Bear Grease - Ep. 286: The Night Rider Tobacco Wars of Kentucky & Tennessee

Episode Date: January 8, 2025

At the turn of the 20th century as the U.S. production of tobacco was on the rise, a group of disgruntled tobacco farmers in small region of western Kentucky and northwestern Tennessee called “The Black Patch” organized against the monopolizing Duke Trust to help protect the income of so many small tobacco farmers. In this episode of the Bear Grease Podcast, hear the little known story of the largest domestic armed uprising in America that had taken place since the Civil War. Author and former Justice of the Kentucky Supreme Court Bill Cunningham shares the unbelievable story of the Night Riders. Dr. Lloyd Murdock of the University of Kentucky talks about the history of tobacco in the region and why is was so important to the people of the “Black Patch.” If you have comments on the show, send us a note to [e-mail] Connect with Clay and MeatEater Clay on Instagram MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Youtube Clips MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube Shop Bear Grease MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Built to perform, built to last. Check out. First Light's new field. Worldware gear at firstlight.com. Of course, dark fire tobacco, that was the cash crop. But you had mostly subsistence farmers that raised what the ate, raised a lot of some extent, what they wore, all this on the farm. But they needed cash.

Needed cash to pay for the farm. They need cash to buy groceries they didn't raise. They had need cash to clothe the children. They cashed to buy Mama New Calico dress for Easter. They needed cash to buy plow points. and they cash to maintain their farming operation. How they're going to make it? They're going to grow tobacco.

On this episode, we're going to hear the true story of the Knight Rider Tobacco War in Kentucky and Tennessee when farmers stood up against America's Goliath tobacco monopoly in a five-year reign of strategic terror. But in the ruckus, it divided states, communities, and even families in the most continuous, violent unrest in America between the Civil War and the race rides of the 1960s. But I think you might have a hard time deciding between the bad guys and the good ones, or at least history has. If you ask people what they're afraid of, there would be a long and varied list.

But what should be at the top of that list are the things that divide us. Because divisive things make people do some crazy stuff. We're going to interview author and former Kentucky Supreme Court Justice Bill Cunningham, tobacco expert, Dr. Lloyd Murdoch, and hear an archival interview from the 1980s from the last living night writer. I really doubt that you're going to want to miss this one. My name is Clay Newcomb, and this is the Bear Grease podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant. Search for insight in unlikely places. and where we'll tell the story of Americans who live their lives close to the land.

Presented by FHF Gear, American-made, purpose-built, hunting and fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged as the places we explore. You know, it's an interesting thing about Kentucky. You know what our motto is? United we stand, divided, we fall. There's never been a more divided fractured state in the union. in Kentucky. Civil war divided, politics divided, night rider movement divided, divided, divided, even today, this county was divided. The things that divide us are always really interesting

to me. Division is an ancient point of psychological leverage that can turn ordinary men into savages and weak men into powerful monsters. Division is a core tenant inside of most clandestine organizations where people rally against an enemy who sits across some ideological divide. But ironically, what this does is create a deep sense of unity amongst the oppressors. And it seems to be no secret that unity is the key to accomplishing goals and moving mountains. You hear it in sports, politics, religion, inside of families and businesses, and even inside of personal relationships, but the undeniable thread that unites all humanity together is that we're really good at using division as a weapon. The voice you just heard was lawyer, author, and former Kentucky

Supreme Court Justice Bill Cunningham from Katawa, Kentucky. He'll start this story by telling us about a man he met back in the 1980s. And remember, this is a story about the things that divide us. Joe Scott, like I said, when I went out there to do his will, I knew Joe. He'd been on a grand jury. Good guy. I mean, he knew Joe, go guy. He called me one day. He said, Bill, I want you do my will. I said, okay, Joe, when you want to come in? I'm not coming in. You're coming out here. And he's the guy, yes, sir, when can I come out there? I went out to his house, and his wife, he sat there at the kitchen dining room and I took all information and you wrote that book on that night rider didn't you i said yeah joe i did

well i can tell you some things about night rudders and he started talking she kept hitting him like this he was just dying to talk about i got up and left and went back out to execute the will took my secretary and another witness to witness he started you i may tell you a few stories boy about that book about the nightrider and he just started filling it all out in the mid-1980s bill cunningham and a went and interviewed the last known living night writer Joe Scott in Lyon County, Kentucky. This interview aired on a local television station in the 1980s, but hasn't been seen since. This is some stuff crammed deep in the cracks of history. Joe Scott was born in 1889.

