A KENTUCKY VENDETTA.

Rangitikei Advocate and Manawatu Argus, Volume XXXIII, Issue 9109, 31 March 1908, Page 6

A KENTUCKY VENDETTA.

The shooting of Judge Hargis, of Jackson, Kentucky, by his reprobate sou, closed a series of fends which, says a New York correspondent, can only be paralleled by the fierce vendettas of Sicilian or Corsican romance. Judge Hargis was a rough uneducated man, but he was •Democratic boss of his country, and as such was country judge, and dispenser of political patronage. His influence was such that for twenty years his misdeeds went, unpunished and he is reported to have' spent £40,000 in successfully defending charges of murder, but when he thrashed his grown up sou, he went too far. The young man went next day to his father’s shop, wounded him, and when his father shrieked for mercy, fired two more shots into his body. Hargis was the central figure in the notorious Hargis-Oock-rill feuds. The Hargises had long been dominant in the county, and when they were opposed by the Oockrills at the polls, feeling became so bitter that revolvers were drawn. Each side sought to establish justice of its claim by killing as many people as possible, and in the first nine months of the feud there were 38 deaths. A Dr. Cox, guardian of two Cockrill boys, was decoyed out one night and shot at his gate by a concealed assassin. James Marcum, the leading in Jackson, who was fighting Hargis in local politics, for mouths, never loft home without carrying his infant daughter in his arms, for he felt certain that his enemies would spare the child. So soon as he omitted to take this" precaution he was shot dead on the steps of the Courthouse. His wife swore that she would - bring the murderers to justice, but although the actual perpetrators were imprisoned, Hargis escaped conviction by trickery. The poor woman spent five years in trying to bring the judge to justice. Jackson juries persistently refused to convict in such cases, in the face of irrefutable evidence. Judge Hargis had more than a presentiment of his end, for he had had made to order a very expensive coffin. It is estimated that during the feuds 23 homes and many business places were burned, and 60 people were killed. “Neither education, nor wealth, nor the refinements of civilisation are as strong as murder lust in the Land of Feuds,” says a magazine ■writer. As for reform—“regeneration will come only through the introduction of outside influences of people who will not only intellectually but numerically settle in t this broken, mountain region. ”