When Snakes Are Blind

The history of Dog Days is practical­ly as old as Western civiliza­tion. The ancient Greeks plotted star positions and connected them with lines to form shapes. One of the images that emerged was that of a dog, called Canis Major, which included Sirius, the brightest star in the sky. These ancient stargazers eventually formed an association between the position of Sirius and the most oppressive days of summer. They discovered that the forty hottest days coincided with Sirius, the Dog Star, rising and setting with the sun and concluded that the stifling tempera­tures were due to the heat of Sirius combin­ing with that of the sun. The lore surrounding Dog Days was carried to America and by the beginning of the nineteenth century pioneers had carried it over the Appala­chian. At the time of the Civil War, Dog Days was firmly established in the folklore of the upper Big Sandy. However, the beliefs em­braced in the Appala­chian foothills of Kentucky would have been virtually unrecog­nizable to the Europeans who first charted the heavens and predicted celestial events.

While Big Sandians sweltered through July and August, they deduced their own cause-and-effect relation­ships. Farmers believed that potatoes would rot if cut or scraped during Dog Days. Mothers warned their children not to swim in creeks and rivers and that wounds would require longer to heal. The most incredible tenet of Dog Days held that snakes are blind during those few weeks, despite the fact that antebellum death certifi­cates reveal only one Pike County death attributable to snake­bite. Youngsters learned to be cautious, but they were also taught that snakes would strike only in self defense. During Dog Days, howev­er, it was said that the deadly serpents, in the frustration of their blindness, would strike without warning at the least provoca­tion.

Along the Big Sandy, the final few weeks of Dog Days 1862 were extremely dry. In Catletts­burg, the level of the Big Sandy at the ford “was not over nine or ten inches deep, with a well-beaten track, over which teams, horsemen, and even footmen, by stepping from rock to rock, could cross with perfect ease and safety.” Another report said the Ohio River “. . . could be and was forded by horse­men at a shoal” near Ceredo, Virginia. If such was the case in the lower valley, the water level at Pikeville would have been shallow enough to expose portions of river bed that had not been seen for decades. The lethargy of the townspeo­ple probably equaled the weak flow of the Big Sandy.

The war brought little activity to the Big Sandy valley following the Union move to Prestonsburg in late spring. The Confed­erate guerrillas who had so unmercifully harassed citizens in Pike and Floyd counties moved into Virginia. Vincent Witcher’s cavalry, which made Johns Creek a living hell during the late winter and early spring, was operating east of the river. By late July, Andrew Jackson May had been promoted to colonel and was commanding the Fifth Kentucky following John Stuart Williams’s promotion to brigadier general and, so far as most everyone knew, he and his regiment were in Tazewell County. By the time shadows faded into darkness and the need for candlelight approached on Saturday evening, August 2, mothers coaxed their young­sters inside with, “Something will get you out there.” Chicken keepers latched the hen­house doors to keep their fowl in and the predators out. Girls left the barns with pails of fresh milk ready for the strainer, then a spring­house or churn. Chairs rested with all four feet on the plank sidewalk for the first time since mid-afternoon as whittlers and storytellers started home. The last thing Pikeville expected was some excite­ment.

The peaceful dinner John Dils had with his family that evening was to be his last unhurried moment for the next several days. Two hours before dusk, Dils learned that a raiding party from Virginia was on its way down Levisa Fork with his general merchan­dise store as its target. Dils had spent less than two months in Libby Prison. He had been released in Decem­ber, due in great part to a letter written by John M. Rice to the judge who heard his case. When released, Dils was assured by the prison comman­dant, General Winder, that he would not be molested so long as he remained neutral. Nevertheless, he had spent February 1862 in Washing­ton with, in his own words, “a view of getting relieved from any military obligation I might be considered bound to observe to the Confederate States.” He had not signed a parole promising to not take up arms against the South, but still carried an uneasiness: “I did not feel just like a free man; not that I wanted to go into the service, but I knew my failing: I would speak out my sentiments, therefore I desired to be relieved from any trammels, however constructively viewed.” He visited President Lincoln in search of an answer, but his postwar recollec­tions gave no hint of an executive recommenda­tion. The sagacious Lincoln surely realized that Dils, living in a border county in a border state, could be offered no assurance of protection. Dils also undoubtedly under­stood that Winder had no authority to speak for guerrillas or state militia troops. Recalling the severe treatment he had received from Confed­erate hands following his October arrest, and once he saw and/or learned who was in the vanguard of the approaching band, Dils recalled, “This crowd looked so rough that I run from them.” He had good reason.

