The Seattle post-intelligencer. [volume] (Seattle, Wash. Terr. [Wash.]) 1888-1914, 1892-03-19

civilization and that of the Lowland
Of military consequence. and was forced to
reform his ways and conform to Law
and order. In the Scottish Highlands
the mountaineer continued TO lead life
of comparative lawlessness until after
l745. when with the disarming and break
ing up of the Highland clans the Scottish
mountain outlaw became extinct. The
family names in the mountain regions Of
the Carolinas, Georgia, Virginia, Ten
nessee and Kentucky are largely of Scotch
and North of England origin. and these
family feuds were due something to hered-
itary habit and education, for there is
really no more reason why the family
feuds should have always existed in the
mountain regions of the South and
Southwest than in the mountain re-
gions of New England, the Middle
states and the West. There were
border feuds between New York and
the New Hampshire Grants; there wete
terrible barbarities practiced on both sides
in the conflicts between the patriots" Of
the American Revolution and their tory
neighbors, but these were political, not
family feuds, which were unknown at the
North even in her rudes. and most igno-
rant day. Nor was the family feud pecu-
liar to the slave-holding districts of the
South. On the contrary the family feud
has been confined chiefly TO the mountain
districts where slavery never existed to
any extent. Nor will ignorance and iliit-
eracy explain it. for the mountaineer was
not more ignorant than thousands of
other poor whites of the South. The
family feud was largely due to blood in
heritance and family tradition 1t
is the transplanting and survival
of the old Scottish border and
Highland clansman habit and educa-
ton. which by favor of isolated circum-
stances and situation has survived to the
present from the past, just as the elk still
roams in certain comparatively inaccessi-
bic mountain districts Of this state. The
survival of ''the moonshiner," too, is the
result largely of the hereditary belief that
neither smuggling nor poaching are
crimes. The strength of this feeling of
clanship among American mountaineer
families was shown by the fact that when
family feud broke out the whole machinery
of Justice became paralyzed in county,
the local authorities owed allegiance to
one or the other OF the parties to the feud.
Juries failed to convict, for members of
both families composed them. In event
OF trial both clans were present armed to
the teeth; at the local elections there was
the same division between the families.
In the course of the bloody feud be-
tween the Hatfields and McCoys, young,
helpless strplings were murdered in cold
blood; three women were deliberately
slain, one of them shot dead as she stood
up to be married. Wounded men on either
side were killed in cold blood after the
conflict by men who were as cruel as they
were brave; who were honest in all
pecuniary matters, truthful and hospit-
able, but in the execution of their vendetta
as ruthless in their vengeance as the Sioux
when ne took the warpath against the Paw
nees, the Crows, or the Chippewas. These
American perpetrators of the family feud
were not robbers at all; they robbed their
enemies of nothing save their lives. This
curious survival of the family feud in the
mountains of the South and Southwest
was due to hereditary faint and the edu-
cation Of tradition transplanted from Eu-
rope to American regions, where it -four
ished because Of isolation and ignorance,
until the extension of railroad and mining
interests to the mountain region made it
necessary and possible to compel the
mountain outlaw to become a law-abiding
citizen.