The Seattle post-intelligencer. [volume] (Seattle, Wash. Terr. [Wash.]) 1888-1914, 1892-03-19
SEATTLE, SATURDAY, MARCH 10.
A DISAPPEARING TYPE


ces that the old Kentucky feuds in Bell.
Rowan. Perry, Harlan and Breathitt
county are dying out; the leaders are in
prison, in the grave, in exile or have been
persuaded to lead lives of peace, suoordi-
nate to law and order. These frightful
feuds eliminated in 1887. when Craig
Tolliver and his band in Rowan county
were hunted down and killed by sheriff s
posse of 200 men who were ordered by
Governor Knott to take these desperadoes
dead or alive. Toliiver began his vendetta
against his enemy Martin in
1854. for three years deded the sher-
if and the courts, numbering
thirty men. destroying thousands
OF dollars worth of property and terror
izing whole county. Juries dared not
convict and judges dared not hold court
without permission. So powerless Was the
state against this feud that the authorities
stopped so low as to hire o. persuade both
parties to promise to leave the state. Tol-
liver terrorized his county into electing
him justice of the peace; issued warrants
for the arrest of two members of the other
faction, placed them under arrest and shot
them to death. Then Governor Knott
hunted him to death.
Next followed the Hatield-McCoy feud
between two border families of Kentucky
and West Virginia; the principals to this
feud have been hanged or imprisoned or
lynched. The Turner-Howard feud in
Harlan county forced the judge of the
county court to head an armed party to
bring the Howards to justice, and the
principals to the quarrel falling into the
hands of the law their followers have be-
come fugitives or ceased to be outlaws
Jerry Little, one of the principals to the
Strong-Little feud, is dead. The
French Eversole feud, the most
recent display of Kentucky noun
taineer barbarism. is dead, and
its guilty representatives all in custody
awaiting trial by the courts. These
frightful family feuds were the survival of
q civilization that was once the rule
throughout the mountain districts of West
Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North
Carolina, Alabama and Arkansas, but is
now dying rapidly before the march of
progress to better things in the new South.
1t was 8 civilization characteristic of
community that had been educated in its
savage iiliteracy for many years to con-
slider physical courage and nerve the
noblest human attributes.
Under other circumstances and more
humane influences these Kentucky noun
taineers would make admirable citizens.
Craig Tolliver, with his daring courage
and iron nerve, disciplined and controlled
by the education and attrition OF a higher
civilization, contained just the stuff to
have made bold, resolute, energetic
leader of alaw-respecting community, in
stead Of dying with his boots on, the cap
tain of band of outlaws as brave and
bloody-minded as himself. These Ken
lucky outlaws were survivors of civil
ization, for many years potential at the
South and Southwest, that the rapid ex-
tension of railroad and mining in
terests is fast making obsolete. Its
comparative mountain isolation was
the explanation of its protracted life. 1t
had lived too long for further patient en-
durance when the multiplication of rail-
roads and the opening of mines brought
the civilization of large commercial and
business interests into closer contact and
consequent collision with the hitherto iso-
lated, primitive mountaineer civilization.
The Kentucky mountaineer finds the
times out of JOINT; finds the
new civilization too sultry for men
who were educated to despise courts,
TO laugh at law. and who believed
that the right to rule belonged TO the man
who had the largest roll of dead enemies
notched on his rifle and had looked death
in the eye oftenest without linching.
These barbarous people had great virtues :;
they were ignorant, but brave, truthful
and hospitabIe; at once kindly and vim
d;ctiye; white men as death-defying and
law-despising as the wild Arabs of Soudan,
whose desperate charge broke an English
square. But OF such stock education and
the attrition of commercial civilization
would make fine race of men.
There were thousands of these ignorant
but daring mountaineers, of matchless
alld VIC al hpNu the MON ana
Confederate armies. No wonder the Con-
federate army, which contained so many
men who had been taught from the cradle
TO consider physical courage the cap sheai
of manhood, should have made tremen-
dous fight for error. These mountaineers
In their virtues and vices recall the Scot.
fish borderers and Highland clans as they
existed in the fifteenth, sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. The story of the
bloody family feuds that ragged on the
Scottish border and in the Highlands fur
nishes the prototypes of the family
feuds that for ten years past have afflicted
the mountain regions from West Virginia
and North Carolina to East Kentucky and
Tennessee. where We also find the modern
survival Of the English and Scotch SNUG
glers, described by Scott and Marryat, in
the "Moonshiners' of these mountains
The family feuds of the Scottish border
became rapidly extinct with the union oil
Scotland and England, which made the
border clans no longer necessary as a
military barrier between the two coun,
tries. Between the English industrial