434 HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS
other Indians. This valley was the last section of Kentucky to be
wrested from them by white settlers.
The history of the area on both sides of the Kentucky-West Virginia
Line is violent. It was the scene of the notorious Hatfield-McCoy feud
that began on an election day early in the nineteenth century. Stories
of the origin are obscure. One is that while "Devil Anse" Hatfield and
his clan from across the Tug Fork in West Virginia were carousing with
the McCoys on the Kentucky side, Hatf1eld’s son eloped across the
river with Randall McCoy’s daughter. When a few months later
McCoy’s unwed daughter returned to her Kentucky relatives with a
child, a war of hatred and revenge began. The feud outlived all of
those who saw its beginning, and though there were peaceful inter-
ludes, a trivial argument over such a matter as the number of notches
on a hog’s ear would start another series of killings. On one occasion
an old man of the Hatfield clan stood alone against the McCoy tribe,
and when he died cursing his enemies with his last breath, his gun was
empty, his body riddled with bullets. Later, after three McCoys had
stabbed a Hatfield in the back, a party of Hatfields surrounded Randall
McCoy’s cabin and set it on fire in order to see their targets—the
McCoys trapped inside. On that night a Hatfield shot a young
McCoy girl to death and then broke her mother’s back. It was a great
day for the McCoys when this Hatfield was hanged, many years later,
before 6,000 spectators. He was the Hrst and one of the few feudists
hanged legally.
The courts were particularly ineffective in handling this feud because
the participants lived in two States and the State authorities on both
sides of the line were disinclined to permit extradition of their citizens,
since each side laid blame on the other. Moreover, many of the
sheriffs and even judges were kin to participants. About the time of
the War between the States, when coal mining began in the region on a
minor commercial scale, the operators found themselves much hindered
by the primitive tribal warfare and put pressure on authorities to curb
it. They had a reward offered for the capture of Devil Anse and forced
him into semi-hiding in the hills—then bought up his land for a dollar
an acre. Other Hatfields and some of the McCoys became mine oper-
ators themselves, though many of their kin eventually came down to
work in the mines. But the hill people were only half tamed and the
frontierhabit of every man’s settling his quarrels with his own gun was
not easily eradicated. It was carried over into the period of industrial
development.
In Harlan County big scale mining began about 1911, after the dis- _
covery of thick seams of bituminous. Northern corporations invested
heavily here and a railroad was built. The real boom came with the
World War. The demand for fuel by the steel mills and other plants
manufacturing munitions drove coal prices high enough to make opera-
tion highly profitable even in this field, which had to ship in competition
with northern fields having much more favorable freight rates. Compe-