The Rice belt journal. (Welsh, Calcasieu Parish, La.) 1900-19??, 1915-02-12
CHAPTER III.

In days when the Indian held the
Dark and Bloody Grounds a pionee~.
telling oak and poplar logs for the
home he meant to establish on the
banks Of purling watercourse, let his
Ak slip, and the cutting edge gashed
his ankle. Since to the discovered be-
longs the christening, that Watercourse
became Crippleshin, and so it is today
set down on atlas pages. A few miles
away, as the crow flies, but many
weary leagues as man must travel,
brother settler, racked with rheuma-
tism, gave to his creek the name of
Misery. The two pioneers had come
together from Virginia, as their ances-
tors had come before them from Scot
land. Together they had found one
of the two gaps through the mountain
wall, which for more than a hundred
miles has no other passable rift. To-
gether, and as comrades, they had
made their homes and founded their
race. What original grievance had
sprung up between their descendants
none Of the present generation knew
perhaps it was a farm line or disputed
title to pig. The primary incident
was lost in the limbo of the past; but
for fifty years, with occasional inter
walls of truce, lives had been snuffed
out in the fiercely burning hate of
these men whose ancestors had been
comrades.
Old Spicer South and his nephew
Samson were the direct lineal descen-
dants of the manner of Misery. Their
kinsmen dwelt about them: the Souths,
the Jaspers. the Spicers, the Wileys,
the Millers and McCagers. Other fam
lilies, related only by marriage and
close association, we're, in feud align
ment, none the less "Souths" And
over beyond the ridge, where the
springs and brooks flowed the other
way to feed Cripple shin, dwelt the
Hollmans, the Purvises, the Asberries,
the Hollises and the Daltons-men
equally strong in their vindiCtiye
fealty to the code of the vendetta.
BY mountain standards old Spicer
South was rich His lands had been
claimed when tracts could be had for
the taking, and, though he had to make
his cross mark when there was con-
tract to be signed his instructive mind
was shrewd and far seeing. The tinkle
of his cowbells was heard for long
distance along the creek bottoms. His
hillside fields were the richest and his
coves the most fertile in that country.
Some day, when a railroad should bur-
row through his section, bringing the
development of coal and timber at the
head Of the rails, sleeping fortune
would yawn and awake to enrich him.
There were black outCrOppings along
the cliffs, which he knew ran deep in
veins Of bituminous wealth. But to
tudI IlluS uG IUUhEh Will IOlCDOuluS,
for he had been raised to the stand
ards Of his forefathers and saw in the
coming of new regime curtailment
of personal liberty. For new-fangled
ideas he held only the aversion of
deep-rooted prejudice He hoped that
he might I've out bis days and pass
before the foreigner hGld his land and
the law became power stronger than
the individual or the clan. The law
was his enemy, because it said to him,
'Thou shalt not" when he sought to
take the yellow corn which bruising
labor had coaxed from scattered rock
strewn fields to his own mash vat ard
still. 1t meant, also, a tyrannous
power usually seizsd nd admins, =
by enemies, which undertook to forbid
the gsonal settlement Of personal