bee_pipes
02-07-2007, 04:51 AM
The feuds of Eastern Kentucky.My wife's side of the family has ancestors from that part of the country, dating back a considerable distance, that were some of the original immigrants moving west from Virginia and North Carolina. It really provides an excellent peek at life prior to 1900. Harlin County was not well known for it’s roads, so travel into and out of the area was difficult. People living in the region were fairly self-sufficient and a law unto themselves. We pay a lot of lip service to our form of government and how the common man has a better chance of getting a fair break in this country, but the book paints a bleak picture of the power a large family can exert over the local populace. There’s nothing wrong with having a lot of relatives in government – sheriffs, judges, clerks, etc. until they all start acting in concert. When their allegiance to the family outweighs their duty to uphold the law, nobody is safe. A difference of opinion and harsh feelings between the family in power and other families would often result in a no-holds barred shooting war. You think of the Hatfields and McCoys as the American stereotype of mountain feuds. They are only a minor footnote. I think they became a household name because of nation wide publicity, but the publicity far outweighed the seriousness of the feud. Harlan, Breathitt (Bloody Breathitt) and Clay counties dwarf the Hatfield and McCoy (H&M) feud. The H&M only lasted a span of a decade or so and resulted in the deaths of a dozen people or more. Clay county, on the other hand, resulted in hostilities that lasted one hundred years and involved a number of families choosing sides. The original settlers had to defend their lives and property from animals, Indians and other unscrupulous settlers in the sparsely populated country. With a tradition of self reliance and self defense, it was only a natural matter to take the law into your own hands when you were of the opinion that a family member did not receive a fair shake from the institutional law. That opinion could be based on fact, or just preference. For example, someone getting off for murder, when the victim was a family member, might cause someone to disregard the facts and seek justice on their own terms. In some cases, family influence was involved in preventing or causing a murder conviction – the law was often used as effectively as a rifle in persecuting enemies. Witness intimidation, false testimony, lynching and impromptu execution by jailers were all part and parcel of the justice system. Couple that with the dense growth of the Kentucky mountains and you have a perfect environment for ambush – one of the favorite methods of settling a score. There was no nobility in settling blood feuds – often force was employed by waiting in ambush, firing from the cover of woods on the enemy while they traveled an isolated road or trail. Indeed, it seems like many of the roads and trails of the area were first blazed in order to travel around property and avoid contact with inhabitants where hard feelings existed. If Harlan county could have put a nickel into the public treasury for every time the governor was asked to send troops to maintain order and allow the courts to hold session, it would be one of the wealthiest counties in the nation. That may be an exaggeration, but you get the idea. An excellent read, and I recommend it to anyone that enjoys regional history. It may not read like a Clancy novel, but it is far from a dry history book.
Regards,
Pat
Regards,
Pat