Around the time Homicide, North and South was published, Kentucky's apparent special relationship to feuding was becoming nationally known. However, its reputation for armed interfamilial antagonism can be traced back to before the war. In 1854 a roguish son of a Mississippi planter published a florid account of his cousin Dr. Hezekiah Evans's thirty-year grudge with his neighbors, the Hill family (one of whom was a rival physician) in the Bluegrass's Garrard County. A Hill attacked Evans for abusing a leased slave in 1829-or so the story went. Years later, the neighbor's son, Dr. Oliver Perry Hill, publicly criticized Evans for being a subpar "steam doctor," and a series of confrontations between Evans, Hill's yeoman cousins, and the "rabble" economically attached to both families cost nine lives.57 The conflict demonstrated simmering class tensions among Bluegrass whites (after Oliver Hill turned down Evans's challenge to a duel, Evans considered the other Hills too far beneath his notice to invite into the ritual) as well as a clash of egos involving medical professionalization.

Other than the sycophantic author's praising Evans as "a genuine son of Erin," ethnicity was not made an issue.58 Still, the author self-consciously attempted to frame the story within a European past. The Mississippian, a veteran of the Peruvian navy, originally wanted to write it as a "Spanish romance," the better to display his knowledge of his favorite language. Even in a nonfiction format that described real, recent events in an American/ southern setting, the blood feud was still a product of the Old World; even an American author trying to vindicate his real-life kinsmen wanted to treat it as a novel (Evans's reputation meant more to him than his young cousin's linguistic skills, and he insisted it be written in English).59 Once the locus of the feud narrative was moved from the lowland South to eastern Kentucky (and, by extension, the southern highlands in toto) during the 1880s, continuity with a European past had become more regression than romance.60 It also triggered the question of whether Kentucky's "feud belt" was due to something inherent in Kentucky society (the oft-cited "pauper counties" problem being a likely culprit) or to various conditions found in southern Appalachia within Kentucky and beyond.61 By the turn of the century the latter interpretation was becoming more popular, with or without documentation; one writer obtusely suggested that unreported feuds must also exist in North Carolina and Tennessee, but Kentucky's came to light only because of that state's superior ability to stop them through militia force of arms.62 For most of the twentieth century practically any narrative of violence set in any part of Appalachia was explained as a feud (for instance, Ralph Stanley's prologue description of a Tennessean's revenge murder recounted in his recording of "Hills of Roan County").63 In the 1930s New Deal caseworkers pointed to the very absence of feuds in North Carolina's westernmost Swain County as a sign of federal-initiated progress. Nothing of the sort had ever taken place there "except in the imagination of writers."64 But that was beside the point; the narrative of feuds provided New Dealers with a useful counterpoint.

However, this viewpoint went against prevailing evidence and proved unconvincing. The inherency of feuding to eastern Kentucky, or at least a tendency toward factional white intraracial violence scarcely seen elsewhere, was hard to deny. If feud were Kentuckian, defined by containment within a state's boundaries, it would imply acknowledgment of its political associations. Basing feud upon its mountain environment did the exact opposite. Eastern Kentucky became "a synechdoche for all the southern uplands."65 In the process there followed a tremendous amount of confusion and misinformation.

Kinship remained the established raison d'etre once feuding was decided to be a fixture of the Kentucky mountains rather than the lowland plantations, but with a significant change in syntax. The old antebellum variety of "family feud" could be interfamilial (between either fictive or biological family groups) or intrafamilial (within one family; as Wyatt-Brown mentions in Southern Honor, it was popular for the latter sort to be portrayed as being between brothers).66 In contrast, Kentucky mountain feuds were understood to be ultra-factional with very clear kin-based delineations, taking place between two familial groups who might be related by marriage but suffering no identity crisis as to which side they are on-thus making kinship an even greater motivational factor for killing.67 Presumably, killing became more about eliminating an enemy than about preserving one's honor, thereby allowing the anonymous (as the Louisville Courier-Journal phrased it when William Goebel was shot) "mountain method of ambush" to replace the more publicly acceptable custom of dueling.68 But most important, their alleged aboriginal predilection with kinship conjured an image of " 'tribes' stuck in the 'Middle ages,' " placing mountaineers on a lower rung of a "temporal hierarchy" than the mass of Anglo-America.69 It was this conceptual turn that helped to validate William Frost's oxymoronic "contemporary ancestors" title for Kentucky mountaineers.70 Frost's semifamous quote highlights the trait the lowland feudist and the mountain feudist did share, a special obsession among post-Reconstruction Anglo-Americans, feuds notwithstanding: whiteness. During the advent of scientific racism and the attendant "cult of Anglo-Saxonism," elaborations of whiteness relied upon a shaky combination of biology, anthropology, and history.71 From the 1870s until well into the twentieth century, discussions of feuding in the Kentucky mountains included constant citation of the Anglo-Saxon bloodlines or culture (the two were scarcely distinguished from each other), insistence upon preservation of old behaviors through this continuity, and frequent medieval analogies. In a society bent upon white supremacy, one pervaded by interracial violence against nonwhite minorities, absolute whiteness made these Kentucky/mountain feuds appear horizontal and communal. The constant paeans to "the purest Anglo-Saxon stock in all the United States" gave their "pure" existence a measure of scientific authority.72 The myth of feudists' absolute whiteness was imperative to this construction. Their citizenship in the American Republic became secondary to their alleged anthropological traits.

But there were inconsistencies. Many scholars of race were sure that the inherent traits that allowed the greatest of the Nordic races to fill the earth and subdue it could not include violence unmandated by state or commerce. "The point of honor, as something to fight about, has pretty well disappeared in Anglo-Saxon countries," observed a 191819 Harvard Law Review article on international law.73 If Anglo-Saxons ruled the world, how could they also be primitive, even if they were "contemporary ancestors"? Kentucky's mountain whites were so currish, reasoned eugenicist Madison Grant, that there had to be "other hereditary forces at work there as yet little understood."74 Anthropologist Emma Connelly's aforementioned imagined "sallow, gypsy-like people . . . 'far more incorrigible' than either the Indian or the negro" (a population whose existence was very difficult to prove) living next door to the "purest Anglo-Saxon stock in all the United States" (which was, in contrast, impossible to disprove) was not popular, but it demonstrates Connelly's own difficulty reconciling the orthodoxy of Anglo-Saxon ascendancy with the mountain whites' wartime bushwhacking and feuding that followed.75 Scholars, especially those who were white Kentuckians and southerners, did not want to be any less racially pure than their more rustic neighbors, but they certainly could not share their regressive tendencies. Consequently, Anglo-Saxonism could not tell the whole story, and so not all racial explanations of feud behavior were the same. Anglo-Saxon determinism was hoisted upon its own shaky petard.

What if, then, Kentucky's mountain whites were not quite pure Anglo-Saxon but rather Celtic, a racial designator only subtly inferior (although it was a subtlety not lost on firm disciples of racial science)?76 Applying "pure" Celtic, Scottish, or "Scots-Irish" (sometimes "Scotch-Irish") to the mountain feudist could set the unevolved "mountain white" apart from the mass of the Anglo-Saxon race while preserving his indispensable whiteness. Even if Anglo-Saxon Americans of the New England variety had given up old forms of violence, nineteenth-century feuds had a famous precursor among "the Scotch Highlanders a century ago-the likelihood that most residents of the Kentucky mountains were primarily descendants of Scottish lowlanders was a detail minor enough to ignore.77 Language that nineteenth-century Americans associated with Sir Walter Scott's odes (such as the aforementioned "clan") was often accompanied by exaggerations of recent feuds' historical longevities and obfuscations of their origins, suggesting that the practice continued from Old World to New, "the feud instinct being transplanted with the blood."78 Feuding, if not racially determined, could also be interpreted as a bygone custom that somehow "survived to the present day."79 "The feud is an inheritance," wrote one journalist in 1901. "There were feuds before the war and it is not a wild fancy that the Kentucky mountain feud takes root in Scotland."80 Without noting that the recent decades' rash of feud violence was made up of separate conflicts all contained within one state, one journalist took the generalization further in 1912, claiming, "Actually, they are all one feud, and all are products of the old Highland clan spirit."81 Allusions to medieval Scotland could also be an allegorical disciplining of the feud phenomenon even when writers did not claim there was a direct connection. One southern commentator reasoned that, since "feudal troubles . . . of the Scotch type involved but little loss of life and less of property," they were relatively harmless and, most important, cast no reflection on statewide, regional, or national political conditions.82 Except when these mountain Scots escaped the mountains (at least in fiction); in John Fox Jr.'s fictionalization of the mountain Republicans' 1900 Frankfort occupation was an "invasion from those black hills led by the spirit of the Picts and Scots of old . . . aided by and abetted by the . . . best element of the Blue-grass."83 These metaphors were convincing enough for later Kentucky historians, who remembered Rowan and Breathitt counties' modern, constitutionally ordained judges and sheriffs as "chieftains" and "feudal lords."84 Celtic determinism proved to be more enduring than Anglo-Saxonism, and it remains popular in the twenty-first century, emerging as "highland games" and Scottish novelty stores in the southern tourist economy as well as within organized white supremacy.85 Historians continue to casually find undetailed connections across "vast temporal and physical expanses" between postCivil War "family feuds" and the Scotland or Ulster of previous centuries.86 Nevertheless, when it came to the feud narrative, the Celtic mountain white served the same purposes as the Anglo-Saxon one: the depoliticization of feud violence by thrusting the modern mountain white back to the sceptered isle and far back into (as Eric Hobsbawm put it) "an ancient past beyond effective historical continuity, either by semi-fiction . . . or by forgery."87 In the final analysis, it was not so much about ethnicity or race as it was about time. Collecting all of the reported Kentucky county wars into "one feud . . . products of the old Highland clan spirit" took each out of its respective context and belied the local cleavages that motivated men to take up arms. Even though evidence that "the family feuds of Kentucky . . . seem[ed] peculiar to families bearing Scottish names" was limited, at best, to anecdote, it proved believable and an effective means of depoliticizing feud.88 The Scottish/Celtic inherency theory stripped these conflicts of whatever modern political import that would have been plain had specific facts been publicized. Ethnicity or race were not only ends but also means to providing a place of detachment between eastern Kentucky's "survival of Elizabethan days" and Bluegrass Kentuckians, or between the former and the mass of Anglo-Americans.89 Ethnocentric explanations of feud narratives do not match with the historical record of Breathitt County and eastern Kentucky in the nineteenth century. The surnames associated with the Clay County Cattle War, Strong (English and Irish), Callahan (Irish), Eversole (German), and Amis (Huguenot French) reveal a population hardly diverse by twenty-first-century standards, but certainly not homogenous (the Freeman family's Afro-white biraciality suggests even more complications-not to mention a generous contribution of Native American genes). And by the time eastern Kentucky became associated with feuding, these ethnic identities had become quite meaningless. Early mountain settlers intermarried across pedigree lines with alacrity in the 1700s, and their Civil Wargeneration descendants carried bloodlines and folkways that spanned nations and (in many cases) continents.90 The obsession with "pure" Anglo-Saxon or Celtic inheritance was a vapid fetish. Still, with outside observers like Frost and Connelly setting the standard of interpretation, the actual heritage of the "mountain whites," as well as their actual history, was less important than the racial politics of the day. People looking at eastern Kentucky saw what they wanted to see.

