Photo by U. S. Forest Service

“Dense forest luxuriant undergrowth.”—Mixed hardwoods, Jackson Co., N. C.

The posse, led by Logan and the sheriff, suddenly surrounded the town of Morehead. Everybody gave in except Craig Toliver, Jay Toliver, Bud Toliver, and Hiram Cook, who barricaded themselves in the railroad station, where all of them were shot dead by the posse.

Boone Logan was indicted for murder. At the trial he admitted the killings; but he showed that the feud had cost the lives of not less than twenty-three men, that not one person had been legally punished for these murders, and that he had acted for the good of the public in ending this infamous struggle. The court accepted this view of the case, the community sustained it, and the “war” was closed.

A feud, in the restricted sense here used, is an armed conflict between families, each endeavoring to exterminate or drive out the other. It spreads swiftly not only to blood-kin and relatives by marriage, but to friends and retainers as well. It may lie dormant for a time, perhaps for a generation, and then burst forth with recruited strength long after its original cause has ceased to interest anyone, or maybe after it has been forgotten.Such feuds are by no means prevalent throughout the length and breadth of Appalachia, but are restricted mostly to certain well defined districts, of which the chief, in extent of territory as well as in the number and ferocity of its “wars,” is the country round the upper waters of the Kentucky, Licking, Big Sandy, Tug, and Cumberland rivers, embracing many of the mountain counties of eastern Kentucky and adjoining parts of West Virginia, Old Virginia, and Tennessee. In this thinly settled region probably five hundred men have been slain in feuds since our centennial year, and only three of the murderers, so far as I know, have been executed by law.

The active feudists, as a rule, include only a small part of the community; but public sentiment, in feud districts, approves or at least tolerates the vendetta, just as it does in Corsica or the Balkans. Those citizens who are not directly implicated take pains to hear little and see less. They keep their mouths shut. They can neither be persuaded, bribed, nor coerced into informing or testifying against either side, but, on the contrary, will throw dust in the eyes of an investigator or try to stare him down. A jury composed of such men will not convict anybody.When a feud is raging, nobody outside the warring clans is in any danger at all. A stranger is safer in the heart of Feuddom than he would be in Chicago or New York, so long as he attends strictly to his own business, asks no questions, and tells no “tales.” If, on the contrary, he should express horror or curiosity, he is regarded as a busybody or suspected as a spy, and is likely to be run out of the country or even “laywayed” and silenced forever.

What causes feuds?

Some of them start in mere drunken rows or in a dispute over a game of cards; others in quarrels over land boundaries or other property. The Hatfield-McCoy feud started because Randolph McCoy penned up two wild hogs that were claimed by Floyd Hatfield. The spite over these hogs broke out two years later, and one partisan was killed from ambush. The feud itself began in 1882 over a debt of $1.75, with the hogs and the bushwhacking brought up in recrimination. Love of women is the primary cause, or the secondary aggravation, of many a feud. Some of the most widespread and deadliest vendettas have originated in political strifes.

It should be understood that national and state politics cut little or no figure in these “wars.” Local politics in most of the mountain counties is merely a factional fight, in which family matters and business interests are involved, and the contest becomes bitterly personal on that account. This explains most of the collusion or partisanship of county officers and their remissness in enforcing the law in murder cases. Family ties or political alliances override even the oath of office.

Within the past year I have heard a deputy sheriff admit nonchalantly, on the stand, that when a homicide was committed near him, and he was the only officer in the vicinity, he advised the slayer to take to the mountains and “hide out.” The judge questioned him sharply on this point, was reassured by the witness that it was so, and then—offered no comment at all. Within the same period, in another but not distant court, a desperado from the Shelton Laurel, on trial for murder, admitted that he had shot six men since he moved over from Tennessee to North Carolina, and swore that while he was being held in jail pending trial for this last offense the sheriff permitted him to “keep a gun in his cell, drink whiskey in the jail, and eat at table with the family of the sheriff.”

Feuds spread not only through clan fealty but also because they offer excellent chances to pay off old scores. The mountaineer has a long memory. The average highlander is fiery and combative by nature, but at the same time cunning and vindictive. If publicly insulted he will strike at once, but if he feels wronged by some act that does not demand instant retaliation he will brood over it and plot patiently to get his enemy at a disadvantage. Some mountaineers always fight fair; but many of them prefer to wait and watch quietly until the foe gets drunk and unwary, or until he is engaged in some illegal or scandalous act, or until he is known to be carrying a concealed weapon, whereupon he can be shot down unexpectedly and his assailant can “prove” by friendly witnesses that he acted in self-defense. So, if a man be involved in feud, he may be assassinated from ambush by someone who is not concerned in the clan trouble, but who has hated him for years on another account, and who knows that his death now will be charged up to the opposing faction.

