Infamous America - HATFIELDS & MCCOYS Ep. 6 | “The Deep, Dark Hills of Eastern Kentucky”

Episode Date: October 13, 2021

The Hatfield-McCoy feud wasn’t the only feud in eastern Kentucky in the late 1800s, not by a long shot. The Martin-Tolliver feud, the French-Eversole feud, and the Baker-Howard feud were three of many that plagued the region for decades. The gunfights, assassinations, and ambushes lasted for nearly a century. Thanks to our sponsor, Simplisafe. Get 20% off your entire new system and your first month of monitoring service free when you enroll in Interactive Monitoring at SimpliSafe.com/infamous Get 20% your first purchase of Papa & Barkley CBD products at papaandbarkleycbd.com/infamous Visit Lighstream.com/infamous for a credit card consolidation loan! Join Black Barrel+ for early access and bingeable seasons: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join For more details, please visit www.blackbarrelmedia.com. Our social media pages are: @blackbarrelmedia on Facebook and Instagram, and @bbarrelmedia on Twitter. This show is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please visit AirwaveMedia.com to check out other great podcasts like Ben Franklin’s World, Once Upon A Crime, and many more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Hatfield-McCoy feud is easily the most well-known family feud in American history, but it's not entirely clear why. It wasn't the longest or the deadliest, but it found its way into the American Infamy Hall of Fame nonetheless. In the 1880s and 1890s, there were several other major feuds happening in Kentucky while the Hatfields and McCoys slugged it out across the Tug River. Up in Rowan County, the Tolliver Martin feud went from Warren, to hot after a fight on election day that was reminiscent of the beginning of the real trouble for the Hatfields and McCoys. Down in Perry County, the French family battled the Eversol family. And around the corner in Clay County,

the feud that was possibly the longest and bloodiest in American history was in its fourth decade. It was the Baker Howard feud. It lasted in one form or another for nearly a hundred years, and it claimed somewhere around 150 lives. As always, it's impossible to know the true number, but whatever it was, it wasn't small. In the 1880s and 1890s, eastern Kentucky was probably the fightinest region in the country. There were gun battles, assassinations, arson,

and all matter of mayhem that continued all the way into the 1930s. From Black Barrel Media, this is Infamous America. I'm your host Chris Wimmer, And this is a six-part series on the most infamous family feud in American history, the Hatfields and McCoys. This is episode six, the deep, dark hills of eastern Kentucky. Rowan County is about three counties northwest of Pike County, where the McCoy clan was headquartered.

The feud in Rowan County only lasted for about three years, but it was a hell of a three years. As author John Ed Pierce put it in his awesome book, Days of Darkness, War is a better word for that grisly episode in Rowan County's history than the word feud. Some folks call it the Martin-Toliver feud, or the Tolliver-Martin feud. But Pierce thinks the label Rowan County War is more appropriate. According to Pierce, historian David Williams said 20 men were killed during those three years, and 16 were wounded. And as Pierce also said, this was not a conflict of heroes.

Unlike some of the other feuds, this one didn't start as a direct conflict between the Martins and the Tollivers. They got caught up in a huge brawl on Election Day in August 1884. This election day was specifically for the race of County Sheriff. But back then, election days in general must have been sights to behold. They were basically drunken, rowdy parties. There was plenty of whiskey to go around, which usually led to a fistfight or two. Vote buying was common, and so was gunfire. And votes were not secret like they are today.

Kentucky had not yet adopted the practice of secret ballots, so votes were called out publicly. Everyone knew who you voted for. And while that practice and specific votes weren't the problem, it might have added to the tension. A fight broke out between two men, and the wife of one of the men was a cousin of the Martin family. As the two men grappled, others joined in the fray.

Drunken onlookers cheered from the sidelines. The two-man fight quickly escalated into a brawl and then into a melee. John Martin waded into the mix and started fighting. Floyd Tolliver took the opportunity to go after Martin. Tolliver slugged Martin and sent him flying. The town marshal tried to break up the fight and someone hit him on the head with a rock. The acting sheriff pulled his gun and shouted for order, but it did nothing. When John Martin got back to his feet, he drew his gun.