But why at the age of 97 years old? Yep, he was 97 years old in this interview. Was he finally ready to talk? It was because everyone else was dead. Wrong were you part of this organization? How long were you a Knight Rider? Well, I joined it in 2004-19107. I guess there's long to live.

How many raids did you go on? Any guess? Well, I went to Hopkinsville raid and I went to this raid in Heddyville. Then I went to Bennett's raid. I was about for four raids, three four raids. And how many visits would you say you paid to individual people? I don't know. I don't know.

And they'd say come and go, maybe make two or three visits for every day down at all, don't you see for it? Rades and visits, he said. Joe Scott joined the Knight Rider's when he was 18 years old in 1907. And if you didn't get the gist of what the old man was saying, 97 years old. 97 years old, he basically declared that he was a night rider for life. This organization built a strong sense of loyalty, which is given when a group takes meaningful action towards a cause, giving identity as a side benefit. The nightriders were known for their masked, nighttime horseback terror raids as the clandestine

strong arm of the Tobacco Farmers Association known for threatening, whipping, and beating people into membership and at times even murder. In the late 1800s, tobacco farmers made good money growing tobacco as a cash crop, but the turn of the 20th century in America brought market domination from the loosely regulated tobacco giants who drove down the price of tobacco. And in 1904, the Dark Tobacco District Planners Protection Association, yep, it's a mouthful, decided to boycott selling to American tobacco, which was owned by the Duke Trust.

So remember that name, Duke out of North Carolina. Yeah, like Christian Leitner's Duke. And the farmers who wouldn't join the association and sold to the Duke Trust through American Tobacco were punished and terrorized. Between 1904 and 1909, the Knightwriters would not only terrorize individuals, but they'd be responsible for taking over entire cities

and burning the Duke Trust tobacco barns to the ground, making their actions the most continuous, violent unrest in America in the century after the Civil War. But the real thing you'll have to sort through is this. Were they the bad guys? Or were they a needed revolt from the people to smash a monstrous corporate monopoly? That's what we're here to decide.

But to understand the night riders, we first have to understand tobacco in the region of the country that is to this day called the black patch of Kentucky and Tennessee, which grows the finest dark-fired tobacco in the world. It's like winemaking in Germany and France. It takes generations to learn it and to refine it. You can go out on our front porch sometime this time of year and smell that drifting in. But basically, one of the reasons this is the best place in the world's guard fire to back and to cure it is we have all this hickory in West Tennessee and

West Kentucky is cured by hickory wood. Strips of hickory wood and cut it slats of it. Have the barns that are vented and you go in and you basically dig trenches. This is the way they used to do it now. My dad, my grandfather, you dig trenches in the barn floor. you fill it up with a hickory wood, you stay the fire, and you smother a sawdust, and then it comes up to the debacle, which is housed, goes out, and it promotes this special cure to it. And it comes in order.

You'll hear that term coming in order. Coming in order means that you wait until it's cured out long enough, and there's been enough rain and there's moisture in the air that's malleable. Otherwise, if you take it down too early, it just crumble up the dust. You take it down when it comes in order and amount of it, so you can strip it off the stop and pack it without a break into pieces. Coming into order. That's an interesting descriptor for a plant known for cheap, fleeting pleasure

that would cause more chaos and death than potentially any plant in history. What they call dark-fired tobacco starts with growing dark tobacco, which is a cultivated variety of the tobacco plant cured under hickory smoke to give it a unique flavor. The black patch region of southwest Kentucky and northwest Tennessee covers 30 counties and is the best place in the world to grow it. Dark-fired tobacco is typically used in chewing tobacco, but they also use the dark leaves to wrap cigars and to make some pipe tobacco. And burly tobacco, a different cultivar, is used for cigarettes.

