Law Enforcement
"Doc" Cox was
the
Wise
County Game Warden. He was a hard-living,
hard-pushing, self-centered
kind
of a fellow with a habit of bowling over anybody that
got in his way.
He
had a lot more enemies than friends in Wise County,
and it came as no
particular
surprise to anybody when he was killed.
Doc had a
warrant
for the arrest of a man named Ted Carter, charging him
with dynamiting
fish near his home on Guests River. He went out one
day in early July,
1931--possibly the Fourth of July--to arrest Carter,
and he never came
back. His body was found in a sitting position behind
the steering
wheel
of his car. He had been shot to death, the bullets
coming from a
.32/.20
pistol.
Ted Carter was later
brought
to trial for the murder, but came clear--primarily
because it came to
light
that Doc Cox had been fooling with his (Carter's)
wife.
-----
In 1931 the
salary of the
Wise County Game Warden was $90 per month. Out of that
$90, he had to
furnish
his own car and pay his own expenses. If he was
killed, he even had to
furnish his own casket. There were certain "fringe
benefits" however:
the
Game Warden could supplement his income by performing
such
miscellaneous
duties as county deputy sheriff, process server,
truant officer, and
Notary
Public. In this latter capacity, he became an
important man in local
politics--as
the best-known "outside" contact of the many hundreds
of isolated
back-country mountaineers in places
like
Bear Creek, the Glades, Johnson Flats, Pole Fence Gap,
Gobbler's Knob,
Thacker's Branch, Hoot-Owl Hollow, the Nettle Patch,
Big Pickum, Little
Pickum, Pick-Your-Britches, and Hell-For-Certain.
Escorting the County
Registrar of Voters into these backwoods communities,
he could make it
easy for people of his own political leanings to get
registered--
and he could make it equally difficult
for
the opposition.
Following
the assassination
of Doc Cox, seventy-four men took the Civil Service
exam to determine
his
successor. Not one of them passed the exam.
It was then that my
friend
Henry Gilmer, the bank president, and Roy Fuller, the
supervising game
warden, suggested that I apply for the job. Up to that
time, I had been
backing a friend named Lonzo Roberts in his bid. Due
to my limited
schooling,
I had not even considered myself a candidate.
With a little
prodding
from Gilmer and Fuller, though, I went into action.
And once I set my
mind
on getting the job, it became an obsession with me. I
had to
have
it.
My kid sister, Etta,
was
going to high school at Norton and keeping house for
me at the time. I
told her to ask "Prof" Burton to send me all of Norton
High School's
books
pertaining to county and state geography, fish and
wildlife, and game
laws.
I shut myself up in the house and studied like hell
for the next thirty
days. The only times I left the house were to visit
the privy. (As I
have
already pointed out, inside plumbing was a rarity, as
well as a luxury,
in those days.)
When the second
Civil
Service exam was given, two men passed: Dave O'Neill
and Patrick Hagan
Spivey, a young man from Scott County who was named
for my father's old
and dear friend, Patrick Hagan.
When Spivey and I
were
adjudged to be absolutely equal in our qualifications
for the job, he
suggested
that we settle the tie by flipping a coin. Though I
would
rather have settled it in a back room
with
the door barred, I finally agreed to the coin toss.
Later, during my
heyday
as Wise County's "Bull of the Woods, " the story got
around that when
the
coin was flipped I blocked Spivey's view of it, picked
it up with my
hand
resting on the butt of my pistol, and said, "It's
heads; I win." That's
just another of those stories that have no foundation
in fact. The coin
toss was conducted in the presence of supervising Game
Warden Roy
Fuller,
and I won it fair and square.
But I can't
say
definitely what would have happened had it gone the
other way. I wanted
that job, more desperately than I had ever wanted
anything in my life.
-----
I went to work
as
Wise
County Game Warden in April, 1932.
It wasn't as easy or
as
pleasant as I had anticipated. First of all, there was
Doc Cox'
reputation
that I had to live down. Doc, as I hinted earlier, was
quite a
rounder. He used the office of game
warden
as a base of power, and he was sometimes arrogant and
brutal in the way
he dealt with people.
Other factors
were
involved, too. In hard times, even decent and normally
law-abiding
citizens
are apt to have little respect for fish and game laws.
And those, good
buddy, were hard times. How many men will let their
families go hungry,
when there are fish in the streams and squirrels in
the tree? The man
charged
with protecting that wildlife has a real job on his
hands. A dangerous,
thankless job. That was the situation I faced in 1932.
And then there is a
criminal
element in the mountains of Southwestern Virginia
(and, in fact,
through
all of the Southern Appalachians) that considers
itself exempt from all
game and conservation laws, in good times or bad.
They'll kill a man
quicker,
and over less, than even the big city gangsters.