Interpretations of feud violence could not be fully explained by race, even by a generation that considered race the transcendent determinant of human affairs. In 1889 Charles Dudley Warner suggested that the origins of the "race of American mountaineers occupying the country from western North Carolina to eastern Kentucky" was "in doubt" and that their "lawlessness" was nothing inherent to their makeup but just a "relic of the disorganization during the war" (but even if the war started troubles the writer was fairly sure that "politics has little or nothing to do with them now").91 In Blue Grass and Rhododendron: Outdoors in Old Kentucky (1901), John Fox Jr. relates that a Kentucky mountaineer told him that before the Civil War anyone would have been "druv outen the country" for drawing knives and guns in public (the more public manifestation of what was considered feudlike violence). By the present, however, "now hit's dirk an Winchester all the time," a change the interviewee attributed to the war's introduction of easy killing.92 Sometimes semblances of political/contingency elucidations of mountain life provided a modest challenge to the communal/inherency/racial ones.

For that concern, a discourse of frontier and isolation was needed, the post-Reconstruction imagining of the "two Kentuckys," a division based more upon space and imagined time than race. "Less than a hundred miles divide[d] the habitat of these wildly different types. Their origin was the same, for their forefathers came West over the Wilderness Road," wrote one feud chronicler. "The slipping of a linch pin in the mountains kept here and there a family up among the crags, and they remained there nursing their primitive superstitions and hatreds. Their brothers moved on down to the blue grass, became educated and wore broadcloth."93 As shown in chapter 1, eastern Kentucky was part of "New Appalachia," settled relatively late, prompting mountaineers to refer to the Bluegrass as their state's "old settlements."94 But for the feud to be properly distanced historically, this ineffaceable fact had to be obscured or ignored.

It took a British historical journal to finally proclaim in 1952, "The figure of the feuding Hillman . . . is a phenomenon of modern America rather than of pioneer times" (but considering that the same article was subtitled "the scene of family feuds as fierce as any fought, before the Union of the Crowns, on the Anglo-Scottish border," the tone of temporal confusion was still present).95 And this was only briefly after fellow Briton Arnold Toynbee had declared that Kentucky's "mountain people . . . acquired civilization and then lost it," a viewpoint that avoided the issue of temporal hierarchies altogether while still echoing the same implications. For his part, Toynbee saw Appalachian Kentucky as more Celtic than Anglo-Saxon.96

"We've been cartooned for the world with a fearsome, half-contemptuous slap on the back"

Picts and Scots aside, John Fox Jr. did not always think of the Kentucky feud phenomenon as something wedged in a frozen past. In The Heart of the Hills (1912), the novelist suggested that historical change could affect a (fictional) feud's boundaries of conduct. What had once been an honor-based family affair, the Hawn-Honeycutt feud, eventually took on the taint of the outside world and its politics after both families began to see better days financially.

As old Jason Hawn and old Aaron Honeycutt had retired from the leadership, and little Jason and little Aaron had been out of the hills, leadership naturally was assumed by these two business rivals, who revived the old hostility between the factions, but gave vent to it in a secret, underhanded way that disgusted not only old Jason but even old Aaron as well. For now and then a hired Hawn would drop a Honeycutt from the bushes and a hired Honeycutt would drop a Hawn. There was, said old Jason with an oath of contempt, no manhood left in the feud. No principal went gunning for a principal-no hired assassin for another of his kind.97 The egalitarian "manhood," the primal force that gave the mountain whites their native animus and had once defined the ritualized blood feud, had been polluted by a less valorous form of combat that involved the employment of hired underlings. Not only was the original Hawn-Honeycutt feud apolitical but it was antithetical to politics. Politics, and the violence that it involved, supplanted the communal conflict that the two families had kept going in their locale until forced to deal with the outside world. Now that the feud had resumed, however, it had lost its "manhood" by taking on hierarchies (that is, politics) on each side.

Later in the novel Fox Jr. returned to "manhood" in a soliloquy by Colonel Pendleton, an elderly Bluegrass patron who mentors a young Jason Hawn Jr. while he attends stately Centre College. On his deathbed the colonel confesses Kentucky's sins committed between the 1860s and 1910s: The war started us downhill, but we might have done better-I know I might. The earth was too rich-it made life too easy. The horse, the bottle of whiskey, and the plug of tobacco were all too easily the best-and the pistol all too ready. We've been cartooned for the world with a fearsome, half-contemptuous slap on the back. Our living has been made out of luxuries. Agriculturally, socially, politically, we have gone wrong, and but for the American sense of humor the State would be in a just, nation-wide contempt. The Ku-Klux, the burning of toll-gates, the Goebel troubles, and the night-rider are all links in the same chain of lawlessness, and but for the first others might not have been. But we are, in spite of all this, a law-abiding people, and the old manhood of the State is still here. Don't forget that-the old manhood is here.98 John Fox Jr. peppered his fiction with references to Breathitt County and once interviewed its infamous former sheriff Edward Callahan. His fictional portrayals of eastern Kentucky probably determined Americans' reading of violence in the county more than any newspaper articles. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Bain Collection, LC-DIG-ggbain-03385) Fox Jr. temporarily sets the "two Kentuckys" motif aside, suggesting that all of the ugly incidents and types of violence witnessed in the state since before feuding was in flower developed from the same decadent source. But the images conjured were related more to the antebellum Bluegrass, and Colonel Pendleton noticeably left feuding off of his list. These other forms of violence were openly insurrectionary or (in the case of the Ku Klux Klan) politically motivated vigilantism. Feuding and its "manhood," he implied, was apolitically horizontal and, accordingly, a vestige of a Kentucky before it went "downhill," a vestige that hearkened back to the old undivided consensus white Kentuckians-and perhaps all white southerners-once shared.

Louisville poet Madison Cawein, "the Keats of Kentucky," apparently agreed, at least in terms of placing feuds in the past. Between 1887 and 1914 he acknowledged all the recent horrors in verse, and in "Ku Klux," "The Lynchers," and "The Feud," they received their due. While the first two vividly depict the terrors their titles evoke, "The Feud" only describes a dilapidated bullet-riddled cabin, an archeological site bearing proof of a long-ago attack. Lynch mobs were current, but feuds were an event from an irredeemable past even when the shooting continued into the present.99 Journalist Charles Mutzenburg, second only to John Fox Jr. as a popular interpreter of feud violence, used the same anecdotes from Kentucky's recent history to protect the mountaineers from self-righteous condemnation. All of Kentucky's violent embarrassments, in Mutzenburg's view, were from the same source; the "lack of confidence of the people in their courts" conveyed a public atmosphere still suffering from the postbellum crisis of legitimacy. However, violence that was seen as "feudal" did not affect women and children, or impede commerce, as did other outrages.100 Compared to this hateful violence, communal feudists did not upset the status quo beyond their wooded environs.

We believe it germane to the matter under discussion to add that not only feuds, but mobs and the like, are, and ever have been, the direct outgrowth of a lack of confidence of the people in their courts. The shameful nightrider outrages in the western part of Kentucky a few years ago, in a section which had boasted of a civilization superior by far to that of the mountaineers, where schools and churches are to be met with at every corner, were the outcome, so it is claimed, of the failure of the law to deal sternly with the lawless tobacco trust, the "original wrongdoer" in the noted tobacco war. If this were true, if this justified the destruction by incendiaries of millions of dollars' worth of property, brutal whippings, the indiscriminate slaughter of entire families without regard to age or sex, the butchery of little children (for aiding the tobacco trust, no doubt) then, indeed, is the mountaineer feudist also innocent of wrongdoing; more so, for he, at least, never made war upon suckling infants, nor have women suffered harm, except in one or two instances. Nor is the cultured Blue Grass citizen free to censure him, when he calls to mind the outrages of the toll-gate raids, or takes into account the numerous lynching bees, proceedings from which the mountaineers have always been practically [my emphasis] free.101 The fact that Kentucky's last purported "feud" climaxed with the assassination of a well-known political figure (James B. Marcum) was left unmentioned; it did not suit Mutzenburg's thesis.

While Fox Jr. and Mutzenburg established eastern Kentucky as the home of the feud phenomenology, they were only following the lead of countless newspaper stories. Small-circulation Kentucky papers displayed party stripes until well into the twentieth century and, as revealed in preceding chapters, their interpretations of commotions in the eastern third of the state were usually guided by their loyalties (especially before 1880 when the feud narrative served as a political diversion for southern conservatives). But editorial party devotion was a dying trend when national interest in the Kentucky feud was growing. Flourishing national news conglomerates favored human interest and sensationalism over party line toeing. By the middle of the 1890s the scandalous and the grotesque had become the currency of widely read publications as they divested themselves of their old party identities.102 As a result, the party associations that made up most Kentucky feuds were scarcely addressed. A parochial "political rivalry" could be casually included within a list of trivial quarrels over "a horse trade, a gate left open and trespassing cattle, the shooting of a dog . . . or a difficulty over a boundary fence," according to Ellen Semple.103 Journalists led scholars like Semple and William G. Frost to favor explanations of feuds that dealt with race and spatial isolation. By the beginning of the twentieth century the Kentucky/mountain feudist was considered a social type invariably formed by a combination of geography, breeding, and medieval qualities.