From the earliest times it has been customary for our highlanders to go armed most of the time. This was a necessity in the old Indian-fighting days, and throughout the kukluxing and white-capping era following the Civil War. Such a habit, once formed, is hard to eradicate. Even to-day, in all parts of Appalachia that I am familiar with, most of the young men, I judge, and many of the older ones, carry concealed weapons.

Among them I have never seen a stand-up and knock-down fight according to the rules of the ring. They have many rough-and-tumble brawls, in which they slug, wrestle, kick, bite, strangle, until one gets the other down, whereat the one on top continues to maul his victim until he cries “Enough!” Oftener a club or stone will be used in mad endeavor to knock the opponent senseless at a blow. There is no compunction about striking foul and very little about “double-teaming.” Let us pause long enough to admit that this was the British and American way of man-handling, universal among the common people, until well into the nineteenth century—and the mountaineers are still ignorant of any other, except fighting with weapons.

Many of the young men carry home-made billies or “brass knucks.” Every man and boy has at least a pocket-knife with serviceable blade. Fights with such crude weapons are frequent. There are few spectacles more sickening than two powerful but awkward men slashing each other with common jack-knives, though the fatalities are much less frequent than in gun-fighting. I have known two old mountain preachers to draw knives on each other at the close of a sermon.

The typical highland bravo always carries a revolver or an automatic pistol. This is likely to be a weapon of large bore and good stopping-power that is worn in a shoulder-holster concealed under the coat or vest or shirt. Most mountaineers are good shots with such arms, though not so deadly quick as the frontiersmen of our old-time West—in fact, they cannot be so quick without wearing the weapon exposed. When a highlander has time, he prefers to hold his pistol in both hands (left clasped over right) and aims it as he would a rifle. To a Westerner such gun practice looks absurd; but it is accurate, beyond question. Few mountain gun-fights fail to score at least one victim.

The average mountain woman is as combative in spirit as her menfolk. She would despise any man who took insult or injury without showing fight. In fact, the woman, in many cases, deliberately stirs up trouble out of vanity, or for the sheer excitement of it. Some of the older women display the ferocity of she-wolves. The mother of a large family said in my presence, with the calm earnestness of one fully experienced: “If a feller ’d treated me the way ——— did ——— I’d git me a forty-some-odd and shoot enough meat off o’ his bones to feed a hound-dog a week.” Three of this woman’s brothers had been shot dead in frays. One of them killed the first husband of her sister, who married again, and whose second husband was killed by a man with whom she then tried a third matrimonial venture. Such matters may not be interesting in themselves, but they give one pause when he learns, in addition, that these people are received as friends and on a footing of equality by everybody in their community.

That the mountaineers are fierce and relentless in their feuds is beyond denial. A warfare of bushwhacking and assassination knows no refinements. Quarter is neither given nor expected. Property, however, is not violated, and women are not often injured. There have been some atrocious exceptions. In the Hatfield-McCoy feud, Cap Hatfield and Tom Wallace attacked the latter’s wife and her mother at night, dragged both women from bed, and Cap beat the old woman with a cow’s tail that he had clipped off “jes’ to see ’er jump.” He broke two of the woman’s ribs, leaving her injured for life, while Tom beat his wife. Later, on New Year’s night, 1888, a gang of the Hatfields surrounded the home of Randolph McCoy, killed the eldest daughter, Allaphare, broke her mother’s ribs and knocked her senseless with their guns, and killed a son, Calvin. In several instances women who fought in defense of their homes have been killed, as in the case of Mrs. Charles Daniels and her 16-year-old daughter, in Pike County, Kentucky, in November, 1909.

The mountain women do not shrink from feuds, but on the contrary excite and cheer their men to desperate deeds, and sometimes fight by their side. In the French-Eversole feud, a woman, learning that her unarmed husband was besieged by his foes, seized his rifle, filled her apron with cartridges, rushed past the firing-line, and stood by her “old man” until he beat his assailants off. When men are “hiding out” in the laurel, it is the women’s part, which they never shirk, to carry them food and information.

In every feud each clan has a leader, a man of prominence either on account of his wealth or his political influence or his shrewdness or his physical prowess. This leader’s orders are obeyed, while hostilities last, with the same unquestioning loyalty that the old Scotch retainer showed to his chieftain. Either the leader or someone acting for him supplies the men with food, with weapons if they need them, with ammunition, and with money. Sometimes mercenaries are hired. Mr. Fox says that “In one local war, I remember, four dollars per day were the wages of the fighting man, and the leader on one occasion, while besieging his enemies—in the county court-house—tried to purchase a cannon, and from no other place than the State arsenal, and from no other personage than the Governor himself.” In some of the feuds professional bravos have been employed who would assassinate, for a few dollars, anybody who was pointed out to them, provided he was alien to their own clans.

