Appalachian Figures
On a cold January afternoon in 1900, gunfire echoed through the Capitol Hotel in Frankfort, Kentucky. When the smoke cleared, three men lay dead. At the center of the chaos stood Colonel David Grant Colson of Middlesboro, a former congressman and Spanish American War officer who had once argued for “Free Cuba” on the floor of the United States House of Representatives. That single violent moment fixed his reputation in headlines from Kentucky to Australia, yet it obscured a much longer story that began on a Bell County farm and wound through mountain courthouses, the halls of Congress, and a muddy camp in Alabama.
This is the story of the mountain Republican who became a colonel, survived one gunfight, and could not outrun another.
Yellow Creek to the statehouse
David Grant Colson was born at Yellow Creek, now part of Middlesboro, on April 1 1861, only days before Confederate batteries opened fire on Fort Sumter. The Congressional Directory for 1896 described him simply. He was born at Yellow Creek in Knox, now Bell, County, attended common schools, and studied at academies in Tazewell and Mossy Creek in Tennessee, then read law at Kentucky University in Lexington before returning home to practice.
Bell County tradition remembered him as the son of Reverend John C. Colson, patriarch of a large mountain family whose brick house near Middlesboro is still regarded as one of the county’s oldest surviving residences. Local history notes that the young David studied in Tennessee, read law, and opened a practice first at Pineville and later at Middlesboro, tying his career to the emerging coal and railroad towns of the upper Cumberland.
Colson entered politics early. In his twenties he won election to the Kentucky House of Representatives, representing Bell, Harlan, Leslie, and Perry Counties in the late 1880s. He ran statewide as the Republican nominee for state treasurer in 1889, then moved into local executive office as mayor of Middlesboro in the early 1890s.
These were years of rapid industrial change in the mountains. Railroads were punching through Cumberland Gap, coal camps were opening along Yellow Creek, and land companies dreamed of building a “Pittsburgh of the South” in Middlesboro. Colson’s Republicanism fit that new order. He tied his fortunes to development and the national party of protective tariffs, even as many mountain voters still split along Civil War and Reconstruction lines.
A mountain Republican in Congress
In 1894 Colson won election to the U.S. House of Representatives from the Eleventh District, a vast swath of southeastern Kentucky that included his home county and much of the Cumberland Plateau. He served two terms in the Fifty fourth and Fifty fifth Congresses, from 1895 to 1899, chairing the Committee on Expenditures on Public Buildings in his second term.
Congressional records portray him as loyal to the Republican administration of William McKinley on national issues while sometimes voting with Democrats on matters that touched directly on his mountain district. In an era of intense debate over tariffs, currency, and overseas expansion, Colson staked out a position within the “Free Cuba” bloc in the House that pressed for intervention against Spain in the Caribbean. Thomas E. Stephens’s study of the Fourth Kentucky Volunteer Infantry quotes Colson predicting that the United States would have to recognize Cuban independence and criticizing delays in action.
Colson later published a pamphlet of his House speeches, printed by the Government Printing Office in 1896. The House’s own biographical office lists that slim publication alongside his scrapbook, an unusual survival that preserves clippings and campaign material from his rise in Kentucky politics.
Raising the Fourth Kentucky: “Mountain Men” in a short war
When war with Spain came in 1898, Colson did not merely vote for it. He left Congress to enter uniform. Kentucky raised several volunteer regiments for the conflict. One of them, the Fourth Kentucky Volunteer Infantry, drew its companies largely from the mountain counties and soon earned the nickname “the Mountain Men.” The Kentucky National Guard’s official history notes that Colonel David Grant Colson took command of the regiment, which mustered into federal service between July 4 and July 27 1898.
The Fourth never saw combat overseas. Instead, like many volunteer regiments, it spent most of the war training and waiting. W. P. Norris’s early twentieth century regimental history and later summaries on Spanish American War reference sites describe the Fourth Kentucky at Camp Poland, then at Anniston, Alabama, performing garrison and training duties while disease and monotony bred frustration.
Stephens calls the Fourth’s experience a tragedy of unfulfilled expectations. Volunteers who had marched off expecting to fight in Cuba or Puerto Rico instead battled typhoid, heat, and boredom in Alabama. Officers clashed over discipline and honor. It was in this strained environment that Colson crossed paths with a young subordinate named Lieutenant Ethelbert Dudley Scott.