In the mountain counties of [Kentucky's] eastern border, where the rugged and untaught minds are dominated by a crude and savage idea of the meaning of honor, the deadly vendetta still rages, and no one can say when it will cease. So long as the mountain defiles remain uninvaded by the emigrant; so long as their mountain sides intimidate the prospective railroad line; and above all, so long as their wild, barbaric blood remains uncrossed by a gentler strain-just so long will their internecine wars prevail. For here men are governed by a medieval idea of right and wrong, and each man's mind is his own court and judge. He acknowledges no other, and by it are his actions governed. And when it has led him to wanton slaughter, as it often does, the endless stretches of forest-clad mountains afford a refuge which it is impossible to lay bare. But it is a rare thing that the slayer of his kind seeks the shelter of the hills. When his enemy is done to death, the victor goes home and tells his friends, and the clansmen gather on either side, as they did in the days of Roderick Dhu [a character from Sir Walter Scott's six-canto narrative poem The Lady of the Lake].104 Bluegrass optimists had once expected that the civilizing influences of church, dam, bank, and steel track would bring peace to Kentucky's more restless counties. But by 1900 "men had fallen dead by feudists' bullets on the doorsteps of the churches" and the arrival of railroads had not ceased the killings.105 The mountain whites' feudal habits were beginning to appear something irredeemably inherent. In what could have been one of the most open admissions that feud violence might have some internal political import, activist John C. Campbell wrote that the "name commonly applied to the feud in Kentucky is 'war,' and the principle upon which it was carried out was the principle of warfare-to do as much harm to the enemy as possible while incurring the least risk oneself."106 This description was a far cry from the classical feud's ritualistic practice. But instead of crafting a commentary on how feud had been applied to eastern Kentucky arbitrarily by exogenous observers, Campbell intended for the war analogy to be only an illustration of the hypothetical mountain feudist's ruthlessness as well as his arrogance in applying the air of legitimacy attendant to war onto his own personal vendettas. However, Campbell inadvertently acknowledged that there had been something at work in eastern Kentucky that did not fit well into the Old World's feud template.

By the time of Campbell's writing the associations of feud were making a transition from the Old World to North America. What need did twentieth-century Americans have for Montagues and Capulets (especially as the number of American Shakespearean productions declined) when they had McCoys and Hatfields at their disposal? The "Hatfield-McCoy feud" began to "fire the public imagination" at the end of the 1880s, although the public generally had little interest in the facts surrounding it.107 Long before it became an American English idiom, it was identified as an absurd fight between "Chatfields and McLoys" in Virginia. Between 1878 and 1888 ten men and two children were killed in a series of Election Day confrontations, ambushes, and an arson in the Tug River Valley community straddling the KentuckyWest Virginia border. The feud's most widely publicized deaths coincided with the French-Eversole feud and the Rowan County War, and might have been lost among eastern Kentucky's 1880s feud propagation had it not been for New York reporter T. C. Crawford, who made Hatfield-McCoy the newly discovered mountain phenomenon's epitome. It went on to become the only feud manifestation that the American reading public remembered by name-albeit in simplified, distorted form. Historian Altina Waller believes that Crawford (along with one other reporter) "probably had more to do with the development of the hillbilly stereotype than any other individuals."108 In choosing this particular atrocity over others, Crawford permanently established how Americans defined feud.109 His rendering was popular as a broad illumination of white intraracial violence in the United States, as were versions of the Hatfield-McCoy feud that followed in print and eventually on film.110 Its origins were murky enough (originally reported as one white family's absurd attempt to enslave another, it was eventually reported as beginning after a lawsuit filed over a stolen sow) that it was commonly believed that the feud lasted generations rather than a more modest twelve years; the entirety of the violence took place in one of the most remote areas of the Cumberland Plateau; and, in the style of Edmond Rostand's play Les romanesques (1894), it ended with a supposedly forbidden romance between the combatants' children.111 The story had charisma that the Rowan County War or the French-Eversole feud lacked because it combined aesthetic elements of European romanticism with frontier color in a satisfying manner. Although it pleased readers not to know its beginnings (or to marvel at how petty they were), it did have an exciting middle and a satisfying end. Above all, it was entertaining, at least as Crawford and his imitators told it.

Perhaps most important, the Hatfields' conflict with the McCoys, in its factual and fictional versions, was less offensive than others because of its communal rather than political theme. The homicides involved were committed either as impulse or in revenge, befitting a Corsican vendetta. The feud was between families and factions of modest means and did not indict men in high places (even after an extradition conflict between West Virginia and Kentucky, no politicians were unduly embarrassed by the whole thing).112 It was unmistakably horizontal and devoid of class significance, thus sustaining the popular notion of the egalitarian mountain white. It had no definite connection to intimate hostilities created by the war, and therefore did not challenge the promise of a national reunion based upon whiteness. Well into the twentieth century, long after Progressive Era racial determinism faded, it was still believable that the feud had roots in the British Isles; beneath a 1982 article commemorating the centennial of the feud's cessation, the county seat newspaper in the Hatfields' and McCoys' old territory (now Mingo County, West Virginia) expressively printed images of both families' supposed coats of arms.113 Even after books that strove to treat these "feudists" as historical people were published (notably, Otis Rice's The Hatfields and McCoys [1982] and Altina Waller's Feud [1988]), most Americans still prefer the event's more primordial explanations. It could easily be written off as the product of a strange aboriginal culture rooted in the past rather than an outgrowth of the affairs of state. As close as it was in time and space to Bloody Breathitt, the Hatfield-McCoy feud was everything that Breathitt was not, thus making it far more popular and almost inspiring. "Hatfields and McCoys" had lasting power as an American idiom, even though eastern Kentucky's most demoralizing episodes of feud violence, the Clay County War and the Hargis-Cockrell feud, were yet to come and would eventually be forgotten on a national scale. In American memory it was the feud's extrapolitical apotheosis.

As Altina Waller has shown, the Hatfields, McCoys, and people of other surnames who were directly involved in their conflict rarely got the opportunity to tell their own story but were reticent when they did (especially the latter; a 1975 televised drama called The Hatfields and McCoys called every historically based character either "Hatfield" or "McCoy" lest historical fact confuse the pat dramatic dialectic). The majority of interpretations of Kentucky's feud violence between the 1870s and 1900s did indeed come from the city-dwelling journalists and industrialists who were products of, simply put, a "dominant culture."114 The Hatfield-McCoy feud's mythological arrangement was fundamentally a hegemonic device to make way for economic exploitation in the Tug River Valley. Along the way, it inadvertently told an oversimplified story about "mountain whites," irrespective of their relationship to violence. Feuds and "Hatfields and McCoys" became emblems for things with nothing at all to do with their actual historical or linguistic meanings.

As "Hatfields and McCoys" made the transition from human-interest story to idiom, it produced the broader popular culture "hillbilly" image as a cultural codicil.115 By the 1930s, the ever-bearded feudist, native to some unnamed mountain locale, appeared in popular media with little or no contextual elaboration needed-it was something Americans simply knew. These characters were so detached from their intended audience's points of cultural reference that they approached surrealism, the realm of cartooning rather than literature or dramaturgy. Their prevalence in preWorld War II cartoons, both still and animated, gave them a surreal, timeless quality that further detached mountaineers from objective reality (Paul Webb's Esquire drawings are considered the characterization's true quintessence before the more famous Li'l Abner Yokum and Snuffy Smith-both mountaineer caricatures but not necessarily feudists-premiered).116 "Hatfields and McCoys," a bloody anecdote from nineteenth-century history, had become material for the funny papers in approximately the same half century's time a similar thing happened for "cowboys and Indians."

Academics have also blithely employed the feud trope for their own purposes, purposefully or inadvertently, with uncritical abandon. A historian of southern violence wrote in the 1980s that "isolated mountain people" in the years after the Civil War "had no notion of cultural pluralism or moral relativism-only right and wrong," suggesting that spatial removal from metropolitan areas resulted in a lack of nuanced attitudes toward relationships of power (one wonders how great other nineteenth-century Americans' perceptions of such decidedly twentieth-century concepts were in comparison).117 In a mid-1990s political science monograph, nineteenth-century white intraracial violence in Kentucky provided a primordial explanation for a very current political trend. "Because of Kentucky's history of dueling and feuds, its penchant for self-reliance, and its isolation, one would not be surprised to find that 95 percent of rural Kentucky households are armed; about half of the males in those areas, it is estimated, carry guns either on their person or in their vehicles. Given such powerful attitudes, it is also not surprising that the Kentucky General Assembly, strenuously lobbied by the National Rifle Association (NRA), in 1984 prohibited Kentucky localities from regulating the distribution of firearms."118 By placing the origins of their supposed "powerful attitudes" about gun ownership into a past "beyond the polis" suggested by dueling and feuds, opposition to gun control was invalidated as acceptable political behavior (for that matter, the NRA's lobbying power in the legislature was conflated with a popular affinity for guns as a causal factor, thus rendering the argument inconsistent and confused). This cast the gun control debate as a hierarchical relationship between a knowledgeable, benevolent urban elite and a rural populace ignorant of modern norms and obsessed with an unfortunate past defined by "regressive political tendencies."119 Although Breathitt County was not individually mentioned, its history of since-depoliticized violence was integral in delegitimizing the ideology of late twentieth-century Kentuckians as well as distorting the temporal distance between the age of "dueling and feuds" and the late twentieth century's "culture wars."

