ALTERNATE ORIGINS

His son, Oscar Allen, Deputy Jailer, was asleep on the second floor. He came to the landing when he heard voices

“My grandmother Luna on my dad’s side was a blue Fugate. It was real bad in her,” Alva Stacy, the boy’s father, explained.

below, but when one of the men began mounting the stairs, he saw that he was masked. He threw the keys back into his

“The doctors finally came to the conclusion that Benjamin’s color was due to blood inherited from generations back.”

room and started to draw a gun. At that moment the other fired and Oscar Allen fell with a bullet wound through his ear.

Benjamin lost his blue tint within a few weeks, and now he is about as normal looking a seven-year-old boy as you could He was not badly injured.

hope to find. His lips and fingernails still turn a shade of purple-blue when he gets cold or angry a quirk that so intrigued medical Maggie Allen, his sister, and Mrs. Oscar Allen, his wife; both were shot. Maggie Allen four times. Maggie Allen died students after Benjamin’s birth that they would crowd around the baby and try to make him cry. “Benjamin was a pretty big item the next day. Mrs. OscarAllen eventually recovered.

in the hospital,” his mother says with a grin.

Albert Roberts, a 17 year old boy, was the hero of the encounter. He it was who with a pistol routed the assailants, but Dark blue lips and fingernails are the only traces of Martin Fugate’s legacy left in the boy; that, and the recessive gene that he was mortally wounded in the effort and died four hours later.

has shaded many of the Fugates and their kin blue for the past 162 years.

Bud Noble and his sons were accused of having conspired to raid the jail in an attempt to free Hargus Noble, son of They’re known simply as the “blue people” in the hills and hollows around Troublesome and Ball Creeks. Most lived to their Bud, and Willie Noble, a nephew; Isaac Watts, another nephew, and Don Grigsby, who were not in the jail at the time hav-80s and 90s without serious illness associated with the skin discoloration. For some, though, there was a pain not seen in lab tests.

Hargus and Willie Noble had been given life sentences and Isaac Watts a two year term for the killing of Joe Napier, There was always speculation in the hollows about what made the blue people blue: heart disease, a lung disorder, the pos-a young married man, on Barge Creek, on Oct. 3, 1921. Jealousy due to Napier’s mariage, was said to have been the

sibility proposed by one old-timer that “their blood is just a little closer to their skin.” But no one knew for sure, and doctors rarely prompting motive for this slaying.

paid visits to the remote creekside settlements where most of the “blue Fugates “ lived until well into the 1950s. By the time a The headquarters of the Noble family is on Leatherwood Creek in Breathitt County. Sol Noble was a cousin of

young hematologist from the University of Kentucky came down to Troublesome Creek in the 1960s to cure the blue people,

“Honeysuckle” Noble and also of Aunt Polly Watts, whose grandfather Washington Noble immigrated from Virginia to

Martin Fugate’s descendants had multiplied their recessive genes all over the Cumberland Plateau.

Kentucky.

Madison Cawein began hearing rumors about the blue people when he went to work at the University of Kentucky’s

To the persistency of Aunt Polly Watts and following Judge Sam Hurst’s court up from Irvine to Beattyville and from Lexington medical clinic in 1960. “I’m a hematologist, so something like that perks up my ears,” Cawein says, sipping on Beattyville and Jackson and insisting that Bud Noble and his two sons, and not her own son, Lewis Watts, who afterwards whiskey sours and letting his mind slip back to the summer he spent “tromping around the hills looking for blue people.”

was arrested in connection with the raid, were responsible for it is due to the fact that Lewis Watts was eventually tried Cawein is no stranger to eccentricities of the body. He helped isolate an antidote for cholera, and he did some of the early and freed. Lewis Watts married a daughter of Sol Noble. Mrs. Watts also made several trips to Frankfort to endeavor work on L-dopa, the drug for Parkinson’s disease. But his first love, which he developed as an Army medical technician in World to have another son, William Penn Watts, who is under sentence of death in connection with the jail raid, either freed or War II, was hematology. “Blood cells always looked so beautiful to me,” he says.

commuted.

