We've just arrived at Mr. William Buckley's. Mr. Buckley is a long time resident of Pocahontas County. His family (Irish) arrived at Jamestown,
VA in 1621 with the first boatload of permanent settlers acquired over 1,400 acres as a “Tomahawk”land grant from the king of England. Mr.
Buckley was
educated at West Virginia University, coached at Concord College. Was a first lieutenant in WWI and during his college days worked at the Cass General Store earning money for his college expenses. (A brief history of
the BUCKLEY family is contained in the History of Pocahontas County, West
Virginia 1981)
ALEX.: Now you told me I had to read Blackhurst's book. I have done that. These boys have been reading these books. We've done all that.
ALEX.: . . . of this tape to make sure we're recording. We do want to make sure we're recording this time because this is the second trip for this particular historical account . . . the Bridgers or however you want to tell it. Whichever one you want to start with. The Bridger Brothers.
BUCKLEY: Well, I don't know the history of ____ but that Bridger that went
to the Pacific was the same Bridger from up on the mountain here or not.
ALEX.: Yeah.
BUCKLEY: There's not record of that I guess.
ALEX.: Yes, Sir.
BUCKLEY: But he needed me to read into this country and kill the schoolteacher up on the fairground above ____ and sell firearms to the citizens to get into the forts. The Indians were raiding the country and the old road came down to the top of this ridge at the other end of the bridge there.
ALEX.: Yes, Sir.
BUCKLEY: And they called my ancestor, mother and her children on this side of the river and they went over and joined them over there and when it was dark could go over to the
fort at Millpoint. Now my ____ tells me that that fort was called Bucker's Fort at that time.
ALEX.: I see.
BUCKLEY: But afterwards that place was called Cackley Town. Where Millpoint is now.
ALEX.: I see.
BUCKLEY: And they went alone, the two Bridger boys from up on the mountain.
They decided to leave the group of people that were traveling on the road and go through the woods. Camp on the mountain and maybe they could kill a deer or a turkey that they might besieged there for sometime. They went around then and they heard shots up in this gap but they thought the boys were killing some game or something of that kind but the boys didn't come to the fort. They went back up there in a day or two and found where the Indians had killed the two Bridger boys and had taken their scalps off and their bodies were up in what they called Bridger Gap.
ALEX.: Yes, Sir.
BUCKLEY: I don't know the date . . .
ALEX.: Yes, Sir.
BUCKLEY: . . . but it was pretty early. It was about . . . It must have been 1775 or some place right in there.
ALEX.: Yes, Sir.
BUCKLEY: My ancestors moved into this house down here on the side of the river in 1774.
ALEX.: Yes, Sir. That was before we came . . . before we got our independence.
BUCKLEY: Now I expected a Price history book out of this county to give you the date that this schoolteacher was killed up at the fairground.
ALEX.: I see. Uh huh. I'll check it again. Now how does that figure into Teddy Roosevelt's book, The Winning of the West, you told me about?
BUCKLEY: Well, these brothers was not with them. He followed the Indians and became a very famous scout and Roosevelt's book, The Winning of the West, mentioned him as one of the greatest escapists in the Army and the Indian War. I don't know just where he's buried but I think they had a little money sent out West to him.
ALEX.: Now your father you told me helped run the arks down the river. Was a pilot and he often ran a boat back across the river down here and took people back and forth. You told me, I think, or made some reference to special, what appeared to be special people came up here from Tug River. Could you tell me about those people and what they did?
BUCKLEY: Well, that was my, my father was born and raised on the banks of the river down here and the ____ was a ____ and sawmills would saw walnut, cherry lumber and things like that and they would stack it along the river and my dad would built it into a raft. And then when the river got enough water in it to go over the ripples and things, he would float those rafts to Roncrevete. He could run them on down there with good time in about eight hours by keeping them in current all the time.
ALEX.: Yes, Sir.
BUCKLEY: Then the next day he would take it out and stack it up beside the railroad and the next morning he would get up and walk back home.
ALEX.: I declare.
BUCKLEY: It's fifty-six miles by the railroad, but of course he came . . . took the shortcuts and then traveled that far. I suspected it was forty miles the way he came.
ALEX.: I see.
BUCKLEY: So I'm braggin' on my dad's ability to walk. He really could do that. When I started floatin' white pine logs out of this east side of Greenbrier River to that sawmill at Roncevete. They had him for a pilot for what they called arks. Big houseboats that the men ate and slept on and had the horses. You'd have about five of them. One for cooking and eating in. One for sleeping in and two for horses and one for an office in one end and an office in the other for keeping the horses shod and things of that kind. The one they cooked and ate on was usually a little larger than the others and that's the one they had my father to pilot.
ALEX.: I see. He could get it down the river could he?
BUCKLEY: ____ knew where the rocks where, where the currents were, where the bends were, and what the current would do to his raft.
ALEX.: Yes, Sir. I guess he kind of provided transportation back and forth across the river there occasionally for people who came . . .
BUCKLEY: Huh?
ALEX.: I say he occasionally provided transportation too with the rowboat across the river there.