In another scholarly engagement with the rural working class, an anthropologist studying gender and labor relations in western North Carolina used feud in a more nuanced fashion in a published moment of confession. The scene described a family quarrel over a matter of racial and regional identity politics (and involved the use of a racial epithet) that ended with one subject reminding another that their living in "the South" ultimately stifled the debate. "I have been loathe to offer this vignette because it presents mountain whites as ignorant, hate-mongering, and racist-a partial truth which invokes the Hatfields and McCoys [my emphasis]. Failing to note instances such as these, however, I unwittingly construct Appalachia as egalitarian, bucolic, and white [Anglin's emphasis], echoes again of the local schema. It is equally important to note that this moment of virulent racism did not go unchallenged, but was refracted and relocated in the debate between Hazel and her father [Anglin's subjects]."120 The vignette reflected an issue probably very common to researchers who harbor sympathy for their subjects. But the language the author used to reveal this is more telling than was probably intended. "Hatfields and McCoys," the phrase that Americans use interchangeably with "feud," was offhandedly linked with the "ignorant, hate-mongering, and racist" even though the ethnographic sketch in question had nothing to do with a familial vendetta or, for that matter, any act of violence. The anthropologist used the familiar surname pair as a surrogate for some mudsill of white American existence that could only be spoken of in the fictive form of mythologized historical figures and that is, unlike her previously idealized subjects, undeserving of her sympathy or "help." It would seem that feud, or its synonyms, suggests not only a format for primordial violence but a racial and cultural presence that tests the limits of scholars' belief in multiculturalism and "cultural pluralism or moral relativism."

More recently, feud had a particularly egregious mishandling in Malcolm Gladwell's best-selling Outliers: The Story of Success (2008). In trying to trace the variety of unstudied factors that contribute to various types of human "success," Gladwell appropriated Harlan County's Howard-Turner feud of the 1880s as an example of the omnipresence of "cultural legacies."121 In doing so, he displayed as "little obligation to [historical] veracity" as J. Stoddard Johnston, John Fox Jr., T. C. Crawford, or any of the other local-color writers who interpreted eastern Kentucky's history of white intraracial violence for their own ends.122 As detailed in an earlier chapter, the so-called Howard-Turner feud not only involved men of more than two surnames, it had far more to do with one county's two-party system than familial hatred.123 In Gladwell's telling, Harlan County was "a remote and strange place, unknown by the larger society around it," founded in 1819 by "eight immigrant families from the northern regions of the British Isles."124 He then skipped ahead many years to the obscure livestock-related feud origins (in the 1880s) without mentioning any other specific dates, the better to demonstrate its primordialism. The "Scotch-Irish," "steeped in violence" in the Old World, brought their proclivities with them to Appalachia but, although Gladwell argued that "one of the world's most ferocious cultures of honor" took root throughout the southern highlands, he neglected to explain why the four feuds he named all happened within one discrete corner of Kentucky rather than all over Appalachia (or, for that matter, any parts of the United States with substantial "Scotch-Irish" populations but no history of notable violence).125 Gladwell's use of Harlan County, Kentucky, shows that cultural continuities and social inherencies still hold popular currency when it comes to explaining human behavior. To demonstrate this he quotes historian David Hackett Fischer (for whom the feud phenomenon was only part of a larger ahistorical thesis on British inherency and primordialism) and journalist John Ed Pearce, while leaving out the more thorough work of Altina Waller, Kathleen Blee, and Dwight Billings. In fact, it would seem that Gladwell selected the relatively obscure Howard-Turner feud in order to avoid their books due to their dedication to detail and emphasis on contingency and historical context-attributes that do not support Gladwell's point. The origins of the "feudists' " dialogue he uses is uncited. Outliers was a humble middlebrow suggestion that, although continuities provide satisfying answers, change does happen, and therefore contingency should receive more attention. Gladwell's chapter on Harlan County suggests precisely the opposite. His selection of the Howard-Turner feud and his employment of apocryphal sources rather than more thorough ones comprised a purposeful, gratuitous disservice to understanding violence.126 Gladwell's poor handling of feuds has deep roots, namely, an abiding refusal among educated people to acknowledge complexity within what they hold to be "simple societies."127 During the worst days of troubles in Rowan, Perry, Harlan, Pike, or Breathitt counties (or any number of other smaller incidents the Gilded Age press labeled a "feud"), the number of newspaper correspondents was always low. Reportage of events often gave way to innuendo and unfounded assumptions. Throughout the nineteenth century discussions of feuds had always been more associated with fancy than with fact, but this was when the concept was almost purely within the fantasy. When feud was applied to factual violent deaths during Reconstruction and afterward, it meant the belittlement of killing.

This was partly a timeworn war correspondent's syndrome, an urban outsider's tendency to "explain violence as a product of marginality and relative deprivation, or even [evoke] simple theories of violence as a phenomenon of the frontier."128 Attributing violence to environmental "otherness" ("They are simply not like us") has always been easier than delving into bare facts, especially when men with guns stand in front of these bare facts. But the refusal of writers to strive to find the origins of feud violence is also a tool for delegitimizing its practitioners and even its victims, as is the primeval social atmosphere suggested by kinship, temporality, and the various other attributes applied to eastern Kentucky by the outside world.

Breathitt County, the place that John Fox Jr. considered the Kentucky/mountain feud's alpha and omega, was not interpreted exclusively by the outside world.129 "Bloody Breathitt" was recorded and created according to a combination of the wants and needs of outsiders as well as those of the county's own inhabitants. But the end results were analogous to that of the Hatfield-McCoy feud or the Harlan County War. In due course, it was decided to be in virtually everyone's interests for the causality of political divisions to be subordinated to the language of feud.

"A killing in Breathitt always seems to be big news"

In Jackson, Kentucky, the news of 1891's peace between the Hatfields and McCoys was received as it was everywhere else: a telegraphed half column in the newspaper with references to the Middle Ages, gross exaggerations of the conflict's length and death toll, and a general oversimplification of the facts. "The Hatfield-McCoy feud which has lasted nearly twenty years, and caused the death of 100 persons [in] Logan county W. Va., and Pike county Ky., has at last ended. Like the 'War of the Roses' it was terminated by a marriage. A truce was proclaimed, a Hatfield married a Miss McCoy, a peace congress was call and terms amicable to both parties were agreed upon. Thus ends one of the most bloody feudal wars of modern times not equaled in ferocity and fatality, perhaps, by the wars of the Scottish Highlanders." John J. Dickey received the news with foreboding. Noting the recent heightened national attention on eastern Kentucky as a whole, Dickey dourly predicted that fact and fancy would become intermingled in written accounts of his adopted section's "feuds." "The feudal wars of Eastern Kentucky will no doubt be utilized in coming years by writers of fiction," read a Jackson Hustler editorial. "It is in this form, perhaps, they will go down to posterity as no historian feels like chronicling the naked facts, and incorporating them into local history. Already two novels have been written to celebrate the deeds of the Hatfields and McCoys."130 The missionary journalist's concerns reflected a passion for historical accuracy that shone through the oral histories that filled hundreds of pages in his immense diary. Breathitt County was home not to one iconic famous feud but to a series of marginally well-known spates of lawlessness dating back to the war, making the truthful recording of its past a task so byzantine as to be almost impossible. Since his arrival Dickey had touted the county's improvements over other eastern Kentucky trouble spots and protested what he considered unfair media misrepresentations.131 He had tried to be fair to Breathitt County in his own recording of its "naked facts," and he was concerned that other writers would not. And he was correct; eastern Kentucky feud narratives almost always subordinated facts to colorful facade, and descriptions of events in Bloody Breathitt were no exception. A little over twenty years after Dickey made his prediction, one daft author placed "a family feud between the McCoys and the Hatfields" in Breathitt County.132 The Hatfield-McCoy feud's end coincided with the Kentucky Union Railroad's arrival in Breathitt County. The railroad's eminence in the lives of Jackson's residents represented an opportunity not afforded to the residents of the more isolated Tug River Valley to the northeast. It offered Breathitt an opportunity to divest itself of an image that dated back to the 1870s. If white intraracial violence was a product of isolation and "family feuds," as had been said for years, the railroad was a sure cure. But just over a decade later, when James Marcum's death reoriented national attention toward the county again, this assumption was disproven. "The Breathitt County feuds," wrote the Courier-Journal soon after Marcum's murder, "furnish a contradiction to the old adage that wherever newspapers, railroads, and colleges penetrate feuds are vanquished."133 Bloody Breathitt seemed to embody the conception of feud, while also negating its most popular assumptions.

The same newspaper had begun Bloody Breathitt's definition more than twenty-four years before, when the Kentucky militia's Jackson occupation gained national press attention. But this was long before Bloody Breathitt became familiar to Americans outside Kentucky. The mountain Kentuckians' alleged need for civilizing in the winter of 187879 (as detailed in a previous chapter) established what would become the feud belt's essential premise. When Breathitt County once again received widespread media scrutiny, the mold for its interpretation had already been set in other eastern Kentucky counties. Because of the "feuds" of the 1880s and 1890s, it was arguable that Breathitt's experience was an example of a greater whole. But Bloody Breathitt's creation came about with contributions from a diverse, often conflicting array of forces, not all of whom agreed upon how the strange county should be defined. To an observer from the outside world with no prior knowledge of the county's history or politics, it was an eastern Kentucky county little different than most others, beset by a racial or cultural tendency toward communal violence irrespective of county boundaries.

But at the same time, there was also an impulse to make Breathitt seem strange even among its neighbors and within eastern Kentucky's larger feud mythos, a viewpoint more likely to be espoused by the mountain white's self-proclaimed defenders. Whenever the "outbreak of another feud in 'bloody Breathitt' " was reported, "the world infer[ed] that battle, murder, and sudden death are commonplaces in Appalachia," travel writer Horace Kephart complained from his North Carolina hermitage in 1913.134 Relatively orderly feuds were carried out in surrounding counties, opined a fictional character in 1922, "not laywaying and ambushing and sech, like in Breathitt, whar the wrong man gets kilt often as not."135 But Bloody Breathitt's seemingly inherent violence did not encourage greater attention to be paid to possible political causes. The conception of "Bloody Breathitt" was very different than the Hatfield-McCoy feud or any of the other feuds or "wars" that were reported in other eastern Kentucky counties. A feud was an event, or a series of events, with a beginning (albeit an often obscure or unimportant one) and an ending. To a degree, it was determined by clear contingency. But for there to be a series of relatively self-contained feuds within the confines of one county, as was the case with Breathitt, violence would have to be a permanent product of the terrain rather than of human agency, and therefore inherent in the culture for reasons beyond direct comprehension; Harlan County, Kentucky's renaming as "bloody Harlan" during the coal strike violence of the 1930s was a product of a similar rhetorical turn.136 This was why the persistence of the Hargis-Cockrell feud was exaggerated and said to continue "despite the fact that most of its actors have been laid low by bullets."137 By suggesting that the late feud lasted past the deaths of most of the political actors who acted as instigators or victims, feud was suggested to be a localized ontology of violence rather than a historically finite event or series of events. Whether Bloody Breathitt was part of the feud belt or singularly perverse, its violent history was decidedly inherent, irrespective of what went on in the outside world. No matter what was revealed about the political stratagem that led to James Marcum's murder, it was ever after considered something as intrinsic to a place as flora and fauna.

