Blood Feud: The Hatfields & The McCoys (28 page)

Unfortunately, the reporting of the feud tended to tar all inhabitants of the southern Appalachians with the same brush. Some of the adjectives most frequently used in articles about the region were:
backward, barbarous, dissolute, idle, primitive, revolting, savage, uncivilized, violent,
and
wild.
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Between 1905 and 1928 ninety-two silent movies were filmed for national distribution that featured feuding mountaineers exhibiting all those damning qualities and more.
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One writer describes the shift that occurred during this period in how other Americans perceived Appalachian people: “Images of the mountaineer as pathetic and romantic gave way before a new set of images of the mountaineers as feudists and desperadoes, criminals and social deviants.”
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Whereas Southern mountain people had been portrayed prior to the feud era as “our contemporary ancestors,”
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afterward they became crazed outsiders. With their feuding and their moonshining, they had ventured beyond what had become the new American pale. The media at the time stressed the European origins of their violence, among the Highland clans of Scotland—from which most in the Southern backcountry hadn’t, in fact, descended.

An adjective frequently found in reviews and synopses of the scripts of these silent movies about Appalachian feudists is “virile.”
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Once again, while audiences gasped in horror at the outrageous behavior of the fictional feudists, they admired their ruthless aggression. As one writer puts it, “Those forces, which were shaping a new American business and political elite—and hence American mass culture . . . found the idea of man’s ‘wolf-law’ nature a useful indulgence, a justification for annihilating one’s rivals, or minor nations.”
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But in the final reel of each silent film, the feudists were usually arrested, and their women were whisked from the mountains to a richer life in the cities of America.
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So, after a brief flirtation with anarchy, urban audiences emerged from the darkness of the movie theaters knowing that they were different from, and superior to, these vicious outlaws prowling the Southern mountains.

Coal formed the foundation of the industrial revolution in Europe and America in the nineteenth century because it powered steam engines and fueled the manufacture of steel. Anthracite fields near the East Coast were nearly exhausted, so the bituminous seams in the south­ern Appalachians looked very attractive to industrialists.
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William MacCorkle, elected governor of West Virginia in 1892, maintained that the abundance of raw materials in West Virginia would assure that the state would become a major manufacturing center, bringing abundance and harmony to its citizens.
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Unfortunately, the arrival of industry in the Tug Fork Valley didn’t provide the panacea that Governor MacCorkle blissfully predicted for the people who lived there. Many local residents sold their farms and timberlands to these large corporations or sold the rights to the minerals beneath them, for prices ranging from twenty-five cents to three dollars per acre. Some sold entire mountains for a mule, a horse, or a rifle, like the Lenape who supposedly exchanged the island of Manhattan for some beads.
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Some mountaineers made such deals not by choice but because overlapping land grants and unreliable eighteenth-century surveys put many existing land titles in West Virginia into jeopardy. Nonresident agents challenged traditional proprietors, who lacked the resources to fight these challenges in court. Some preferred to sell their land for pennies on the dollar rather than to face the confusing and expensive maze of legalities required to uphold their own claims.
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Others exchanged their mineral rights for quitclaim deeds that assured them of ownership of the land on which their families had already been living for generations. Unfortunately, these deeds granted the owners of the mineral rights access to the minerals by any and all means necessary for their extraction. At the time the deeds were signed, this provision meant a tunnel in a hillside and space for a tipple and a railroad spur. Later, in the twentieth century, this same provision allowed for strip-mining, mountaintop removal, and complete destruction of the land that the original owners had sought to preserve by signing away the mineral rights in the first place.
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Unable to rely any longer on farming, herding, hunting, and riding their rafts of logs downriver to the sawmills for their sustenance, many Tug Fork Valley residents became wage laborers. Those who took up mining soon discovered that they were required to work twelve-hour days, six days a week
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—an incomprehensible schedule for people accustomed to working their own land at their own pace according to the demands of the weather and the seasons.

