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Old Time Kentucky: Remote Madrid Bend was scene of a less famous, but still deadly, family feud


By Berry Craig
NKyTribune columnist

Nobody seemed to know what brewed the bad blood between the Darnells and Watsons in Madrid Bend, as far west as Kentucky goes.

The 19th-century feud might have started over a horse or a cow.

Mark Twain wrote about the slayings, claiming, “in no part of the South has the vendetta flourished more briskly, or held out longer between warring families, than in this particular region.” He did not say what begat the bloodshed.

Madrid Bend is that tiny, townless, teardrop-shaped section of Fulton County pinched off from the rest of the state by a big loop in the Mississippi River. By road, the only way into the sparsely-populated, 10-square-mile bend is from Tennessee.

Peace prevails in Madrid Bend, where giant cottonwood trees tower over soybean fields as flat and green as pool table tops. But here Watsons and Darnells supposedly slew each other for 60 years before the remaining Watsons wiped out the last of their sworn enemies.

Madrid Bend is that tiny, townless, teardrop-shaped section of Fulton County pinched off from the rest of the state by a big loop in the Mississippi River. The map is from the New York Herald, March 24, 1864

Madrid Bend is that tiny, townless, teardrop-shaped section of Fulton County pinched off from the rest of the state by a big loop in the Mississippi River. The map is from the New York Herald, March 24, 1864

The Darnell-Watson vendetta isn’t as famous as the Hatfield-McCoy feud of eastern Kentucky and West Virginia. One of the few accounts of the Madrid Bend mayhem is in Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, published in 1883. Reportedly, the killings were the inspiration for the Grangerford-Shepherdson feud in Twain’s famous novel, Huckleberry Finn.

Life on the Mississippi is partly a Twain travelogue based on a trip he took down the river after he became a successful writer. A fellow passenger, who says he lived near Madrid Bend, told Twain about the Darnell-Watson war:

“Every year or so, somebody was shot, on one side or the other; and as fast as one generation was laid out, their sons took up the feud and kept it a-going. And it’s just as I say; they went on shooting each other, year in and year out — making a kind of religion of it, you see — till they’d done forgot, long ago, what it was all about. Whenever a Darnell caught a Watson, or a Watson caught a Darnell, one of ’em was going to get hurt — only question was, which of them got the drop on the other.

“They’d shoot each other down, right in the presence of the family. They didn’t hunt for each other, but when they happened to meet, they pulled and begun. Men would shoot boys, boys would shoot men. A man shot a boy twelve years old — happened on him in the woods, and didn’t give him no chance. If he had ‘a’ given him a chance, the boy’d ‘a’ shot him.”

The passenger also said that the rival clans worshipped at a little church that straddled the Kentucky-Tennessee state line. The spot was called Compromise Landing. Supposedly, half the church was in Kentucky and the other half was in Tennessee.

Twain’s traveling companion explained:

“They lived each side of the line…. Sundays you’d see the families drive up, all in their Sunday clothes, men, women, and children, and file up the aisle, and set down, quiet and orderly, one lot on the Tennessee side of the church and the other on the Kentucky side; and the men and boys would lean their guns up against the wall, bandy, and then all hands would join in with the prayer and praise; though they say the man next the aisle didn’t kneel down, along with the rest of the family; kind of stood guard.”

The passenger maintained that neither the Darnells nor the Watsons knew why their forebears took up killing each other.

“Some says it was about a horse or a cow — anyway, it was a little matter; the money in it wasn’t of no consequence — none in the world — both families was rich.”

Berry_Craig_Mug

Berry Craig of Mayfield is a professor emeritus of history from West Kentucky Community and Technical College in Paducah and the author of five books on Kentucky history, including True Tales of Old-Time Kentucky Politics: Bombast, Bourbon and Burgoo and Kentucky Confederates: Secession, Civil War, and the Jackson Purchase. Reach him at bcraig8960@gmail.com


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One Comment

  1. Gayle Pille says:

    You are great Mr. Craig. Always enjoy your articles 🙂

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