Did you know that tobacco is a completely American thing? It's native to North and South America and used by indigenous people here since time immemorial. The plant belongs to the genus Nicotinia. So all the ancient pipes found in other parts of the world, those guys were smoking something else. But apparently, it was one of the first things that Europeans picked up from the native people, because by the mid-1500s, really not that. that long after the first Europeans got here, there was enough dark leaf tobacco being exported

that it became a global craze. In 1604, King James I, not LeBron of the Lakers, but shout out to Arkansas's Austin Reeves, King James declared, quote, tobacco was a nasty weed. Right from hell they bought the seed, it fowls the mouth and soils the clothes

and makes a chimney of the nose. Apparently, like Eminem, he liked to rhyme the truth. But by 1664, the colonies were exporting 24 million pounds of tobacco per year. And this brings up a timely point, boys. I hope you don't think that any of the various ways someone might soak tobacco's voodoo into their bloodstream gets the ju-ju-nukem or bear-gree stamp of approval because it doesn't. But in full disclosure, as a young fool, I dip some snuff behind Juju's back. But when I was 19, I believed that I heard the voice of God himself tell me to quit.

I'm not joking. And so I did. Sorry, Juju. But tobacco is an interesting part of our history and of society today. But back to the hard-hitting history, here's why it became so important to these poor American farmers. This is Dr. Lloyd Murdoch of Princeton, Kentucky. He has a Ph.D. in agronomy soils and happens to be a tobacco expert. Well, Kentucky is probably the second largest tobacco state in the United States. And it's very traditional and it's very, very important to Kentucky and has been.

It was the best crop that one could have as far as when you were subsistence farming. You had your hog that you killed every year. your milk and you had the beef, but in your chickens, and so you could subsist, you know, and you didn't make much money, you'd sell hay or something like that, and maybe you would sell milk, you know, in town or to somebody and get the cream off, but you didn't make much money, and tobacco, you could sell it, and you could make some money. So it was the thing that sustained you as far as having something above subsistence, and that was extremely important to a person different people at that time.

And if they didn't have that, you know, you'd have trouble by the car, you know, any of the things that would take you up one step in society, you know, it wasn't there. Of course, dark fire tobacco, that was the cash crop. But you had mostly subsistence farmers that raised what they ate, raised a lot of some extent, what they wore, all this on the farm. But they needed cash. Needed cash, paid for the farm, need cash, about groceries they didn't raise, They need cash to clothe the children.

They cash to buy Mama and New Calicoe Dress for Easter. They need to cash to buy a plow points. And they need cash to maintain their farming operation. How they're going to make it? They're going to go to backup. On Blood Trails, the stories don't end when the hunt is over. They just get darker. I've seen something in the road.

I instantly thought it was a sleeping bag. And there was a full of blood. Oh, my God. He doesn't have a hit. Blood Trails is a true crime. podcast born in the outdoors. Where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce, and the truth gets buried under brush and silence. Indications were he should be right there, but he wasn't. This season, we're going deeper, from cold case files to whispered suspicions, from remote mountains

to frozen backwoods. Each story begins in the wilderness and ends in darkness. Because out here, there are no witnesses, no cameras, just fragments, and the people left behind trying to piece them back together. He's not an honest person. He's incapable of being honest. Somebody somewhere knows something. I'm Jordan Sillers. Season two of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, Iheart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Here's Bill Cunningham getting an answer of how important tobacco was in the early 1900s. straight from the horse's mouth, Mr. Joe Scott. Sometimes the recording is a little hard to understand, but just bear with him.

Tobacco, of course, was your only cash crop, wasn't it? Bacca crop was a main crop, only crop. Might as much, say. And if you didn't make any money on it. Everybody couldn't have a hog. You know that. Trapers couldn't have. And the sugarcroppers,

but it wouldn't let them have hogs on the place, you know, and stock like that. So if you didn't make you tobacco, You almost literally starved if you couldn't, you couldn't, you could get a job anywhere. If you didn't, if you didn't have a crop, but what did you do? Worker's 25 cents a little day, maybe something like that. You didn't get nothing but you work. He said the going rate for manual labor was 25 cents a day, and a crop of tobacco would yield a lot more than that.

We'll learn exactly how much. Dr. Murdoch said something interesting, too, that tobacco, allowed people to live, quote, above subsistence. And this is an important idea. It seems to be an inalienable human right to subsist, to just make it. But to get more than you need to simply survive. That's a playing field that makes humans get crazy, greedy, ambitious, create divisions, and start wars.

