Governor Bradley sent State troops into Clay County, and Tom Baker surrendered to them. Baker was tried in the Knox Circuit Court, on a change of venue, and was sentenced to the penitentiary for life. On appeal his attorneys secured a reversal of the verdict, and Baker was released on bail. The new trial was set for June, 1899. Governor Bradley again sent a company of State militia, with a Gatling gun, to Manchester where the trial was to be held. Baker was put in a guard-tent surrounded by a squad of soldiers. A hundred yards or so from this tent stood the unoccupied residence of the sheriff, at the foot of a wooded mountain. An assassin hidden in this house spied upon the guard-tent, and, when Baker appeared, shot him dead with a rifle, then took to the woods and escaped.
I quote now from a history of this feud published in _Munsey's Magazine_ of November, 1903.--
"Captain John Bryan, of the 2d Kentucky, said to the widow of the murdered Tom Baker, after they returned from the funeral:
"'Mrs. Baker, why don't you leave this miserable country and escape from these terrible feuds? Move away, and teach your children to forget.'
"'Captain Bryan,' said the widow, and she spoke evenly and quietly, 'I have twelve sons. It will be the chief aim of my life to bring them up to avenge their father's death. Each day I shall show my boys _the handkerchief stained with his blood_, and tell them who murdered him.'"
Corsican vendetta or Kentucky feud--what are language and race against age-long isolation and an environment that keeps humanity feral to the core?
Shortly after Baker's death, four Griffins, of the White-Howard faction, ambushed Big John Philpotts and his cousin, wounding the former severely and the latter mortally. Big John fought them from behind a log and killed all four.
On July 17, 1899, four of the Philpotts were attacked by four Morrises, of the Howard side. Three men were killed, three mortally wounded, and the other two were severely injured. No arrests were made.
Finally, in 1901, the two clans fought a pitched battle in front of the court-house in Manchester. At its conclusion they formally signed a truce.
This is a mere scenario of a feud in the wealthiest and best-schooled county of eastern Kentucky. Two of the families involved were of distinguished lineage, counting in their ranks a governor, three generals, a member of Congress, and a prohibition candidate for the Presidency.