“Remember Anniston”: The first shooting
The feud that would define Colson’s later life began, fittingly, in camp. In early 1899, after the war had ended and the regiment was still at Anniston, tensions between Colson and Scott exploded. Contemporary press accounts reported that Scott had been court martialed after a quarrel with his colonel. On February 1899 the Indianapolis Journal described how Lieutenant Scott ambushed Colson in Anniston, firing on him with a revolver and wounding him in the arm.
Stephens reconstructs this first shooting in detail from military records and newspapers. Scott, publicly humiliated, believed Colson had ruined his reputation. Colson, already exhausted by the difficulties of commanding a restless volunteer regiment in a war that never reached the front, saw Scott’s challenge as a direct assault on his authority and honor. The Anniston incident did not kill either man, but it planted a seed of bitterness.
By February 1899 the Fourth Kentucky had been mustered out of federal service at Anniston and sent home. Colson carried a scar and perhaps a resolve that the quarrel with Scott remained unfinished.
Home to Middlesboro
After leaving the army, Colson did not return to Congress. He resumed his law practice at Middlesboro and remained a figure in Republican politics, winning another term in the Kentucky House of Representatives in 1902. Local histories of Bell County recall him as lawyer, politician, and Spanish American War veteran who moved easily between Pineville, the county seat, and the growing industrial town at Yellow Creek.
His war service, even without overseas combat, had enhanced his standing. The Kentucky National Guard’s Spanish American War overview lists him among key officers of the state’s volunteer regiments, and his name appeared in wartime newspaper stories reporting on recruitment and the Mountain Men.
Yet beneath the honors lay unresolved animosity with his former lieutenant.
Gunfire at the Capitol Hotel
On January 16 1900, the feud between Colson and Scott erupted again, this time in the heart of Kentucky’s capital during one of the state’s most turbulent political seasons. The contested gubernatorial election of 1899 had already thrown Frankfort into chaos. Republicans and Democrats fought in court and in the streets over whether William S. Taylor or William Goebel would sit in the governor’s chair. Armed men crowded the city.
That afternoon, in the lobby of the Capitol Hotel, Colson and Lieutenant Scott encountered each other once more. Accounts differ on which man reached for his gun first. A front page story in the Indianapolis Journal described Colson drawing his pistol and firing repeatedly at Scott, who returned fire as bullets tore through the crowded room. When it ended, Scott lay dead. Two bystanders, Charles Julian and Luther W. Demaree, had also been fatally struck.
Newspapers across the country relayed the incident as a “bloody Kentucky tragedy.” The Savannah Morning News, for example, summarized Colson’s career as mountain lawyer, two term congressman, and colonel of the Fourth Kentucky, then reported that he had just killed his “enemy” and two others in a hotel gunfight. Papers in Georgia and Indiana that had covered his wartime service now reported his alleged crime.
The story even crossed oceans. Australian readers of The Advertiser in Adelaide read of a sensational shooting affray in Frankfort, Kentucky, where a former congressman shot his foe and accidentally killed two additional men.
Trials, acquittal, and the court of opinion
Within weeks a Kentucky grand jury indicted Colson for the willful murders of Scott and Demaree. New York and New Jersey papers, some later compiled in digital crime history projects, printed the text of the indictments and sketched the legal arguments.
The trial that followed drew intense attention. The early twentieth century compilation Famous Kentucky Tragedies and Trials devoted a chapter to the Colson Scott case, summarizing testimony and legal strategies drawn from press accounts and court records. The authors portrayed Colson as a man claiming self defense against a longstanding enemy, while prosecutors called the hotel gunfight a reckless and murderous assault that had killed innocent bystanders.
In April 1900 a jury acquitted Colson. For the rest of his life he remained legally innocent of murder, yet the phrase “Capitol Hotel shooting” clung to his name in political gossip and newspaper columns. Modern reference works still list him under “politicians in trouble” for the years 1900 to 1909.
Stephens argues that the feud and the trial destroyed Colson’s broader ambitions. Any hope of returning to Congress or winning higher statewide office evaporated the moment the first bullet left his pistol in the Capitol Hotel.
