36. Lexington Herald, May 10, 1897.

37. Boston Globe, May 10, 1897.

38. LCJ, May 10, 1897.

39. Ibid., December 3, 1878, May 10, 1897. The Courier-Journal did not completely ignore the political significance of Strong's career as a "feudal chieftain." However, the newspaper's admission of Strong as a political actor after a fashion was not particularly remarkable considering that the struggles that Strong had taken part in probably would have seemed more quaint than controversial to most readers at such a late date as 1897. See also Cincinnati Commercial, May 10, 1897.

40. LCJ, May 12, 1897.

41. The Jackson Hustler probably did, but there are no extant issues from 1897.

42. Cincinnati Commercial-Tribune, May 10, 1897.

43. NYT, May 10, 1897.

44. Baldasty, The Commercialization of News in the Nineteenth Century, 139.

45. Lexington Herald, May 27, July 31, 1897; MPL, July 31, 1897; HVK, August 3, 1897.

46. Lexington Herald, May 11, 1897; interview with Ebb Herald, AOHP, no. 279, p. 3.

47. LCJ, May 12, 1897; interview with John Akeman [Aikman], July 20, 1898, JJDD, reel 2, pp. 241213.

48. Lexington Leader, May 10, 1897.

49. SIJ, May 24, 1912.

50. Wright, Racial Violence in Kentucky, 18081.

51. Aikman: "Ned Callahan and Capt. Strong compromised [reprised?] their troubles in Jackson and in a few days Strong was killed. Their excuse for that way of doing was that Capt. Strong did the same way with the Amises. He, Al [?] and John Amis and old Wilson Callahan agreed to go home and go to work and he would not trouble them. In two days he had them killed at least it was only a few days. Old Wiley, Tom, Ause and Bob Amis bundled up and left at once. I don't think any of the Strong men were killed. I do not remember that any besides these were killed on the Amis side. The war lasted over a year. Strong kept his men around him. The others did not have the means to support their men in a body as Strong had." Interview with John Aikman, July 20, 1898, JJDD, reel 2, pp. 241213. See also Rolff, Strong Family of Virginia and Other Southern States, 93.

52. The use of the word clan as a reminder of specific historical events in past centuries is not the only way in which the press removed Breathitt County and, by extension, eastern Kentucky, from the present. The allusion to kinship in describing Breathitt County's violent politics is telling. Kinship, by modern definitions, is a social designator firmly rooted in societies that existed (or exist) in the past since modern society replaces familial bonds with administrative or bureaucratic forms of rationalization. The application of kinship therefore is "fraught with temporal connotations" especially after anthropologists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries used degrees of kinship to construct "temporal scales" (by which societies could be judged as paradoxically existing in the past or present). Fabian, Time and the Other, 7576.

53. LCJ, May 5, 1903; Clements, History of the First Regiment of Infantry, 14849.

54. WPA, In the Land of Breathitt, 71.

55. During the 1890s Strong's ties to Breathitt County's African American population seemed to have diminished. A possible reason for this is that, after 1870, the already tiny segment of the population had shrunk steadily. Hiram Freeman and his family had left Breathitt County sometime in the 1880s, and by the late 1890s the Red Strings had apparently become an exclusively white group. However, at least a few of the Strong family's former slaves and their descendants lived on or near William Strong's property. Lexington Herald, May 11, 1897; Ernest Collins, "Political Behavior in Breathitt, Knott, Perry and Leslie Counties," 10.

56. Spout Spring Times, June 12, 26, 1897.

57. If the organization refounded in Georgia by William J. Simmons in 1915 eventually included a local klavern in Breathitt County, it is very possible that it may have had a greater measure of continuance from the nineteenth century than almost any other klan-hosting locality due to the latter's phenomenal longevity. For historical comparisons and contrasts between the two versions of the organization, see Wade, The Fiery Cross.