In response, Floyd Tolliver drew his gun. They opened fire on each other. Other men joined in, and suddenly bullets were flying in all directions, and the area was covered in gun smoke. When the shooting stopped and the smoke cleared, one man was dead and two were injured. One of the wounded was John Martin. When the confusing case of the brawl that led to a shootout was put before a grand jury, the jury couldn't tell which of the witnesses was telling the truth,

so the jury indicted Martin, Tolliver, and the acting sheriff. A court date was set for December, but it never happened. Shortly before the trial, John Martin and Floyd Tolliver ran into each other at a hotel in the county seat of Moorhead. As usual, they were drinking, and predictably they started arguing. Both men reached for their pistols, but Martin was faster. John Martin shot and killed Floyd Tolliver. Martin was arrested and thrown in the local jail, which made him instantly afraid of retaliation from the Tolliver family.

Floyd's brother Craig was the leader of the clan, and John Martin probably couldn't have asked for a worse enemy. Craig Tolliver was tall, strong, and brutal, and his family wanted swift action. John Martin persuaded the county judge to transfer him to the jail in a neighboring county to get him away from the Tollivers. Craig Tolliver was content to be patient and wait for Martin to return to Rowan County for his trial, but the judge saw the warning signs and postponed the trial indefinitely. That move pushed Tolliver over the edge.

If the county wasn't going to bring John Martin back for trial, then Craig Tolliver would do it himself. He wrote a fake transfer order and gave it to one of his trusted allies. The ally recruited four men to pose his deputies, and the five of them traveled to the jail in the neighboring county on December 9, 1884. When they arrived, they presented the jailer with the phony order that instructed him to give up custody of John Martin. The jailer didn't know anything about the trouble between the Tollivers and the Martins, so to him, these guys looked like five lawmen with a lawful order. He released John Martin into their custody over Martin's loud protests. The Tolliver henchmen marched John Martin to the train for the trip back to Rowan County.

The train was bound for the town of Moorhead, but it made a stop along the way. At the stop, Craig Tolliver and a dozen supporters were working with. waiting. Five men grabbed the conductor and the engineer and held them at gunpoint. Six men went to the passenger car and found John Martin. Martin was shackled and handcuffed, but he still tried to run. The men shot him and left him for dead. Unbeknownst to Martin, his wife was on the train. She was in the car in front of his, and when she heard the shots, she ran back and found him bleeding on the floor. Martin made it through the night as the train chugged into Moorhead.

When it stopped, his wife and some others helped him walk to a nearby hotel. But his wounds were too serious. He died at about 9 o'clock in the morning. And with the murders of Floyd Tolliver and John Martin, Rowan County descended into open warfare. In March 1885, three months after the murders of Floyd Tolliver and John Martin, the Rowan County War officially escalated. A county attorney was shot and wounded outside the town of Moorhead,

which was about to become the center of all the action. A week later, a deputy sheriff was shot and killed in nearly the same location. Heavily armed supporters of the Tolliver and Martin factions flooded into Moorhead. Some hot words were exchanged at a hotel bar. The Martin faction took positions in that hotel, and the Tolliver faction ran across the street to a different hotel. They fired at each other and terrified the townspeople until the Martins realized they were outnumbered and fled the hotel.

At that point, the Tollivers took over the town of Moorhead, and the fighting continued for most of the summer of 1885. Prominent citizens moved out of the town temporarily or permanently to escape the warlike conditions. The governor sent an adjutant general, to investigate the situation. The man reported back that there was basically no objective law in the area. The governor summoned representatives of both sides to a peace conference in Louisville,

and for a brief second, it looked like there was a truce. As soon as both sides returned to Moorhead, Craig Tolliver, the leader of the Tolliver clan, got himself elected town marshal. A crooked trial took place in a neighboring county, and one of the results was that Cook Humphrey, the man who had won the sheriff's race on election day that started all the trouble, was indicted on a scheme with the now dead John Martin to steal money from the county. Craig Tolliver now had dubious legal cover to go after county sheriff Cook Humphrey.