Death on Yellow Creek
Colson spent his final years back in Bell County. He continued to practice law and remained active in Republican politics, but he never again held national office. On September 27 1904 he died at his farm near Middlesboro. The Daily Public Ledger of Maysville printed an obituary noting his service as member of the Fifty fourth and Fifty fifth Congresses and as colonel of the Fourth Kentucky Volunteers.
His headstone in Middlesboro’s Colson Cemetery carries the same summary. The inscription identifies him as David G. Colson, born April 1, 1861, died September 27, 1904, member of the 54th and 55th Congresses, and colonel of the 4th Kentucky Regiment Volunteer Infantry, United States Army, Spanish American War.
The stone reduces a complicated life to four lines. Farmer and lawyer, state legislator and mayor, congressman and colonel, survivor and shooter, all end in the same quiet hillside cemetery above Yellow Creek.
Colson’s place in Appalachian memory
For many years Colson’s story circulated in fragments. Local genealogists and Bell County historians preserved his family connections and noted his grave. Political reference works listed his offices and mentioned the Frankfort shooting as a curiosity in long lists of wayward politicians. War historians counted him among the colonels of a regiment that never left the South.
The first sustained effort to piece those fragments together came in 2000, when Thomas E. Stephens published “Congressman David Grant Colson and the Tragedy of the Fourth Kentucky Volunteer Infantry” in the Register of the Kentucky Historical Society. Drawing on Colson’s military service record, contemporary newspapers, and archival collections such as his scrapbook at the University of North Carolina, Stephens traced Colson’s path from Yellow Creek to Congress and through the Spanish American War to the Capitol Hotel lobby.
More recently, Stephens revisited the story in a podcast interview titled “The Deadly Colson Scott Feud,” which brought the tale of the mountain colonel and his doomed regiment to a twenty first century audience.
Colson’s life raises questions that echo across Appalachian history. How did railroads, coal, and new party alignments lift mountain lawyers into national office. What did it mean for volunteers from Bell, Clay, Harlan, Leslie, and Perry Counties to march under a “Mountain Men” banner in a war fought mostly in Caribbean sugar fields. How did honor culture, militarization, and political fury turn a hotel lobby into a killing ground.
His story also reminds us that Appalachian figures often stood at the crossroads of national events. The boy born on Yellow Creek in the first spring of the Civil War grew up to vote for war with Spain, carry a colonel’s commission, and fire a pistol in the capital of his state at the height of a constitutional crisis.
In the end, the inscription on his stone may be too short, but it is not wrong. David Grant Colson was, in fact, a congressman and a colonel from the mountains. How we remember the rest is up to us.
Sources & further reading
Congressional Directory, 54th Congress (1896). Biographical sketch of David G. Colson, including his Yellow Creek birth, education, and legal career. GovInfo
Colson, David G. Speeches of Hon. David G. Colson, of Kentucky, in the House (1896). Pamphlet of House speeches printed by the Government Printing Office. GovInfo
Compiled military service record, Col. David G. Colson, 4th Kentucky Volunteer Infantry, National Archives. Cited by Stephens as the core military source for Colson’s service. KY National Guard History
Contemporary newspaper coverage, including the Indianapolis Journal, Savannah Morning News, and other papers that reported the Anniston shooting, the Capitol Hotel gunfight, and Colson’s trial and death. KY National Guard History+2Kentucky National Guard+2
Colson headstone, Middlesboro Cemetery, Bell County, Kentucky, recording his dates of birth and death, congressional service, and colonelcy of the Fourth Kentucky Volunteers. Find a Grave
Thomas E. Stephens, “Congressman David Grant Colson and the Tragedy of the Fourth Kentucky Volunteer Infantry,” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 98, no. 1 (Winter 2000). KY National Guard History+1
Kentucky National Guard History, “The Spanish American War” and related materials on the Fourth Kentucky Volunteer Infantry. KY National Guard History+1
Biographical Directory of the United States Congress and U.S. House of Representatives History, Art & Archives entries for “COLSON, David Grant.” GovInfo+1
Henry Harvey Fuson, History of Bell County, Kentucky, for context on the Colson family and local setting.