Coal seams often lay in remote coves, so mining companies had to build entire towns for their workers, in which the companies owned the houses, schools, churches, and stores.
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Wages usually came in the form of scrip that had to be spent at company stores, where prices were manipulated artificially according to the requirements of the companies’ profit margins.
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The valleys they mined were sometimes so narrow that there was room for only a creek, a road, a railroad track, and a row or two of buildings, with walls of rock rising up on either side and blocking out the sun by midafternoon. The houses “squatted on the mountainside like ‘great drab beetles with their stilt legs braced against the slope.’ ”
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West Virginia in 1900 had the largest percentage of native-born coal miners in the nation, but there weren’t enough of them, so miners came from eastern and southern Europe, as did blacks from farther south.
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Within a decade, West Virginia had the highest percentage of foreign-born workers south of the Mason-Dixon Line.
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Whereas once the Tug Fork Valley had hosted very few people, most related to one another and most of them subsistence farmers and loggers, now people from all over the country and all over the world called the valley home. But they knew only the inhabitants of their own isolated coal towns and depended entirely upon the whims of absentee owners for their shelter and sustenance.
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The last decade of the nineteenth century and the first two of the twentieth were an age of industrial violence. Major strikes occurred all over the United States. In the Lawrence, Massachusetts, textile strike, for example, twenty-three thousand workers left their looms, demanding higher wages and safer working conditions.
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But in West Virginia the coal companies were in bed with state and county governments to prevent any form of regulation.
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Those who used to win elections in the Tug Fork Valley were the best orators and those who enjoyed the support of extended kinship groups. They often bought votes with free liquor, as the West Virginia Hatfields did in Kentucky, where they themselves couldn’t vote. Replacing this system was one dominated by industrialists who bought support with private patronage.
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Hand-loading coal required miners to lie on their backs and undercut coal seams with picks, to augur holes with drills braced against their chests, to pack these holes with explosives, to light the fuses, and then to run like hell.
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West Virginian coal miners were more likely to lose their lives on the job than soldiers fighting in World War I.
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They could die from explosions, roof falls, poisonous gases, or the lingering suffocation of black lung disease.
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Unions, which negotiated for safety regulations and higher wages, were allowed in most states, but not in West Virginia due to the influence of the coal operators. As a result, cheaper, nonunion coal from West Virginia flooded the national market and forced a reduction in price for union coal mined elsewhere.
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The United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) moved in and unionized the mine at Paint Creek, some seventy-five miles from the Tug Fork Valley. But the mine at nearby Cabin Creek remained without a union. So in 1912 the Paint Creek owners outlawed the union there and hired the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency to root out any miners who objected. A hundred Baldwin-Felts guards, some former criminals, moved in with machine guns and evicted the miners’ families from company houses, beating up and killing several miners in the process and kicking one pregnant woman, who later lost the child.
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The ousted miners moved to a tent colony during an unusually harsh winter. Strikebreakers roared past the colony in an armored train called the Bull Moose Special and fired machine guns into the tents.

The coal operators brought in scabs, whose trains the union miners attacked. Martial law was declared, and Mother Jones, a UMWA organizer, was arrested and sentenced to twenty years in prison for reading the Declaration of Independence from the statehouse steps in Charleston.
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At this point Henry D. Hatfield, Devil Anse Hatfield’s nephew and the son of Good Elias, became governor of West Virginia. A practicing physician, he went to Paint Creek carrying his doctor bag. While helping the miners’ families with their health problems, he earned their trust. He brought union leaders to Charleston, put them in a room with the coal operators, and insisted that they reach a deal to end the strike. They did so—but the deal didn’t include the right for miners to unionize.

In 1912, Woodrow Wilson became the first Democratic president of the country in twenty years. A friend of labor, he established the Federal Trade Commission, instituted a federal income tax, and introduced some pro-union legislation regulating wages and working conditions, and protecting existing unions during mergers.
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