The Hatfield-McCoy feud has long been the most famous vendetta of the
southern Appalachians. Over the years it has become encrusted with myth
and error. Scores of writers have produced accounts of it, but few have
made any real effort to separate fact from fiction. Novelists, motion
picture producers, television script writers, and others have
sensationalized events that needed no embellishment.
Using court records, public documents, official correspondence, and
other documentary evident, Otis K. Rice presents an account that frees,
as much as possible, fact from fiction, event from legend. He weighs the
evidence carefully, avoiding the partisanship and the attitude of
condescension and condemnation that have characterized many of the
writings concerning the feud.
He sets the feud in the social, political, economic, and cultural
context of eastern Kentucky and southwestern West Virginia in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By examining the legacy of the
Civil War, the weakness of institutions such as the church and education
system, the exaggerated importance of family, the impotence of the law,
and the isolation of the mountain folk, Rice gives new meaning to the
origins and progress of the feud. These conditions help explain why the
Hatfield and McCoy families, which have produced so many fine citizens,
could engage in such a bitter and prolonged vendetta
