The old man walked down through the mud and grass toward the water, and the crowd on the bank knew his name before the preacher ever spoke it. They had come by the thousands, two thousand of them by the count that came down, gathering on the creek at Fairview, Virginia, on the 24th of July, 1929, to watch John Wesley Wright be baptized. He was eighty-five, tall, white-bearded, and they had called him Devil John his whole life. They had called him the law of Pine Mountain and the tall sycamore and worse.

He waded out into the creek. The preacher took him under, and when he came up, the story goes, he gave up his guns, the pistols and the Winchester he had carried across seventy years of mountain country. The men on the bank remembered different things about him. Half remembered a lawman.

Half remembered a killer. A Louisville newspaper man would print that this old convert in the water had killed twenty-eight men in gun battles across his life. Wright himself, asked near the end, said, “Count seven. ” The water did not settle which number was true.

Nobody ever has. John Wesley Wright was born on the 17th of April, 1844, near Kona in the far southeastern corner of Letcher County, Kentucky. The land sat on the headwaters of the Kentucky River, hard against the Virginia line, in the corner that would one day become Jenkins. Pound Gap lay just east, the natural notch through Pine Mountain where the wagon road crossed from Kentucky into Wise County, Virginia.

On one side of the gap stood the Kentucky Creek country. On the other lay Pound and the county seat at Wise. Wright would spend his whole life crossing that gap, and he would die on the Virginia side of it. This was thin, hard country in the 1840s and fifties.

Narrow farms on the creek bottoms, split rail fences, log houses, corn and timber, and corn whiskey. Wright learned to make the whiskey young. One account names a woman, Rosen Burke, who taught him the still. He ran stills as a boy and ran them as an old man with his sons on the river headwaters.

Later he built a sawmill at a place they called Wright’s Hollow, and the lumber went into neighbors’ houses. The creeks had names the record still holds: Elkhorn Creek, Boone Creek, the water around Kona. There were ridges and hollers, a general store or two, regular Baptist churches, and little else. Law here was a personal thing, and it came armed.

There were no railroads yet, no coal camps, no outside money. Feuds were settled with Winchesters on the ridge roads. A grand jury would sit at Whitesburg, the Letcher County seat, or across the line at Wise, and more often than not it found no charge. When a man was convicted, a governor’s pardon could end the sentence inside a few years.

That was the real texture of mountain justice, and John Wright would live inside it, on both sides of it, for the better part of a century. He was not quite seventeen when the Civil War reached the mountains. By the most credible account, Wright rode with loosely organized Confederate cavalry, the 7th Battalion under Lieutenant Colonel Clarence Prentice. The tales that grew up around those years, that he trained far off and rode with Quantrill and met the James brothers, came later out of a novelized book about his life, and the record does not carry them.

What the record allows is thinner and stranger. Wright was reportedly captured by Union troops in Kentucky in early 1863, forced into the Union Army, and discharged the next year at Columbus, Ohio. That reversal comes mostly through family telling, so it sits as reported, not proven. However it went, he came home to the creeks when the shooting stopped.

On the 14th of October, 1866, Wright married Martha Humphrey, called Mattie. He was twenty-two. In the years just after the war, he farmed, traded horses, ran whiskey, and began to work as a peace officer and a hunter of wanted men. The killings he owned from those years, he later told an interviewer, were of horse thieves and murderers.

He put it plainly in old age. “Seven I have killed,” he said, “and feel I have done my duty. ” And he added something that the record keeps as his own measure of himself: “I always gave a man a chance. ”

That was Wright’s account of Wright.

The country around him would build a far larger figure. The first of the feuds that shaped his name began in 1886, and it did not begin with John. It began with his younger brother, William S. Wright.

The trouble opened in Knott County over the killing of a man named Linville Higgins, shot by William Wright. A deputy named Dolph Draughn raised about thirty men to arrest the Wrights and was ambushed at Daniel’s Hill. From there the fighting spread, faction against faction, and it carried west into Letcher County. On one side stood the Wrights, with John, now a grown man and a feudist.