Tolliver assembled a gang and found Humphrey and another man at the home of a Martin relative. The gang infiltrated the property before dawn, and ended up killing the other man and forcing Humphrey to run for his life. Then the gang burned down the house. Humphrey resigned as county sheriff, a move that allowed Craig Tolliver to consolidate power. A temporary sheriff attempted a brief uprising and arrested many of the Tolliver men who'd been part of the gang.

But a trial never happened, thanks to a magistrate who supported the Tollivers. Craig Tolliver took over a hotel in town, and started operating saloons without licenses and built himself a dry goods store. He turned Moorhead into his own personal fiefdom. The governor sent troops to Moorhead twice during the summer of 1885, but with little result. As soon as the troops left, the trouble started right back up again. The killings and political machinations continued for the next two years.

Tolliver family members were murdered. then Martin supporters were murdered, and back and forth and back and forth it went. The courtroom trials that did happen resulted in very little punishment. Citizens continued to flee Moorhead. Over the course of two years from 1885 to 1887, the population dropped by more than half as Craig Tolliver continued his stranglehold over the town. In the second half of 1886, he installed himself as a county judge to give him even more leverage over his enemies. But his enemies were secretly planning

his downfall, and it led to one final battle to end the war. Boone Logan organized the rebellion against the Tollivers. In June of 1887, Craig Tolliver had led a party of henchmen who murdered two young men of the Logan family in cold blood. The young men were probably Boone's nephews, and afterward, Tolliver ordered Boone to leave Rowan County. The ultimatum was, if Boone left the county, his wife would become a servant in a Tolliver home and she could continue to care for their children. In other words, she and the children would remain alive and well.

The murders and the ultimatum pushed Boone over the edge. Boone and a couple close friends started secretly talking to other men in the county. They discovered that hatred of the top. Tollivers had spread far and wide. A small army was ready to enlist for a fight. But Boone made one last attempt at a diplomatic solution. He met with the governor and requested help, and the governor said no. Boone left the governor's office and decided there was only one course of action.

He traveled to Cincinnati and bought 50 Winchester rifles, some shotguns and pistols, and 2,000 rounds of ammunition. On the night of June 21, 1887, more than 100 men assembled outside Moorhead. Boone and his two closest allies divided the army into four squads and they surrounded the town. The leaders of the Tolliver faction were headquartered in Craig Tolliver's hotel. Boone had planned to call out for their surrender just after 8 o'clock in the morning. But before he could, he saw a Tolliver supporter sprint across the street with a rifle. Clearly, the Tollivers had learned about the Logan Army. Boone shouted at the hotel anyway and told Craig to surrender.

Craig and the rest of the Tollivers responded with gunfire, and that started the ball. For two hours on the morning of June 22nd, a gun battle raged through Moorhead. The Tollivers were badly outnumbered, but they held out as long as they could. There were four Tolliver men, two Tolliver boys of 14. and 12 years old, and two Tolliver supporters against more than 100 Logan men who had the town surrounded. By the end of the fight, five of the six Tolliver men were dead, and the sixth would die later from his gunshot wounds. Only the two boys survived. And that ended the bloodshed of the Rowan County War in the reign of the Tolliver faction. Afterward, the state legislature issued

a scathing report on the lawlessness in Rowan County. A general in the militia went so far as to recommend that the county be abolished, but the county stayed intact. It recovered and flourished, and today it's the home of Moorhead State University. Boone Logan, whose full name is Daniel Boone Logan, moved to Pineville in Bell County in the extreme southeastern corner of the state. If he was trying to avoid trouble with family feuds, he picked a tough spot. Three feuds were happening at the same time in neighboring counties, one of which was the longest and bloodiest in American history. My relentless sleep problems have always come from an overactive mind.