Having more than just enough isn't just an American dream. It's the global dream. It's the ancient dream that pushed men across continents, mountain ranges, and oceans in search of riches. It's what makes people strategize and work hard, and some to steal and kill. Like winemakers at a vineyard in Sicily, this region of Kentucky and Tennessee built a culture around tobacco. And in the black patch, the way for the common man to get ahead was by growing that dark-fired tobacco. So how do you grow it? The tobacco farmer started in February.

He would take his tobacco seed, and he'd find a nice place on the hill that gets a lot of sun, and they go out there and they clear tobacco beds. I've heard my dad say many times, you know, in February, you always get a big warm spell, perfect time to make her tobacco beds. So what they would do, they would kind of work the ground a little bit and smooth it out in the late winter. Put a lot of wood on top of that, set it a fire. And when you set it a fire, then you raise the temperature in the top several inches, say maybe three to four inches, enough that all the seeds that were alive would perish.

And they go out and clear the tobacco bed to make it real fine, and then they get the tobacco seed and plant it. The tobacco seeds very, very small. In fact, you can buy it in pouches. You know, and almost your whole crop would be in a little pouch. It's so fine, and you grow it out, and then you cover it with a canvas. Protect it from the cold weather. It's going to grow, and it grows, and it grows tobacco plants.

And when the weather warms up, and the plants come in to Bing about this high, you go out and draw your plants, transfer them to the field, and set them out, and then hope for the best, and then it grows and you cultivate it, and you hoe it out. So tobacco plants have to be started in a protected seed bed. And once they grow to four to six inches, they're dug up by hand and replanted in the main tobacco field. I read an article one time it would take like 900 nan hours for one acre. So you had fairly good-sized families. The kids started working in tobacco when they were fairly young.

young. You didn't have herbicides, you didn't have insecticides, you didn't have anything like that that was later on used that would make tobacco farming much easier. So you had to walk the fields and look to see if there were any insects there. And if there were insects there, you had a little can that you threw it into and it had some little poison stuff in it. It would kill those insects. And so consequently, you would take and you would go down the row, you'd pull the weeds out. used to be you would sucker it. I think they got defolients now that

sucker. The sucker comes like if you grow a garden with tomatoes, you suck your tomatoes you suck your tomatoes, yeah, same thing with the bag. And then topping it, when it goes late in the summer he has a big bloom. Blooms on any plant. Magnolia trees, whatever, it sucks the energy out of the plant. Same way the bloom on top of the tobacco plant. It's really

beautiful. I grow tobacco here sometimes. And so then you top it and then it's a It's very, very labor intensive. That's why my grandfather, my dad would only grow four or five acres, and you had to depend on family to grow it. So it was just continuous. It was the thing that they needed to take them up a notch in society, but it demanded a lot, and it was a sacrifice to grow.

It's clear to see that this was more than a meaningful crop to these poor dirt farmers. But it was also important to some other people, especially the Duke family of North Carolina, and specifically James Buck Duke, who was a major player in this story, though he never was physically involved. The James B. Duke, he grew up, there were three boys, James, Rodie, and Ben. They grew up poor, pretty much, in Durham area of North Carolina. James was born like 1857. He was old enough to remember. So he grew up pretty poor.

But then after the Civil War, tobacco used up to that time, tobacco was pretty much just hand-rolled. The invention of the cigarette maker and all this. And after the Civil War, tobacco use started moving north because during the Civil War, there's a lot of economic intercourse between the two. They'd have a truce, and they'd trade coffee for tobacco. and cigarette smoking cigarette only came about. You won't see, you don't see those Civil War movies or Civil War for General Thore smoking a cigarette like you do in World War II. It didn't have it.

But cigarettes, consumption started to go up. According to Bill Cunningham's book On Bended Knees about this Knight Rider Tobacco War, which is where I learned all of this stuff, The Civil War expanded tobacco use in America when Yankee soldiers started using southern tobacco. But by 1869, there were less than 2 million cigarettes being manufactured and sold in America. Two million. But by 1890, there were 2.1 billion with the B cigarettes made in America. And this became the heyday of American tobacco. Imagine the draw to smoking or chewing if there was almost no knowledge.

of the health risks. And combine that with the radically addictive nicotine and, as we're about to see, the strong arm of a new philosophy of capitalism and marketing. America blew up into a tobacco nation. In 1890, the state of Kentucky alone produced 221 million pounds, making it the leading tobacco producer in the country. Today, the leading state is North Carolina. But just after the Civil War, the Duke Trust Company started by the father, Washington Duke, who when he started was a single-mule tobacco farmer, but his new company was rapidly growing in the global tobacco trade. But in 1889, the middle son, James Buck Duke, started the American Tobacco Company, which was the beginning of an empire, but still part of this Duke Trust. And the business took all. And the business took all.