Nathaniel Menefee, the commander of the raiding party, was no stranger to Pikeville. Besides being present with William­s’s army during the previous fall and having developed a high disregard for the truth surrounding his role in the November fighting, Menefee had created quite a stir. Memories of the ghastly hanging at the mouth of Shelby five months earlier, his indirect complicity in the deaths of Aaron and Ananias Moore, as well as such suspected crimes as the hanging of the thirteen-year-old boy four miles outside Pikeville, were still fresh in people’s minds. Once a bounty was placed on his head, Menefee favored discretion over bravado. He crossed Pine Mountain and began operating in Virginia, but the change of location did not alter his self-serving writings: “. . . South East­ern Ky . . . and the adjoining counties of Va. was infest­ed by numer­ous bands of home guards . . . in Wise County the peo­ple were up in arms and scouring the country after secessionists. Col. Menefee repaired thence . . . explained to them the nature of our struggle and the duties of every citizen of Va. to unite in our common cause . . . home guards as well as Southern men flocked into his camp, and peace and quiet was again established.Despite Garfield’s March assertion that Menefee was one of Mar­shall’s scouts, the Confederate correspondence captured at Pound Gap, all between Major Thompson and Marshall, contained no mention of Menefee. During the late spring, Menefee was named by General William Preston as a candidate for a colonelcy in the Confederate army. Probably in an allusion to Preston’s recommen­dation, Menefee stated in his April 10 letter to the Richmond Whig, “The Colonel has gone to Tennessee for money and clothing for his men, and when he returns you may hear of more Yankees being disposed of.” Six weeks later, sufficient time for him to have made the trip to visit Preston, Humphrey Marsh­all wrote in a May 21 note to John C. Breckin­ridge, who was then serving with Preston in Tennes­see, “Ask Preston if he has appointed Mr. Menifee as a colonel in his Provisional Army. He is unfit for anything, I reckon.”

The lightning of Menefee’s raid had been develop­ing for only a few days, but the storm which produced it had been brewing for months in locations far removed from the upper Big Sandy. Before John B. Floyd’s name was well known in eastern Kentucky, he had been governor of Virginia and later Secretary of War under President Buchanan. He owned the Big Sandy’s only newspa­per, the Sandy Valley Advocate, and engaged nine slaves in his Lawrence County salt-making business. Floyd surprised few by siding with the Confedera­cy. He served in the western Virginia campaign of 1861 and was one of three generals, along with Ken­tucky’s Simon B. Buckner and Tennessee’s Gideon Pillow, in charge at Fort Donelson, Tennes­see. Floyd was nearly paranoid at the thought of being captured. During his service as War Secre­tary, he had been accused of sending munitions to Southern forts, thereby strengthen­ing the South at the expense of the North. Floyd was sure he would be summarily executed if captured or, at best, put in an iron cage and paraded as a war prize. In his post Donelson report he justified his actions by arguing, “I had a right individu­ally to determine that I would not survive a surrender there.” Once concession seemed inevita­ble, he and Pillow relin­quished their portions of the command to Buckner. Floyd escaped Donelson, along with several hundred Virginia troops under his command, hours before the surrender. Among those were Colonel John McCausl­and’s Thirty-sixth Virginia, including the Pike Countians who had volun­teered at Logan Courthouse the previous May. McCausland reported fourteen killed and forty-six wounded in the Thirty-sixth during the four-day Fort Donelson siege. The remain­der of the 13,000-man garrison soon swelled Union prison camps.

Floyd escaped the doomed fort, but he could not avoid Jefferson Davis’s wrath. The Confederate president, a Mississip­pian, stripped both Floyd and Pillow of their commands, in part because there was a Mississippi regiment abandoned on the steam­boat landing behind the fort as the two generals fled. The Southern press jumped on the bandwagon and placed the burden of the Donelson disaster at their feet rather than give credit to Ulysses S. Grant for a well-planned assault. Floyd went home to Abingdon and regained his composure as well as his fighting spirit. After several petitions for his reinstate­ment were ignored by President Davis, Floyd turned his attention to Governor John Letcher of Virginia. Floyd found Letcher a willing listener, but the governor had his own agenda and saw the former general as a useful tool.

Letcher owed his position to the counties west of the Blue Ridge. He had lost his home county of Rockbrid­ge by twenty-eight votes and was victori­ous due to support from the mountain counties, which had since fallen under Union control. The idea of an army under the auspices of Virginia rather than the central Confeder­ate govern­ment fit snugly into the plans of both Floyd and Let­cher.

