Robert Tanenbaum - Absolute rage

After making some notes on the blank sheets thoughtfully provided at the back of the binder, he turned to the Robbens County report. He had expected the usual dry bureaucratic prose. Instead he found a fluidly written and absorbing history of what seemed to be a remarkable, if grim, piece of the nation. The county had been settled in the late eighteenth century, by Scotch-Irish farmers on the run from poverty or worse. They were feisty, independent, clannish people, the original pioneer stock that produced people like Daniel Boone and Andrew Jackson.

Those of them who might have been a little too feisty and clannish to invent great nations settled in the hills and hollows of the Appalachians and stuck. There they cut down the ancient forests of hickory, oak, and chestnut and built little farms and sawmills and fought the Cherokees and, on occasion, the agents of the United States, who tried to collect taxes on the corn liquor that was their principal source of income. The fields were small, rocky, and steep-not a prosperous sort of farmland, but at least they did not have to chop wood to keep warm. Great boulders of coal stood out from the hillsides, and many people started to mine it in a small way, for local use. In 1787, a vein of hematite was found near Ponowon in the western part of the county, and they started a furnace at Furnace Cove, nearby. They began making nails and ploughs, knives and fowling pieces. Around this nascent industry, small towns sprang up. Donald McCullen deeded land to the settlement that bore his name in 1793, and a few years afterward it became the county seat of Robbens County, that named for an otherwise forgotten legislator. For the next fifty years, the nation flowed around them westward, leaving the people to their strictly local concerns. Though poor, the people were nearly self-sufficient. Bartering was the rule in that economy. What little cash arrived in the place came from the stills. Corn liquor was the only product worth carrying over the rough trails that connected Robbens to the country of which it was nominally a part.

Among the people who arrived in the county during this period were Josiah Cade (b. 1810) and Ephraim Jonson (b. 1815). Cade settled on Burnt Peak, Jonson on Belo Knob to the east. Both married locally and raised families and attracted kin from other states and the old country. Cade had five sons and two daughters, and Jonson had four sons and one daughter. Somewhere around 1856, the two men fell into a dispute about a boundary between two adjoining fields. They went to law, and Jonson won his case. Cade was ordered to move his boundary markers. This he refused to do and ordered his sons Lemuel and Ransome to drive a herd of cattle to pasture on the disputed land. When this action was challenged by James and Peter Jonson, Ephraim's eldest sons, shooting broke out. In the affray, Peter Jonson was badly wounded, and Lem Cade was killed.

This was the origin of the Cade-Jonson feud, or war, as the report called it. In the next four years, two Cades and four Jonsons were shot from ambush. Barns were burned. Cattle were poisoned. Dogs were hung from trees. Shortly thereafter, actual war came to the region, when Virginia seceded from the Union and West Virginia seceded from its mother state. Although there were no formal contests of uniformed troops in Robbens during the Civil War, nearly the entire able-bodied male population of the town engaged in hostilities at some level. The report made it clear that the War Between the States was considered an excuse to escalate the War Between the Cades and the Jonsons. The surviving Jonson boys went to Harpers Ferry to enlist with the Union. Immediately thereafter, the surviving Cade boys trooped to Knoxville to sign up with the rebels. In the county, guerrilla warfare was continual for the duration of the conflict. Both sides easily obtained arms from the belligerents. By war's end only one son survived in each family-Moses Jonson and Ransome Cade.

Appomattox did not bring an end to the sniping and ambushes. Of the ten children, male and female, of Moses and Ransome, only two escaped murder long enough to survive into the twentieth century. Of the two, the report took particular notice of Ransome Cade (1864-1937), who brought a new level of ferocity and cunning to the feud. Devil Rance, as he was known, moved his clan away from its agricultural roots, replacing this as a source of income with a variety of criminal enterprises. He ran moonshine; he stole horses and rustled cattle; he could break a limb or a head for cash up front. He also ran a primitive protection racket among the local illicit distilleries. Most significantly, he consolidated the tribal property into a single hollow around Canker Run on Burnt Peak. This settlement was approachable only by a narrow, winding road and was surrounded on three sides by nearly impenetrable growth. From this fortress, Devil Rance fell like a robber baron upon his enemies and retreated with impunity. He held to the theory that the secession of West Virginia had been an illegal act, and that the state had no authority over him or his. Moreover, neither had the United States, since Virginia had seceded from the Union and the part of it that comprised West Virginia had never been legally reincorporated. It was not a theory that Karp would have liked arguing before a court, but Devil Rance was not all that interested in courts anyway. Courts had failed his tribe once; he was not inclined to give them another chance.

Into this parochial violence now barged the Gilded Age in the person of Thomas G. (Big Tom) Killebrew. Killebrew was a McCullensburg man whose family had been involved in small-scale coal mining for decades, all for the local market. But Killebrew was a traveling man and visionary. He had been to Knoxville on horseback and even to Pittsburgh. He had ridden on a railroad train and seen streets lit with gas. Quietly at first, and then brazenly, Killebrew began to buy up all the coal rights in Robbens County. Some people refused to sell, but Big Tom was not daunted. He soon concluded that the muscle that kept the moonshiners in line might be put to other uses. An agreement was reached with Devil Rance. Soon, after a brief terror, Killebrew had all the coal leases, save one. In gratitude, he gave his partner his very own coal patch, right up there near the Cade home place on Burnt Peak.

With the leases in hand, Big Tom ventured out to Pittsburgh again and talked with Mellons, and to New York to converse with Goulds. The result was the construction of the Huntington amp; Knoxville Railroad, which reached McCullensburg in the fall of 1889. Killebrew was, of course, a partner in the railroad, for the construction of which large numbers of Italian and Slovak immigrants were recruited. As soon as the railroad was finished, he began his mining operation, fittingly called the Majestic Coal Company.

Karp was distracted at the next chapter, an account of the worst labor violence in U.S. history, by a change in the motion of the plane. It was banking counterclockwise and seemed to be descending.

Hendricks was in the aisle, leaning over him. "How's that report?"

"It's fascinating. It reads like fiction. Is it on the level?"

"Like what?"

"Oh, here where it says fourteen revenue agents have gone missing in the county since 1900. Fourteen?"

"That's only the federals. We lost some state boys, too, over the years. They don't much like lawmen poking into them hollers up there. Plus, you got to consider that the county is stuck full of mines like a Swiss cheese, and you got boys up there with unlimited access to blasting compound. Stick a couple of bodies down a shaft and dump sixty tons of rock on top of 'em. What're you gonna do? Start digging with a pick and shovel? We know they run meth, they run pot, some corn liquor, too, but not as much as they used to. It's a bad situation. If you want to know the truth, the law wrote off Robbens County a while back."