And Washington Duke and the three boys were devout Methodists, but James B. Duke wasn't as devout, and he was more of a capitalist. He saw the money making, and he just took it from there, and the cigarette-making machine really opened it up. James Buck Duke became the tycoon. In Washington, before he died, he was already feeling pain, so maybe we made it too big, maybe some of the back farmers are suffering. So he was kind of the conscience.

When he died, you know, it was kind of unbridled to James B. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a successful entrepreneur is a lot of us DNA. Well, it's still got his money floating around today. I don't think James Duke was ever the corrupt tycoon you see in movies. I don't think he ever potentially really, I never see any. He was ruthless from a standpoint that he would buy out and, Didn't think too much about the impact. James Buck Duke may not have been overtly corrupt,

but showed an insatiable desire for money, power, and success in a time in America when this was becoming something attainable. He was in his early 20s when he started working for the business, and at age 32 he started this American tobacco company. It was said that he believed sleep and leisure were the enemies of man. He was charismatic, cunning, and a business wizard. According to Bill Cunningham, his company would be the first to give free samples, use Billboard advertising, and use personal endorsements of celebrities and athletes to promote their product. In many ways, America learned full-throttle capitalism from tobacco companies.

But with the rise of the Duke Trust Tobacco Empire and even monopoly, tobacco farmers got less and less for their crops. Here's Josh Spillmaker asking Dr. Murdoch a question. Get ready for some math. What would be a typical yield for an acre of tobacco? Probably about 4,000 pounds, somewhere along in there. 4,000 pounds. So quick math. Do you have any idea of what the going rate would have been

kind of before the Duke Trust kind of started pushing prices down? Probably before they started pushing prices down, it was probably seven, eight, nine cents a pound. Okay, so for, you have $350 to $400 per acre, which would have been pretty substantial. That's a lot of money then. You know, a guy would work all day for a dollar. Right. But the, I think the cost to produce was about six cents is what I think.

That's probably right, yeah. So, you know, they're making anywhere from two to four cents per pound per acre. Which was significant. To summarize that, in the late 1800s, a farmer was making $120 profit per acre on tobacco. And the average farmer was only growing about two acres, but that's $240 a year. So 900 man hours per acre works out to an hourly rate of 13 cents per hour. Another way to look at this is if a family as a whole could raise two acres. and the father could work making a dollar a day elsewhere.

A family could almost double their yearly income or raising two acres of tobacco. But that was before the Duke's American Tobacco Empire showed up, because after that, the prices would plummet, even down to farmers producing tobacco at a deficit, sometime only making two to three cents per pound. This destroyed the farmer's way of life. And I bet you see that this is building into a story that got some people really upset. But so it was a cash crop.

And if anything happened with their cash crop, it really put a rural hurt. So what happened when you monopolize the buyer, they can come take you a take or leave it price. And it was costing the tobacco farmers, six cents a pound, to grow tobacco. And they were being offered three cents a pound. So they began struggle and getting angry. And this being a cash crop lent itself with this animosity of anger between farmers because the farmer who didn't go along with the association

sold his tobacco to the trust because they'd up the price with him. But it wasn't the others. Mama got Calico dressed. Their kids had the good shoes for school and all. He caused a lot of resentment. This is why I got so violent.

Tobacco, Felix Yew and out of Robertson County, Tennessee, he was a big plantation on it there. He grew a lot of tobacco. He organized them and said, let's form an association. He was the brains, the Moses of the Black Patch, is what he's called. He was the brains. So they held a meeting over in Guthrie, Kentucky in September 1904, so what can we do? And he said, we can form an association. If they monopolize the buying, we'll monopolize the selling.

establish warehouses and sell oil to buy the tobacco up to the prices go up. They were going to monopolize the selling to cause tobacco prices to go up. But what I haven't told you is that the Duke Trust started paying more money to buyers who weren't members of the Tobacco Association. Did you hear that? They penalized the association members. And this became a massive point of division. It was a good concept, but when the American Abye Company kind of countered by raising it would go out and try to lure that farmers not into buying it, giving them a little bit more. So a lot of end up farmers didn't buy into it and the resentment. And so a year later in 1905, when they met, the numbers went up from 5,000 farmers gathered to 10,000.