Many a game warden,
in
order to stay alive, gives the hard-core mountain
poachers a wide
berth.
He enforces the law in perhaps ninety percent of his
county, but he
stays
to hell out of the other ten percent. Or he makes
"deals" with the bad
boys, and polices them on their own terms.
When I took
the
oath of office, I decided to make the fish and game
laws of Virginia
apply
to all citizens of Wise County on an equal basis
whether they be
personal
friends or enemies, relatives or strangers,
law-abiding people or the
meanest
and most disrespectful bastards on earth. Toward that
end, I set about
establishing myself as the best man in the county with
my fists or with
a gun. If I was issuing a citation and a man started
handing me a line
of crap, I was pretty apt to lay down my pistol and my
badge and invite
him to put up or shut up. And I practiced for hours
every week with my
Smith & Wesson triple lock .44 Special, until I
became as quick and
as accurate with it as any man in that part of the
country.
While mountain
people
don't care much for many of society's laws, they have
always placed a
lot
of stock in The Law of the Gun. Just about everybody
who lives in the
mountains
owns a gun and knows how to use it. It's a regular
custom for the men
of
a community to get together on holidays and special
occasions for a
"shooting
match"--shooting at stationary targets or at objects
thrown in the air.
Some of them, of course, get to be expert shots.
Remember Sergeant
Alvin
York, the famous World War I hero? He was from our
part of the country.
It's quite possible that even today, some of the
potentially best
crapshooters
in the world have never even heard of clay pigeons!
I made a point
to
enter every one of those shooting contests I could get
into. It wasn't
long before word got around that the new game warden
was the best
pistol
shot in that part of the country. And such a big
pistol too. Why, that
thing would blow a man's head off! I didn't do a thing
in the world to
discourage that kind of talk.
One of the
highlights
of my career as a marksman came in a match at Guests
River with Ted
Carter,
the man who had killed my predecessor, Doc Cox.
My first three
shots
were all bullseyes, on cans tossed into the air. Then
someone set an
empty
shotgun shell on a fence post about twenty-five feet
away. I whipped
out
my pistol, aimed, and fired. It was a perfect hit. The
shell casing was
untouched, but the cap was blown off! Ted Carter
examined the casing,
smiled,
and put his gun away. The match was over.
I'll be the first to
admit
that I had scored with a lucky shot. But it wasn't
exactly an accident,
either. It really represented luck, plus nerve and a
hell of a lot of
hard
practice. Whatever it was, it sure didn't do my
reputation as an expert pistolero
any harm.
-----
The most
important "fringe
benefit" of the county game warden job at the
time I took over
was
full jurisdiction over dog laws. It was a source of
extra income.
Wise County had no
dog
pound in those days. It was my job to levy and collect
license fees,
give
rabies shots, destroy unwanted animals, and otherwise
enforce all laws
pertaining to dogs. The licensing and vaccinating end
of it was a
time-consuming
but very profitable business; I could sub-contract the
work and still
make
a nice profit. But I've always loved dogs, and I hated
to kill them.
It was just another of those things
that
had to be done--unthankful, unpleasant work. Somebody
had to do it.
Wise County
operated
on the "fee system" of law enforcement until the early
1940s. Officers
received one dollar for each arrest, and $50 for each
moonshine still
uncovered.
Justices of the peace were elected by the people. They
got one dollar
for
each warrant issued. It was a system that invited
fraud and political
patronage--but
that's the way things were done in Harry Byrd's
Virginia.
-----
One of the
more
pleasant aspects of game law enforcement is the
comradeship an officer
finds among sportsmen. A game warden is essentially a
public servant,
and
the building of good will and respect for the law
through public
relations
is as much a part of his job as is the apprehension of
lawbreakers.
I tried to make
myself
always available, without fee, to attend meetings of
sportsmen's clubs,
Boy Scouts, or businessmen's organizations and to
address them on any
subject
pertaining to conservation, game laws, wildlife study,
handling and
care
of firearms, or just about anything else.
I was able to
pass
on helpful bits of information to fishermen and
hunters, things that
would
make them more likely to come home with something in
the creel or
knapsack--or
other things that would underline the importance of
sportsmanship and
courtesy
to their fellow man. A lot of hunters, for example,
came back and told
me that they had improved their shooting a hundred per
cent by
following
this little suggestion I used to make: Stand an
unloaded shotgun by the
head of your bed, and practice using it for a few
minutes each day. On
a self-determined signal, grab up the shotgun and
throw down on same
object
on the ceiling--then check the sights to see how
accurately you have
"aimed."
Repeat a few thousand times, and eventually you'll be
able to throw
down
on a target
and have it in your sights immediately.