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the French Eversol War revolved around a central location, the tiny village of Hazard. Hazard was a hard scrabble community if ever there was one. It was isolated in the Cumberland Mountains, with a main street that was mud and muck for half the year, a few stores, and a courthouse that was underutilized because judges were afraid to hold trials for fear of violence. Fulton French and Joe Eversall were lawyers and rival merchants who had businesses in hazard, and their war almost destroyed the town. French was an agent for one of the largest companies from outside the region that bought land in Perry County as quickly as possible.

Timber was a valuable resource, but coal was the new hot commodity. The company bought land so that it could own the mineral rights to the black gold that was in the earth. Fulton French soon developed a reputation as a tough man to bargain with. He did what it took to buy the land as cheaply as possible. As his reputation and his sales grew, he developed a rival in Joe Eversoll. Eversoll didn't like the sudden arrival of all these outside companies that were more or less forcing people off their land. French and Eversol both had stores in hazard,

and as their disagreements grew more heated, the town suffered. Trouble had been slowly brewing for a couple years, but in 1887, as the Rowan County War came to its conclusion, Joe Eversole and Fulton French were preparing for a war of their own. Both men hired gunslingers and built small armies of paid mercenaries, and the shooting started when a friend of Fulton French was ambushed and killed. The Eversole faction always denied the killing, but the lines were clear. drawn nonetheless. There was sporadic gunfire for several months, but thankfully no one died. It was even more miraculous when the streak continued during a day when both factions took

up positions in buildings in the middle of hazard and fired at each other for hours. There was one injury on the French side, but that was it. The erratic gunfights continued until eventually everyone in the area was exhausted. The village had been terrorized. People moved away. just like they had in Moorhead. It was almost impossible to do business, which made it very difficult for French and Eversoll to keep paying their mercenary armies. They were bleeding money, and it had to stop.

So Fult and French and Joe Eversolle agreed to a truce. With the agreement, a very tense and tenuous peace settled over hazard. Members of both sides eyed each other suspiciously in town, and then the peace was shattered when Joe Eversonel killed a French ally in the middle of Main Street. And somewhere around that time, a hired killer named Bad Tom Smith became a prominent fighter for the French side. Bad Tom Smith had been recruited by both sides and eventually landed with the French faction

and had already killed one man in the war who was on his own team. But he really became a celebrity when he ambushed Joe Eversol. In April of 1888, Joe was riding with his brother. brother-in-law and a prominent judge who was related to Joe by marriage. Shots rang out from the brush and Joe and his brother-in-law were killed. The judge managed to escape and it was later revealed that Bad Tom Smith led the ambush. The murder of Joe Eversall was the beginning of the downward spiral for the Eversal clan. John Campbell became the leader of the clan, but he was killed by friendly fire. Shade Combs, who was related to the judge and Joe's dead brother-in-law,

took over and tried to ambush Bad Tom Smith, but Bad Tom and his men got the better of Shade Combs' men. Bad Tom's guys killed one of the ambushers and forced Shade Combs to run. Weeks later, Bad Tom assassinated Shade Combs while Shade was in his front yard playing with his kids. After that, a French supporter was ambushed and killed, probably in retaliation. The governor sent in military troops, but their presence only paused the feud. As soon as they left, the trouble started back up. Then finally, in the fall of 1889, a grand jury handed down multiple indictments for bad Tom Smith. A judge convened a special court session to hopefully put an end to the deadliest menace of the feud.

Instead, it caused the Battle of Hazard. Eversol forces were badly depleted. They'd been killed or had fled for their lives. But those who remained were determined to make a stand against Bad Tom Smith and the French clan. Allies of both sides rushed to hazard. The Eversolls took control of the courthouse. The French's took control of the jail,

which was right next to the courthouse. They blasted away at each other for hours and nearly shredded the courthouse in the process. A French supporter was killed on graveyard hill above the courthouse, but he was quickly replaced by bad Tom Smith and another man. They dug in and used graves and tombstones for cover. For the next 18 hours, Hazard turned into a war zone. The firing was steady, but many, if not most, of the men were drunk, so there was little killing until the very end.

