Prancing , pawing horses, eager to be gone, and frisking from a week or ten days’ stay in the stable, are brought up before boarding houses and hotels in the little county seat; leggings and spurs are donned, saddlebags are adjusted; an easy swing into the saddle, a wave of good-bye to the friends and hosts waiting...