-----
Though
the
mountains
of Southwest Virginia were in ancient times (and are
again today) a
perfect
home for deer, the species had practically disappeared
from Wise and
surrounding
counties many years before I became Game Warden. Deer
had been hunted
and
killed into virtual extinction in an area encompassing
many hundreds of
square miles.
After a lot of
hard
talking and politicking, and with the aid of some
state and private
financing,
I arranged in 1932 for the importation from Pisgie,
North
Carolina, of fifty healthy young fawns.
The
first "positive" deer seen in that part of the state
since Civil War
days,
the fawns were raised on P. Terpster's dairy
farm in Powell's Valley until they were
old
enough to be released into the wild.
The biggest
buck
of the herd, called "Old Dick" jumped over a
sixteen-foot fence in
trying
to escape from the farm, suffering a broken foreleg in
the process. He
was quickly recaptured and his leg splinted--but,
being a cripple, he
had
to remain behind when his playmates were turned loose.
Old Dick lived
in
captivity for so long he just couldn't adjust to the
ways of a wild
deer,
when he finally was released. He took up first at
Coeburn High School,
then at Virginia City, where he became such a pest
that people in the
community
wanted him taken elsewhere.
I picked
up
the buck and took him into the mountains and turned
him loose in the
company
of a herd of nice, fat young does over near Cracker's
Neck, but he soon
showed up in civilization again, bumming around
Coeburn and Wise High
Schools..
One day a big,
overgrown
boy named Ed Parks got a gun and shot Old Dick. He
probably figured the
deed would make him a local hero, but it didn't quite
work out that
way.
I arrested young Mr. Parks for killing the deer
illegally, and he got
the
maximum sentence: a $100 fine and six months in jail.
It was his own
grandmother's
testimony that convicted him.
Parks was
tried
before Trial Justice "Uncle Tommy" Hamilton, who was
born and raised in
the mountains of Wise County, living a good part of
his life in the
Nettle
Patch.
-----
The world
of small
town politics is something that is impossible, really,
to describe to
someone
who hasn't experienced it. Perhaps this little story
will give you some
idea what it's like:
In 1938 I
helped
a Norton woman cast an illegal vote by mail. It was a
dumb, dishonest
thing
to do, but it was very much in accordance with the way
we did things in
those days. Without those kind of votes, we couldn't
win an election.
At the
instigation
of a militant old Republican named P.D. Bishop, who
ran a used auto
parts
business in Norton, a warrant was issued charging me
with fraud in
election.
It was an extremely serious charge, sure to cost me my
job if proven in
court. In fact, I wasn't at all sure that I could even
stay out of
prison,
the way things were shaping up. The local Republicans
knew I was a real
vote-getter for the Democrats in that area, and they
were all for
pushing
hell out of the thing.
But then I got a
lucky
break. Deputy Sheriff Jim Collins came to me and told
me that Orb
Cordor, who was at that time the postmaster at Norton
and a local
Republican
party leader, had contracted to take delivery on two
ten-gallon kegs of
moonshine whiskey on the Post Office loading platform
at 11 p.m. one
night
just before a big election. That information gave me
the "wedge" I
needed
to free myself from that charge of voting Margaret
Bishop illegally.
I waited until just
before
the moonshine was due to be delivered before calling
on Mr. Cordor. I
didn't
mince any words: I knew all about that illegal whiskey
transaction that was due to take place
on
U.S. Government property in just a few minutes, and I
was ready to blow
the whistle--but if Mr. Cordor would be kind enough to
agree to use his
influence to have the election fraud charges against
me dropped, I'd
keep
quiet about the moonshine.
It didn't take
us
long to reach what is commonly known as a political
compromise. We
chose
to call it a "gentleman's agreement."
Orb kept his
promise,
and I kept mine. And neither of us was ruined.
-----
Electioneering
in Southwest Virginia in my day, you got votes where
you could find
them.
Take George
and
Lizzie Woliver, for example. They were both good
Democrats, but Lizzie
was illiterate as hell. That made it rough, because in
the Commonwealth
of Virginia, every voter must pass a literacy
test---unless of course,
the voter is blind.
Well, something
seemed
to go wrong with Lizzie Woliver's eyesight once each
year--on election
day. She'd show up at the polls wearing dark glasses,
blind as a
bat, and some loyal party worker would
have
to lead her into the voting booth and help her to vote
the straight
Democrat
ticket.
Another voter,
old "Pusher"'
Rash, continued to vote for several years after he was
too feeble and
nearsighted
to find his way around. We carried him bodily to the
polls! Like I say:
you got votes where you could find them.
-----
I'm not
proud of
some of the things I had a hand in while hustling
votes for the
Democratic
party in Wise and neighboring counties. It was rotten
business--but
believe
me, the other side was cutting corners, too.
Sometimes, I think they
even
outdid us. But not often.