The character of the highland bravo is precisely that of the western “bad man” as pictured by Jed Parker in Stewart Edward White’s Arizona Nights:

And there is no romance about a real mountain feud. It is marked by suave treachery, “double-teaming,” “laywaying,” “blind-shooting,” and general heartlessness and brutality. If one side refuses to assassinate but seeks open, honorable combat, as has happened in several feuds, it is sure to be beaten. Whoever appeals to the law is sure to be beaten. In either case he is considered a fool or a coward by most of the countryside. Our highlander, untouched by the culture of the world about him, has never been taught the meaning of fair play. Magnanimity to a fallen foe he would regard as sure proof of an addled brain. The motive of one who forgives his enemy is utterly beyond his comprehension. As for bushwhacking, “Hit’s as fa’r for one as ’tis for t’other. You can’t fight a man fa’r and squar who’ll shoot you in the back. A pore man can’t fight money in the courts.” In this he is simply his ancient Scotch or English ancestor born over again. Such was the code of Jacobite Scotland and Tudor England. And back there is where our mountaineer belongs in the scale of human evolution.

The feud, as Miss Miles puts it, is an outbreak of perverted family affection. Its mainspring is an honorable clan loyalty. It is a direct consequence of the clan organization that our mountaineers preserve as it was handed down to them by their forefathers. The implacability of their vengeance, the treacheries they practice, the murders from ambush, are invariable features of clan warfare wherever and by whomsoever it is waged. They are not vices or crimes peculiar to the Kentuckian or the Corsican or the Sicilian or the Albanian or the Arab, but natural results of clan government, which in turn is a result of isolation, of physical environment, of geographical position unfavorable to free intercourse and commerce with the world at large.

The most hideous feature of the feud is the shooting down of unarmed or unwarned men. Assassination, in our modern eyes, is the last and lowest infamy of a coward. Such it truly is, when committed in the civilized society of our day. But in studying primitive races, or in going back along the line of our own ancestry to the civilized society of two centuries ago, we must face and acknowledge the strange paradox of a valorous and honorable people (according to their lights) who, in certain cases, practiced assassination without compunction and, in fact, with pride. History is red with it in those very “richest ages of our race” that Professor Shaler cited. Until a century or two ago, throughout Christendom, the secret murder of enemies was committed unblushingly by nobles and kings and prelates, often with a pious “Thus sayeth the Lord!” It was practiced by men valiant in open battle, and by those wise in the counsels of the realm. Take Scotland, for example, as pictured by a native writer.—

Yet the Scots have always been a notably warlike and fearless race. So, too, are our southern mountaineers: in the Civil War and the Spanish War they sent a larger proportion of their men into the service than almost any other section of our country.

Let us not overlook the fact that it demands courage of a high order for one to stay in a feud-infested district, conscious of being marked for slaughter—stay there month in and month out, year in and year out, not knowing at what moment he may be beset by overpowering numbers, from what laurel thicket he may be shot, or at what hour of the night he may be called to his door and struck dead before his family. On the credit side of their valor, then, be it entered that few mountaineers will shrink from such ordeal when, even from no fault of their own, it is thrust upon them.

The blood-feud is simply a horrible survival of medievalism. It is the highlander’s misfortune to be stranded far out of the course of civilization. He is no worse than that bygone age that he really belongs to. In some ways he is better. He is far less cruel than his ancestors were—than our ancestors were. He does not torture with the tumbril, the stocks, the ducking-stool, the pillory, the branding-irons, the ear-pruners and nostril-shears and tongue-branks that were in everyday use under the old criminal code. He does not tie a woman to the cart’s tail and publicly lash her bare back until it streams with blood, nor does he hang a man for picking somebody’s pocket of twelve pence and a farthing. He does not go slumming in bedlam, paying tuppence for the sport of mocking the maniacs until they rattle their chains in rage or horror. He does not turn executions of criminals into public festivals. He never has been known to burn a condemned one at the stake. If he hangs a man, he does not first draw his entrails and burn them before his eyes, with a mob crowding about to jeer the poor devil’s flinching or to compliment him on his “nerve.” Yet all these pleasantries were proper and legal in Christian Britain two centuries ago.

This isolated and belated people who still carry on the blood-feud are not half so much to blame for such a savage survival as the rich, powerful, educated, twentieth-century nation that abandons them as if they were hopelessly derelict or wrecked. It took but a few decades to civilize Scotland. How much swifter and surer and easier are our means of enlightenment to-day! Let us not forget that these highlanders are blood of our blood and bone of our bone; for they are old-time Americans to a man, proud of their nationality, and passionately loyal to the flag that they, more than any other of us, according to their strength, have fought and suffered for.