The Eversol side ran out of ammunition, and the men started to escape the town. Bad Tom shot and killed one of them, and then two French allies were badly wounded, and the battle was finally done. But it wasn't the end of the war. Ambush killings continued, and someone burned down the courthouse the year after the battle,

and the town of Hazard was in tatters, as nearly every building was very building was very. riddled with bullets. The Eversol side was in ruins, and it was about to take another hit. Six years after the battle, Judge Josiah Combs was murdered in front of the new courthouse. He was the judge who'd been with Joe Eversal when Joe had been ambushed and killed by Bad Tom Smith. Now the judge had been shot and killed from long range. One year after the judge's murder, Bad Tom Smith finally got his comeuppance. When he was caught, he admitted to six murders over the course of his life,

though the true number is probably much higher. He was hanged June 28, 1895. Fulton French, the leader of the French faction, survived the war and all the aftermath, but an Eversal got him in the end. In 1913, he was shot by the son of Joe Eversal and died from his wound a year later. 1890s, many of the feuds were done. But as they stepped aside, the Baker-Howard feud took the spotlight. Though in actuality, the Baker-Haward feud started the spotlight. It's the longest running and probably the deadliest family feud in American history. And like the Martin-Toliver feud that was often

called the Rowan County War, the Baker-Howard feud is often called the Clay County War. For nearly a hundred years, four families and their allies fought each other with pretty much every weapon imaginable. And like all the other feuds, the basic cause was money, money from the sale of land, or from the sale of resources on the land or in the land. The two most common resources were timber and coal, but the Baker-Haward feud was rooted in the salt industry. Salt was a major commodity of the 1800s. It was the best ingredient to preserve food for long periods of time. So for instance, if you were migrating across America in the 1800s and you were living out of a wagon for months at a time, salt was almost as valuable as gold. Two families,

the Garrards and the whites, got rich off the salt wells in southeastern Kentucky. And long before the feud hit its apex in the late 1890s, the Garrards and the whites had moved up into the elite class of Kentucky Gentry. For decades, They'd been much more concerned with securing family wealth through business and political office than fighting in the streets. They left that part to their kinfolk, the bakers and the Howards. That was what made this feud unique. The Garrards and the whites were like the godfathers of mafia families. The bakers and the Howards were like the foot soldiers who did the dirty work.

The names and the relationships are going to get a little confusing in the beginning, but hang in there, it'll get easier. The bakers were related to the Gerards by marriage, so they were allies, and the Howards were related to the whites, so they were allies. And way back in 1840, a land dispute started the bad blood between the two sides. There was a confrontation in front of the Clay County Courthouse, and Daniel Bates, an ally of the White family, was shot with a shotgun. He survived, which shocked everyone, but he only lived for four more years. In September of 1844, Daniel Bates was at his salt operation examining one of his wells.

Abner Baker walked up behind him and shot him in the back without saying a word. Abner hid in the nearby woods for several hours and went to the home of the head of the Garrard family. The Gerrards hid Abner for several days and waited for the immediate heat to die down. About a week later, two justices declared Abner Baker insane and acquitted him of the crime. One of those justices was the Gerard who had hid Abner for the past week. The Baker shipped Abner to Cuba to keep him safe and to see if the climate would help him, because the acquittal on the basis of insanity wasn't just a maneuver to skirt the law. It was very probable that Abner Baker did have a mental illness.

Abner was 31 years old when he murdered Daniel Bates, and he had recently. married Susan White, since the bakers and the whites were allies. Susan was just 14 years old, and while their ages and the age gap weren't uncommon back then, the marriage had more problems than age difference. From the beginning, Abner was convinced that his young bride was having affairs with virtually every man in the area, from slaves to her own father and brothers, to Daniel Bates. Within three months of Abner's marriage to Susan, Susan's father moved her back home and planned for a divorce because Abner was so unstable. And then Abner killed Daniel Bates, and that solidified the feud between the four families for nearly 100 years.

