Outliers, The Story of Success

1.

In the southeastern corner of Kentucky, in the stretch of the Appalachian Mountains known as the Cumberland Plateau, lies a small town called Harlan.

The Cumberland Plateau is a wild and mountainous region of flat-topped ridges, mountain walls five hundred to a thousand feet high, and narrow valleys, some wide enough only for a one-lane road and a creek. When the area was first settled, the plateau was covered with a dense primeval forest. Giant tulip poplars grew in the coves and at the foot of the hills, some with trunks as wide as seven or eight feet in diameter. Alongside them were white oaks, beeches, maples, walnuts, sycamores, birches, willows, cedars, pines, and hemlocks, all enmeshed in a lattice of wild grapevine, comprising one of the greatest assortment of forest trees in the Northern Hemisphere. On the ground were bears and mountain lions and rattlesnakes; in the treetops, an astonishing array of squirrels; and beneath the soil, one thick seam after another of coal.

Harlan County was founded in 1819 by eight immigrant families from the northern regions of the British Isles. They had come to Virginia in the eighteenth century and then moved west into the Appalachians in search of land. The county was never wealthy. For its first one hundred years, it was thinly populated, rarely numbering more than ten thousand people. The first settlers kept pigs and herded sheep on the hillsides, scratching out a living on small farms in the valleys. They made whiskey in backyard stills and felled trees, floating them down the Cumberland River in the spring, when the water was high. Until well into the twentieth century, getting to the nearest train station was a two-day wagon trip. The only way out of town was up Pine Mountain, which was nine steep miles on a road that turned on occasion into no more than a muddy, rocky trail. Harlan was a remote and strange place, unknown by the larger society around it, and it might well have remained so but for the fact that two of the town's founding familiesthe Howards and the Turnersdid not get along.

The patriarch of the Howard clan was Samuel Howard. He built the town courthouse and the jail. His counterpart was William Turner, who owned a tavern and two general stores. Once a storm blew down the fence to the Turner property, and a neighbor's cow wandered onto their land. William Turner's grandson, “Devil Jim,” shot the cow dead. The neighbor was too terrified to press charges and fled the county. Another time, a man tried to open a competitor to the Turners' general store. The Turners had a word with him. He closed the store and moved to Indiana. These were not pleasant people.

One night Wix Howard and “Little Bob” Turnerthe grandsons of Samuel and William, respectivelyplayed against each other in a game of poker. Each accused the other of cheating. They fought. The following day they met in the street, and after a flurry of gunshots, Little Bob Turner lay dead with a shotgun blast to the chest. A group of Turners went to the Howards' general store and spoke roughly to Mrs. Howard. She was insulted and told her son Wilse Howard, and the following week he exchanged gunfire with another of Turner's grandsons, young Will Turner, on the road to Hagan, Virginia. That night one of the Turners and a friend attacked the Howard home. The two families then clashed outside the Harlan courthouse. In the gunfire, Will Turner was shot and killed. A contingent of Howards then went to see Mrs. Turner, the mother of Will Turner and Little Bob, to ask for a truce. She declined: “You can't wipe out that blood,” she said, pointing to the dirt where her son had died.

Things quickly went from bad to worse. Wilse Howard ran into “Little George” Turner near Sulphur Springs and shot him dead. The Howards ambushed three friends of the Turnersthe Cawoodskilling all of them. A posse was sent out in search of the Howards. In the resulting gunfight, six more were killed or wounded. Wilse Howard heard the Turners were after him, and he and a friend rode into Harlan and attacked the Turner home. Riding back, the Howards were ambushed. In the fighting, another person died. Wilse Howard rode to Little George Turner's house and fired at him but missed and killed another man. A posse surrounded the Howard home. There was another gunfight. More dead. The county was in an uproar. I think you get the picture. There were places in nineteenthcentury America where people lived in harmony. Harlan, Kentucky, was not one of them.

“Stop that!” Will Turner's mother snapped at him when he staggered home, howling in pain after being shot in the courthouse gun battle with the Howards. “Die like a man, like your brother did!” She belonged to a world so well acquainted with fatal gunshots that she had certain expectations about how they ought to be endured. Will shut his mouth, and he died.