After the Hargis-Cockrell feud, the international feud analogies continued in the press, forecasting that "Breathitt" was on its way to argot status. "The feuds of Breathitt County and of the mountains," concluded one activist, grew out of the "code of morals which belong to the old Scotch Highlanders."138 Newspapers in Frankfort and Chicago agreed that the events of 1902 through 1908 rivaled "the worst stories that have come out of Corsica and Sicily."139 Sources that acknowledged political impetus used temporal exaggerations to make the feud's electoral origins seem more distant in time than they actually were. Even when the "official position and political influence" of modern politicians was recognized, they were still considered only aggravating factors in "feud wars" that had "raged since the Kentucky mountains were first settled by white men," or at least were "older than [the] War."140 A children's novel published less than six years after James Hargis's death (and a year before Sheriff Callahan's) recounted the feud lasting "for generations" after "some election for a county judge."141 "The Breathitt folks live in the Eighteenth century; you might almost say in the Seventeenth," said the New York Sun via telegraph from Jackson in 1903. "They have not changed much since the Revolution" and "know little and care less about the opinions of the world beyond the mountains."142 Republican Kentucky newspapers, usually less willing to separate Bloody Breathitt from the state's political present than the Democratic opposition, still could not resist comparing the Hargis courthouse's corruption to the conditions of the "the middle ages."143 In the interest of being au courant, Louisville's Evening Post ran cartoons associating Bloody Breathitt with Russia's ongoing invasion of Manchuria as well as the recent slaughter of Bessarabian Jews.144 Breathitt County existed in the United States of the present, but it was easier to dismiss its implications if it was placed as far away in space and time as possible-nowhere served that purpose better than tsarist Russia.

In 1903, Louisville's Evening Post lampooned Breathitt County's murders in several zany cartoons, some making snide comparisons with contemporary events abroad. (Louisville Evening Post, May 13 and 29, 1903) After 1903, "Breathitt," bloody or unmodified, briefly became a glib metaphor. After the grisly murder of Serbia's King Alexander I (involving disembowelment followed by defenestration) just weeks after James Marcum's death, a Life editor compared it to "habits in Breathitt" (a Chicago newspaperman compared Alexander's successor King Peter I's chances of assassination to that of a Breathitt County prosecuting attorney).145 A Memphis newspaper included "Breathitt County fandangos" in a list of civilization's woes Arctic explorer Frederick Cook had left behind him.146 In the humor magazine Puck, a grizzled westerner named "Tarantula Tom" told about "Crimson Gulch," a rowdy mining camp left pacified after "a feller come along from Breathitt county, Kentucky, an' we felt so much like amateurs that the boys all quit tryin' to show off."147 Seven years later the same magazine hoped "some beneficent, heedless, rakehelly, irresponsible, light-hearted cyclone, earthquake, avalanche, conflagration, tidal wave, comet, pestilence, or plague would arise and smite, overwhelm, wipe out, submerge, consume, chew-up-and-spit-out, devour, emasculate, or destroy" Breathitt County and other recent trouble areas.148 In a reverse of the old Mediterranean metaphor, a character in an American novel about Sicily exclaimed that the island's vendetta habit was "worse than Breathitt County, Kentucky," with no further explication needed.149 When a Virginia courthouse massacre made national news in 1912, one commentator branded it "an echo of the Breathitt County feud."150 Fictional accounts of mountain feuds in the first decades of the twentieth century also exploited the recent memory of the Hargis-Cockrell feud. A settlement schoolteacher's fictional memoir used the town of Jackson and Breathitt County as its model and began the story line briefly after the cessation of a recent prolonged fracas between town politicians.151 The surnames Jett (as in Curtis Jett) and Valentine (the first name of one of the more famous Hatfields) were used as character names in a feud novel set in the story-bound town of Leeston.152 Although fascinated by Breathitt County, John Fox Jr. never used it as a setting for one of his novels (he tended to avoid using explicitly real places for such), but the county was mentioned as a neighboring locale in two short stories and a novel (he used Marcum as a character's name in one novel).153 His primary concern was establishing feud violence as something innate to the experience of the mountain white, not just a series of events between two families or factions. For that reason, the violent streets of Jackson and the bushwhacker-rife woods that surrounded it made for better subject matter than the finite vendettas of other Kentucky counties. In order to be interesting, feuds had to have historical (or ahistorical) longevity, and even though the length of other feuds was exaggerated for dramatic effect, Fox Jr.'s interest in authenticity led him to what he considered an inherently violent territory rather than simply a place that had played host to a feud or two. The inherency of violence came to replace the historical facts of feuds in the memory of Bloody Breathitt and the rest of eastern Kentucky.

By the 1920s the only nationally available account of the Hargis-Cockrell feud that announced the facts of the conflict and made explicit use of full names (particularly Judge Hargis's and Sheriff Callahan's role in organizing James Marcum's death of at the hands of Curtis Jett and Tom White) was a folk song of dubious composition. As late as 1920 song collectors discovered that Breathitt County's native balladeers were reluctant to sing it, and its eventual musicological "recovery" took place in Texas a few years later. Though recorded numerous times, it never became a folk standard even when it was targeted at a "mainstream" audience; pop composer Johnny Mercer's recording of "The Murder of J. B. Markham" was met with little response, violent or otherwise, in 1937.154 By the high years of the New Deal, it was no longer politically advantageous for Breathitt County to be set off from the rest of Kentucky or the United States; instead it was brought into the same efforts at incorporation as the rest of the South. In the years that had passed since Edward Callahan's shooting death (often considered the end of the "feudal era"), the county had become a prime target of reform efforts bent upon hookworm eradication, flood prevention, and other types of uplift.155 These Progressive efforts often restated eastern Kentucky's long-standing reputation for isolation and deprivation for which feud violence had been blamed since the 1870s, but as the notorious Breathitt County came to be seen as one mountain county suffering from the same social and infrastructural ills as many others, its individual fame waned. In the 1930s the county was a frequent subject for photographer Marion Post Walcott as she collected the Farm Security Administration's visual data.156 Rather than taking pictures of aging "feudists," Walcott focused upon muddy roads and parched cornfields, images that made Breathitt County part of a larger regional whole rather than singling it out. In 1936 one pair of educators acknowledged the deleterious effects that Breathitt County's being defined by the outside world had on its wellbeing: "the epithets which role so easily off the tongue-a 'Kentucky feud,' a 'hillbilly song,' 'poor whites,' and that telltale appellation which so many of the inhabitants would like to live down, 'Bloody Breathitt.' It is through these stock phrases that some of us have come to know this part of the South."157 Given the need for cooperation between local elites and federal arrivals, politics was not acknowledged as the root cause of the county's past horrors. An indictment of the Democratic Party of the past might have seemed like an indictment of present Democrats, especially considering that, save for a brief period after the Hargis-Callahan regime's end, they had ruled the county perpetually (and, by the 1930s, "controlled everything").158 And, in any case, a society disadvantaged on "the scale of cultural and social values" (a more advanced sociological version of "contemporary ancestors") could not be blamed, considering that "in these days there is hardly any people competent to judge another."159 It was now time for the county to reenter the rest of the region, even if it meant being part of what President Franklin Roosevelt would call "the Nation's number one economic problem."160 Feuds were now an event thankfully stuck in the past and absent in a county with access to federal aid and centralized planning. But as Breathitt County was the historical home of the feud country, its past of factional violence could not be completely forgotten, especially considering that its rate of violent crime was still relatively high as late as 1940. "Even though the county may have one or two well-broadcasted murders every year-for a killing in Breathitt always seems to be big news-educational facilities, better roads, in short, greater contact with modern forces have corroded the feudal spirit," said one 1941 local history published by the Works Progress Administration. Feuds were understandable in their day because of environmental factors beyond the control of the mountain pioneer. The "hilly country where ridges and creeks tended to mark off one clan and its supporting faction from another, and where Mother nature was hostile and niggardly" contributed to the development of "feudal ties between men." To observers from the outside world, common criminal violence was even less legitimate than feuds, but recent unnamed troubles, readers were reassured, had "not assumed the proportions of a feud."161 Even if Breathitt Countians supposedly retained a customarily nonchalant attitude toward murder, "life was cheap" now because "the hills were stripped, the timber business expired, floods washed the topsoil off the farms."162 Violence in Bloody Breathitt was no longer a product of the residents' temporal dissonance from the Bluegrass and the rest of the outside world but was now the outcome of very current economic problems. Although crime had supplanted feud, violence of either sort was still useful. More than ten years later, even the county's reputation for "unrestrained lawlessness" was, by itself, admissible evidence in a corporation's 1953 lawsuit against a striking labor union.163 Long after John Fox Jr.'s death, Breathitt County garnered at least one more fictional sketch in two of James Jones's World War II novels. In his debut, From Here to Eternity (1951), Jones featured Sergeant Fatso Judson, Schofield Barracks' sadistic stockade guard who is mentioned in passing as having Breathitt County origins. Judson is eventually punished for his cruelty to prisoners when he is killed by Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt (himself from Harlan County, a locale with far more notoriety than Breathitt by 1951; a third character is similarly from Hazard, Kentucky).164 A "small, thin, Breathitt County Kentucky boy" named Private Witt was prominent in Jones's The Thin Red Line (1962), this time in a combat setting. Like Prewitt, Witt is an exceptional fighter (with shades of Alvin York, gaining his flawless sharpshooting from having "shot squirrel all of his life") and ceaselessly loyal to his comrades. He shared the same independence and antinomian worldview attributed to various Fox Jr. protagonists, although, unlike them, Witt could never assimilate to the forces of modernity (in this case the army's self-defeating chain of command during the battle of Guadalcanal). "He was free, white and twenty-one," in Jones's description, "and had never taken no shit off nobody and never would, and as the prospect of action got closer and closer he could feel himself tightening all up inside with excitement, exactly like he used to do in the [nonhistorical] coal strikes back in Bloody Breathitt."165 Judson, Witt, and Jones's other eastern Kentucky soldiers shared an inherent aptitude for violence, while Breathitt was only one place-name among many; as a fictional character's casually mentioned place of birth in an early 1960s novel, Breathitt County had joined "Harlan" and "Hazard" as synonyms for labor struggle rather than feud, the prefix "bloody" assumed to be from the famously deadly coalfield battles for unionization. For Jones (a native of southern Illinois), Bloody Breathitt represented a segment of the American population living in the twentieth century against its will and able to exist in the unwelcome present only because of its valuable (at least in a time of war) propensity for hurting and killing.