BUCKLEY: Oh yeah. Oh, that was the only way to get across the river. We had a boat all the way. When I was just a little fellow we had to cross the river to go to school, to go to the post office, to go to the store. And we had to go on the boat. And when the railroad was built the post office was over there and the mail was on the train. The mail had to go across boat. People on the train had to be ferried back and forth across the river.
ALEX.: Yes, Sir.
BUCKLEY: And that's why the ____ back in this mountain was familiar with my dad and when he came going across the head of William's River and Cranberry that country hunting, well, my dad was take over the ark. We all did that. Father and Mother, sister and brother. When they wanted across the river, we would take them over there to hunt. We took them over and went over and got them and took them across. Took them over and came back and got them. I can't remember when I couldn't run the boat.
ALEX.: Yes, Sir.
BUCKLEY: I could always read the river. In winter and summer. I can't remember couldn't skate nor couldn't swim or couldn't run the boat. Those are things I learned when I was a very small boy.
ALEX.: Yes, Sir. How did this Messer get back up in this country, you mentioned?
BUCKLEY: I don't know just when Messer came. He came before most of the old people did because he owned a great big tract of land back there. A house, apple trees and peach trees . . . long before he was killed. And he must have been there . . . there is a grave up there with a marker about. Oh, it must be close to ninety years. Oh, way back about 1890, something like that. This gravestone right up there where he was buried.
ALEX.: Yes, Sir.
BUCKLEY: And they cleared that off and they put peach trees, practically every stump has a peach tree growing beside it. I can remember seeing a peach tree growing beside it up there. I can remember seeing a peach alter. I suspect he may be ____, that's what they had those peach trees for.
ALEX.: Yes, Sir.
BUCKLEY: And it might have been that this man Colley was just a rival moonshiner and we had, that Messer volunteered to arrest him.
ALEX.: What had he done? What had Colley done?
BUCKLEY: Colley had borrowed a gun off of one of his neighbor's.
ALEX.: Yes, Sir.
BUCKLEY: A Winchester rifle. And he wouldn't return it. And the man went to Marlington and swore out a warrant for him to get this gun back. Well, Messer heard about it that there was a warrant out for Colley and he went to Marlington and volunteered to the sheriff to serve the warrant on him. On Colley. And the passenger trains went down in the evening about 4 o'clock. Came back about eleven in the morning. Messer deputized two men he knew real well to go with him to arrest Colley. They went down and stayed all night at Watoga. That's a mile below where Colley's house was. And they were going to come up and arrest Colley and put him on the train the next morning and take him to Marlington, before they had cars or anything of that kind. Well, the next morning they came and went to the door and knocked on the door and Colley was left-handed. He opened the door with his right hand and Messer said, "You're under arrest.:" And he just pulled the gun and shot Messer right in the chest. The fellows outside said Messer said what Messer was going to do and he shot just about the same time that Colley did. And Colley kept moving his right hand towards Messer's gun and the shot went through his hand or his wrist and then on to Colley's body. Messer emptied his six-shootin' shot 38 pistol. Turned around and took a 32 from one of the fellows that was with him. And after that they found he had eleven bullets in his chest. Most of them had gone through his hand. John Sharp that was with Messer jumped through the door and the old lady reached up and picked his rifle down and Sharp grabbed the old lady and took the rifle from her. Colley turned and shot him right in the back. But it didn't penetrate him; it just broke a big blood vessel. A big schapel. It hit that schapel and it just broke a big blood vessel right in back of Messer's back. Then he turned the gun back on Messer. He found the gun empty and he said I'll surrender and he fell back across the bed. Messer turned around and sat down on the choppin' block and broke his gun down and emptied his shells out and ____, ____, ____, the boy that handed him the 32 said, "Messer, are you hurt?" He said, "Yes, I'm probably killed." And he fell off the choppin' block dead. Well, they buried Colley out there in the yard, but they took Messer back to his farm back in ____, I forget what it was called, ____ in the ____ Mountains back here, and anyway, when they buried him ____ and all the neighbors that could, came to the funeral and they ____ the burial ceremony and somebody took Messer's rifle. It was laying in the casket with him and they closed the lid down and buried Messer up in there. Before this, Messer tried and some man that came across the river. My father was there and he took him across the river, and in a day or two they came back and my father took them back across. He happened to be at home and none of the children were there or something. And the next time Dad saw Messer he asked him about this man. He said he was a fine lookin' man, but he acted kind of peculiar. He said he never took his eye off of me all the time either time. He said when he got on the boat he'd frisk me and then when he got out on the bank, he stood there till I turned the boat around and started back. So ____ turned the boat across. Messer said, "Now, John," that was my father, "I don't tell everybody my business," he said, but he said, "You'll probably never see that man again because that's Cap Hatfield. He’s got a $5,000 reward for him and he can't afford to turn his back on people."
ALEX.: Yes, sir. Yes, sir.
BUCKLEY: That's the only one that now of that he was probably one of the Hatfield clan down in Mingo County, because his boy, Troy, went back after his father was killed left here and went back to Mingo County.
