The New York Times
August 3, 1921
“The Primitive Mountaineer”
Hatfields and Mccoys are as famous in the West Virginia Mountains as ever Armstrongs and Eliots were on the Scotch Border. They carry on clan Feuds in the Ancient Way. Sometimes they do a little outside shooting from habit or to keep their hand in. They are a Curious Survival, a Sixteenth Century Fauna Flourishing in the Twentieth. They are of the Days before the Law. They Wage Private War.…
Sid, a pleasant Young Chap … Sometime the spirited Matewan Chief of Police, Perished in no Tribal Combat.… Sid and a Companion were Killed in front of the Court House. Who Fired the First Shot, after a Short Parley, Amicable at First, isn’t made clear; But Perhaps the Private Detective lively Acted his name. Surely, if Sid had got the “Draw,” an Artist of his Experience would have made full use of it. The Good behavior of the Crowd of Mountaineers Deserves a Kind Word. There was none of that Neurotic Excitement which would have blazed up in Communities of Ordinary Heredity.
It was an Orderly, Quiet and Successful shooting Match. That it took place in the shadow of a court house needn’t prompt us to any obvious Moralizing or Righteous Indignation. These men are of an Inheritance and Habit Apart. Only slow time can cure them. Meanwhile, time is not so slow in killing off their most Active Specimens.
THE NEWS OF SID’S killing whips and tumbles through the mining camps like a wind, spiraling in hearths and campfires and twisting the cap-lamp flames of men underground into new and furious shapes, horns and antlers of fire. All over the state, miners are coming down from the hills, rising up out of the ground. They gather in a holler fifty miles north of Matewan, summoned by whisper and ire. They have cut the telegraph lines around their encampment and set out armed patrols on the roads, carrying a motley assortment of weaponry. Sleek rifles, double-barreled family mantelpieces, and outsized revolvers from the previous century, exhumed from dusty bureau drawers or attic trunks.
They are men long accustomed to the flickering darkness of the mines, men who’ve learned the bravest of their kind can be shot dead in the street and no one will care. The greatest newspaper in the land will make light of his death. Will say he deserved it. And the public will hardly hear, deaf to their cause.
They are a hundred men at first, then two hundred. Five hundred. One thousand. An army of men rising from the earth, clad in blue-bib overalls. They hail from Italy and Poland, the Deep South and Appalachia. One in five is Black. They wear red bandannas knotted around their necks, as if their throats have already been cut.
People will call them primitives and hillbillies, anarchists and insurrectionists.
They will call them Rednecks.