The outlawry along the Mexican border within the last three years has not been as great in proportion to size of territory and population involved as has been the destruction of lives in Breathitt County at intervals for years. Yet with regard to Mexico this government has seen fit to say that conditions along the border had become “intolerant” and must cease even at the risk of war.
The people of Breathitt County are citizens of the United States, as well as of their State and county. As such they ought to hasten to restore the good name and the honor of the country to which they belong, and of which they should be proud. The murderous, lawless Mexican bandit is no more a knave than the American guilty of similar atrocities.
There did come, a few years ago, a wave of reaction, an upheaval which brought into the limelight of publicity the fearful state of affairs existing there. Murders in the streets of the county seat and throughout the county had occurred with such frequency and boldness as to at last attract the attention of the press of the entire country. At last a man of wide prominence in the State was struck down. This man was J. B. Marcum, a United States Commissioner, and a trustee of Kentucky State College, as well as lawyer of prominence and a leading Republican.
The circumstances attending this murder and the prominence of the man slain aroused at last a storm of indignation throughout the land. Newspapers of other States condemned Kentucky so severely that public sentiment within the State itself became aroused and forced the investigations which revealed Breathitt County’s history of blood and crime.
In spite of the most strenuous efforts from certain quarters to hush the matter up and to block investigations of the damnable plots and murderous conspiracies by men entrusted with the enforcement of the law, the public was at last made acquainted with conditions of affairs in Breathitt County, which presented a picture so harrowing and degrading that the civilized world stood aghast and for a time refused to believe.
Breathitt is a beautiful mountain county along the Kentucky River, scarcely forty miles distant from Lexington, the metropolis of the Kentucky Bluegrass, famous the world over for the refinement of her people.
Jackson is the county seat, a small but thriving town on the Kentucky River, built upon numerous hills, which give it an irregular, though by no means displeasing appearance.
Commercially, Jackson is prosperous, surprisingly so under the circumstances. How much more rapid and greater might have been its progress but for the deplorable epidemics of murder, none can tell.