As Daniel Bates lay dying in terrible pain, he told his supporters that he was leaving them $10,000 to make sure that Abner Baker was convicted or killed. Ultimately, Abner Baker was convicted of murder and hanged for his crime. Daniel Bates' dying wish was fulfilled, and it seemed justice was served, but whatever peace might have come out of it, it didn't last long. Four years after the hanging, in 1849, there was another killing. Eight years after that, there was another. The Civil War interrupted the family feud, but the year after it was done, the trouble

started again. A relative of the Baker family was shot and killed during an argument right in front of the courthouse while he was standing with the sheriff, who was part of the other side of the feud. Naturally, the bakers blamed the sheriff for killing their kinsmen, even though no one knew for sure who pulled the trigger. After the Civil War, the logging industry made a big push into Clay County, just like it had in the counties that were home to the Hatfield-McCoy feud. The Godfather's of the Clay County War, the Garrard family and the White family, had the wealth and power to work directly with the logging barons. But the foot soldiers, the Bakers and the Howards, didn't. So they began to fight each other even more intensely for the leftovers. And as the years

dragged on, a leader emerged from the Baker clan. He was young, he was only in his 20s, but he was brash and fierce and smart. He was tired. He was tired. He was tired. He was tired. He was Tom Baker, and in the tradition of Appalachia, he quickly earned the nickname Bad Tom Baker. The hottest part of the war was a year and a half stretch from early 1898 to the summer of 1890. In February, Bad Tom Baker and another man were on trial for arson. A big group of bakers rode into the county seat of Manchester for the trial. The defendants were acquitted, and that sparked a bloody fistfight in the hallway outside. the courtroom. A week later, a deputy sheriff was shot and wounded on the town square.

Two weeks after that, two men were shot and killed at a dance. And then in April, the mayhem really began. It started out on Crane Creek, where the bakers and Howard's both had timber operations. Bad Tom Baker confronted a member of the Howard clan about a supposed debt, and the argument turned into a fight, but it stopped short of a blazing shootout. The next day, someone took a shot at Tom as he stood in his front yard. Then he was warned that the Howards might ambush him if he returned to his job site. Bad Tom decided he wasn't going to wait around to get picked off by the Howards. He was going to strike first. On an afternoon in April 1898, the Howard's finished their work at their spot on Crane Creek. A group of six men started to ride home when a volley of

gunshots flew from the hillside beyond the trail. Two brothers went down instantly. Then their father was hit. He only survived because the bullet pushed him forward onto his horse's neck, and the horse galloped away in terror. The other three in the group charged after the frightened horse and escaped the ambush unharmed. The assassins were bad Tom Baker and his allies. One of the young men who escaped the ambush rode into Manchester and told Big Jim Howard that two of his brothers had just been killed, and so had his father. Jim was obviously furious about the attack on his family, but he was also outraged because

he believed the bakers had broken a truce. He had heard about the dust up at the creek a few days earlier, and he made an agreement with the leader of the Baker clan to settle the matter in court instead of with guns. The problem was neither man told anyone else about the deal. The day after the assault, Big Jim Howard rode toward the creek to collect the bodies of his brothers and his father, which he thought were still lying in the road. When he arrived, he learned that his father had survived, and his brothers were being prepared for burial. They hadn't been abandoned where they'd fallen. As Jim continued toward the Howard family homestead, he dodged two ambushes as gunmen fired from hidden spots along the road. He retreated to a small country store that doubled as a

post office. While he tried to decide what to do next, he stood outside talking to a couple men from the area. One of them spotted the leader of the Baker clan riding toward them. That was the man Big Jim had made the peace treaty with a couple days earlier. Jim grabbed a rifle off his saddle and fired at Baker. The shot hit Baker in the stomach and he crumpled to the ground. Doctors performed surgery in the little post office, but the patriarch of the Baker clan died the next day. Now that's probably the most accurate version of the story. but it's certainly not the most common or the most insane. The story that circulated in the newspapers

claimed that Jim basically tortured Baker to death by shooting him 25 times so that he died slowly and painfully. No one knows how that legend started, but it's almost certainly false. The killing that started in April continued all summer and struck every family, the Bakers, the Howard's, the Gerards, and the whites. The village of Manchester suffered like Moorhead up in Rowan County.

