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Charles Herndon Julian

Accidental Death

On January 16, 1900 at the Capital Hotel in Frankfort, Kentucky, Charles Julian was in the wrong place at the wrong time.  As an innocent bystander,
he was accidentally shot and killed during the duel between David Colston and Ethelbert Scott.

The following is an article by Irvin S. Cobb, newspaper man

Chapter 17 - Along Here, Among Other Things, A Wedding

"A Couple of months or so before the Goebel case advanced to the point of prosecuting the alleged assassin and his affiliates in that glory whirligig, we turned our
attentions for the time being to something in nature of a by-piece.  This was the trial for manslaughter -- and the triumphant acquittal -- of Colonel David Colson, the
central figure and the hero of a flare-up marked by some mighty quick mortality.  Burning powder fanned it to a red-hot climax in the lobby of the principal Frankfort
Hotel only a few days before the major tragedy of Goebel's undoing was to befall just around the corner, as it were.  This lesser affair was not related except distantly
and collaterally, to the larger factional controversy, but dated back rather to the Spanish-American War when Colson had surrendered his seat in Congress to lead a
volunteer regiment which boiled internally for the entire term of its enlistment and frequently boiled over.  It did its only fighting in camp at Anniston, Alabama, making
a showing there which would have considerable ill for the enemy in Cuba, provided the Fourth Kentucky Infantry had got that far."  

"First to last, the actual gunfire in this cribbed and confined hotel battle lasted less than ninety seconds; final score;  Three dead, those being ex-Governor Bradley's truculent
nephew, Captain Ethelbert Scott, and two bystanders accidentally slain; and four wounded, including that master marksman, the Colonel, and a Northern traveling man who, on
his first trip south of the Ohio River, had arrived only that day and was having his shoes shined at the head of the steps leading down to  the basement, when the "impromptu
duello began".  So he vaulted over the stair railing and as he sprawled on the half-landing below, with a smashed ankle crumpled under him.  Captain Scott, all riddled and dying
on his feet as he fled, cam tumbling down and fell across him. while the vengeful Colson followed on behind, with a fractured right arm dangling but with his left hand briskly throwing
lead into the quivering back of his adversary. When I arrived, having heard the racketing blasts from just across the street, the traveling man was still lying there, crying out: "My
wife begged me not to come to this wild country.  She begged me. And, what happens? No sooner do I get here than everybody goes to shooting everybody else and then when I
jump down here and break my legs they start piling dead men on to of me."

"The place was a shambles; bullet pocks in the wainscoatings; dribbles and dots and rippled trails of red on the tiles; separate red puddles here and there; shattered plate-glass
windows.  In the middle of the floor, under a bright blue raincoat and an overturned chair, was the slight body of Assistant Postmaster Demaree of Shelbyville.  I happened to know
him and helped to identify his remains.  There were two holes through his thin breast.  Scott, who inaugurated the fusillade and probably died repenting of it, had used this hapless
on-looker for a living shield.  Behind the clerk's desk was a deputy manager in a faint.  I headed along a cross hall, seeking for scattered eye-witnesses who might be able to furnish
particulars, and one of the overlooked casualties, a mountaineer lawyer named Golden, with a puncture neatly placed right between the rear buttons of  his long frock coat, pulled
away from a wall against which he was leaning and collapsed in my arms.  He was Scott's friend and the theory was that, finding the occasion grown perilous, he had turned to retreat
and Colson deftly had flung a sideways shot and plugged him as he ran. I got Golden disposed of and came abreast of the open door of a sample room just as another uncounted
victim, who had dragged himself in there, a tobacco planter named Julian out in the county, finished bleeding to death through a severed artery in his leg.  On Mr. Julian's account
there was much local indignation, his being the only Democratic name of the fatalities list.  It would seem that fourteen years before the event, I was being tutored -- but of course didn't
know it -- for service as a correspondent on the western battle fronts of the First World War."

"Oh, yes, I almost forgot the farewell sequel to that particular day's happenings.  Without notifying anyone, numbers of the colored help had gone hurriedly thence, but the remaining
members of the staff succeeded in tidying up after the massacre in time for Honorable William Jennings Bryan, The Peerless Perennial, to speak there that night.  It was a good speech,
naturally; it being his regular one, with tremolo interpolations where he endorsed the Goebel contest of the merits of which he knew only one side and that sketchy.  After that he ran again
and again for the presidency."

Source: Exit Laughing, by Irvin S. Cobb; Garden City Publishing Company, Inc, 1942
Submitted by; William J. "Bill" Latin , Jr.
blattin@bellsouth.net

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