Boomer Winfrey  

Varmint County Correspondent

When last we left you, dear readers, we had just recounted the tale of how Varmint County came by its unusual name… as a compromise to prevent a blood feud between the two families of the county’s “founding father,” Louis Lowe.

Louis, you might recall, was the founding father, literally, being not only a Revolutionary War hero, hunter and trapper, but a bigamist with two wives and families who were unaware of each other. For the next few decades, the county was populated mostly by Louis’ offspring, either members of the “Cow” Lowe clan or the “Go” Lowe clan, depending on how one pronounced the name.

Slowly, however, a phenomenon occurred that locals referred to as the “Louis Curse.” It seems that the male descendants of the old pioneer had difficulty siring male heirs. Of Louis’ 12 sons, only two fathered sons of their own. Those two Lowes, one in each clan, managed to father only girls.

The Lowe females married into new families with strange new names like Hockmeyer, Aslinger and Pinetar. By the eve of the Civil War, not a Lowe remained in Varmint County with the exception of aging widow Cloretta Lowe, whose daughters had both married into the Hockmeyer clan.

The Hockmeyers migrated down from up north in the aftermath of the 1791 Whiskey Rebellion, when Pennsylvania farmers rebelled against a federal tax on homemade whiskey. Although the tax was later repealed, the Hockmeyer clan found the cool spring waters of Varmint County much to their liking and stayed, keeping pretty much to themselves as they pursued their favorite pastime in the broad valley that stretched from the base of McCracken’s Peak to another rock promontory known as McCracken’s Nose.

When the War Between the States broke out in 1861, the Hockmeyers remained loyal to the Union, since many of their kin still lived in Pennsylvania. Those who did not migrate north to join the Union Army stayed out of the fray altogether, merely taking potshots at any soldiers, Confederate or Union, who wandered too close to their whiskey stills.

Following the end of the war, a second migration occurred as members of the Haig clan began to settle into an isolated hollow on the opposite side of McCracken’s Peak. The Haigs were Louisiana Cajuns who were all unapologetic Rebels, having served in the Confederate Army until the war ended. 

Captain Jebediah Haig had discovered the region when his regiment occupied neighboring Burrville during Kirby Smith’s invasion of Kentucky. The Rebel commanders sent Jebediah’s company to scout Varmint County and its isolated county seat, Primroy, but the Confederates found little to tempt them into occupying the place, a log courthouse facing a muddy street with a handful of cabins, hog pens and a single saloon.

Jebediah Haig, however, took note of the rich taste of the local water and distilled products made from it, the abundance of unattached Lowe females and vast tracts of unclaimed land. When federal authorities began to round up the Louisiana Haigs who refused to take an oath of allegiance to the reunited nation, Jebediah led two dozen Haig families north to a new home, so isolated that nobody cared about oaths, past loyalties or the Haig’s favorite pastime, the manufacture of powerful spirits.

With Union sympathizing Hockmeyers on one side of McCracken’s Peak and unreconstructed Rebel Haigs on the other side, both specializing in the production and sale of fine spirits, the stage was set for a feud, and one was not long in coming.

Strangely enough, it was neither the clan’s political loyalties nor their competing whiskey enterprises that set off the bloodshed. Both Hockmeyers and Haigs quickly married into the local population, which as I pointed out earlier, was heavy on female descendants of old Louis Lowe.

The Haigs married into the “Go” Lowe clan while the Hockmeyers took their wives from the “Cow” Lowe clan. An uneasy truce existed between the two sides for a number of years, until 1879, which happened to mark the 100th anniversary of Louis Lowe’s arrival in what would one day become Varmint County.

One might say that old Colonel Cornelius Jass, a Confederate veteran who migrated into the county after the war and eventually became the County Judge, was responsible for the Haig-Hockmeyer feud.

The dedication ceremony for the Louis Lowe statue at the county courthouse fueled the Haig-Hockmeyer feud.

The dedication ceremony for the Louis Lowe statue at the county courthouse fueled the Haig-Hockmeyer feud.

Cornelius got this bright inspiration to celebrate the county’s first settler by dedicating a monument to him in courthouse square, the old log building having been upgraded to a fancy two-story structure made of Crab Orchard stone, imported all the way from the Plateau, complete with a bell tower.

All of the descendants of Louis Lowe were invited, of course, but when Judge Jass addressed the crowd, he was not sure which pronunciation to use. “We’re here to honor our first settler, the great hero Louis, uh, yes, Louis, regardless of how he pronounced his last name.”

One of the Hockmeyer wives called out, “That was Lowe,” pronouncing it as in “cow.” 

A Haig wife responded, “No, it was Lowe,” pronouncing it as in “go.”

The two women began screaming at each other until their husbands tried to intervene, but that led to Anjou Haig and Buford Hockmeyer trading blows. Knives were drawn, a shot or two rang out and soon a dozen Haigs and Hockmeyers were cooling their heels in Sheriff Caleb Bandit’s jail.

Caleb migrated into the county with the stream of newcomers after a railroad into Primroy opened up the rich coal seams in the mountains above the town. A coal camp soon sprang to life that became known as Upper Primroy, while the county seat soon became Lower Primroy. 

Caleb Bandit had been a Texas Ranger before moving east, and swiftly earned the job of “High Sheriff.” He would begin a tradition of giving his sons female names because, “They’ll have to fight their way through childhood and it will toughen ‘em up.”

It apparently worked. Caleb’s son, Shirley Bandit, served as Sheriff from shortly after the Spanish-American War until he dropped dead from a heart attack in the 1960s, having just seen his first long-haired hippie protesting on television. 

But I digress. We’ll revisit the Bandits at another time. To make a long story short, the Hockmeyers and Haigs began a blood feud that lasted for nearly a century, with many men from both clans falling victim to gunshot or knife wounds.

The bloodbath persisted, uninterrupted, until many young Haigs and Hockmeyers found themselves serving together in World War II, using the skills honed from a century of feuding to stab and shoot Nazis instead.

Returning from the war, many of the younger generation had lost the taste for killing, especially if their enemies were their former brothers-in-arms.

But the feud was not officially ended until the Blizzard of ’77, when Caleb Hockmeyer’s six-year-old granddaughter became lost in the snow. The child was discovered by Elijah Haig, who rushed the child to Granny Haig’s cabin. Granny applied her best home remedies to ward off frostbite and hypothermia and the child was returned unharmed to a relieved grandfather.

A grateful Caleb and Elijah agreed that it was time to bury the hatchet. The one exception would be an annual Haig-Hockmeyer free-for-all each Fourth of July at the county fairgrounds, “Just so the youngsters don’t completely lose their fightin’ spirit,” the two patriarchs agreed.

Next month we will complete our review of Varmint County’s rich history, as we look at Doc Filstrup’s crowd of poker-playing politicians, how they got here and how they have lost out in recent years to Varmint County’s females.