People were terrified. Families moved away. Businesses closed. Gunfire and drunkenness were common, and there seemed to be no way to stop the constant retaliation of one side against the other. Suspected killers were put on trial and nearly all were acquitted. All except Bad Tom Baker and Jim Howard. Bad Tom was acquitted for killing Jim's worst.

brothers, but he was convicted of murdering the deputy sheriff, who was a member of the white family. Bad Tom appealed the ruling, and he was set free until his second trial. And the same thing happened with Jim Howard. He was convicted of killing the leader of the Baker clan, but he appealed and stayed free until his next trial. But that trial never happened. There was so much chaos in Clay County that the case against Jim Howard was simply a ban. and he was never punished. But bad Tom Baker wasn't so lucky. His appeals process began in June of 1899,

after more than a year of open warfare. The governor sent hundreds of troops to Manchester to protect against violence. They set up a tent city outside the courthouse, and Tom lived under guard in one of the tents for his safety. The first step was for the judge to determine if a fair trial could be held in Clay County. After two days of testimony, he decided it couldn't, and he changed the venue to a neighboring county.

Bad Tom was set to be transported the next morning. It was now between four and five in the afternoon, and there was nothing left to do. The fervor of the hearing was done, and since there wasn't going to be a trial in Clay County, people started leaving town. Soldiers lounged around their camp and relaxed until dinner. Tom and his wife Emily were in his tent when a photographer asked if he could take Tom's picture. Tom reluctantly agreed and posed for two photos. After the second, he stood outside the tent with Emily. And at that moment, a bullet thumped into Tom's chest.

The gunshot was strangely muffled, and for several seconds, no one understood what was happening until Emily screamed. Tom fell forward and landed at his wife's wife's feet. She clutched him and yelled for help. Some soldiers rushed to their side. Others looked in the direction of the shot and saw a little wisp of smoke rising out of a partially opened window in a house across the street. The house belonged to Sheriff Beverly White, whose brother Will had been murdered by bad Tom Baker last summer. Soldiers stormed the house and broke down the

door. Inside, they found a rifle with the barrel still warm. but no shooter. Sheriff White and Big Jim Howard were the immediate suspects, but it was highly unlikely, if not impossible, that they were the culprits. The true killer was never found, and the cycle of reprisals and retaliatory killings lasted for another 33 years. In 1932, 92 years after the trouble began,

Frank Baker was killed by an unknown gunman. He is thought to be the last direct fatality of the Baker Howard feud, also known as the Clay County War. Thanks for listening to the story of the Hatfields and McCoys and other Kentucky feuds here on Infamous America. Next time we're going out west for two stories of thrilling man hunts, where law enforcement officers were truly tested by outlaws on the run. We'll see you then. And members of our Black Barrel Plus program don't have to wait week to week. They receive the entire season to binge all at once with no commercials.

Sign up now through the link in our show notes or on our website, Black Barrel Media. Memberships begin at just $5 per month. This season was researched and written by Jen Labyrinths. Script editing by Christopher Marcaquas. Audio editing and sound designed by Dave Harrison. Original music by Rob Valier. I'm your co-writer, host, and producer, Chris Wimmer. Find us at our website blackbarrelmedia.com or on our social media channels.

We're Black Barrel Media on Facebook and Instagram and B-Barrell Media on Twitter. And you can stream all our episodes on YouTube. Just search for Infamous America Podcast. This show is part of the Airwave Media Podcast Network. Please visit airwavemedia.com to check out other great podcasts like Ben Franklin's World, Once Upon a Crime, and many more. Thanks for listening.