58. Aside from John Aikman, all of the men that Strong's family suspected of being his slayer, Abner Baker, Asbury Spicer, and John Smith, were Edward Callahan's employees or Democratic associates (and possibly Klan members). John Smith would later be implicated in another murderous scheme involving Callahan. Begley v. Commonwealth, Court of Appeals of Kentucky, February 19, 1901, SWR, vol. 60 (January 21March 18, 1901), 84749; Strong Family Papers, 9394, Breathitt County Public Library; LCJ, May 10, 1897; Cincinnati Commercial Tribune, May 10, 1897; NYT, January 12, 1907; Rolff, Strong Family of Virginia and Other Southern States, 9394.

59. Lexington Leader, November 12, 1902.

6. "There has always been the bitterest political feeling in the county"

1. LCJ, December 24, 1888.

2. While the new constitution reaffirmed ballot voting, a law had already been passed two years before the convention eliminating vive voce in elections for state office. LCJ, January 14, 1888; MVS, March 16, 1900; Hickman Courier, September 11, 1891; Scalf, Kentucky's Last Frontier, 37071.

Agrarian protest against corporate ascendancy emerged just as divisions between Bourbons and New Departure Democrats were beginning to heal in the late 1870s. Populists were able to take a large chunk out of the Democratic electorate until many Democrats began heisting their platform, espousing railroad regulation and silver coinage. This, however, was too late to prevent Republicans from taking advantage of these divisions. Kinkead, A History of Kentucky, 21618; Thomas J. Brown, "The Roots of Bluegrass Insurgency," 23141; Klotter, William Goebel, 1112; Tapp, "Three Decades of Kentucky Politics," 21216; Bland, "Populism in Kentucky," 140; Lowell Harrison, Kentucky's Governors, 1036; Thomas Louis Owen, "The Formative Years of Kentucky's Republican Party," 165.

3. Earlington Bee, November 7, 1895; MPL, November 9, 1895 (quote); Richmond Climax, October 9, 1895; Kinkead, A History of Kentucky, 21617; Wiltz, "The 1895 Election," 133.

4. HGH, September 19, 1895 (quote); Woodward, Origins of the New South, 29.

5. MPL, March 30, 1896; Paducah Sun, October 7, 1898; Pearce, Divide and Dissent, 1617; Wright, A History of Blacks in Kentucky, 7076, 9091; Bland, "Populism in Kentucky," 109; Tapp and Klotter, Kentucky, 369; Lowell Harrison, Kentucky's Governors, 16879.

6. HVK, March 17, 1896.

7. McKinley won Kentucky by a mere 142 votes. TAPR, 1896, 238; 1897, 241; Powers, "My Own Story," 265 (quote); Harpine, From the Front Porch to the Front Page, 179; Woodward, Origins of the New South, 288. Kentucky's first Republican U.S. senator was elected in 1897. Gordon McKinney, Southern Mountain Republicans, 198; Lowell Harrison, Kentucky's Governors, 108; Klotter, William Goebel, 2425.

8. Paducah Sun, November 30, 1896.

9. Breckinridge News, March 2, 1898. Bradley came to office just in time for the South's widespread first wave of demand for railroad legislation. Grantham, Southern Progressivism, 14552. Suspicion toward the L&N began in 1887 when the railroad unsuccessfully lobbied for the abolition of Kentucky's regulatory railroad commission, a lobbying effort accompanied by a well-known measure of bribery. Although the Kentucky House passed the L&N's proposal, it was defeated in the Senate. However, anti-L&N Kentuckians did not consider this a permanent victory and continued to attack the railroad as a conspirator in statewide graft. KSJ, 1893 (vol. 3), pp. 3909, 3929, 3949; Gary Robert Matthews and Ramage, Basil Wilson Duke, 265; Clark, "The People, William Goebel, and the Kentucky Railroads," 48; LCJ, January 19, 1888, quoted in Woodward, Origins of the New South, 7; Bland, "Populism in Kentucky," 4.

