Once when a terrible flood
caused Troublesome to overflow its banks, carrying everything in its
raging course, I saw a team of mules, the only means of support of a
widowed mother of a dozen children, swept away. She hired the team to
neighbors and thus earned a meager living. I remember the despair of
that white, drawn face as the widow looked on helplessly at the
destruction. Not a word did she speak. But before darkness the next day
neighbor men far and wide, and none of them were prosperous, chipped in
from their small hoards and got another team for the woman.

2. LAND OF FEUDS AND STILLS

HATFIELDS AND MCCOYS

When Dr. Walker, the Englishman, the first white man in Cumberland Gap,
followed the course of Russell Fork out of Virginia into Kentucky back
in 1750, he came upon a wooded point of land shaped like a triangle
which was skirted by two forks of tepid water. The one to the left, as
he faced westward, this English explorer called Levisa after the wife of
the Duke of Cumberland.

Generations later a lovely mountain girl wore the name he had given the
stream and she became the wife of the leader of a blood feud in the
country where he set up his hut. It was a blood feud and a war of
revenge that lasted more than forty years, the gruesome details of which
have echoed around the world, cost scores of lives, and struck terror to
the hearts of women and innocent children for several decades.

Devil Anse Hatfield, the leader of his clan, himself told me much of the
story when I lived on Main Island Creek in Logan County, West Virginia,
and on Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River. His wife Levicy--she who had
been Levicy Chafin--did not spell her name as the name of the stream was
spelled though she pronounced it the same way. It was a story that began
with the killing of Harmon McCoy in 1863 by Devil Anse, who was a
fearless fighter, a captain in a body of the Rebel forces known as the
Logan Wildcats. Later, when Jonse Hatfield, the leader's oldest boy,
grew to young manhood, he set eyes upon Rosanna McCoy, old Randall's
daughter, and loved her at sight. But Devil Anse, because of the hatred
he bore Rosanna's father, wouldn't permit his son to marry a McCoy.
Rosanna loved Jonse madly. And he, swept away with wild, youthful
passion, determined to have her. He did, though not in lawful wedlock.

Quarrels and bickerings between the sides sprang up at the slightest