Johnnie had also heard a lot about Milt Haley.
“Yeah, I knowed about Milt. Well, as you know, they used to raft timber in this country. That was their work. That’s what they fed their families with. They’d cut their logs and they’d roll them in these bottoms and then they’d back up the creeks till they could get water enough to float those logs into Guyandotte. And my dad — he was a young man — they would all float them into Huntington, you know, to where they could get their pay out of them. My granddad owned everything in here and he had plenty of timber, so somebody got jealous or got mad or some way ‘nother and — if I remember right in what I’ve heard all my life — they hitched Milt and another fellow up to shoot Grandpa Burl Farley and Uncle Al Brumfield. They was together — they was like brothers.
“So they laywaid Grandpa Burl and Uncle Al and some more boys that was a rafting the timber down through there. Well, Aunt Hollene was behind Uncle Al on the horse, so whenever they aimed to shoot Uncle Al they shot Aunt Hollene. And she was Burl’s wife’s sister so they had it out. Somebody took Aunt Hollene on to get her doctor but the men took out after them and catched them. They didn’t wait. They took them down here on the creek at the mouth of Bill’s Branch to Hugh Dingess’ old big log house and they made them cook chickens. Milt Haley and Green McCoy — they were both musicians — and they played a fiddle and a banjo all night. Hugh Dingess took his family and went to his brother’s house whenever this all took place.”
I asked Johnnie who told her that Milt and Green had played music before their deaths and she said, “My grandpaw Burl told us. I was raised right under my grandpaw’s feet. They rode somewhere and got these instruments but I forgot where Grandpaw said it was. They packed instruments into this house.”
Brandon asked about the members of the mob.
“Well, from what I understand, they was my grandpaw Burl, his brother Wash, and his brother Dump, Al Brumfield, Charley Brumfield — a whole bunch of them, all together,” Johnnie said. “French Bryant was in it.”
She looked at me and said, “They tortured them, John. That was my way of looking at it. I’d call it torture. If I shoot you in the leg here and foul you up here some way to you couldn’t do nothing to me and directly take a big drink of liquor and just shoot you again somewhere I’d call that torture. Now they didn’t kill them right in the house. They took them outside to shoot them about four in the morning. They didn’t want no blood or nothing left over in their house.”
Billy asked who fired the first shot.
“I don’t know which one fired the first shot, whether it was Uncle Al or Grandpaw Burl,” Johnnie said. “It was one of the two.”
After Milt and Green were shot, they were hung from a walnut tree.
Johnnie said, “One of my uncles said that was the cruelest thing he ever saw and he crawled back under the bed and hid and said two or three weeks later he had to fight my grandpaw over that. That was Uncle Dump. It hurt that old man, it really did. He crawled under the bed, John. He said that they done them so cruel and mean. They musta been a knocking them around you know.”
Brandon asked why Dump had joined the mob if he had no intentions of participating in Milt’s and Green’s punishment.
“He didn’t have no idea,” Johnnie said. “He just figured they’d be a drinking. From the way he talked, he didn’t know they was a gonna do it. Whenever he’d go to talking about it, tears would just fall down his cheeks. He’d say, ‘You know, people pays for these things.’ Dump was a good man as long as you didn’t try to do something mean to him. If you did, you paid, too. He’d never back talk Grandpaw Burl cause he’d just a knocked him down. Grandpaw was a big man and Dump was a little man.”
We were kinda surprised to hear Johnnie speak so frankly about her Grandpa Burl.
“My grandpaw was wicked, John, and mean. He packed guns and he was the meanest old man I ever heard tell of. Well, anybody that crossed him they had to pay. Grandpaw was mean after women. He ‘bumped’ every woman he could get with. I’ll tell you what. They wasn’t none of us kids loved him good enough to go stay all night with him. We was afraid of him. We actually was afraid of him.”
I said, “Well now, it was talked around that Milt Haley and Green McCoy were pretty mean themselves…”
Johnnie said, “Well, they were from all accounts.”
I continued, “…so there was a kind of a feeling that the guys that killed them had kinda done the neighborhood a favor.”
Johnnie said, “Yeah, they felt that way, John.”
It also seemed as if there was a deliberate attempt for everyone to “get blood on their hands” so no one could talk.
Johnnie said many of the men who participated in Milt’s and Green’s murder hung together after the feud.
“You know, after them killings, I believe that they was afraid they’d be ganged, too, and they was people went to different states.”
Burl always kept a gang of men around him for protection.
Johnnie said, “You never met a man what didn’t have a gun. People drinking would ride horses right up on your porch. I’ve seen them do it.”
Brandon Ray Kirk 