Cawein would drive back and forth between Lexington and Hazard an eight-hour ordeal before the tollway was built and

The Nobles have participated in many feuds. Aunt Polly Watts’ father was killed during the Civil War, being shot

scour the hills looking for the blue people he’d heard rumors about. The American Heart Association had a clinic in Hazard, and down at his doorsteps by guerillas. Breathitt County was at that time the scene of some sanguinary conflicts. One of the it was there that Cawein met “a great big nurse” who offered to help.

elder members of the family was said to have dispatched an opponent in a similar feud by loading a shotgun with pieces Her name was Ruth Pendergrass, and she had been trying to stir up medical interest in the blue people ever since a dark blue of a broken up tea kettle and with that charge, blowing his head off.

woman walked into the county health department one bitterly cold afternoon and asked for a blood test.

“She had been out in the cold and she was just blue!” recalls Pendergrass, who is now 69 and retired from nursing. “Her

• Author’s Note: Solomon Noble had a number of illegitimate children born to the daughter of one of his family’s for-

face and her fingernails were almost indigo blue. It like to scared me to death! She looked like she was having a heart attack.

mer slaves. One son was named Braxton Noble. His mother was a Mullins – rumored to be a Melungeon. Braxton is

I just knew that patient was going to die right there in the health department, but she wasn’t a’tall alarmed. She told me that

buried in Watts Cemetery, Watts, Kentucky.

her family was the blue Combses who lived up on Ball Creek. She was a sister to one of the Fugate women.” About this same time, another of the blue Combses, named Luke, had taken his sick wife up to the clinic at Lexington. One look at Luke was enough to “get those doctors down here in a hurry,” says Pendergrass, who joined Cawein to look for more blue people.

THE BLUE PEOPLE OF TROUBLESOME CREEK

Trudging up and down the hollows, fending off “the two mean dogs that everyone had in their front yard,” the doctor and the nurse would spot someone at the top of a hill who looked blue and take off in wild pursuit. By the time they’d get to the top, the The story of an Appalachian malady, an inquisitive doctor, and a paradoxical cure.

person would be gone. Finally, one day when the frustrated doctor was idling inside the Hazard clinic, Patrick and Rachel Ritchie

by Cathy Trost

walked in.

©Science 82, November, 1982

“They were bluer’n hell,” Cawein says. “Well, as you can imagine, I really examined them. After concluding that there was Six generations after a French orphan named Martin Fugate settled on the banks of eastern Kentucky’s Troublesome Creek with no evidence of heart disease, I said ‘Aha!’ I started asking them questions: ‘Do you have any relatives who are blue?’ then I sat his redheaded American bride, his great-great-great great grandson was born in a modern hospital not far from where the creek down and we began to chart the family.”

still runs.

Cawein remembers the pain that showed on the Ritchie brother’s and sister’s faces. “They were really embarrassed about The boy inherited his father’s lankiness and his mother’s slightly nasal way of speaking.

being blue,” he said. “Patrick was all hunched down in the hall. Rachel was leaning against the wall. They wouldn’t come into the What he got from Martin Fugate was dark blue skin. “It was almost purple,” his father recalls.

waiting room. You could tell how much it bothered them to be blue.”

Doctors were so astonished by the color of Benjamin “Benjy” Stacy’s skin that they raced him by ambulance from the mater-After ruling out heart and lung diseases, the doctor suspected methemoglobinemia, a rare hereditary blood disorder that nity ward in the hospital near Hazard to a medical clinic in Lexington. Two days of tests produced no explanation for skin the results from excess levels of methemoglobin in the blood. Methemoglobin which is blue, is a nonfunctional form of the red hemo-color of a bruised plum.

globin that carries oxygen. It is the color of oxygen-depleted blood seen in the blue veins just below the skin.

A transfusion was being prepared when Benjamin’s grandmother spoke up. “Have you ever heard of the blue Fugates of

Troublesome Creek?” she asked the doctors.

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