KENTUCKY: Bloody Breathitt

To the people in “Bloody Breathitt” (pronounced breath-it) County, Ky., homicide has a purely clinical interest. They ask: How big was the gun? How big a hole was blowed in him? There is also a certain social distinction (“There goes the man who killed Little Jack Combs. He did it with a big, shiny .44. It made a big, round hole in Little Jack’s belly. And Little Jack laid there on the ground, talkin’ before he died”).

One August afternoon in 1938, two brothers named Lewis and Lee Combs went to a political meeting in Breathitt County. Sheriff Walter Deaton, who was with them, stayed downstairs while the Combs boys went up to the meeting room. The Sheriff heard shots, got pinked in the left forearm. Down the stairs tumbled the Combs boys. Lewis was wounded in the back with a .45; Lee was dying. Five men, including Cousin (and county jailer) William Combs, a State Senator and the circuit court clerk were arrested, all were cleared.

Last Feb. 5, Deputy Sheriff Jerry Combs threatened to arrest Brown Howard and his brother Tom, who were raising Cain at a relief office in Jackson, the county seat. One of the Howard boys shot Jerry Combs dead. Three weeks later, Lewis Combs met Sheriff Deaton’s one-armed son, Deputy Sheriff Fred Deaton. The Saturday crowd at the Jackson post office saw Lewis Combs pull his gun, saw Fred Deaton do the same with his lone right hand. Lewis Combs wounded Fred Deaton, who killed Lewis Combs. Last March 16, a bus carrying Deputy Sheriff Wilson Deaton passed five men brawling on a roadside near Jackson. A bullet whistled through the bus. Wilson Deaton jumped out, was shot dead. Sheriff Deaton has three more sons, six daughters.

Homicide (17 killings) was Breathitt’s leading cause of death in 1935, tied with heart disease (20 each) in 1936. Last year, when spring floods boomed down the mountain creeks and drowned 51 people, homicide (nine killings) ranked a bad fifth.

Long inured to the newsroom cry: “Shooting at Jackson!”, Reporter John F. (“Sunny”) Day of the Lexington, Ky. Herald-Leader scented a deeper story in Bloody Breathitt. Armed only with a camera, he spent two days among Breathitt’s “483 square miles of scraggy mountains and lean, infertile hollows.” Last week the Herald-Leader printed John Day’s noteworthy report, suggesting some reasons why life is cheap and pride is dear in Breathitt County.

> “Like a great walnut cleaned of its meat, it lies there a shell—no timber, no coal, no petroleum, no farm land really farmable.” Twenty-five years ago, people first moved in numbers to Breathitt, to cut trees for railroad ties. The hills were stripped, the timber business expired, floods washed the topsoil off the farms.”Now one farmer after another has given it— up as a bad job, has even deserted land he owns. . . .”

> Of Breathitt’s 21,600 inhabitants, 15,000 are on relief. Only 700 have WPA jobs, and that number is about to be cut. Mostly Breathitt reliefers live on insufficient Federal surplus commodities (corn grits, flour, lima beans, lard, prunes, raisins, apples in a good month; little but grapefruit—”sour oranges”—in bad months).

> Breathitt’s total assessed valuation dropped from $7,205,920 in 1931-32 to $5,052,607 in 1938-39. County revenue this year is down to $48,790 (of which the Louisville & Nashville Railway will pay a third). There are 200 telephones in the county; County Judge Pearl Campbell has no telephone in his office.

> “People just don’t have money for hospital service”—so Breathitt’s only hospital is closing. The hospital doctor is going away, leaving only two physicians and young, overworked County Health Officer Frank K. Sewell to cope with the trachoma (eye inflammation), syphilis, gonorrhea in Breathitt’s remote mountain shacks. To get to Morris Fork for a clinic once every six weeks, Dr. Sewell has to ride mule-back or walk the last five miles across two mountains.

> Of 625 live births recorded last year, only three occurred in a hospital; mountain midwives delivered 531. Breathitt’s birth rate of 28.92 per 1,000 population is well above Kentucky’s, but the death rate is lower (9.07, to 9.88 for the State).

Reason: “… a great many deaths are not reported.”

> Of those who die in Breathitt County, 56% get no treatment by physicians. Perhaps one out of ten is buried by an undertaker.