On the other stood James Clayborn Jones, called Club, of Beaver Creek, born in 1826, who led the faction against them. The Wright and Jones feud ran for years across the ridges. It reached a truce around 1895. Clabe Jones outlived it and died in 1914, an old man at eighty-eight.

But the name that the legend ties hardest to Devil John is not Jones. It is a man the record calls his lifelong friend, a boyhood companion from the creek country, and one of the most feared killers the mountains produced in those years. His name was Thomas Tolton Hall. They called him Bad Tolt.

Tolt Hall was born around 1850. He grew up near Wright in the creek country, and the two stayed close the whole of Hall’s life. But where Wright moved between the law and the gun, Hall mostly carried the gun. By the time he was a grown man, his name was attached to a string of killings up and down the Kentucky and Virginia line.

The mountains feared him. The record charges him in the coverage of his later years with as many as twenty-seven deaths, though that figure, like the ones hung on his friend, belongs more to reputation than to any court ledger. In July of 1891, Talt Hall killed the man who would finally cost him his life. The victim was Enos Hilton, written in some records as Enoch, the chief of police of Norton, Virginia, a young coal and rail town just east of the gap.

Hall shot him. Hilton lived a few hours and then died. The exact day is given as the 14th in some tellings and the 26th in others, one of the small conflicts the record never cleaned up. What is certain is that Hall ran, and that for the first time the mountains that had sheltered him could not keep him.

He went west. Under a false name, Hall took work on the railroad in Memphis, Tennessee, two states away, and for months the law lost him there among the yards and the boarding houses. It was not John Wright who found him. The man who did was Wright’s enemy, Marshall Benton Taylor, the herb doctor the mountains called the Red Fox.

Taylor traveled from Wise County to Memphis for the purpose, and on the 9th of December, 1891, Memphis police arrested Hall and the Red Fox identified him. Sheriff Wilson Holbrook of Wise County came and carried the prisoner back across the country to Virginia. In all of it, from the shooting to the capture, John Wright plays no part the record can find. The legend that Devil John hunted down and took his old friend is just that, a legend.

He did not. Hall went on trial at Wise in the last days of January 1892 before Judge H. A. W.

Skeen. It did not take long. On the 30th of January, the jury convicted him of murder in the first degree. A first execution date in March was stayed while the case went up on appeal.

The appeal failed, and while Hall sat waiting, the country around the gap produced its worst single morning of blood. On the 14th of May, 1892, at a cut in the Pound Gap Road, the mountains called Killing Rock, a party of travelers was ambushed from above. Among them was Ira Mullins, a whiskey hauler, partly paralyzed, who had to be carried in his wagon. Mullins and four others were shot dead at the rock.

Two people in the party lived through it: Mullins’ sister, Amota Jane, and his teenage son. The killings were laid in time at the feet of the Red Fox, the same man who had pointed out Talt Hall in Memphis. It was not John Wright’s doing, but it was his world, the gap and the road and the rock, all within a few miles of where he was born. On the 2nd of September, 1892, Talt Hall was hanged at the courthouse in Wise.

It was the first legal execution in the history of Wise County, and the county turned it into an event. The gallows stood inside a board enclosure. The crowd that pressed in around it was put at somewhere between two thousand and five thousand people, come on foot and by wagon across the ridges to see Bad Talt die by the law. By one account, Hall asked his old friend Wright to carry his body back over the gap into Kentucky for burial, a last request that comes down as a story more than a settled fact.

The Red Fox followed Hall to the same gallows. On the 27th of October, 1893, Marshall Taylor was hanged at Wise for the killings at Killing Rock, convicted in large part on the testimony of Amota Jane Mullins, who had lived, and on the examination of his rifle. John Wright was now near fifty, and the old feud country was closing in around his own family a second time. In the late 1890s, the trouble that history calls the Wright and Reynolds feud took hold, and again it belonged first to his brother, William S.

Wright, born 1855. The quarrel ran through the small hard currency of mountain life: timber, a brick kiln, livestock, and at one point a single mule. There were shootings and standoffs. The Wright house took fire until there were bullet holes through its doors and windows.

