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5 death of a feudal hero Here beyond men’s judgments all covenants were brittle. —Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian; or, The Evening Redness in the West (1985) After Jeremiah South’s death in 1880, his family experienced a number of setbacks. Barry, his most enterprising son, replaced him as penitentiary executive but, like his father, ran afoul of the reformers who sought to humanize Kentucky’s appalling penal system.1 Barry South’s 1887 bid for state treasurer was trounced in the Democratic primary just months before he lost thousands of dollars of uninsured property in a Frankfort warehouse fire.2 His elder brother, Confederate congressional medal honoree Colonel Samuel South, died the next year, while their nephew Jerry South III fell into a life of crime and dissolution.3 One of the few adult Souths still living in Breathitt County by the 1890s, Jerry was involved with the French-Eversole feud, and the dynamiting of the Jackson Hustler office (it was later revealed that he wanted to destroy the Reverend J. J. Dickey’s paper because he was “strongly opposed to evangelists coming into Eastern Kentucky”). He was shot to death in 1896 while arguing over the spoils of a fish-poaching operation . His accused assailants were acquitted on a technicality.4 It was an ignoble decline for a family that had once been on the make. Any number of factors might be blamed for the Souths’ dwindling prosperity , and most of them related to land ownership in an industrial age.5 They had never been able to properly exploit the vast Breathitt County acreage that had appreciated in value since their patriarch first purchased the land and arranged for the county’s creation. Poor surveying kept farmers and speculators from making unimpeachable claims to ownership, especially when faced with well-lawyered timber and coal companies. As enormous parcels of Breathitt County land were sold in the 1890s, prices soared and 141 142 Bloody Breathitt state-recognizedpropertydemarcationbecametrulyvital.Thelong-standing confusion of boundaries was no long tolerable. An acceleration of litigation ensued, as Barry South and others tried to defend their holdings. For years after his father’s death, other claimants challenged him for what was left of his inheritance as he tried to prevent unknown parties—the hunters and marginal drovers, Breathitt County’s “wood denizens”—from felling what he considered his timber. As those who aspired to legitimate land ownership came upon hard times, they thrived on absentee-owned land for indefinite years until they were discovered and driven off.6 In 1894 Barry South told a federal judge that he and his coheirs had not been able to “invade” their Breathitt County property for twenty years because of a “lawless and desperate” population of squatters who were hostile to surveyors and unwilling to provide depositions. What was left of the old Thomas Franklin Revolutionary grant was far more land than even a family of means could survey or surveil. So it remained the domain of men “who built houses and eked out a bare existence,” armed with superior knowledge of its landscape, its coal seams, and its phenomenally valuable hardwood.7 The landless never need worry about becoming land poor; railroads and large-scale extractors could also afford to bide their time. Barry South could not. Of course many of these “wood denizens”—or their fathers—had also been on the opposite side of the Civil War from Barry South and his brothers . This may have mattered less if they were not still led by one Captain William Strong, “one of the most notorious men in the state” even as late as 1894. Strong maintained his hidden sylvan martial state on and around his farm in the southern part of the county. Although he was no longer a challenge to Breathitt’s post-Confederate Democracy, he still served as the county’s disfranchised and defiant, poor whites, and a small number of former slaves. In describing Strong, the South-sympathetic Hazel Green Herald trotted out all the specious feud associations it had always complained of when they appeared in newspapers from outside the mountains, including the ever-popular medieval analogy. “Strong is a sort of feudal hero,” it read, “exercising over his own neighbors a greater power than ever did landed baron in the days of night-errantry.” It was claimed (no doubt to raise the federal judge’s hackles) that Strong was also the guardian of an unknown number of whiskey stills, and he had supposedly...

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