Case Study 2: How Newspapers Manufactured the

Case Study 2: How Newspapers Manufactured the "Feuding Hillbilly"

The Business of Sensationalism

In the winter of 1888, a reporter named T.C. Crawford boarded a train in New York City and headed south. He worked for Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, then locked in a savage circulation war with William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal. The contest between Pulitzer and Hearst — which historians would later call the era of yellow journalism — rewarded reporters who could deliver stories that were dramatic, shocking, and irresistibly readable. Nuance was not a selling point. Sensation was.

Crawford was heading to the Tug Fork Valley, where the New Year's Night Attack on Randall McCoy's cabin had just produced the kind of story the World specialized in: arson, murder, a young woman shot dead in the snow, a fleeing patriarch, and a remote mountain setting that practically begged to be described in terms of savage exoticism. The story had already been reported in regional papers — the Louisville Courier-Journal, the Wheeling Intelligencer, the Charleston Daily Mail — but Crawford's assignment was to bring it to a national audience, and to do so in a way that would make his readers feel they were peering into another world.

He succeeded beyond anyone's expectations. The articles Crawford produced from the Tug Fork Valley — published in the World in early 1888 and widely reprinted — did more than any other single body of work to create the image of the "feuding hillbilly" that persists in American culture to this day.

The Framing: How Crawford Saw What He Expected to See

Crawford spent several weeks in the Tug Fork region, traveling on horseback through the hollows, interviewing members of both the Hatfield and McCoy families, and gathering material for his series. He was a skilled reporter in the technical sense — his writing was vivid, his eye for detail was sharp, and his ability to create narrative momentum was considerable. What he was not was open to having his preconceptions challenged.

Crawford arrived in the mountains with a framework already in place — a framework drawn from the local color literature that had been depicting Appalachian people as quaint, primitive, and dangerous for the previous fifteen years. His articles read less like original reporting than like a confirmation of existing expectations.

Consider the language. Crawford described the Tug Fork Valley as a "wild region" inhabited by a "fierce, untamed people." He compared the mountaineers to "clansmen of the Scottish Highlands" — a romantic but dehumanizing analogy that cast his subjects as warriors of a primitive tribal society rather than as citizens of American states with functioning legal systems. He described their homes as hovels, their customs as barbaric, and their motivations as driven by blood loyalty rather than rational calculation.

What Crawford did not describe — or described only in passing, as curiosities that did not fit his narrative — were the elements of Tug Fork life that contradicted the "primitive" framework:

The courthouses in both Pike County, Kentucky, and Logan County, West Virginia, where Hatfields and McCoys had been filing lawsuits, recording deeds, and participating in the legal system for decades
The election precincts where both families voted and where the political stakes of local offices were well understood
The commercial timber operations that Devil Anse Hatfield ran, which involved contracts, employees, and market transactions
The literacy of many community members, evidenced by the letters, legal documents, and business records they produced
The diversity of opinion within both families and the broader community about the violence and how to stop it

These omissions were not random. They were structurally necessary for the story Crawford was telling. If the people of the Tug Fork Valley were literate, commercially active, legally engaged, and politically sophisticated, then the violence among them could not be explained as primitive savagery. It would have to be explained as something more complex — a product of specific legal failures, economic pressures, and political conflicts — and that story, while more accurate, was less entertaining and less flattering to Crawford's audience.

The Louisville Courier-Journal: Regional Amplification

While the New York World brought the feud to a national audience, the Louisville Courier-Journal — Kentucky's most powerful newspaper, edited by the formidable Henry Watterson — shaped the story for a regional audience with its own set of interests.

Watterson was one of the most influential editors in the post-Civil War South. His paper was the voice of Kentucky's business and political establishment, and that establishment had very specific ideas about what the state's mountain counties represented and what should be done about them.

The Courier-Journal's coverage of the Hatfield-McCoy feud — and of Appalachian violence more generally — consistently framed the mountain counties as zones of lawlessness that required strong intervention from the state government. Watterson editorialized that the feuding was evidence that mountain communities were incapable of self-governance and that the state needed to assert its authority through military force if necessary.

This framing served multiple interests simultaneously:

Political interests. Watterson and the Bluegrass establishment he represented wanted to consolidate state power at the expense of local autonomy in the mountain counties, where political machines operated semi-independently and where county-level power brokers like Devil Anse Hatfield wielded authority that Frankfort could not easily override.

Economic interests. The railroad companies and coal operators who were preparing to move into eastern Kentucky needed a legal and political environment that would protect their investments. The image of the mountains as lawless and dangerous justified the extension of state authority (in the form of courts, militia, and law enforcement) that would, in practice, serve the interests of outside capital at least as much as it served the interests of local communities.

Cultural interests. The Bluegrass elite of central Kentucky — families whose wealth derived from horse breeding, tobacco, and bourbon — had their own identity to maintain. Defining the mountain counties as backward and uncivilized reinforced the Bluegrass region's sense of its own sophistication and its claim to represent the "real" Kentucky.

The Courier-Journal's coverage, in other words, was not simply bad journalism. It was strategic journalism — reporting that served the interests of the paper's owners, advertisers, and political allies while presenting itself as neutral observation of a natural phenomenon.

The Stereotype Takes Shape

The combined effect of Crawford's World articles, the Courier-Journal's regional coverage, and the dozens of other newspapers that picked up and embellished the story was the creation of a stereotype that would prove almost indestructible: the feuding hillbilly.

