Blame it on Salt Excerpt from Chapter One

If you look on a map near the center of Clay County you will see a wishbone made by Goose Creek and Collins Fork where they converge at Garrard, with the main stream continuing north for a mile or so where it loops around the town of Manchester. The land between the forks, a low, flattish area, is what we may call the salt bowl. It contains the sites of most of the important salt works that flourished in the early 1800s right up to the Civil War and beyond. This area along the creeks contained the largest source of near surface salt water to be found in the United States as far as was known at the time. It was right there, in several places, just oozing out of the ground in springs. For ambitious types who owned enough slaves to take advantage of it, it was like picking money off trees.

Here was where the big names in early Clay County history congregated, James and Hugh White, Daniel and Theophilus Toulmin (T. T.) Garrard, John and Daniel Bates. And though it is not where the Bakers and Howards lived -- the biggest names in the infamous Clay County feuds -- here also was the breeding ground for those feuds. For there is evidence the major feuds were born out of the enthusiasm the salt kings had for making money. The feud warriors -- the ones who pulled the triggers -- were considered surrogates from the beginning, and this is one case where what some have thought to be a myth can be seen as fact.

Sources in both camps attributed early animosity between the Garrards and Whites to a geographic situation that was lucky for one family, unlucky for the other. For the first White salt works were nearer to the Wilderness Road, and thus to markets for the salt, than was the Garrard operation a few miles down stream. That made all the difference in volume of sales and profits. It was when the Garrards started to cut prices to entice customers to their harder-to-reach works that the grumbling between the two rich families is said to have started.

There was nothing wrong with this cutting of the price for a bushel of salt. It was laissez-faire capitalism in its purest form. Americans loved it then, and we still do. But just as government price supports for tobacco would be seen as necessary to the survival of the Clay County farmer many decades later, it might not have hurt if there had been some stabilizing influence on the salt industry in those early days. Nor would it have been unusual. The first Clay County court had its hand in business matters to an absurd degree, even to the point of establishing what saloons could charge for drink and food, and even for a bag of feed for a weary traveler's horse. Of course the first court was controlled by salt men, and there was the rub. When both sides were advocates of unbridled commerce when it came to their own business, there was no chance of any sort of government meddling in that business. There was nothing left to do but start a price war and let the chips fall where they may. The legacy of this ill feeling between the wealthiest families in the county was felt well over a hundred years later, and for that, we can blame it on salt.

In one of those unhappy convergences of history that occur every now and then this animosity born of competition between the salt men met up with a peculiar type of settler coming into Clay County at about the same time. These were the independent, garrulous and trigger happy Scotch - Irish of Appalachian lore and history. In many respects these clannish quarrelers were the opposite of the salt families but they teamed up with them in what we may see as a union ordained in hell to establish a culture of violence that has been termed the Hundred Year Clay County War (or, some would argue, the Two Hundred Year Clay County War). There is plenty of evidence that mountaineer family vendettas would have been carried out in Clay County without the salt families, the way they were in Breathitt, Harlan, Pike and other Eastern Kentucky Counties. But when the Clay County versions found sponsors in the salt men, their natural proclivities for settling disputes by the gun went way beyond the other feuds.

This culture of violence was unusual in its magnitude, and that created an opportunity for its antidote to be unusual in its magnitude as well. To counteract the bad old things Clay County was becoming famous for the county produced men of unusual character and will. The driven genius James Anderson Burns founded a school with the specific intention of ending the feuding. Bert Combs, one of the school's pupils, became Kentucky's most progressive governor and helped end the extreme isolation of the mountains. David Yancy Lyttle was a major player on the statewide educational playing field, Charlie Goins, on the local. We produced doctors of renown, educators of brilliance, military colonels and generals, and captains of commerce. And, boy, did we need these people to counteract the bad press. In the mid-1930s there was a proposal in Frankfort to do away with Clay County. And if you looked at those who were getting the publicity ­ and we're talking about national publicity ­ you could see why.

In doing research for this book I began to realize something that contradicted what I had always believed about human nature: that people are basically the same down through the generations and centuries. Now I'm not so sure. While some people throughout history have been able to transcend the hand they were dealt, for the most part I believe we are products of our time, for better or worse, and that only a few of the more exceptional types remain constant in their abilities to resist the downward pull of base instincts.

Looking back, the amorality of some of our old Clay County progenitors is shocking, and the lack of religious constraints surprising. This cut across all classes, the poorest and the richest. The simplest way I can put it is that these folk did not subscribe to the Judeo/Christian philosophy that we Clay Countians generally live by today. The willingness of the feudists to shoot people, the casual attitudes of regular citizens toward shooting people, the surprising willingness of the courts to let people who had shot people go free time and time again suggests that life didn't mean as much then as today.

People's attitudes were hard, cold, and above all, cynical. They were different even than the historical model of fair play when it came to shooting each other. Our old feuders weren't constrained by moral niceties and chivalrous notions that kept them from standing behind a tree and bushwhacking someone they were mad at as he rode by on his horse. This sort of thing happened time and time again and there is little evidence that the snipers felt remorse. These were often thought to be good men, whose loyalty to their families was legendary. But what sort of moral code would allow for cold blooded murder outside the family? This is an otherness that is foreign to most of us of the modern era, and its is disturbing because we can't make any sense of it.

So what has accounted for the change? Many people nowadays are surprised to learn just how few churches there were in the early days of the county. There were some hard shell Baptists and some fire-and-brimstone preachers scattered around the populace but few organized congregations where people heard of Christian love and forgiveness. When preachers such as Rev. John Jay Dickey (whose diaries contribute much to any history you will find of Clay County) came to enlighten the folk as to the proper way a Christian ought to treat his neighbor he was met time and time again with an indifference Dickey found hard to believe. And those were the good people that he boarded and socialized with; the others he found to be beyond hope.

It almost appears that the mellowing of attitudes was proportional to the establishing of more and more churches, that old Professor Burns was right in thinking that providing the feuders' children a Christian education would lessen the hostilities. At about the same time Burns started the Oneida Baptist Institute the Presbyterians established an academy in Manchester (about a year after Rev. Dickey left town in defeat). Before these and a few other congregations were established the only religious experience many people had was at "associations," those occasional all day social events where preachers took turns in reminding the folk of the hell that awaited them. "You could hear them old preachers; they'd have voices just like a lion," an old man on Red Bird told an interviewer in 1978. "You could hear their voice ringing against them mountains just like a freight train hollering." Then communities began to organize more genteel congregations from Big Creek to Fogertown to Oneida, and even in that den of iniquity and depravity that so depressed Rev. Dickey, Manchester itself. By the end of the first one hundred and fifty years, 1957, people may have argued which word in the phrase "Christian education" was operative in causing the county to turn its back on the violent old ways. But neither religion nor education could claim total victory, for there was something left of the unique mix of people that created the peculiar culture Clay County became known for that persisted beyond anyone's or any thing's ability to change it.

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