And they were getting angry. So the original dark tobacco planners protection association meeting, led by Felix Ewing, this Moses of the Black Patch, had 5,000 farmers show up in support to join that first year. But a year later, 10,000 showed up and joined. The movement against the tobacco giant was gaining momentum. So about two weeks after that meeting, they had a little meeting at a little Stainbeck Schoolhouse, and a group of about 30 farmers got together there and started talking about what we're going to do

about these independent farmers, and they came out with the staying back resolution, which basically said, we're going to go visit these people at night because they worked during the day, and we're going to go visit with them and see if we can't talk them into joining, and there's a lot of implications there

and do whatever it takes to get them to join. So when that happened, it just threw fuel on the farm. They go at night. And farmers are independent cuss anyway. You know, you don't tell me what to do. And so you had that clag. You had this neighborly feeling where we want to get together and help each other.

And then you have the other independent feeling. You're not going to tell me what I'm going to do. So the palace broke out. He's spread like wildfire. This Steinbeck Resolution branded the Duke Trust as a criminal organization. So the Tobacco Association. mission was fighting this corporate criminal. This was a righteous mission.

It's interesting, but this original group of men in 1905 sent to convince the independence to join the association weren't supposed to be violent, and they were actually called possum hunters. You should remember that, because that's likely going to be on a bare, grease-rendered quiz. But these possum hunters, who did all their work at night, turned into the night riders.

which was a name that would stick. And this produced a real conundrum inside this region, a real division. And that's what this story is about. The majority of tobacco farmers in the Black Patch, as much as 70% became members of the association. And interestingly, included a very high number of African American tobacco farmers, many of which were sharecroppers. Yep. But 30% of tobacco farmers, for what to be.

ever reason rejected the selling boycott and were rewarded by American Tobacco. The people who sold to them were seen as traders and sellouts and ironically were labeled as hillbillies. That's right. The people who sold to the trust were known in Kentucky and Tennessee as hillbillies. Even old Joe Scott still called them hillbillies in the 1980s. On blood trails, the stories don't end when the hunt is over. They just get darker. I've seen something in the road. I instantly thought it was a sleeping bag.

And there was a full of blood. Oh my God, he doesn't have a hit. Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors. Where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce, and the truth gets buried under brush and silence. Indications were he should be right there, but he wasn't. This season, we're going deeper. from cold case files to whispered suspicions, from remote mountains to frozen backwards.

Each story begins in the wilderness and ends in darkness. Because out here, there are no witnesses, no cameras, just fragments and the people left behind trying to piece them back together. He's not an honest person. He's incapable of being honest. Somebody somewhere knows something. I'm Jordan Sillers. Season two of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, Iheart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is a good place to slow down for a minute and think about what you would do. Here's Dr. Murdoch.

We talked about how important it was. And so we're just talking about ourselves, putting ourselves in that time. You know, my neighbor, we all have to get together and get this price up. You know, we've got to do something. And so we decide most of the people come together and they volunteer and they say, let's do it. So we've got a big majority and we feel like we have almost everybody. And so if we don't do this, we can't do it. You know, we're going to be down to nothing as far as living.

And, you know, clothes for kids too. That's important. And so but these people aren't cooperating, you know, so you plead with them to do this. and if just if you do it and cooperate with the trust, you're okay, but you've got to have almost everybody. And they refuse to do it, and so you talk to them and, well, maybe they just need to be reminded. And so you take that next step, if you follow what I'm trying to say. And then that requires another step because they become defiant also against you in your position.