People in
rural
areas were allowed to vote by mail--so you can guess
what happened to
many
of their votes. In my capacity as as Notary Public, I
chauffeured the
Registrar
of Voters, a lady named Rose Roberts, all over
the back country.
Rose and I
helped
the mountain people mark their ballots and place them
in sealed
envelopes
to which the Notary's seal was affixed. But we had a
nasty habit of
opening
the envelopes, throwing out the "negative" ballots,
and substituting
"positive"
ones. Sometimes we'd let a few Republican ballots go
through untampered
with, just so it wouldn't look so bad--and because
everybody knew there
were a good many loyal Republicans in the back
country.
I have
no
justification to offer for this action, other than to
say that in my
heart
I knew that the policies of the Democratic party were
the best ones for
the people of my area in those days of starvation and
need. And
besides,
I wanted to keep my job.
Law
enforcement is
serious business--most of the time. But i t does have
i ts lighter
moments.
I remember
catching
a school-age colored boy gigging fish near Coeburn. I
took him to his
home,
where he lived with some old people--most likely his
grandparents.
The shriveled-up old
lady
called from inside the house when we walked up on the
porch.
"Honey, do you get
some
fish?"
"Get some fish,
nothin'
," the boy snorted. "The man done got me!
Webb
Willetts of
Norton, president of the. Norton Coal Co., had
peculiar problem. He was
taking a party of friends, including Mrs. King of
King's Department
Store
in Bristol, and Judge Carter of Scott County, on a
fishing party into
the
mountains. His problem was that he had a gallon of
good moonshine
whiskey
in the trunk of his car, but he was afraid to take a
drink in the
judge's
presence.
The party had
met
me on the road on their way into the mountain, and
Willetts had flagged
me down for a quick conference.
"Let me handle
this,
Webb," I said.
Walking over
to
the other car, I engaged Judge Carter in conversation
for a few minutes
and then I got him off to one side and said, in a very
confidential
tone,
"I don't know about you, Judge , but I feel pretty
rough today, like
maybe
I'm coming down with a cold. I believe Webb keeps a
little bottle in
the
trunk of his car sometimes, and if you don't mind, I
think I'll ask him
for a drink--strictly for medicinal purposes."
"Why, that's a
fine
idea, Dave, " said the judge. "I've always
regarded whiskey as a
wonderful medicine, and I think It'll just join you in
a little drink,
if Webb
has one."
Judge Carter
was
a huge man, and chewed tobacco. I'll never forget the
picture of him,
holding
his big cud of tobacco in one hand as he downed two
table glasses of
that
whiskey, without batting an eye--strickly for
medicinal purposes!
-----
One day in the
late Thirties
I was driving from Tacoma to Norton with deputy Ray
Wells and my
brother
Tom when we came up behind a horse-drawn wagon. A
young man about
twenty
years old, dressed in his "Sunday" clothes , was
standing up in the
wagon,
running the horse and whipping it with a long, stiff
pole. The horse
had
already gone lame. It was dead tired, bathed in foamy
perspiration,
wobbling
and ready to drop in its traces.
I stayed
behind
the wagon long enough to see what was going on, then
swung around in
front
of it and stopped. Charging back to the wagon, I
grabbed the pole out
of
the boy's hand.
"Now we'll see
how
you like it on the other end of this goddam thing, " I
told him.
Whap! I laid the
pole
down across his shoulders, breaking it in two. And I
proceeded to wear
him out with what was left of his whip, breaking it
with just about
every
lick, until it was worn down to a length of less than
a foot.
Traffic coming
both
ways had stopped, and people in their cars sat
goggle-eyed.
The boy
cowered,
stupid-looking and bewildered, all the time I was
lamming him.
"Boy,
you
don't know why I whupped you, do you ?" I said.
He shook
his
head.
"Well, I
didn't
figure you would. But you take what's left of this
whip with you, and
let
it be a reminder to you that if I ever hear of you
beating this horse
again,
I'll come back and take up where I left off."
When we
were
back in the car again, Ray Wells said, "Dave, that man
will kill you
some
day."
"If
anybody
kills me for defending a poor, dumb animal against
that kind of
cruelty,"
I replied, "I'll consider it an honorable way to die"'
And I still
feel
that way.
-----
A report
came to
me that a lady named Maggie Wagner of Pound, Virginia
(referred to
locally
as the Pound) was keeping an unlicensed
dog.
Squire
Hubbard,
Pound's Justice of the Peace, warned me in issuing the
warrant that
Maggie
was a wicked woman. He suggested that I take along
some help in going
to
investigate the report, and that we use extreme
caution in
dealing with her. Thus forewarned, I
had
Ray Wells with me when I called on the Wagner woman.
Neither
Ray
nor I knew Maggie Wagner, other than by reputation.