10. Even though the earlier respective popularities of the Greenback Party, Grange, Farmer's Alliance, Colored Farmer's Alliance, and Agricultural Wheel resulted in enthusiasm for Populism in the state (especially the tobacco-growing west), the history of Kentucky's People's Party was relatively brief. The Republicans' 1895 gubernatorial victory alarmed Kentucky Democrats enough that they followed the national trend in absorbing the Populist platform, after which "the People's Party itself wither[ed] away." However, under Goebel's leadership, "Populism became more than a party in Kentucky; it became a style." Conti, "Mountain Metamorphoses," 18586; Thomas J. Brown, "The Roots of Bluegrass Insurgency," 241.

11. This problem was exacerbated by his rivalry with fellow Democrat "blue-blooded, ex-Confederate soldier" W. J. Stone. To add further weight to the war memory's contribution to the controversy, Goebel's two primary Democratic detractors were two of the state's most highly regarded Confederate veterans: W. C. P Breckinridge and Henry Watterson (although the latter eventually cautiously endorsed him). Clark, "The People, William Goebel, and the Kentucky Railroads," 37; Klotter, William Goebel, 4749.

Despite, or perhaps because, of his age, McCreary was said to have "established the most progressive record of any chief executive in Kentucky up to that time." Burckel, "From Beckham to McCreary," 305.

12. Tapp, "Three Decades of Kentucky Politics," 451 (quote); Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism, 17682, 27987; Grantham, Southern Progressivism, 14749; Ayers, Promise of the New South, 40917; Woodward, Origins of the New South, 37479.

13. Unlike most Kentucky Democrats, Goebel welcomed black men's votes, which made up about one-seventh of the state's electorate. However, his dedication to separate but equal disenchanted most black power brokers. Wright, A History of Blacks in Kentucky, 9394; Tapp and Klotter, Kentucky, 410; Ayers, Promise of the New South, 413.

14. Klein, History of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, 38283.

15. NYT, April 12, 13, 1895; "Kentucky's Political Anarchy," 126. The manner in which Goebel dispatched his street-side antagonist adds credence to C. Vann Woodward's contention that the public "shooting on sight" had supplanted the traditional duel as the primary method of white intraracial violence after Reconstruction, especially since Goebel apparently did not respond to a "customary challenge to a duel" by the L&N's lobbyist Basil Duke a few years later. Had he done so, he would have been disqualified from ever taking the oath as governor since, by 1900, Kentucky's constitution forbade anyone who had ever participated in a duel in any capacity from assuming the office. "Executive Order #I," February 3, 1900, Papers of J. C. W. Beckham, Special Reports and Studies (Goebel Incident), box 1, folder 8, bundle 11, KDLA; Gary Robert Matthews and Ramage, Basil Wilson Duke, 277; Woodward, Origins of the New South, 158, 160, 378.

16. SIJ, October 20, December 1, 1896; NYT, December 7, 1896; Paducah Sun, February 27, 1897; Earlington Bee, March 18, 1897; Bourbon News, March 19, 1897; MVB, March 19, 1897; Lexington Herald, April 9, 1897; AAC (1896): 375; (1897): 437; (1898): 356; Klotter, William Goebel, 22; Tapp, "Three Decades of Kentucky Politics," 35260.

17. Lexington Herald, February 19, 23, 1898; MPL, April 16, 1898; Bolin, Bossism and Reform in a Southern City, 2629; Tapp and Klotter, Kentucky, 356.

