Violence in the Coalfields

A strike roils the area where Hatfields and McCoys feuded

A stranger coming upon the gorgeous green mountains soaring over the Tug Fork Valley of West Virginia near the Kentucky border would not, at first glance, suspect that a combat zone was at hand. Yet for more than a century, bloody civil strife has roiled the region embraced by Mingo County, W. Va., and Pike County, Ky. There in the late 1800s, the Hatfield and McCoy families began a feud so lethal and long that it became legend. Then in 1920 the early struggles of the region's coal miners to unionize exploded into a fray that left nine people dead and...

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