Scott here with another episode of the History and Plug podcast.

The origins of the Hatfield-McCoy feud between the Hatfield family of West Virginia,

led by William Anderson Hatfield, and the McCoy family of Kentucky, led by Randolph-McCoy,

began with a dispute over a pig.

From there, it escalated from minor disagreements to

violent encounters to a full-blown feud that spanned for decades, nearly sparking a war between

the two states. The feud between the two families quickly took root in American imagination.

Mark Twain made fun of it in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, where Huck describes a feud is when

one man kills another man and then his brother

kills him, that brother kills the other family member, then the cousins get involved, and it goes

on and on and on until everyone's killed and there's no one left, but it's kind of slow and takes

a long time. But the feud speaks in many other aspects of America and life in the 19th century,

vigilanteism, extrajudicial means of justice, what to do to settle disputes when a magistrate or a

courthouse was tens or hundreds of miles away, how a small matter could spiral completely out of

control. To explore this feud, to set it in the context of America at the Times, today's guest

Jennifer Benny, hosts of the Walk With History podcast. We look at the historical context of the feud,

its escalation from minor dispute to violent encounter, its significance in American folklore, and how even

though the descendants of the family signed a symbolic peace treaty in 2003, bad feelings still linger,

and how long disputes like these can last. Hope you enjoy this discussion.

And one more thing before we get started with this episode, a quick break for word from our sponsors.

If you're like me, you never have as much time to read as you want to.

Honestly, it's hard to sit down and carve out the time to read a book.

...