When we arrived at
her house, we found a boy skinning a squirrel (which,
incidentally, was
out of season) in her front yard. I called the boy
over to the gate to
question him.
At that
very
moment, the front door of the house swung open and a
big, fine-looking
woman stepped out with a big pistol in her hand.
Cursing violently, she
threw down on us and squeezed the trigger--but the
gun, fortunately,
was
unloaded.
Wells and I
ran
up the steps, grabbed the woman, and slapped handcuffs
on her.
At that
point,
a large, raw-boned man with black hair and a three-day
stubble of beard
came out of the house. He made no move to interfere
with our arrest of
the woman, so we left him behind when
we
took her off to jail.
A few
minutes
later, as she was being booked, Maggie admitted guilt
concerning the
squirrel
and her attempted assault on Ray and me. But both she
and the boy
insisted
that the unlicensed dog at their house belonged to the
man, whom they further identified as a
bad
man who had killed two people.
I went
back
to the house, where I found the "bad" man sitting on
the front porch
with
his head down and a pistol laying across his lap. He
made no move as I
approached, and when I picked up his gun I saw that he
was crying.
The man
explained
that he had "lost his nerve." He said that he had
armed himself because
people had told him the first thing Dave O'Neill would
do was kill his
dog.
I
assured
the man that I'd killed a lot of dogs, but never one
without good
reason.
The man
bought
a license for his dog--and paid a fine for being
late--and the case was
closed.
-----
Just
outside Norton,
on the road to Wise, is a community called Stoney
Lonesome. I went
there
one day, looking for a boy suspected of violating the
state fishing
laws.
The boy's
father
met me on the porch, and we became engaged in
conversation. The boy
came
to the door, saw me standing there in my uniform, and
turned pale. He
left
the door and went back inside.
The
father
and I talked a few more minutes, and then he called to
the boy to come
on out. The boy did not reply. The father called
several more times,
but
the
boy still didn't answer.
Finally,
the
father stepped into the house to investigate.. The boy
was there,
sprawled
out on the floor--dead. He had suffered a fatal heart
attack.
-----
An
officer
of the law can sometimes walk into an explosive
situation without
realizing
it. That's another way of saying that he can get his
head blown off
without
half trying.
I recall
the
time several seasons back when a rabid dog was running
loose at
Burton's
Ford, near the town of St. Paul. The dog was known to
have bitten
several
other dogs in the neighborhood before it was killed by
a local
farmer--and
those dogs, of course, had to be destroyed right away
to prevent rabies
from spreading.
One of
the
dogs was owned by a mentally retarded nine-year-old
boy whose family
lived
in a little farm house below the road, at the foot of
a steep
embankment.
I
was
halfway down the embankment when the boy's mother
cried out a warning.
"Look
out,
Mr. O'Neill! He'll shoot you!" she yelled, and I
dove for cover.
The boy
was
holed up in the barn with his dog and a shotgun. He
had been told that
I was coming to kill his dog, and he had decided to
shoot me first.
From my cover
behind
an old outbuilding, I began a long-range conversation
with the boy. He
wouldn't listen to his mother, but he listened to me.
I explained
to him what rabies was, and why I had
to
take his dog. After a few minutes he walked out of the
barn, crying a
little
bit, but without the shotgun. He turned the
dog over to me.
I made
that
little boy a promise, and I kept it. On my next trip
to Burton's Ford,
I brought him a new puppy.
Shortly after
a big coal operator named Gibson moved to Norton, I
received a tip that
he and two men who worked for him were killing deer at
night and
bringing
them out of the mountain in Gibson's car.
That
suited
me just fine. Though I had never met Mr. Gibson
personally, I knew a
little
something about him. And what I knew, I didn't like.
John O'Neill had
once
been marked for death as a result of his union
organizing activities in
a Harlan County (Kentucky) coal camp where Gibson
swung a lot of power.
Fortunately, John got out of Kentucky with his family
a few hours ahead
of the "goon squad." But I didn't consider the matter
closed--especially
after Gibson moved to Norton and started poaching on
the deer that I
had
worked so hard to bring back to that country.
After
several
weeks of careful investigation and surveillance, I
caught Mr. Gibson
and
his two companions with the goods. Sure that they had
an
illegally-killed
deer in the trunk of Gibson's car as they came down
off the High Knob,
I pulled out behind them and sounded my siren. He led
me on a
high-speed
chase down the mountain and when he finally did pull
over, it was at a
lonely spot on the road.
Knowing
I
was dealing with bad actors, I was ready for anything
as I approached
them.
All three sat in their car, not moving or speaking.
Gibson
was
a huge, bull-necked man, weighing maybe 260 pounds. He
sat behind the
wheel,
giving me the fisheye.
"Gentlemen,
I'd like to search the trunk of your car, if you don't
mind," I said.