And so all of a sudden it's kind of like a war, you know. You find yourself in something that you didn't ever expect to be when you started down here. And how far do you go and what do you do? And so who was it fault? What was the injustice, you know, and which one's at it? And it becomes very confusing. It became very confusing. If you join the association, your organization,

basically hurting your family's immediate financial future for a hope that the plan would work and the monopolized selling would drive the prices back up. But on the hillbilly side, those who sold to the trust, maybe they thought it wasn't going to work at all. Maybe it was futile to stand up against a giant. You could sell your crop at a higher price today and take care of your family, which was your primary obligation. Are you more committed to your family? Or are you more committed to your community, what would you do, who were the bad guys? But I can see, I can understand one of the person that had 10 kids and was just making barely a living, just subsistence, and didn't want to send their kids to school with no shoes

or clothes in them or something like that. I can understand why that would be real important to them and why they may take that next step, you know, and go a little bit further than they probably should have. But then the other people, you know, on the other side, they were down there with what these people were talking about that took this stand, but now they had an opportunity to sell because the trust was trying to break the tobacco association. So I think, I'll do that because, you know, they need shoes. You can understand why they might want to do it. And so it's a difficult, difficult thing. I think that, you know, they need shoes. You know, you can understand. You can understand why they would, might want to do it. And so it's a Difficult thing.

I think that there was a lot of consternation. I think there was a lot of people that didn't sleep at night because they were wondering if they were right or wrong or if they took the wrong step. And they felt because you're harming your neighbor. The guy that next door that you barred the tractor from or he came over and he got your wagon for a while. And that's hard.

That is hard. Would you have joined the association? And if you're tempted to jump into quickly and to whichever side you think was righteous, it might help to hear a story from someone who was there. Let's listen to what the last living night rider, Joe Scott, said when he was asked why he joined. This might put it into perspective. I didn't go into it about 19 and 17. That's a year I went into this, 1970.

Why did you join? Why did I join? Why did I? I stuck a gun in my face and say, yes, go. Wouldn't you go? Huh? I didn't want to. I didn't want to.

But now I will. The other man said this, you better be there. When they came and told you that, uh... You had a man come to me, and every man comes to me at daytime and looked at and told you that. He called the night. He had a mask on and he said, you don't know who you told him.

You don't know who you told him. You don't know whether there's some trade counter? line counter, or where it from? So they threatened you, and that's why you joined. Oh, yeah, a lot of them had to certain. All of them didn't have to, but I told us, I said, I'm a young girl. I ain't got nothing. I don't need to go.

You know, if you can go, we need more men. He said they came at night with masks on and threatened him, forcing him to join. He was just 18 years old, and he did what most men in the Black Patch did. You see, it wasn't just tobacco farmers that joined, but people from all walks of the community because a cash crop affects everybody. Store owners, doctors, cities collecting taxes. This wasn't just about farmers. It was about farming communities.

And this is where it makes sense to introduce an unsuspecting, charismatic, militant leader and potential villain. The medical doctor, David Amos. He would become a key player in this story that delivered a deep sense of mission to the Knight Riders and will become the arch nemesis of James Buck Duke. And then David Amos, a little country, Dr. O'Wern Gob, serviced these people. He knew their misery. He knew their agony. I don't know whatever happened to about I was able to go through Dr. Amos' account book.

And a lot of fields weren't not paid, and a lot of them were paid with cams, chickens, this, that. He was kind of a frustrated Army General. He grew up, I think he was born in like 50, so he grew up here. This is something, I'm going to take this on, join the association. And I'm convinced, although I never felt any hard confidence of this, was in direct conference with Felix Ewing. Felix Ewing always kept the night rudders, you know, like this.

But I think the night rudder activity, David Amos, activity was probably police got a tacit approval from the association. And they became the middle of the arm and organized, started doing their visits home farmers, reading Princeton and warehouses, trying to make a difference. So the Knight Rider's connection to the Dark Tobacco Planner's Protection Association wasn't official.

Wasn't official. But there was little doubt who these Knight Riders worked for. These guys were always masked and no one really knew who they were. But Dr. Amos was an unlikely villain. And to most people in Kentucky, even today, he's not a villain at all. He was born in 1857 in Cobb, Kentucky. His father was a compassionate, well-respected doctor, known for treating the recently emancipated black patients without charge. David Amos attended a military high school, but in 1880 at the age of 23, he became

a doctor following the footsteps of his father long before being a doctor was financially lucrative. The profession was primarily connected to service. His piercing blue eyes and a trendy handlebar mustache gave him some charm and he had charisma to boot. He loved horses, pistol shooting, the military, and service to his country, community, and Cobb. He didn't even grow tobacco, but he cared for a lot of people who did. So around 1905, Dr. David Amos became the unofficial, under the radar, militant-minded leader commanding a branch of the Tobacco Association that would become known as the Knight Riders. He was a Knight Rider by night and country doctor by day. This is the same group that old Joe Scott, 80 years later, still pledged his allegiance to.

