For long years the mountain section remained a wilderness, with here and there a small settlement. The inhabitants lived the lives of frontiersmen and were generally poor. While many of them owned large tracts of land, its productiveness scarcely repaid the labor spent in cultivation. The great majority of these people were honest, upright and hardworking, but the wilderness, the frontier, unfortunately attracts the vicious, the violent, the criminal, the shiftless, the outcast of better communities. Such characters have a pernicious influence upon those with whom they come in contact, especially upon the young and thoughtless fellows with a taste for viciousness.[2] The mountains of the surrounding states of Virginia, West Virginia and Tennessee offered admirable asylum to fugitives from justice of those States. As like seeks like, individuals and families of that stripe settled near each other, intermarried, and thus formed a dangerous element in an otherwise good population. Life in the wilderness, the frontier, is apt to bring out the true nature of the man, and his qualities, good or bad, are accentuated. The history of every frontier of this country is the same. The man who leaves the restraining influence of civilization behind him, becomes either _man_ or devil. If there is "dog-hair" in a man, the wilderness, the frontier, will sprout it. When the wicked element in a community had once gained a foothold, it organized against possible interference. Once organization was complete, all attempts to enforce law and order were promptly stifled through terrorization which intimidated courts and overawed the officers of the law. Under such circumstances the good element has but one alternative--to lie supinely on its back and ask to be killed, or to organize and strike back at the enemy, to destroy the vicious with powder and shot, in open fight, if possible, from ambush if necessary, as their sires fought in the days of the Indian. Herein lies the secret of the long-continued, bloody internecine strifes which have made the dark and bloody ground of the Indian days more dark and more bloody. Herein we find the ready and clear explanation of the fact that many men of unquestioned integrity and honor were thrown into the vortex of bloody strife from necessity, to fight for preservation of themselves, their families, their firesides. Immigration into these remote mountain regions was almost nil and intermarriage between the settlers became the rule. In this wise the population of any county comprised but very few distinct families. Everybody was of kin to everybody else, and therein we find the key to the difficulties encountered by courts in dealing with crime.