18. As a product of Kentucky's ancient inclination toward county autonomy, election officers were chosen by county courts, meaning that ballot boxes were subject to the whims and wishes of county judges, clerks, and sheriffs. If multiple parties were to be represented in the boxes' management, it was solely up to local courts to do so. Goebel's bill took this authority away from local officials and placed it in the hands of a commission chosen by the General Assembly. Succinctly, the directors of local elections would be chosen without the permission of the local court, a potentially problematic situation in cases in which county courts were under the control of a different party than happened to currently hold the majority in the General Assembly. While the most immediate effect of this law was to place elections in all counties (including those controlled by Republicans) under the management of the then Democratically controlled legislature, Goebel insisted that his election bill was a remedy for the alleged corruption that resulted in William Bradley's election and the L&N's continuing influence. Lexington Herald, February 27, March 1, 2, 10, 11, 12, 13; NYT, March 5, 1898; Columbus Enquirer, March 12, 1898; KSJ, 1898, 1022, 1145; AAC (1899): 356; Hartford Republican, October 5, 1900; Klotter, William Goebel, 4647.

19. MVB, June 22, 1899; SIJ, June 23, 1899; HVK, June 23, 1899; Lexington Herald, June 27, 1899; Hartford Republican, June 30, 1899; CDT, December 4, 1899; Hughes, Schaefer, and Williams, That Kentucky Campaign, 1642; Levin, The Lawyers and Lawmakers of Kentucky, 556 (quote); Klotter, William Goebel, 57.

20. HGH, November 10, 1886; interview with David Redwine, July 18, 1898, JJDD, reel 2, p. 2538. In Redwine's time, accusations of collecting "boodle" were more salacious innuendo than they were allegations of betraying the public trust. Whether or not Redwine was guilty of buying votes, it was more the rule than the exception in the 1880s. Summers, Party Games, 91106.

21. The first book-length account of the Goebel affair (written from a Goebel-friendly perspective at that), published within less than a year of Goebel's death, introduced Redwine as being from Breathitt County with no need for a fuller explanation. Hughes, Schaefer, and Williams, That Kentucky Campaign, 34.

22. For instance, Powers, My Own Story, 86; Levin, The Lawyers and Lawmakers of Kentucky, 556; Gordon McKinney, Southern Mountain Republicans, 195.

23. Hartford Republican, June 30, 1899.

24. Hughes, Schaefer, and Williams, That Kentucky Campaign, 4648; Tapp and Klotter, Kentucky, 41822.

25. Hughes, Schaefer, and Williams, That Kentucky Campaign, 34; Powers, My Own Story, 86.

26. Lexington Herald, July 11, 1899; Lexington Leader, November 14, 1902; LCJ, February 6, 1908; Clark, Kentucky: Land of Contrast, 209 (quote). James Hargis was the son of former Breathitt County treasurer and (briefly) state senator John Seldon Hargis.

27. Powers, My Own Story, 80.

28. Lexington Herald, June 28, 29, 30, July, 1, 2, 3, 1899; Louisville Dispatch, August 27 (quote), 1899; Lexington Herald, November 18, 1899. See also Fenton, Politics in the Border States, 4144.

29. HVK, September 19, 22, 1899; MVS, October 13, 1899.

30. Hughes, Schaefer, and Williams, That Kentucky Campaign, 108.

31. LCJ, October 17, 1899.

32. NYT, June 24, 1899; AAC (1899): 409.

33. Lexington Herald, September 11, 1899; NYT, October 15, 1899; Henry Loomis Nelson, "The Kentucky 'Boss's' Desperate Campaign," 1083; Tracy Campbell, The Politics of Despair, 3336; Powers, My Own Story, 56, 5859, 8997, 12023; Tapp, "Three Decades of Kentucky Politics," 446.

34. Lowell Harrison, "Taylor, William Sylvester," 870.

35. KHJ, 1900, 4652; KSJ, 1900, 6066.

36. Hughes, Schaefer, and Williams, That Kentucky Campaign, 145; Clements, History of the First Regiment of Infantry, 119; Klotter, William Goebel, 95.