By the time the War on Poverty was initiated, Breathitt County was an oft-advertised exemplary of Appalachia's unsolved economic problems. When Kentucky's red-baiting Republican governor Louis Nunn vetoed federal Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) funds for a Jackson-based development council in 1969, the ensuing war of words became the "Nunn-Howell feud" (so named for the council's Democratic chairwoman Treva Turner Howell).166 Newly hired OEO assistant Dick Cheney went to Breathitt County to investigate and found none of the irregularities Nunn (who had been southern campaign chairman for Cheney's boss, Richard Nixon, in 1968) had alleged. The upheaval discomfited Nixon and OEO chief Donald Rumsfeld, and tousled the president's "southern strategy." More important, it shortened the life of the OEO; complaints of Howell's corruption (which neither J. Edgar Hoover nor John Ehrlichman could uncover) gave Nixon an excuse to dissolve the program after his reelection. The "Feud in the Hills," as Time magazine called it (echoing the Louisville Courier-Journal's "Breathitt Feud" headline) was a crippling blow to the Great Society as well as another embarrassment for Breathitt County-caused, once again, by local machine politics (Howell's Turner forbears began amassing influence in Breathitt not many years after the end came to the Hargis courthouse, though more incrementally and with less dependence upon counterrevolutionary murder).167 As always, the feud narrative (or, as Rumsfeld minimized the kerfuffle forty-two years later, "an old-fashioned Southern political blood feud") added its emblematic element of deception, suggesting the elite parties' victimless warring when, in fact, the victims were the Breathitt citizens the OEO had benefited.168 From John Fox Jr.'s Progressive Era novels to Donald Rumsfeld's 2011 apologia, Bloody Breathitt was largely the creation of outside observers who were heedless or ignorant of the exigencies of life in the county, be it the violence of the past or the poverty of the present. Breathitt County seemed to be one exemplar of the larger eastern Kentucky feud phenomenon but, at the same time, seemed to stand out from the others as well. In Cincinnati newspaper editor Harold Coates's Stories of Kentucky Feuds (1942), "true and accurate descriptions of the various Kentucky Feuds" (an anthology of stories published individually in pamphlet form in the 1920s), three of the twelve vignettes were dedicated to Breathitt, from William Strong's 1874 courthouse capture to the death of Edward Callahan in 1912.169 Rather than protesting, twentieth-century Breathitt Countians avoided discussions of conflicts over power, and instead tried to place violence as far into the past as possible. They, too, contributed to the mythology of Bloody Breathitt.

"We know that, from the first, the wilderness was their teacher"

Judge James Hargis was quite successful in using the cover of feud to protect himself from criminal conviction, and was probably unbothered by his subsequent magazine portrayal as a "Middle Ages character" a few months before his death.170 A large part of his success depended upon how ingrained the feud narrative already was in eastern Kentucky, so ingrained that even his greatest detractor, the Breathitt County News, casually described "feuds" in other mountain counties while Hargis was still in office.171 Those from Breathitt County who were able to make their voices heard, mainly Jackson's commercially interested elite, echoed the language of the outside world, and the four-letter word was not avoided once it was widely popular.

For one thing, they believed in race and all it entailed. Language employing the racial politics of the day was just as popular in Breathitt County as it was among the anthropologists and local-color writers. The aforementioned booster who anonymously begged for the Bluegrass's investment in 1884 attributed past violence to the Scots and the Irish.172 Breathitt's Anglo-Saxon families presented such a numerical fight against "race suicide," the Courier-Journal snarked in 1904, that "President Roosevelt's heart would be gladdened by a sight of Jackson" (Roosevelt was a well-known proponent of Nordic monumentalism).173 Once word of their unadulterated, superior Anglo-Saxon blood was a widely known fact, white Kentuckians in and around the county clung fiercely to the ethnic badge that they probably had never doubted was theirs in the first place, even if it did implicitly suggest an innate tendency toward modern savagery. Upon reading of a 1905 lecture that suggested that the "Kentucky mountaineer" was the progeny of Indians and "white slaves" (the lecturer presumably meant seventeenth-century indentured servants), a Perry county resident protested: There is not one family out of a thousand of the present inhabitants of the Cumberlands whose parentage may be traced either to the Indians or to those white slaves who had been freed by the Virginia planters. They are descendants of families who had been prominent in the Revolutionary struggles, and those people have known almost no intermingling of other blood from the time of their immigration to the present. The allegation that these bold, generous, hospitable, strong-minded neighbors about us in Breathitt, Perry and Leslie counties are a new class of humanity and descendants of Indians and white Virginia slaves is a slander which we repel.174 As the national debate over the teaching of evolution was building steam in 1922, a Breathitt County News editor fired off a similar salvo when his county's state representative cast the deciding vote to strike down an anti-Darwinism bill.175 "The professors at the state university [in Lexington] may believe they are descended from apes and baboons, but let it be known that the good people of Breathitt are pure Anglo-Saxon."176 Racially conscious Breathitt Countians were as aware as other white southerners that whiteness dealt as much, and perhaps more, with material and social attainment as it did with skin color. For a place and a people increasingly economically marginalized, and vilified in the media as something culturally or even biologically different than the white southerners they had once been, racial validation was crucial.

Backtalk from Breathitt came in other forms as well. Louis Pilcher's The Story of Jackson City (1914), the last in a series of promotional publications promoting eastern Kentucky towns, became Bloody Breathitt's most all-inclusive written defense. Pilcher, a self-styled "literary free lance" from Lexington, wrote as if he were a Breathitt County native, peppering "brief biographies of prominent citizens" with ingratiating trivia about Jackson.177 For Pilcher, the story of "Bloody Breathitt" had already been told in fictional form and the more fictional it was, the better. "If the reader is seeking any light or information on the feuds of Breathitt County," he warned, "this book will be a disappointment for I want to go back to the 'City of Sudden Death' [a nickname for Jackson], and I don't like to write about feuds anyway." Because, after all, "feuds and pistol toting are so vulgar and low flung."178 Pilcher hoped that literary interest in Kentucky's feuds would soon die down, lest it pollute young minds. "Just contemplate what a terrible nightmare such a book [collecting all of Kentucky's feud stories] would produce on the plastic minds of the youth of Kentucky; a veritable chamber of horrors."179 Jackson, the "inspiration of the new Kentucky," had eliminated feuds through progressive social engineering: de facto zoning that kept disorder confined within spatial boundaries and class designators. The absence of licensed saloons helped to keep the peace, and the civically maintained enclosure of "Snake Valley," the sin district along the river, kept the town quiet enough to require "only one policeman and but little for him to do except collect city taxes and electric light bills."180 Even if violence that took the feud form was in the past, Pilcher stood by his belief in the racial determinism that caused it. Although he shared others' belief in Kentucky's "purest Anglo-Saxon stock," Pilcher put a greater emphasis on the sociology of race and saw the less adulterated eastern portion of the "two Kentuckys" as America's last great white hope.181 "It is a well-known fact in sociology of Kentucky and the South that the Afro-American race has for long been the 'escape valve' in morality and immorality-there also being another division, unmorality. In certain sections of Kentucky-notably in the eastern part-the absence of Negroes has laid the heavy toll upon the white race, and hence there is more white immorality than in communities where Negroes abound, Central Kentucky and many Southern States having a greater number of Negroes than Caucassians."182 "We [eastern Kentuckians] will not stand for miscegenation," wrote Pilcher. "It is said that in Louisville and Indianapolis, Cincinnati and Chicago, that many depraved and degenerate white women have Negro husbands."183 But pure eastern Kentuckians' massive childbirth rates guaranteed the unassisted survival of whiteness. "When fathers count their progeny from eight to a dozen, race-suicide is out of the question and the crusade for eugenics makes the healthy bucks that snuff the mountain air, smile in derision when the name is defined. It belongs to hot-house civilization and degenerating, neurotic practices" (he did not know that, less than ten years later, Breathitt County would have its own interracial cooperation committee and a $7,000 schoolhouse dedicated to colored education).184 Just as when Hiram Freeman and his sons opposed Breathitt County's Democrats in the 1870s, black mountaineers were not to be mentioned. In 1912, with the prospect of "race-suicide" on many Americans' minds, their invisibility was more crucial than ever in a place assumed to be racially uncontaminated.

The county's nonwhite minority did not fit the outside world's image of Bloody Breathitt as did the white "healthy bucks" who were natural "fighting men . . . big, powerful fellows [and] men of courage and fine marksmen; sometimes ignorant, wary and good shots, like the Boers."185 And entrance into politics was eastern Kentucky's chief means of harnessing this natural energy and aiming it toward useful purposes. "It is a fact in criminology of the mountains that the 'tough customers' are frequently reformed and become good citizens by elevating them to offices, and so there is no end of Deputy Sheriffs and Constables and Deputy Constables in Breathitt, Perry and Letcher Counties. It has had a salutary effect in many instances I hear and frequently Sheriffs, Jailers, County Attorneys and County Judges are 'reformed' bad men elevated to offices of dignity and power."186 Even with Judge Hargis and Sheriff Callahan gone, most of the men who had been peripherally involved in their courthouse ring were still alive, and Pilcher was careful to spin their colorful pasts in as flattering a style as possible. More important, however, it was vital that political office be these "bad men's" redemption. Pilcher framed the recent past's problems as a social system worthy of envy.