With
that,
Gibson made a quick move with his right hand. But he
hadn't moved the
hand
six inches before I rammed the muzzle of my .357
Magnum into his neck,
just below his left ear.
"Hold it
right
there!" I said. "One false move and I'll kill you."
All the
color
drained from the big man's face, and his Adam's apple
bobbed up and
down.
He made
another
slight motion, or maybe it was just a nervous quiver,
with his
hand--as,
in that very split-second, I shoved the gun barrel
deeper into his neck.
"Don't
move,
I tell you!" I shouted, right in his ear. "Don't
move move a
muscle,
or I'll blow your goddam head off!"
He
didn't
move.
"I---I
was just reaching for the keys," he said.
Maybe he was, and maybe he wasn't. It developed later
that he did have
a pistol in his coat pocket. He might have been going
for it, before I
changed his mind.
The
evidence
was there, all right--a freshly-killed deer in the
trunk of his car. I
was able to get a conviction, with the maximum
sentence, for the two
hired
men.
But I
couldn't
get a warrant for Gibson, who was guilty as hell but
insisted that he
wasn't
aware that the other two men had put a deer in his
car. Judge Taylor,
even
with all the evidence laid out before him, backed
away.
Now ,
let's
see you figure that one out.
------
Sometimes game
law enforcement is dull work, and sometimes it's
exciting. Sometimes
it's
pleasant, and sometimes it's pretty grim.
I was
checking
dog licenses in the Stonega coal camp in 1933. The
Depression was
really
on. The mines were shut down, and just about everybody
at Stonega was
unemployed.
Dog licenses were something that most people just
couldn't afford.
At
one
house in the Negro section of the camp, an unlicensed
dog lay in the
front
yard. I climbed the steps to the high front porch and
knocked on the
door.
A giant of a man, well over six feet and black as
coal, swung the door
open and looked down at me.
"Mistuh,"
he said, "you ain't goin' kill my dog." He was
standing full in the
doorway,
his shoulders almost touching the facing on either
side, his right hand
rest ing on a gun rack overhead.
Poking a
cigarette
into my mouth and offering him one, I said, "Partner,
what on earth
makes
you think I came here to shoot your dog?"
I pretended not to notice that the big black hand was
now fondling the
handle of a pistol in the gun rack. Under the pretense
of fumbling for
a match, I got my hand on my own pistol and before the
big black man
realized
what had happened, I was aiming it at his bellybutton.
Placing
the
man under arrest, I escorted him to the court of Judge
Banks at
Appalachia.
The judge fined him $75 for attempted assault on an
officer, $5 plus
cost
for the unlicensed dog, and gave him thirty days in
jail, suspended.
Just
when I had begun to feel sorry for the old boy, he
pulled a roll of
bills
out of his pocket so big that when he peeled off four
twenties, it
didn't
even make a dent in it. I have no idea what he had
done to get that
kind
of money in those days, but whatever it was, you can
bet it wasn't
honest!
------
Most
everyone,
probably, is by now familiar with the tragic story of
the American
passenger
pigeon--of how this species was once almost as
numerous as the sparrow;
and of how it was slaughtered into extinction.
President Woodrow Wilson
wrote that as a youth in the Ohio Valley, he once
observed a migratory
flight of passenger pigeons 250 miles wide, flying at
sixty miles per
hour,
that took twelve hours to pass. Yet within forty years
from that time,
they were extinct.
The
"passengers" were not wiped out by famine or by
disease or by
four-footed
predator. They were killed out, by people. My maternal
grandmother,
Clara
Beverley Nickels, as a young girl witnessed and took
part in the
slaughter.
I have heard her describe how everyone in her
community (Tom's Creek,
in
Wise County) used to go out to where the pigeons were
roosting in
laurel
groves, and club them down until their bodies covered
the ground. They
carried them away by the sackful--to eat, of course.
The pigeons were
slaughtered
in similar fashion wherever they went, until
eventually they just
disappeared
from the earth.
------
Here
is a similar
story--but with a happier ending. It's the story of
"The Slaughter of
the
Robins."
At a
place
called Big Laurel, in Wise County, there was an old
house that belonged
to the local postmaster, James Taylor Adams, the
author of a book
called
The History of Wise County. One spring day in the
early Thirties, the
Taylor
place became the scene of the "slaughter."
An
unexpected
turn in the weather and a huge, late snow interrupted
the migratory
flight
of millions of northbound robins. "Grounded" by the
elements, they
chose
the several acres of wild rhododendrons surrounding
the Taylor
place in Big Laurel as their roosting
place.
It
didn't
take long for the word to get around. Soon thousands
of
Depression-bitten
people, some of them interested only in "killing for
sport"' but many
of
them actually starving, converged on Big Laurel from
miles around to
join
in the slaughter. They killed the robins around the
clock, with all
manner
of weapons, in a scene of carnage that must have been
reminiscent of
the
passenger pigeon disaster.