On May 15, the Virginia assembly did what Jefferson Davis would not. It commissioned John B. Floyd a major general of state troops. The legislation also created a one-year militia unit called the Virginia State Line. The legislature separated the State Line from the Confederate army in both personnel and purpose. It was to be composes of men ineligible for service under the Confed­erate conscription act. The stated and implied reasons for its existence were: to recover the western section of Virginia from Union control; to guard the salt works at Saltville; and to protect the Virginia-Tennessee Railroad. Additional inducements over the Confederate army were that Floyd’s militia offered a twelve-month term of service, as opposed to three years in the Confeder­ate army, and proclaimed that it would operate under the terms of the Partisan Ranger Act.

John B. Floyd was a phoenix who arose from his Fort Donelson ashes. His spirit, if not his body, which was in failing health, was reinvigorated by this new command. The State Line, however, suffered a slow start. The limited period of time afforded for this service, the scarcity of labor and supplies of all kinds, as well as uncertainty regarding its strength were cited as reasons for delays in supplying its troops. Virginia had legislated Floyd the army to re-establish himself as a public figure, but the burden of filling its ranks fell upon the general. The State Line desperate­ly needed soldiers, and so, despite the quar­termaster’s shortcomings, recruiting began from northern as Randolph County, east into Roanoke County, into Wayne to the west, and as far south as Ashe County, North Carolina. Word soon reached Wise, Buchanan, and Pike counties, the territory in which Nathaniel Menefee was operat­ing.

Menefee missed an opportunity to become legitimate when he failed to receive a commission in Confederate service. At one point during the early summer he wrote, “I was in the act of furling my flag and of leaving the Confederacy forever,” probably when Garfield had placed a price on his head. In order to protect his men from summary execution upon capture, as well as to pay, feed, and clothe them, Mene­fee’s only viable course at that time, if he remained in the war, was service in the Confederate army. Or so it seemed.

  Another Kentuckian offered a solution to Menefee’s dilemma. Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Johnson of Mount Sterling, future commander of the Second Kentucky Mounted Rifles, informed Menefee by letter that he could probably attach his command to General Floyd’s Virginia state troops. State Line recruiters adver­tised that the new militia unit would operate under the Partisan Ranger Act. That act, passed on April 21, was simplified for public consumption by the Confederate military: “. . . for any arms and munitions of war captured from the enemy by partisan rangers . . . the rangers shall be paid their full value in such manner as the Secretary of War may prescribe.” The act also stipulated that confiscated property would be appraised and then treated as an ordinary purchase.

The legislation failed to define enemy, a term that was open to interpretation, but intimated that it applied to military units only. Menefee saw potential for great personal benefit within the terms of the Partisan Ranger Act. However, calling upon the craftiness of his legal training, Menefee would apply his personal definition of enemy and use his own means of liquidating property taken from those enemies. The Partisan Ranger Act was the means by which he would soon become known throughout eastern Kentucky and south­west Virginia, but it would eventually lead to his downfall.

Taking Johnson’s advice, Menefee interviewed with Floyd and found the former Secretary of War “. . . ready and anxious to aid me in any manner so as to secure my cooperation with him in the defence of the state of Va.” As had been the case with his compact with Governor Letcher, Floyd found in Menefee a man who, like himself, craved recognition. Floyd was willing to agree to some extreme terms in order to get the guerrilla into the State Line, but, as Menefee probably failed to realize, Floyd had made his livelihood based partly upon making such hollow promises. Menefee recalled of their accord:

“An agreement was made and entered into between Genl. Floyd and myself in which he was to perform certain condi­tions and I was to cooperate with him in the defence of the Va. & Ky. Border. . . I retained my command without changing its status as Independent Troops . . . when actively cooperating with him I was to come under Genl. Floyd’s orders but in no case to come under the jurisdiction of his subordinate officers. I was to make out new muster rolls and muster my men into the state service of Va. and . . . Genl. Floyd who was to hold them in his posses­sion and never to file them in the Adjutant Genl’s office unless I afterwards authorized him to do so. That was to assure to my men the protection of Va. in the ex­change of prisoners of war. I was privileged to use my name as a State Line officer but in no instance or case to be responsible as such to Genl. Floyd or the state of Va. I was at liberty to draw on Genl. Floyd’s officers for arms, ammunition, clothing and food when under his command and actively cooperating with him.“

For a man in such desperate straits only a few weeks earlier, Mene­fee’s future suddenly seemed brighter. Floyd had given him legitima­cy, independence, and, most precious of all, a colonel’s commission. Secure under Virginia’s banner, he began recruiting in the Gladeville (Wise Courthouse) area of Wise County. His trouble with Humphrey Marshall continued when he and Sam Salyer, a Wise County militia colonel, were accused of pirating men from Marshall’s command.