On the other side were two brothers, Noah Reynolds, a brick mason, and his brother, John Reynolds. On the 30th of January, 1900, near Boone Creek, Noah and John Reynolds shot William S. Wright dead, both men firing at once. William was forty-four.

The date would wait thirty-one years to show its full weight, because John Wright himself would die on that same day of the calendar, the 30th of January in 1931. The law moved on the Reynolds brothers, though slowly and in the mountain pattern. Noah Reynolds stood trial for the killing. It ran fourteen days.

On the 2nd of April, 1902, he was sentenced to life in prison. He did not serve much of it. On the 1st of January, 1909, Governor J. C.

W. Beckham pardoned him. Noah came home, became a regular Baptist preacher, and lived on. His brother John Reynolds was also pardoned, went to work as a prohibition officer, and was killed in August 1921 in a moonshine raid, cut down enforcing the very law against the liquor that had run through all their lives.

By then, John Wright had turned to the work that made the last chapter of his life and remade the country he was born in. In the first years of the new century, the outside money came over the gap at last. A lawyer and land buyer named John C. C.

Mayo, born in 1864, was riding the same creeks and hollers Wright had fought over, carrying deeds. Mayo and the coal operators coming in behind him were not after the farms. They were after what lay under them, the coal in the mountains, and they bought the mineral rights out from under the people who worked the surface. The deeds concentrated in the years from 1903 to 1905.

John Wright, who knew every family and every property line in that country, went to work as a land and mineral rights agent in the middle of it. He was the man who could get the signatures. Out of that work came the town of Jenkins, Kentucky, built by Consolidation Coal around 1911 and 1912 on the ground near where Wright was born. It was a model company town, rows of identical frame houses, a tipple, rail tracks, a company store, camps named Fleming and McRoberts and Seco strung out nearby.

In the space of one long life, the creek bottom corn and whiskey country of the 1840s had become a coal field. The old feudist had helped turn the key. Not everyone remembered that work kindly, and the darkest account of it came from Wright’s own kin. One family manuscript, unpublished and sharply critical, charged that Wright strong-armed his relatives into signing their mineral rights away for almost nothing, and told of a man named Sam Wright, who, the account says, got twenty-five cents for his.

That telling goes further still and lays killings at Wright’s door done for the coal companies. It is a single contested account, the bitter memory of some of his own people, and it stands against the gentler picture the county histories drew. The record does not let either one win outright. Around the edges of the true story runs the lore the mountains could not resist hanging on a man like Wright.

He was connected by family to Martin Van Buren Bates, the Kentucky giant, born 1837, a man said to stand over seven feet tall, who toured as a circus marvel. From that real thread, the tellers spun a whole cloth of Wright’s own supposed show business years, trick riding and sharpshooting across the country, even a performance for Queen Victoria. None of it stands up outside the storytellers’ books. What does stand is quieter and in its way larger.

The writer John Fox, Jr. , born 1862, who knew this country and set his novels in it, published The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, and readers ever after said the fierce old mountain patriarch in it, Devil Judd Tolliver, was drawn from John Wright. Fox never signed a confession to it. The mountains simply decided they recognized their man.

And always underneath, the question of the number. The figure that rode with Wright into legend came from a Louisville newspaper columnist named Joe Creason, who wrote that Wright had sired twenty-seven children and killed twenty-eight men in gun battles. The coverage of the tall years had already pinned twenty-seven murders on him. The popular tellers pushed it past thirty.

Against all of it stands the one count that came from the man’s own mouth, given in old age to the historian Luther Addington, who sat with him and wrote it down. Seven. Seven men killed, and the old man felt he had done his duty by everyone. Fifteen, eighteen, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, thirty, and more have all been printed.

The ledger that would settle it never existed. Grand juries found no charge. No court ever convicted John Wright of murder, and by the standard accounts, he was never once brought to trial for a killing in his life. What he was by title is nearly as blurred.

