wws/67; –and it went on awhile. Sgt. York, the doughboy hero of WWI, lost his father-in-law to a bullet fired in a Civil War fight, still going on in the hills. Low-intensity, not really much confrontation, but two clans which accepted not the slightest sign from eaach other, not a wrong look, nothing.

The famous Hatfield/McCoy feud was another of such (to quote from that wiki): The majority of the Hatfields living in Mingo County (in what would eventually become West Virginia), fought for the Confederacy in the American Civil War. The majority of the McCoys living in Pike County, Kentucky fought for the Union army. The first real violence in the feud was the murder of a returning Union soldier, Asa Harmon McCoy. Harmon was killed by a group of ex-Confederates Homeguard called the “Logan Wildcats.” “Devil Anse” Hatfield was a suspect at first, but was later confirmed to have been at home, sick, at the time of the murder. However, it was widely believed that his uncle Jim Vance, a member of the Wildcats, committed the murder.

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The escalation reached its peak during the 1888 New Years Night Massacre. Several of the Hatfield gang surrounded the McCoy cabin and opened fire on the sleeping family. The cabin was set on fire in an effort to drive Randal McCoy into the open. He escaped by making a break but two of his children were murdered and his wife was beaten and left for dead. The remaining McCoy family moved to Pikeville to escape the West Virginia raiding parties.

Between 1880 and 1891, the feud claimed more than a dozen members of the two families, becoming headline news around the country, and compelling the governors of both Kentucky and West Virginia to call up their state militias to restore order[citation needed] The Governor of West Virginia once even threatened to have his militia invade Kentucky.

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The trial of Johnse Hatfield was the last of the feud trials. It took place in 1901.

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On June 14, 2003, on the initiative of Reo Hatfield, an actual peace treaty was drawn up and signed in Pikeville by representatives of the two families, even though the feud had ended over a century before. The idea was symbolic: to show that Americans could bury their differences and unite in times of crisis, most notably following the September 11 attacks.

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