Three of the manpower thefts which probably rankled Marshall most involved Jefferson, Phillip, and Isaac Fleming of Wise County. The three had been scouting for the general since February 22. On June 12 they were each paid eighty dollars for serving “. . . as a scout per engagement with Gen’l Marshall . . . looking to the avenues across the Cumberland Range in Wise County” Six weeks later, they were members of the Virginia State Line.

During that summer, Menefee and Salyer made a recruiting trip from Glade­ville to Holly Creek, near present-day Clintwood. In what was probably the first gunfire of the war in the region known as South of the Moun­tain, some Union sympathiz­ers set up an ambush. Two of Mene­fee’s men were killed. Another received an arm wound and Emma Treadway, Menefee’s mare, lost some flesh along the top of her head. Within a short time, Mene­fe­e returned to Holly Creek with a stronger force and a fraudulent order to conscript all able-bodied men into Confeder­ate service.

Never one to miss a chance for self promotion, he wrote: “Col. Menefee is the man for the times and place. . . The Colonel made a speech to a large assemblage . . . and has wraught the greatest change in the minds of the Union men . . . nearly every man and woman was moved to tears. He is a lion in the field of battle, a sage in the Council Chamber and an orator in the forum. If it was possible for Col. Menefee to make one of his telling speeches to the Union people of Va. and Tenn., our victory there would be sure.”

Menefee was determined to return to, and control, Pike County. On July 23 he wrote of an aborted plan to move across Pine Mountain: “The Col. started yesterday for Kentucky to meet some recruits that he expected; but when he had reached the Cumberland Mountains, he found the Union ‘Home Guards’ of Pike and Letcher counties on the march to this county, and the Col. turned back.” The Pike County Home Guards were, more often than not, the object of Menefee’s ire. He stated in the same letter that he had, practically single-handedly, “. . .broken up the Holly Creek and Crane’s Nest bands of Union men, and has laterally driven Toryism from the county. But the close proximity of Pike County, Ky., enables the Union men of Kentucky to invade Wise County with ease, and return home with their spoils at leasure, unless active means are taken to chastise them.”

Menefee gave an indication that his lingering war injuries were becoming more bothersome. He expressed a fear that, “. . .this gallant Chieftain will be forced to leave the field, on account of his old wounds received in the Mexican War.” To steel the citizenry against this possible loss, to gain a bit of sympathy for his cause, as well as to issue a warning, he closed with, “Kentucky will lose one of her most promising heroes and defenders when he leaves the field. He has immortalized himself in his career in Kentucky and Virginia, since the war began; yet he has never received the attention that he merited . . . We are sounding the tocsin of war from every hill-top and vale, and will soon be in the enemies land,” The letter ended with, “Yours, and a soldier, A Knight.”

Menefee probably had no intention of coming under Floyd’s direct command in the protection of the Kentucky-Virginia border, but he was still responsible for furnishing supplies for his troops. When he heard a rumor that John Dils was warehousing Home Guard ammuni­tion in his Pikeville store, he realized the Pike County storekeep­er could fulfill a need that Virginia and General Floyd could not.

By the end of July, Menefee was marching again, fearlessly bearing the flag of rebellion inscribed “Liberty or Death.” On July 29 or 30, his command left Camp Jesse on the Wise County proper­ty of Joseph Long and ascended Pine Mountain. From the summit, the new colonel delivered yet another of the stirring speeches for which, according to his own testimony, he was known:

“Brave Kentuckians, long have you fought and devotedly clung to Kentucky and under worse circumstances than men ever struggled under for freedom. Amid these rugged mountains, did you rally around me when I was struggling to hold up Kentucky’s once honored name, and amid the snow and ice bound barrier of the Cumberland Mountains we held for months the enemy in check. Not a word of encouragement have we received for such service.“

While most cheered, some feigned enthusiasm at the idea of belonging to Menefee’s outfit. One was James Cool, son-in-law of Ananias Moore. Cool affirmed, “Col. Menifee forced me into the Rebel service from August 1 to November 1, 1862. He did this at the point of a pistol. Andrew Moore. . . was with me. The company had no regular uniforms. . . They were not regular sol­diers.” Another was Henry Vanover of Elkhorn Creek, who had dodged Menefee’s recruiting efforts for some time. When asked why he finally went to Abbs Valley, Virginia, where the State Line mustered, Vanover replied, “I was going out there to try to save my life.” According to John Hylton, an Elkhorn Creek farmer, Menefee “. . . took some 40 or 50 of us prisoners. Some volun­teered . . .” while others, like Vanover, agreed to meet the command in Virginia.