Wright told Addington he had held office as a justice of the peace about sixteen years, as a sheriff about eight, and as a detective some thirty, working across Virginia, West Virginia, and Kentucky. Other sources call him a United States Deputy Marshal, a sheriff of Wise County, and a Pinkerton agent. The specific badges vary from teller to teller, and many trace back to the old man’s own account of himself. What is not in doubt is that for decade after decade in a country where the law was thin and armed, John Wright carried it, or carried something the mountains took for it, and that he outlived nearly every man he was ever said to have faced.

He was old now, and the men of his generation were in the ground. Clabe Jones had died in 1914. The same year, John Mayo died, one of the richest men in Kentucky. Talt Hall and the Red Fox had been thirty years under the Wise County sod.

William lay near Boone Creek. And John Wright, who had made whiskey and war and law and a coal field, turned at the very end toward the one Appalachian institution that had run alongside all the killing the whole time. The church. The regular Baptist faith had stood in these hollers the whole time, in plank churches on the creeks.

And it drew whole communities to the water for a baptizing the way the courthouse had drawn them to a hanging. It was that church that produced the strangest peace the feud years ever made. Noah Reynolds, out of prison and pardoned, had become a preacher in it. And Tilden Wright, the son of the William Wright that Noah had shot dead at Boone Creek, became a preacher too.

The two of them, a man and the son of the man he had killed, joined the same regular Baptist congregation on the same day. They stood in the same pulpit. They preached together. The feud that had put bullets through the Wright house ended with the two sides sharing a church house, which is a thing the mountains did and the ledgers never could.

Ever John Wright came to that same water late, and the whole country came to watch him do it. The old man of eighty-five walking down into the creek at Fairview before a crowd that had feared or followed him the better part of a century. After it, he was by every account a quiet church member, the guns put away, a convert the preachers claimed and the newspapers wrote up. He had something close to two more years.

On the 30th of January, 1931, John Wesley Wright died at Horse Gap at Pound in Wise County, Virginia. He was eighty-six. He died in a bed in a house of being old, which almost no one in this story managed. Talt Hall had died on a rope, the Red Fox on a rope, William on the ground at Boone Creek, John Reynolds in a whiskey raid, Ira Mullins at the rock.

The man the mountains had named for the devil and credited with more dead than any of them went out the gentlest way the record offers. They buried him on the hillside in the John Wright family cemetery at Pound, over on the Virginia side of the gap, not far from Horse Gap, where he died, and just across the notch from the Kentucky coal town his signatures had helped raise. A headstone stands over him there. His people had come across that gap and settled both sides of it.

And so, when the man who crossed it his whole life was finally still, he was still on the Virginia side in Wise County, the same county that had hanged his best friend. Things of his outlived him. Out at Big Stone Gap in Wise County, the Southwest Virginia Museum holds a saber attributed to Wright, dated around the turn of the century, a plain curved blade behind glass that a visitor can stand and look at. His son, William Troy Wright, called Chid, wrote a book about his father, The Devil John Wright of the Cumberlands, a son’s account of the man.

Others wrote their own versions, one of them a frank novel that put Quantrill and the circus and Queen Victoria into the old man’s life and sold them as his story. A moonshine brand carries the name Devil John on a label today, selling in a bottle the one trade of his the law never did stop. The county Wright was born into is gone. The creek farms became a coal field.

Jenkins and Fleming and McRoberts, the tipples and the company houses, and then the coal itself began to leave the way the timber had and the whiskey money had before it. Pound Gap still cuts the mountain between Kentucky and Virginia, and the road still runs through it past the rock they called Killing Rock, where the marker now stands for the five who died there in 1892. July 24th, 1929, John Wright walked down into the creek at Fairview, an old man, and two thousand people watched him come up a church member. The 30th of January, 1900, his brother William went into the ground at Boone Creek, shot by two men.

The 30th of January, 1931, John went into his bed at Horse Gap and died of being old. The newspaper counted twenty-eight men dead at his hand, and the old man in the water counted seven and said he had done his duty by everyone. No court ever took up the difference. Half the mountains had buried a lawman, half had buried a killer.

The gap he crossed all his life kept them both on the Virginia side of the mountain, under one stone.