Pilcher's interpretation of eastern Kentucky's "fighting spirit," and by implication the history of the feud, confirmed popular ideas about masculinity and the environmental construction of American humanity. His employment of the feud concept divorced violence from actual events, making it instead an abstract product of an inherent white mountain Volksgeist that stood as a model for all white Americans. Life in the Kentucky mountains was a Rooseveltian "strenuous life" all to itself and, combined with the people's unsullied Anglo-Saxonism, provided a cure for the urban North's enervating industrial life and ethnic pollution. Feud was now a useful artifact, one with a rakish facade and no mention of injustice; Pilcher never mentioned the widow Abrelia Marcum Tucker, remarried and still living in Jackson (though he erroneously identified her late husband as "Judge Marcum"), even though he did reference Callahan and Hargis. Actual death and suffering, the (in Hannah Arendt's phrasing) "dead load which by itself time will bury in oblivion," could be forgotten, replaced by a mountain "heritage" that toughened its descendants without causing any real harm.187 Ultimately, The Story of Jackson City was little different than the anthropological and fictional portrayals of eastern Kentucky produced by writers from the outside world.

Men who had actually participated in violence did not take Pilcher's booster role, but instead personalized Bloody Breathitt. None had more to say about this than Curtis Jett. By his own admission "as vile a sinner as ever came down the pike," Jett was famously converted to Christianity while serving time at the Frankfort Reformatory (where, in an odd echo of his former employer's role in William Goebel's campaign, he challenged one of the convicted conspirators in Goebel's death for the Penitentiary Christian Endeavor Society's presidency).188 To help "put down Kaiserism," he organized an in-prison Red Cross fund-raising effort after the United States' entrance into World War I. Despite Abrelia Tucker's efforts, he won an early release, thanks to his conversion testimonial and a one-prisoner crusade to have pool tables removed from the state penitentiary. He then began a new life as an evangelist.189 Jett's story of his evil path that led to the assassinations of 1902 and 1903 was a pat combination of nature and nurture, explaining Bloody Breathitt and his own role as a "feudist." Now happily a Bluegrass resident, Jett confirmed many of the assumptions held regarding the section of his birth; his upbringing was nominally Christian but "weak along spiritual lines," while his own love of "strong drink," "pistol toting," and cigarette smoking were learned from his "typical mountaineer" father and a "drunkard" neighbor.190 During his childhood in Breathitt County, he discovered that "every one in that section had an axe to grind," and he and his impressionable young friends "were ambitious when we became men to become leaders of such a click, to take our chance in the mountain battles and some day to carry revolvers and Winchesters with notches cut to indicate the number of enemies we had outwitted and gotten the drop on."191 Leaving Bloody Breathitt for incarceration in the more advanced Bluegrass, where he discovered a love of God, patriotism, and personal industry (as the penitentiary's horticulturalist), was an integral part of Jett's salvation. In Jett's telling, the mountains were a natural training ground for violence, especially for an eager pupil such as himself. The exodus of an "old wild dog of the mountains" from "his former mountain days" was a spiritual journey but it was a geographical journey as well, confirming that Jett's former sinfulness and eastern Kentucky were firmly entwined.192 Appropriately, after his release he attended seminary at Edward Guerrant's Asbury College.193 In From Prison to Pulpit: Life of Curtis Jett (1919), Jett depoliticized the feuds of his childhood. He noted the fighting between William Strong's Red Strings and Edward Callahan's Ku Klux in the 1890s (which he referred to it as the "Strong-Callahan feud"). By the end of his incarceration in 1919, he had absorbed enough written and spoken feud lore involving honor and Anglo/Celtic determinism to make it part of his description.

Many of the leaders of the feuds were men of good circumstances and of fine intelligence. They were kind and courteous to their friends, but they came from a race of people beyond the sea who, for centuries, had not looked to the courts for protection, but had taken their affairs into their own hands. With them it was perfectly honorable to defend themselves and take the life of any they suspected of having ill will toward them. The leaders of the mountain feuds were something like the old Scottish Chieftains who gathered their clans about them and fought their misunderstandings to a finish.194 His retelling of his own participation in the Hargis-Cockrell feud was circumspectly apolitical, dwelling more on remembrances of his own personal failings than on the circumstances that brought him to be one of Sheriff Callahan's deputies.

There was much animosity and ill feeling which culminated in several deaths on both sides of the feud. So far as any part I may have had in these unfortunate affairs is concerned that has been thoroughly threshed out in the civil and criminal courts of the State, and I could not add anything which would involve anyone who has not already been involved in the courts. I did not participate in these for any price or cause except for the love of my people and the unfortunate spirit of revenge in my own heart. A merciful God has granted my forgiveness which I feel toward all men and believe it would be unwise for me to enter into any further discussion of the matters.195 Throughout his book, filled with his poems and his own and others' verifications of his redemption, he never once mentioned James Hargis or the men he was convicted of killing, nor his then role as deputy sheriff. His "love of [his] people" and "unfortunate spirit of revenge" gave a personal and communal basis to his behavior when he had been a killer, and implicitly placed his actions within a much longer narrative of inherent violence. "The feud" Jett had participated in was now an organic thing all to itself, devoid of factual details.

Another son of "typical mountaineers" who parlayed his connection to Bloody Breathitt into an evangelical style employed feud in a way that Jett could not. Wolfe County native Charles "Bulldog Charlie" Wireman, fifteen years Jett's junior, echoed his illustration of a rowdy, undisciplined, and armed adolescence. He credited Bluegrass Kentuckians with bringing a more enlightened Christianity to the "purest Anglo Saxon blood to be found on the American Continent." Even though he had once served as a deputy sheriff, his career had no discernible connection to political struggles or any conflict deemed organized into a feud proper. Yet Bloody Breathitt was still available to him as a foil for his own story of salvation although, as of 1950, Wireman's readers were more familiar with the Hatfield-McCoy feud, and he began his book with it rather than with anything that had happened to him personally.196 Feud, as long as it was in a distant enough past, was a useful memory, especially in conversion narratives that depend upon a stark division between a wicked past and a virtuous present. Accounts of Bloody Breathitt written outside of the county were not as consistent in employing this stark division; it depended upon whether or not the storyteller wished to portray a space that was inherently violent or progressively developed (by the passage of time or the contingency of positive exogenous forces) to a point where violence no longer took place, at least in an archaic "medieval" form like a blood feud. In contrast, local accounts like those of Pilcher, Jett, and Wireman left violent inherency in the past, but for different purposes. However, what they shared was a commitment to sustaining Bloody Breathitt's memory as the site of an undeniably horizontal dispute or series of disputes, one defined by revenge and lawlessness rather than struggles over public power. For the last generation to have witnessed or taken part in Breathitt County's feuds, the specifics of the past were best left in the past. If there were "deaths on both sides of the feud," as Jett concluded, then no one was denied justice by this omission. The possibility that this might not be the case was left roundly unconsidered.

Later generations of people from Breathitt County also showed a need to separate past from present. In the 1930s Breathitt County high school students, assigned to collect family oral histories, accepted their county's violent past with the adolescent's temporal detachment. Two students' grandfathers, now happy to freely discuss the Hargis-Cockrell feud (and possibly the 1908 election riot that followed the subsequent Republican victories) openly described their struggle's political nature as well as evidence that the famous courthouse assassinations were only part of a larger effort on Hargis's and Callahan's part. "I had six brothers until one of my brothers Jim was murdered on the middle fork in the Hargis and Callahan battle," one reported to his grandchild. "I was lucky to get out alive but me and Fletch never was even wounded during the time we were fighting. The Callahans were trying to run the county and who ever tried to get ahead of them they meraly shot them down and that was all. But they had a job trying to run us out."197 Another student whose grandfather had died before his or her birth reported that "before [his death] a fuge came up between several parties and it was over politics."198 Another elaborated, "It begun in 1902, and lasted until 1907, and after this period Breathitt county, was called bloody Breathitt. We people of Breathitt should be thankful for what our forefathers has done for us."199 Depression-era teenagers had no reason to shy away from admitting the political causality of a past generation's violence, since it bore no reflection upon their own lives. To them, turn-of-the-century elections were practically as distant as seventeenth-century Scottish chieftains, and there was no need to create a temporal facade or apply a teenager's ironic detachment. The misspelling "fuge" suggests a relative unfamiliarity with the word. However, another student, who was asked to comment on more recent violent crime, felt inclined to comment on what he or she considered the county's distant past, particularly a communal "state of nature" that preceded politics. "We know that, from the first, the wilderness was their teacher and they obtained a kind of education which fitted them for a life in the rough, for it was gained through actual experience with their environment."200 Even though these high school students were presumably natives of Breathitt County and only a generation removed from the county's last nationally reported account of egregious violence, their descriptions of crime and violence within their home territory employ the same language of foreignness used by "outsiders" since the 1870s. To say that "the wilderness was [the students' forbears'] teacher" denied the historical nearness of violence in Breathitt County, placing it further back in history to a pioneer past. None of the students claimed any direct knowledge or experience in violence of any sort, let alone attempted to defend their home county against the mockery and criticism that it had long endured. With access to the enlightenment of national incorporation provided by New Deal programs, these students were now outside of the experience that had made Bloody Breathitt, and at least one refused to lay claim to it without invoking a nostalgic "wilderness" past. As Breathitt natives they had unique insights but, as was the case with most American teenagers in the 1930s, their local knowledge was mitigated by mass culture.