37. When Kentucky's Democrat-majority General Assembly "conced[ed] the mountain counties to the Republicans" in 1890, they created an "oversized" congressional district containing territories formerly controlled by different Republican bosses. The intended effect was that these preexistent machines would come into conflict, further weakening and isolating the Republicans. As demonstrated by the eventual election of William Bradley as governor and steady Republican legislative gains elsewhere, the strategy was not flawless. MVB, March 20, 1890, December 4, 1899, January 31, 1900; MSA, December 5, 1899; Hartford Herald, December 6, 1899; LCJ, January 26, 31, 1900; Washington Times, February 2, 1900; MVS, February 2, 1900; Caleb Powers, Appt., v. Commonwealth of Kentucky, Kentucky Court of Appeals, LRA, 53:25860; Gordon McKinney, Southern Mountain Republicans, 119, 16776 ("conceding" on 168); Shannon and McQuown, Presidential Politics in Kentucky, 71.

38. Hartford Herald, December 6, 1899; LCJ, January 26, 1900 (quote).

39. LCJ, January 26 (quote), 1900; MSA, March 27, 1900; Richmond Climax, March 28, 1900; HMC, March 30, 1900; Crittenden Press, July 19, 1900.

40. LCJ, January 26, 1900; HVK, January 30, 1900.

41. Lexington Herald, January 26, 1900.

42. LCJ, January 31, 1900.

43. Blue-grass Blade, February 11, 1900.

44. HVK, February 2, 1900; Washington Times, February 2, 1900; William S. Taylor and John Marshall, Plffs. In Err. v. J. C. W. Beckham, Drt. Err., U.S. Supreme Court (argued April 30 and May 1, 1900), Supreme Court Reporter, Cases Argued and Determined in the United States Supreme Court, October Term, 1899, vol. 20 (November 1899July 1900), 895; "Executive Order #I," February 3, 1900, Papers of J. C. W. Beckham, Special Reports and Studies (Goebel Incident), box 1, folder 8, bundles 9, 12, KDLA; Tapp and Klotter, Kentucky, 450.

45. ACN, February 14, 1900.

46. Washington Times, February 2, 1900.

47. In 1912 James Gilbert, a Helena, Arkansas, sheriff's deputy formerly of Breathitt County, confessed to being the triggerman in Goebel's death twelve years earlier. Gilbert's confession was made with his last dying breath after a gunfight. His confession was apparently not investigated. Washington Herald, February 16, 1912; MSA, February 21, 1912.

48. Proclamation of Governor Beckham, Governor's Correspondence, Papers of Gov. J. C. W. Beckham, box 1, folder 1, bundle 16, KDLA; Howard v. Commonwealth, Kentucky Reports, vol. 18, part 1 (April 1904), 218; Powers, My Own Story, 12223.

49. Breckinridge News, December 18, 1918.

50. AAC (1899): 409; Berea Citizen, April 29, 1909.

51. SIJ, March 27, 1900; Hartford Herald, April 4, 1900; Hartford Republican, April 13, 1900; MVS, May 18, 25, 1900; MSA, May 29, 1900; Bourbon News, June 1, 1900; Klotter, William Goebel, 11314.

52. Beckham had taken the oath of lieutenant governor at the same time the dying Goebel took the governor's oath. He took the oath as governor the following day just after Goebel's passing. William S. Taylor and John Marshall, Plffs. In Err. v. J. C. W. Beckham, Drt. Err., U.S. Supreme Court (argued April 30 and May 1, 1900), Supreme Court Reporter, Cases Argued and Determined in the United States Supreme Court, October Term, 1899, vol. 20 (November 1899July 1900), 11871212; "Executive Order #I," February 3, 1900, Papers of J. C. W. Beckham, Special Reports and Studies (Goebel Incident), box 1, folder 8, bundles 8, 1012, KDLA.

53. Fenton, Politics in the Border States, 44; Pearce, Divide and Dissent, 25.

54. Woodward, Origins of the New South, 377. A contemporary accusation of Goebel's campaign "precipitating civil war" appeared in Louisville Dispatch, November 10, 1899.