The components of the stereotype were drawn from multiple sources and assembled into a character that, while fictional, was presented as documentary:

Isolation. The feuding hillbilly lived in a world cut off from civilization — no roads, no schools, no churches, no law. This was factually wrong (the Tug Fork communities had all of these things), but it was narratively essential: isolation explained why the violence occurred and why outside intervention was necessary.

Primitivism. The feuding hillbilly was driven not by rational calculation but by instinct — blood loyalty, clan honor, the urge for revenge. This characterization denied the feudists' agency and intelligence, transforming them from people making strategic decisions in a complex environment into automatons following a biological or cultural script.

Violence as identity. The feuding hillbilly was defined by violence — it was not something he did under specific circumstances but something he was. Violence was presented as constitutive of mountain character, not as a response to specific provocations, legal failures, or economic pressures. This essentializing move made it possible to apply the stereotype to all mountain people, not just the handful who had actually been involved in the feuds.

Whiskey and ignorance. The feuding hillbilly was invariably depicted as a drinker and as uneducated — two characteristics that reinforced the impression of primitive, uncontrolled behavior. That the Tug Fork Valley contained teetotalers, schoolteachers, and literate businesspeople alongside its whiskey drinkers was irrelevant to the stereotype.

Amusement value. Perhaps most insidiously, the feuding hillbilly was entertaining. Newspapers presented the feud stories with a combination of horror and humor that invited readers to be simultaneously appalled and amused by the antics of these peculiar people. The tone was never one of genuine empathy or serious analysis. It was the tone of a spectator at a sideshow — fascinated, superior, and fundamentally disconnected from the humanity of the people on display.

The Feedback Loop: How the Stereotype Sustained Itself

Once established, the feuding hillbilly stereotype created a feedback loop that made it self-sustaining.

Newspapers had discovered that feud stories sold papers. This created an economic incentive to produce more feud stories. Reporters were dispatched to the mountains with instructions to find feuds — and they found them, because the same structural conditions (weak institutions, jurisdictional confusion, economic transformation) that had produced the Hatfield-McCoy conflict were producing similar conflicts throughout the Appalachian interior. The French-Eversole feud in Perry County, the Martin-Tolliver feud in Rowan County, the Baker-Howard feud in Clay County — each was reported through the same "feuding hillbilly" framework, and each reinforced the impression that violence was endemic to mountain culture.

The feedback loop had several components:

Selection bias. Newspapers covered the violence in the mountains with enormous attention but ignored the peaceable, productive, and unremarkable daily lives of the vast majority of mountain people. This created an impression of constant violence that was wildly disproportionate to reality.
Confirmation bias. Reporters who arrived in the mountains looking for evidence of primitivism found it — because every community contains material that can be read as primitive when observed through the right lens. The same behaviors (hunting, whiskey distilling, religious fervor, dialect speech) that were unremarkable in other American settings became evidence of backwardness when observed in the mountains.
Narrative momentum. Each new feud story built on the ones that came before, accumulating into a body of coverage that made the "feuding hillbilly" seem not like a journalistic construction but like an established fact. By the 1890s, the stereotype was so well known that a reporter could invoke it with a single phrase — "another mountain feud" — and readers would fill in the rest from their own accumulated impressions.
Absence of counter-narrative. The people who were being stereotyped had no comparable access to the national media. Mountain communities had local newspapers, but these papers reached local audiences. The national narrative was controlled by national publications, and those publications had no interest in stories that complicated or contradicted the feuding hillbilly image. A story about a mountain county with good schools, peaceful communities, and a functioning legal system was not news. A story about a shooting was.

The Long Shadow

The newspaper coverage of the Appalachian feuds in the 1880s and 1890s created a template that has been applied to the region ever since. The specific content changes — feuds gave way to coal wars, coal wars to poverty, poverty to opioids, opioids to political caricature — but the structure remains the same: Appalachian people are presented as different from, and inferior to, the rest of America, and the explanation for their difference is located in their character rather than in the structures that surround them.

Every time a national newspaper publishes a story about Appalachia that leads with images of poverty, every time a television show uses mountain dialect as a marker of ignorance, every time a politician explains Appalachian voting patterns as a product of cultural backwardness rather than rational response to economic conditions — the "feuding hillbilly" template is at work. The original articles by T.C. Crawford and his contemporaries have been forgotten, but the framework they established is alive and thriving.

Understanding how that framework was created — in the specific context of the 1880s newspaper industry, with its specific economic incentives and competitive pressures — is the first step toward recognizing it when it appears in modern form. The "feuding hillbilly" was not discovered in the mountains. He was manufactured in newsrooms. And every time the stereotype is deployed, the newsroom's work continues.

Discussion Questions

T.C. Crawford was a skilled reporter who produced vivid, engaging copy. Does the quality of his writing make his stereotyping more or less dangerous? How does the relationship between good storytelling and accurate representation complicate our evaluation of journalism?
The Louisville Courier-Journal's coverage served the interests of its advertisers and political allies. How does this compare to modern media outlets whose coverage of Appalachia (or other marginalized regions) may serve the interests of their audiences, advertisers, or political affiliations?
The feedback loop described in this case study — selection bias, confirmation bias, narrative momentum, absence of counter-narrative — operates in many contexts beyond Appalachian stereotyping. Can you identify a contemporary example where this same loop is at work? What would it take to break it?
Mountain people in the 1880s had no effective way to challenge the national narrative being constructed about them. How has the rise of social media and self-publishing changed (or not changed) the ability of stereotyped communities to contest the stories told about them?