James
Taylor Adams, on whose property (and over whose
protests) much of the
killing
took place, wrote a letter to the Bristol
Herald-Courier describing the
scene and expressing his indignation. The Associated
Press picked up
the
story, and "The Slaughter of the Robins" became a
celebrated issue
overnight.
Almost
immediately, I received a call from Richmond. The head
of the Game
Commission
suggested that I go immediately to Big Laurel, bring
the slaughter to a
halt, and press charges against everyone involved.
In the
course
of my investigation I interviewed, family by family,
every resident in
the area. I got them to "telling on" each other, and
wound up issuing
seventy-four
summonses.
My
favorite
judge, old "Tommy" Hamilton, really laid it on the
violators--men,
women,
and children. He said, in language they could
understand, "Now, you
'uns knowed you was breakin' the law
when you killed them
robins..."
All
seventy-four
were convicted. Men were fined $20, women $10, and
children $2.50--much
to the satisfaction of bird-watchers and
conservationists the world
over.
Few,
if any, of the fines were ever paid--simply because
those people didn't
have any money. "Uncle Tommy" knew they couldn't pay,
and didn't expect
them to. He just wanted to teach them--and poachers
everywhere who
might
read the story--a good lesson!
------
Deputy Sheriff
Howard Johnson and I were looking for fish poachers on
Powell's River
early
one evening when a call came over the radio that the
post office at
Pardee
had been robbed. We were only a short distance from
Kent Junction,
where
the only road out of Pardee joins U.S. Highway 23. We
quickly threw up
a roadblock there, and within minutes a late model
Ford came roaring
down the road.
The
driver
was a young, redheaded fellow. Seeing our roadblock,
he veered out of
the
road, swung his car around, and headed for Norton. We
gave chase, but
the
suspect had a good half-mile lead on us.
Rounding
a sharp curve a mile or two up the road, we saw the
Ford parked
alongside
the road. Howard and I got out on foot and approached
the car
cautiously,
knowing the fellow had probably run into the
woods--but not
knowing how far. We knew he was armed
and
dangerous; people who rob post offices usually are. A
shot rang out.
Yes,
he was there. And dangerous!
We
decided
against going into the woods looking for the suspect
before more help
arrived.
But by the time the reinforcements got there, darkness
had set in. No
search
was made until the following morning, and by then the
quarry had
slipped
away.
Two or
three
days later, the suspect's sister talked him into
giving himself up. He
was an escapee from reform school, and a desperate
young man. (He would
have to be quite desperate, as well as quite stupid,
to stage an armed
robbery in a dead-end place like Pardee. There was
only one road out,
and
in the age of radio-telephone communications, escape
by automobile from
such a place is well nigh impossible. Anyway, by
bringing her brother
in,
the girl probably saved his life--and perhaps the
lives of several
other
people, as well.)
-----
Information
came
to me one spring afternoon in the Forties that someone
was fishing in
the
Norton Reservoir, the town's source of drinking water.
With my
assistant,
Ray Wells, and town policeman Bill Willis, I hurried
up the mountain to
investigate.
Approaching
the
reservoir on foot, we could make out the outline of
five human forms in
the twilight. But before we could close on them, one
of th suspects
opened
fire.
Fortunately,
nobody
was injured. I opened up with my big .357 Magnum,
providing cover for
Billa
nd Ray as they began a flanking movement.
Within
minutes,
three of our "desperadoes" surrendered. They turned
out to be a fellow
named Kohnny Wyreman and his two young sons. Just
little fellows! From
them, we learned the indentity of their two
accomplices: Hubert Hensley
and Leonard Starnes.
It was
poring
down rain as we walked the mile back to our car. After
dropping off
Wyreman
and his sons at their home, we hurried to a justice of
the peace to get
warrants for the other two men.
We found
Hubert
Hensley at his home, still dressed in his rain-soaked
long handle
underwear.
He said he hadn't been out of the house. As to the
condition of his
hair
and long handles, he said he'd been "sweating."
This
story,
too, has a moral: Don't shoot unless you're looking
'em right in the
eye!
If I'd shot one of those little Wyreman boys, I'd
never, ever have
forgiven
myself.
-------
Prowling around
the Big Cherry country one night, I happened upon the
campfire of a big
party of 'coon hunters who were whooping and hollering
and having a big
time. From their voices, before I ever reached their
camp, I recognized
then as a bunch of fellows I knew. Old Andrew Starnes,
the moonshiner,
was with them, and I knew from the way they were
carrying on theyt
they'd
all had a drink or two of Drew's liquor.
I walked right
into
the camp unnoticed, and the first thing that caught my
eye was the hide
of a squirrel that had just been skinned. Squirrels,
of course, were
out
of season.
