Excerpt: Murderland
"I have been away in Murderland for nearly ten days. No one, unless he has had the actual experience of a visit to the region made notorious by the Hatfield-McCoy feud would believe that there is in this country such a barbarous, uncivilized, and wholly savage region. There is nothing to be found equalling it in the history of the most lawless of our far Western border experience. The county of Logan, in West Virginia, where the powerful mountain family of Hatfield now lives, embraces a region wholly isolated from railroad or telegraphic communication... There are no churches, and the school-houses supply very meagre means of education the children of the mountain people how live in this isolated region.
"I visited this country for the purpose of getting at, if possible, the exact facts connected with the Hatfield-McCoy feud... I found, after visiting this region, that there was much more to be considered here than the feud itself. The vendetta, so-called, which exists between the Hatfield-McCoy families is merely an incident in a series of cold-blooded murders which are almost without parallel in the history of the country. The story of the feud is a strange recital of family quarrels, of the usurpation of legal authority and of the downright violation of the law in every possible form."
Source: T. C. Crawford, An American Vendetta (1889).
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