55. Proclamation, Papers of J. C. W. Beckham, Special Reports and Studies (Goebel Incident), box 1, folder 8, bundle 12 (quote), KDLA; Klotter, Kentucky, 206.

56. Hughes, Schaefer, and Williams, That Kentucky Campaign, 256; MSA, March 27, 1900; Bourbon News, March 27, 1900; Richmond Climax, March 28, 1900; HMC, March 30, 1900; Crittenden Press, July 19, 1900; Hartford Herald, September 19, 1900; Caleb Powers, Appt., v. Commonwealth of Kentucky, Kentucky Court of Appeals, LRA, 3:264.

57. Hughes, Schaefer, and Williams, That Kentucky Campaign, 312. This would have been the Clay County War fought between the hegemons of one county's salt-extraction industry-one Democratic, one Republican. It was an old rivalry that did not come to physical blows until the election of Kentucky's first Republican governor disrupted Clay County's political status quo. Billings and Blee, The Road to Poverty, 29192.

58. Earlington Bee, September 20, 1900; HGH, October 18, 1900.

59. For the problems surrounding the characterization of Goebel's killers as "feudists," see Williams, "Henry Shapiro and the Idea of Appalachia," 35354.

60. In John Fox Jr's. fictionalized account of Frankfort in January 1900, published more than ten years later, Goebel's death provided an ironic twist in the plot of an imaginary feud between the Hawns and Honeycutts in an unidentified mountain county. The threat posed by "the autocrat" (an unnamed fictionalized Goebel) necessitated the two families' swearing "that they had buried the feud for a while and that they would fight like brothers for their rights." Soon after, a member of each "clan" is implicated in the governor-elect's murder. The communal conflict that had led to their initial division was subsumed by the political conflict that not only united them but prompted the Hawns and Honeycutts to engage the more modern world of the Bluegrass in a manner that bettered them with exposure to the "outside world" without stripping them of their native nobility and egalitarianism. The feud between the Hawns and Honeycutts had begun over small differences of a strictly personal nature; politics, the cause of the real-life ruptures that had been labeled as "feuds" years before, was instead treated as the force through which warring clans could be united against a common enemy worthier of their heretofore misplaced wrath. The ability of the Kentucky mountaineer to accept the progress of the outside world, rejecting communal violence while maintaining his nobler qualities, was a typical theme in Fox's portrayals of the region. The use of a Goebel figure as the unseen antagonist in a Fox novel reflected the danger that mountain Republicans saw in his candidacy but, as a literary device, represented the overly bureaucratized republic's loss of democracy that only the reinvolvement of the "pure" Anglo-Saxon yeoman could heal. In Fox's (albeit patronizing) portrayal, published years after Goebel's death, the "ignorant men" who occupied Frankfort in the winter of 1900 could be roughhewn heroes. Fox, The Heart of the Hills, 207. Fox was inspired to include a Goebel-like character in the novel after attending the governor-elect's funeral. York, John Fox, 16566. See also Satterwhite, Dear Appalachia, 5587; Ayers, Promise of the New South, 36465.

61. Hartford Herald, October 10 (quote), 1900; Anne E. Marshall, Creating a Confederate Kentucky, 132.

62. MSA, June 28, 1898; Lexington Herald, September 15, 1897, August 17, 1898.

63. SIJ, September 17, 1897; MSA, September 26, 1899.

64. NYT, September 15, 1897.

65. McAfee, Kentucky Politicians, 7376.

66. Gordon McKinney, Southern Mountain Republicans, 195.

67. Coates, Stories of Kentucky Feuds, 3.

68. Even as most Kentucky Democrats embraced free silver, it would seem that even the Democratic majority of Breathitt County favored maintaining the gold standard. MSA, June 2, 1896; HVK, June 2, 1896.

69. Richmond Climax, October 9, 1895.