After
everybody
had greeted me, I walked over to the pot in which the
squirrel was
being
cooked. A silence fell over the group. I leaned over
and sniffed
the meat, and then I looked right at old Drew, the
cook.
"What's this
you're
cooking?" I demanded.
Drew
glanced
around at the others, then took it upon himself to
answer for all of
them.
"It's a
goddam
house cat," he said. "A man's got to eat somethin!"
--------
One
of my duties
as State Conservation Officer in the early Fifties was
to protect
farmers
against sheep-killing bears--not too unpleasant a job
for an old bear
hunter
like me. It was like "punishing" ol' Brer Rabbit by
throwing him into
the
briar patch, if you know what I mean.
In the
summer
of 1951, I received an urgent call concerning a number
of sheep kills
in
Smyth County, near Marion, Virginia. I loaded up four
good dogs and two
good buddies--"Hoss" Gillenwater and Andrew Starnes,
both of them real
hunters and experienced moonshiners--and set out for
the Clinch
Mountain
farm of Crock Gwynn, where the bear had been helping
himself to the
farmer's
sheep.
Finding
the spot where the bear had been crossing the fence
into Gwynn's
pasture,
I went to a nearby log and loaded it up with honey,
even pouring honey
all over the ground around the log. Then I took Ross
and Andrew off to
Claytor Lake to fish for a couple of days, giving the
bear time to find
our bait.
On the
fourth
day, we found evidence that the bear had discovered
our bait--mauling
the
heavy log, and tearing up a patch of earth around it.
Carefully,
leaving
as little human scent as possible, I loaded up the log
with honey a
second
time. Then I set two bear traps nearby. A bear trap
weighs about forty
pounds and has fourteen-inch jaws, with sharp
"'teeth." When it takes
hold
of you, it won't let go. To each of my
traps,
I attached an eight-foot chain with a toggle on the
other end--so that
the bear could run a bit, giving my dogs (and their
old master) the
thrill
of a chase through the mountain.
A bear,
mind
you, is a very trap-wise animal. He may look a bit
clumsy and not
altogether
smart, but he'll step over or around even the
best-concealed trap just
about every time--and steal your bait.
Day
after
day, the big fellow eluded our traps. But finally, on
the thirteenth
morning,
we found that he had stepped in one, then lugged it
off into the tall
timber. The chase was on.
We
turned
the dogs loose at the spot where the bait had been
laid out, so there
could
be no mistaking what their quarry was. (Ranger and
Blue, the two
experienced
dogs, would have known anyway; but Speedy and Queen,
bless
their poor bones, were not so well
experienced
on bear--though both were already good coon dogs.)
The
trail
was a hot one. The bear crossed ridge after ridge,
with the dogs in
pursuit.
Finally, the toggle hung under a big root, too big for
the bear to
break,
and he was anchored there. He had to
make
his fight.
When I
arrived
on the scene with Hoss and Andrew, the four dogs were
"talking" to the
bear at close range, staying just out of his reach.
When a real,
no-nonsense
hunting dog is in that state of excitement, he goes in
for the kill the
instant he senses blood. For that reason, it is
extremely important
that
the first shot be a good one. A wounded bear can kill
a dozen powerful
dogs in less time than it takes to tell about it, if
they're going in
where
he can reach them. And they'll damn sure go in on him,
if he's
bleeding.
I fired at the bear with my .22 Colt Woodsman, the
bullet striking him
slightly off-target but breaking his jaw on both
sides. Before I could
fire again, all four dogs swarmed into the bear and
there ensued, for
the
next few minutes, the damnedest fight you ever saw.
It
was
there that I learned first-hand how a bear goes about
killing a dog. He
picks him up with his front paws, much like a man
would, and bites him
almost in two. Then he throws him off to the side and
picks up another
dog. Had not that particular bear been fighting with a
shattered jaw,
he
might have killed all four of my dogs. As it was, they
all came out of
the fight with nothing more than a lot of scratches
and bruises--the
two
young ones far better dogs than they had been a few
hours earlier.
The
fight
ended when I stepped to within five or six feet of the
bear and fired
the
finishing shot.
Sure
enough, we discovered when the bear was dressed out
that he had in his
stomach the remains of a black sheep--one of Crock
Gwynn's prize bucks.
As I mentioned earlier, that particular
hunt
took place in midsummer. I lost eighteen pounds before
it was over--a
good
deal of it blood, to those damned Smyth County
mosquitoes. In the
story,
I have named four of the best dogs I ever saw, and two
of the best
hunting
companions that ever any man went into the woods with.
They are
all
at rest now, in that land the Indians called the Happy
Hunting Ground.
God rest their souls.
Warden O'Neill displays bear
trap,
1945
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