Retracing his March in escaping to Virginia, Menefee proceeded down Elkhorn and spent Friday night at the head of Marrowbone. On Saturday he reached Levisa Fork and headed downstream toward Pikeville. Along the way, some of the men talked openly of going to rob Dils’s store while others spoke of making a fight with the Home Guards and capturing bushwhack­ers.

Other Confederates were in the neighborhood on that Saturday. On August 2, one of General Marshall’s staff noted in his diary that, relative to the Fifth Kentucky, “Two compa­nies (Caudill’s & Cary’s) are now in K’y. recruiting.” Captain James M. Carey of Cold Springs, Campbell County, Kentucky, had com­manded Company G since its inception in the fall of 1861, but was not in command during the first week of August. He had tendered his resignation over two months earlier. Carey was replaced by Captain John H. Lair of Harrison County, Kentucky, on June 6, but, after serving only four days, Lair resigned his commis­sion while confined in the Emory and Henry Hospital, stating, “. . . my health will not admit of active field duty.” The company passed to a Pike Countian, Captain Anderson Moore of Elkhorn Creek, who had been nominal command­er of the company since Lair’s resignation. He was formally promoted on July 12. Filling the vacancy was First Lieuten­ant James Lane Rat­liff, son of William “General” Ratliff. Moore’s men were primarily from Pike County and Caudill’s from Letcher. Ordering those two compa­nies into Kentucky was the beginning of an effort by General Marshall to increase the size of his com­mand.

With a politician’s eye toward preventing the seizure of citizens’ property within the territory he held, on July 28 Marshall ordered his commissary officer to “give Col. May one thousand dollars to purchase provisions for two companies of the 5th Regt. of Ky. Volunteers sent on detached service to Ky.” May signed for and received the money on the same day. Both compa­nies arrived in Pike County ahead of the State Line, well financed and, in contrast to General Floyd’s men, generally considerate of both the welfare and property of neutral families as well as those with Southern lean­ings. Union families, however, as well as those against whom local Rebels harbored old grudges, were not as fortunate. Both Moore’s and Menefee’s men knew the countryside well and many from both outfits had been friends and neighbors before the war. A few miles upriver from Pikeville, men from both companies, as well as the State Line, paid a most unneigh­borly visit to the home of Peyton Justice. Soon after, one of the most malevolent events in Big Sandy Civil War history occurred.

Few people along Levisa Fork knew the name Robert P. Justice, but practically everyone knew him by his middle name, Peyton. He was born in 1784 in Pittsylvania County, Virginia, and came to Floyd County, Kentucky, with his family soon after the turn of the nineteenth century. Justice was one of those citizens who gave more to their county than they ever received in return. When Liberty, Pike County’s first seat of government, was laid out in 1822, the one-acre public square was on “Payton Justice’s bottom about one mile and a half below the forks of the Levisa Fork of Sandy River.” The fact that his property was the subject of a friendly condemnation was advertised by Justice in the nearest newspaper to Pike County, the Flemingsburg Star. A month later his name recognition bloomed when he began operating a tavern in his home, advantageously situated along the road to and from Virginia. Over the following three decades, Justice consis­tent­ly served as surveyor or inspector of local roads and often signed as surety for the bonds of various public officeholders. His home was at times a haven for the poor. Justice was a slave­holder who owned but one human chattel before the war. He had been one of the Forks District “pat-te-rol-lers” (patrollers) appointed to keep watch on slaves’ nocturnal activities following the 1846 execution of Edmund, a slave convicted of murder. The old man had lived approxi­mately sixty years of his life on the same farmstead beside the river.