"The dirty old Breathitt County courthouse still stands"

In 1978, eighty-one-year-old Breathitt County native Harlan Strong expressed a similar resolve to remember Bloody Breathitt as a past enormously different from the present, and expressed mild reverence for the lost strenuousness of his childhood. "The horse and buggy days, they're past and gone. Now it's automobile and airplane and stuff like that. The Bible said they'd go weaker and wiser. People are certainly getting wiser but they're weaker. They're weaker in strength and wiser in knowledge. This day and time a kid 15 years old, I'd say twelve years old knows as much as I did when I was 25. That's the truth. They see so much and know so much. That's right. A lot of it is worthless, but still they know it."201 The late nineteenth-century violence that Harlan Strong was aware of, probably from popular rather than personal memory, was far away and factually confused. He knew of the factional alignments designated by the "Red Strings" and "Ku Klux," although he offered no elaboration on the larger Reconstruction-era contexts of these two names. He also erroneously recollected the 1884 lynching of Henderson Kilburn and Ben Strong as occurring in his lifetime (according to his own disclosure, Harlan Strong would have been born about 1896). He also seemed to recall knowing "Bill Strong," who "belonged to what was called the Rebel and Yankee army," even though the real-life Bill Strong had been killed in 1897.202 When asked to explain Bloody Breathitt's origins, Harlan Strong reaffirmed the primordial foundations of a frontier society that many people both in and outside of the county had summoned up in the twentieth century, but augmented this by allusions to prevailing technological change. "The only difference now than back then is there's just more people now. That's why people can see so much more because they're more people and there's more to talk about. But they did just as bad in the early days when I was raised up as they're doing right now. There just weren't so many people. Mohegan law back in them days. An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. If you shoot me, I'll shoot you. They abide by the law now. Sure do."203 "Mohegan law" ascribed the past with qualities that 1970s white Americans associated with Native Americans, who (like feuding mountain whites) were cognitively tucked safely within a distant earlier historical period. A metaphor involving a savage Indian-related past, coupled with the biblical analogy of violent reciprocation, confirmed Bloody Breathitt's persistence as a place and time of communal violence. The death of Native American nations and that of feuds could both be looked back upon as inevitable, since those looking back from a modern present could scarcely imagine it otherwise.204 But Harlan Strong's "prosthetic memory" of a lynching that took place before his birth, and others, demonstrates the continuity of a vague memory of political conflict.205 The ostensibly nonsensical "Rebel and Yankee army," even if it suggested Harlan Strong's ignorance of the Civil War, illustrated the political confusion of the era; as a member of the Yankee army, William Strong had indeed been a rebel within Confederate Breathitt County.206 A memory of the Red Strings and Ku Klux Klan confirmed the political foundations of the violence that took place before his childhood. Long after its characteristic events, Bloody Breathitt was still a usable past, and one that did not require the same level of conscious subterfuge and omission that Louis Pilcher had employed sixty-four years before. Nevertheless, as always, the causes for violence, the motivations for half-remembered killings, remained somewhere between hazy and absent. Meanwhile, the feud narrative, with or without the violence, was permanently wedded to Breathitt County.

Were it not for one oral history project sponsored by the New York Times (the northern newspaper that had once seemed reluctant to place feuds in the mountains rather than the state of Kentucky), Harlan Strong's individual memory of Bloody Breathitt would have remained unspoken and unrecorded. The project had been inspired by a renewed interest in eastern Kentucky in the late 1950s based on the national recognition of Appalachian poverty. Allusions to Bloody Breathitt remained a useful tool for illustrating the region's underdevelopment. During congressional hearings for the proposed creation of the Area Redevelopment Administration (ARA) in 1959, a Louisville paper's article on Breathitt County was used as evidence for the section's dire need for federal sponsorship.207 This is the land of legends, the mountain country of eastern Kentucky where a century of time is thought to have somehow got lost. Blood feuds, moonshining, child brides, place names like Hell-for-Sartain, Shoulderblade-the stuff for a thousand tales. They were not all fictional.

The dirty old Breathitt County courthouse still stands, the place where [James] Cockrell and J. B. Marcum were shot down in cold blood in the incredible Hargis-Cockrell feud that claimed upwards of fifty lives before it ran its course a half century ago. This courthouse was recently condemned, an act that serves as well as a symbol of the gradual passing of the life of the legends. Society is in transition [in Breathitt County], it is desperately trying to catch up with the 20th century.208 The "stuff for a thousand tales" had been the subject of fiction for so long that, by the 1950s, it was reasonable to assume that nineteenth-century history had become more "legendary" than factual. Men killing other men for now-murky reasons had been replaced by the more recent memories of the battle of Blair Mountain and "bloody Harlan," conflicts that could be more readily understood, and hardly denied, especially with John Lewis's then hearty United Mine Workers of America around as a reminder.209 Battles between coal companies and unions had now overshadowed previous atrocities. Less iconic stories from the mountains were even more shrouded in doubt. Cockrell and Marcum were victims' names remembered only by a dedicated student of Kentucky history, but they could still be used to prove a point. For a structure associated with one of these medieval feuds, the symbol of local state authority that had been at the center of sporadic killings for years, to still be standing was an affront to progress, proof that Breathitt County and the region needed federal assistance to "catch up with the 20th century." The dilapidated courthouse stood for a time of partisanship and had no place in an era of consensus and prosperity. It was the only remainder of a past that had mostly passed on to legendary status, an especially ugly reminder in that it connected the feud to an emblem of state power. For Breathitt County to achieve the legitimacy of being truly part of Kentucky and the American Republic, the "symbol of the gradual passing of the life of the legends" had to go.

EPILOGUE.

When we say that Americans are lawless, we usually mean that they are less conscious than other peoples of the august majesty of the institution of the State as it stands behind the objective government of men and laws which we see.

-Randolph Bourne, "Unfinished Fragment on the State (Winter, 1918)," in Untimely Papers (1919) The offending old building was eventually torn down and replaced by the structure that serves as Breathitt County's court building at this writing (designed by a Lexington architectural firm-fitting, since the men from the relatively distant Bluegrass city had long claimed a shepherding role in Jackson).1 But the source of its infamy was not completely erased. In the twenty-first century a marker near Breathitt County's present courthouse in Jackson marks the spot of James Marcum's "feudal" death. Not everyone in Breathitt County wanted history to be relegated to "legend." Even if no one wished to recount the political details, these events, after all, did happen.

But a larger marker nearby commemorates the county's other celebrated distinction: its contribution to military service in World War I. Breathitt men had always contributed to American wars, and evidence almost suggests they began preparations for war in Europe years before the rest of the country. As early as 1914, Jackson's army recruiting station had "more enlistments than at any station south of the Ohio River."2 When the United States entered into the largest war in human history three years later, Breathitt County's volunteers exceeded its 182-man quota. As a result, no draft notices were issued. It was not the only county to hold that distinction but, for one reason or another, the county-and "her patriotic ex-feudists"-caught national attention.3 From one perspective, the tremendous outpouring of Breathitt volunteers was political; an ever-Democratic county rallying to a Democratic president's call to make the world "safe for democracy." From another, it was the masculine "fighting spirit" that journalist Louis Pilcher had touted a few years earlier, evidenced by Breathitt-native Sergeant Willie Sandlin's single-handed bayoneting of twenty-four German soldiers at Bois de Forges, France, in 1918 (which earned him the Congressional Medal of Honor).4 From yet another, it was a patriotism born of the county's natural environment. "The charge of ignorance to which they have been subjected for years is proved libelous by their knowledge of the European situation," the Christian Science Monitor rhapsodized. "They are natural democrats. They are natural foes of aristocracy and autocracy."5 Finally, the remarkable record of volunteers may have just as easily revealed a supposition familiar in all American wars: a young male population with few prospects and a collective eagerness to leave their rural home.

The "feud" marker in Jackson near the present-day courthouse. (Courtesy of Charles Hayes) In any case, this new distinction was widely celebrated. The history of intraracial white violence that had segregated Breathitt County from the United States was now balanced by a "sturdy Americanism" that incorporated it into the whole, a call to duty from an exogenous source to replace its damaged and unusable endogenous identity.6 "All honor to Breathitt county, long known to the world as 'Bloody Breathitt'!" western Kentucky's Hartford Republican announced in 1917. "All honor to the men there who, though they may sometimes have been guilty of mountain feuds and have sometimes fought with unpardonable fury, have heard the call of civilization to protect the women and children!"7 "Thus," cheered another Kentuckian a year later, "does the outlaw mountain county of Kentucky vindicate herself in the eyes of the world, mocking those who would shame her with a record more fanciful than true."8 The "fanciful" agreed; "We've killed too many of our own folks," a short story character lamented. "Now this war gives us a chance to show the outside world that there's more good than bad in us; that we can leave off fighting each other and use our lead on the Germans."9 Breathitt County's World War I Memorial. (Courtesy of Charles Hayes) The subtext that lurked beneath the praise was that Breathitt County was a vessel of inherent violence that could now be harnessed by the outside world. When "the strange land and peculiar people" of the Kentucky mountains had been "discovered" nearly a half century earlier, their suspected tendency toward killing had been glorified as the prime mover of the American Revolution and westward expansion. Since then, however, present-day violence had cooled Progressive Era Americans' nostalgia for past violence, and Bloody Breathitt had instead become symptomatic of a social problem that defied education, industrialization, or planning.10 In 1917 the problem had become a solution. The contingencies that had caused so much killing in Breathitt were still ignored, perhaps more than ever.

Though the county's marked volunteerism for the "call of civilization" involved more killing and dying, it would now be for a cause that Bloody Breathitt could share with the rest of the United States. Unlike feud, the legitimacy of the "War to End All Wars" was a national article of faith. The common use of deadly force had once demonized Breathitt County. When carried out in the name of patriotism, however, deadly force was the key to its redemption.

NOTES.

Abbreviations

AAC.

Appleton's Annual Cyclopaedia and Register of Important Events ACN.

Adair County News (Columbia, KY) AGACK.

Acts of the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Kentucky AOHP.

The New York Times Oral History Project: The Appalachian Oral History Project of Alice Lloyd College, Appalachian State University, Emory and Henry College, and Lees Junior College, Kelly Library, Emory & Henry College, Emory, VA BCN.

Breathitt County News (Jackson, KY) CDT.

Chicago Daily Tribune CSSUS.

Congressional Serial Set FRA.

Frankfort Roundabout HGH.

Hazel Green (KY) Herald HLSCA.

Hutchins Library Special Collections & Archives, Berea College, Berea, KY HMC.

Hickman (KY) Courier HVK.

Hopkinsville Kentuckian JJDD.

John J. Dickey Diary, Margaret I. King Library Special Collections and Archives, University of Kentucky, Lexington KAGR.

Kentucky Adjutant General's Report: Confederate Kentucky Volunteers, 18611865 (Frankfort, KY: State Journal, 1915) KDLA.