ALEX.: Yes, sir. Huh.
BUCKLEY: The girls, two of ten of them married here and some of their children and grandchildren are still around Seabert around here.
ALEX.: Yes, sir.
BUCKLEY: One of the girls married a fellow by the name of Cook. Their son used to ride with my wife to Concord and graduated over at Concord.
ALEX.: Yes, sir. Yes, sir.
BUCKLEY: But they were intelligent people, industrious-like, but that class of people lived in a residence here that the people called Tug, because they were from the Tug River country.
ALEX.: How did they get up here? Why did they come?
BUCKLEY: They walked most of the way.
ALEX.: Uh huh.
BUCKLEY: The old man that I bought his farm up here used to tell me how he'd go, he'd go down to the road to it, walk over through Monroe County to Rich Creek, close to the river that cuts Northfork of the west train, that cuts Northfork down there, and walk across the hills to Gary over in there where his people came from in McDowell County.
ALEX.: Yes, sir.
BUCKLEY: And when they came back, they'd walk down over the mountain from that ____ and down from that ____ that same station and then cross the river to Rich Creek and walk through Monroe County to ____ and catch the Greenbrier train back up here.
ALEX.: Uh huh.
BUCKLEY: I don't know if Ruth does it or not. Messer's brothers came up here with several four yolks of big oxen. So they came by wagon, oxen, horses, and things like that and Messer's had horses that they rode.
ALEX.: Yes, sir.
BUCKLEY: Who's, who's . . .
ALEX.: Jesse's father.
BUCKLEY: Oh, yeah.
ALEX.: Brown Beard.
BUCKLEY: I guess he knew a lot . . .
ALEX.: He knew all about it.
BUCKLEY: Yeah, she could tell you.
ALEX.: But the Cromer's you say over there in the Durbin area, they were in operation. They owned Sidetracks and that sort of thing, too, huh? And ended up in the hole. And he told me, Charlie told me he ran Number 7. He told me he ran Number 7 engine. He has a great sense of humor.
BUCKLEY: Yeah.
ALEX.: Yeah. I recorded him and then I played it back and he didn't know it and I told him, now I've recorded you.
BUCKLEY: Irene's cousin.
ALEX.: Well, she's real ill, you know. She's not feeling . . .
BUCKLEY: Those Hammon's were pioneers. Now they lived down at the three forks of Williams River and they didn't talk our language, you know. They had a dialect of their own. Everybody had some big jokes about Edgie. He was a great fiddler. There's a shortage of great fiddlers, too.
ALEX.: Is he?
BUCKLEY: Yeah.
ALEX.: Good.
BUCKLEY: This Ed, they took down all kinds of different jokes about Ed and his fiddlin'. He wouldn't work in a pie factory, but he played the fiddle. Well, one time up at the fair some man from about Stanton, Virginia, got to talkin' to him and he was placed back here and he got to playin' his violin and this fellow kind of took to that and got to talkin' to the man. He said he'd like to hire him to feed his cattle and work on his farm. He had a big farm over in the Shenandoah Valley. "Oh, I'm an experienced farmer. I can feed your cattle and I'll take care of them. I'll be right over there to take care of everything for you." There was an old man there from Webster Springs that knew Ed. He was sitting back there and just a laughing and he said, "He hasn't any notion of going over there and feeding him a lie. He's just stringing him along." He said, "He wouldn't know one cow from another." He said, "He never did anything like that in his life." He was telling this man over there . . . She doesn't need to ask any questions. She knows all those answers.
*: Not you. You tell the kids.
*: Huh?
*: You tell the boy.
*: You tell him about it. You were here. I was in Preston.
*: I told him about washing away your cattle and ____ between the railroad and the bridge and there a boy on the bicycle. Between the railroad and the bridge it wasn't too deep right there. And he spent the afternoon riding backwards and forward in that water.
BUCKLEY: When I was a boy we lived right on the bank right below a bridge there and the water was coming right below the bridge there. On down between us and the ____ back there. My dad used to get us up at night to push the boat and come and help a neighbor. I remember this ____ last week. They had taken my brother over there on the horse and when they came through the water, it came up to almost the horse's belly coming out through the field. Coming from the river around the house.
ALEX.: Uh huh.
BUCKLEY: My dad didn't mind it because he had lived there all his life. My mother didn't like that idea so my dad started to build another house. She insisted on having it built away from the river.
ALEX.: Yes, sir. On higher ground.
BUCKLEY: We just had a little skip up through the middle of the ____. My mother's sister and her husband owns a road up the river and my mother's family owns a crossing down the river. We just always skipped up through the middle there. We didn't inherit this farm, we bought it.
ALEX.: Yes, sir.
BUCKLEY: It had belonged to my ancestors.
ALEX.: Originally?
BUCKLEY: Originally. But my grandfather was a southern synthesizer. He was a minister. He wasn't in the army, but he was a southern synthesizer. My dad was the only boy in the family, and he was one of the younger ones. He had eight sisters and when he got married, he bought 60 acres and that is what they built the house on and that's where we started.
ALEX.: Yes, sir. Yes, sir.