During the afternoon of August 2, Peyton Justice was mur­dered. His killing added to the bitter legacy of the war on the upper Big Sandy. History records that the perpetrators belonged to both the Virginia State Line and Moore’s company of the Fifth Ken­tucky. The story of Justice’s killing has endured for decades:

Joe Slone and Frank Slone, grandsons of Archibald Slone (stepson of Peyton Justice), said that the [Confederate] Scouts were crossing the river at the Forks and someone shot at them from the trees on the hillside. The Scouts could not catch the person who had fired the shot. They went to Peyton’s home nearby where Peyton was lying sick in the bed. Neither Peyton nor his wife could tell them who had fired the shot when they crossed the river. The Scouts thought it might have been one of their sons who had fired at them as they crossed the river. The men took Peyton from his home and traveled a few miles downstream to the mouth of Dry Fork before they killed him. Later a person coming down Dry Fork stopped to rest on a log and found his body.

On August 28, the Cincinnati Daily Commercial carried a short account of the killing which was reprinted from the Louisa paper:

“Captain William Ford, of Pike County, informs the Sandy Valley Advocate that the rebels visited the house of Mr. Lewis Sowards, in that county, and robbed the family of everything their house contained. They also arrested Mr. Peyton Justice, an old man of 78 years, and then took him to the woods and shot him dead. The ball entered the back part of his head and came out of his forehead. His body was left lying where he was murdered.”

Implicated in Justice’s murder were Thomas Cecil of the Fifth Kentucky as well as State Line members Jackson Fry, Samuel Marrs, Jeff Fleming, Nathaniel McMenefee [sic], James Sykes, John McFall, and John Fleming. Cecil had joined Vincent Witcher’s mounted company the previous April, then transferred to Captain Robert Stoner’s Company E of the First Battalion Kentucky Mounted Rifles. On July 12, per Special Orders Number 78 from Liberty Hill, Virginia, only three weeks prior to killing of Peyton Justice, General John Stuart Williams approved Cecil’s move to Company G of the Fifth Ken­tucky. Fry and Sykes were Marrow­bone Creek neighbors who had ridden with Menefee since early 1862. Marrs was a member of Menefee’s Fourth State Line who later testified that he did not come to Pikeville with his regiment, but was “. . . up the river when I saw them coming through,” and “. . . went up a hollow and let them pass.” The two Flemings were sons of Robert Fleming, a veteran of the War of 1812, who lived and died at the mouth of Pelfrey’s Branch on Shelby Creek. The brothers, as well as McFall, were living in Wise County at the time.

The instigation for the old man’s murder may well have been a sniper’s shots from a mountainside. But, since tradition says two of the Justice sons were not at home and the family would not reveal their whereabouts, the motivation could well have been a suspicion that they had gone ahead to warn Dils of the impending raid. Another possibility is that the sons were suspected of firing the shots. An alternative motive could have been that the Justice brothers were unwilling prospects on Menefee’s recruiting agenda and had fled with the news of the State Line’s approach. Menefee was certainly capable of such a crime, yet the possibility exists that Thomas C. Cecil, not Menefee, was the primary perpetrator. The son of Judge William Cecil was no stranger to the Justices. In a February 1861 lawsuit, Cecil sued the Justices for an unpaid debt totaling nearly $100. The final disposition of the case is unknown, but if the debt remained unpaid it could have provoked the fiery Cecil. The precipitating factors behind Peyton Justice’s death remain unknown.

Whatever the motive, Justice’s widow did not forget. Nearly three years later, once civil procedure was reestab­lished in Pike County, Polly Justice filed a lawsuit charging that the eight “. . . together with others by their command, direction, consent & knowledge did . . . then & there unlawfully & without right beat, maltreat, wound & shot her husband Payton Justice of which beating, maltreatment, wounding & shooting said Payton Justice, husband of Pltff, died.” She asked for $10,000 in compensation for the loss of her husband. Summonses were issued and reissued, but none of the defendants came to trial. The case was finally dismissed during the May 1868 term of court. The story of the murder of Peyton Justice persisted in the folklore of the upper Big Sandy. It outlived, although some­times in garbled form, anyone’s memory of the other events of early August 1862. It has been retold, with one variant putting it in the middle of winter, forcing the widow to cross the frozen river to retrieve the body with an ox cart. The killers have been por­trayed as Union men from Pikeville who were not in agreement with Peyton Justice’s politics. For many years the story stated that Justice was hung near Dry Fork, but there was no hanging. That detail was undoubtedly was a carryover from an earlier murder by the same gang where a Gibson man was hung near that spot five months earlier. Like the fabled serpents of Dog Days, Menefee and his associates, on that fateful first Saturday in August, lashed out blindly at a feeble old man, one who would never have posed a threat. The execution of Peyton Justice further sullied Menefee’s already discredit­ed reputation and reinforced the prevailing disgust aroused by his methods of warfare.

Randall Osborne, August 15, 2021