And the Knight Rider's sole job was to convince people to join. the association, and punish those who didn't. I wonder if Joe Scott ever met Dr. Amos. What kind of fellow about Dr. Amos? I don't know much about Dr. Amos. I haven't ever met him but one time. But now, Dr. Amos was a... Now, he was a smart man.

Now, he had a lot of sense. He did. He had Hopkinsville, you know, just like you'd take this thing here. He's like a checker board. And every man that he had his men, every fellow squads, every fellow had a captain, he had so many men, you understand? Every one of them, them places are numbered. You say the post office, telephone office, and every business place where there was telephone and telephone, he had all that numbered though.

And if he gave a man, he had a captain for so many men. give him a place for all of this. In the next episode, we're going to get into the specifics of what the night riders actually did, the beatings and the organized city raids. But from Joe's description, you see that this organization was militant, and at times would take over entire cities with 500 well-organized men on horseback at the command of the generous country doctor, often with the horse's hooves wrapped with burlap sacks to make their approach quiet.

That's some gangster stuff. But there was something much bigger at work on a national scale, something bigger than tobacco. Mr. Cunningham will now unveil a larger story happening in America. James Duke, he represented the capital interest of this country, and whereas David Amos' humble country doctor represented the labor. And this struggle of the night riders was labor versus capital. and this was going on all over the country. This was just a little microcosm of the labor movement in the railroad industry,

in mining, in the factories. It was that time of our country when this clash between labor and capital was becoming violent, hitting head on, and you had to develop the origins of a labor union. The Knight Riders and the association especially were basically the Hungarian union members. So each one led this, but that's been the growth of this country, right? Capitalism, labor, but it's always been a tension between the two. And it could have very well, like during the Depression, it could have very well gone south, like it did in Russia, like it did in a lot of other countries where the Tartarian government took over. It's easy to take for granted what has happened in history, not really thinking much about what could have happened.

Mr. Cunningham is saying that the same labor versus capital struggle happened in other countries, and it turned out way different, way worse. I want to close this first episode with an interesting clip from Joe Scott, when he was asked if he thought what he did was meaningful. Night writers did any good. Sure, I do. The ham, this bunker wouldn't be where it is today. They asked me the other day, said, well, would you do that again if it's all happening?

I said, because everything it was. I said, I sat enough in my country and the poor people that I thought I was doing all right. I'd do it again, and I do it. That's the way I feel about it. I don't believe I harmed anybody in a way that they didn't need something. This trust comes to need all this money and then started with the poor folks to death. He said that trust company didn't need all that money and to starve them poor folks to death. That's what he said.

And yes, he would do it again. In the next episode, we're going to look exactly at what they did and its effect. And here's a question I'd like you to answer right now. And it's this, do you think the Tobacco Association's boycotted selling worked? Joe Scott sure thought it did. The stories of the common man fighting against a corporate giant are intriguing because they're the stories that still dominate and divide the American consciousness even today. The world of the hunter-gatherer didn't have to consider stuff like this.

He was just too busy trying to subsist. This is a product of extreme prosperity, which overall we'd have to say is a really good thing. But it brings many cancerous pitfalls. After you hear what the association and the association, and the Knight Riders did, you'll be able to decide who were the good guys and bad guys. And actually, we'll get a judicial decision

that reflected the temperature of these people, and it might surprise you the conclusion they came to. There's one more hot episode about these dang night riders coming up, and I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear Grease and Brent's This Country Life podcast. Our render schedule is slightly different right now, because we did a render with CrossFit Master Jedi and Hunter, Rich Froning, and that's going to come out next week. And then the second Night Rider episode will come out,

and then we're going to have a render where we discuss all this Knight Rider stuff. So between now and then, the wild place is wild, because that's where the bears live. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps Game Calls and building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragm. Rams called prime cuts. Now I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen.

But when I run this call, I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to. I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut. because they're all three great cuts.

Check out Prime Cuts at Phelpsgamecalls.com. I think you'll be glad you did, and you'll find out that the Steve Ronella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. This is an I-Heart podcast, guaranteed human.