Hatfields and McCoys

[katieParticipant]

Has anyone else been watching these? I actually had no idea who these people were (my boyfriend: the public school system failed you lol), and so i only watched it because my boyfriend was interested in it. i saw part one and part two last night…

so maybe its just because i never knew about these people, but i had some questions about them.

why do they go to each others parties/the same parties? the daughter and son only meet because they are at the same party/bbq thing. the one guys brother is killed because they are at the same party. if they really hate each other so much i would think they wouldnt associate with the other family at all, right?

did people back then just stab and shoot at will? when the one brother dies, before he is shot, the guys are stabbing him like crazy! i would think that with the spotty medicine back then that would be a death sentence. i mean the flu was a death sentence right? and also, when the brothers are looking for their sister and they see her kissing the son from the other family they freaking shoot him, and hes fine. did that happen a lot? you just recover from gun shots back then? were the bullets just that small or something?

and then why wouldnt that aunt let the guy from the other family see his kid and the mother/girl he loves? everyone knows thats his kid. i thought that was odd, because it wasnt like there was a question of paternity.

[BradParticipant]

“did people back then just stab and shoot at will?” No. Contrary to what Hollywood wants you to believe, murders were actually fairly rare in the west. Most of the violence that occured was between Americans and Native Americans. That’s actually one of the reasons that events such as this one or Wyatt Earp are so popular/immortalized is because they’re one offs. If you compare the crime rate statistics on a per 100 persons basis the east still had far more crimes compared to the west (even after adjusting for the population differences).

As for your first question, yes I plan to watch it but I’m waiting until the weekend as I have too much to do before then. I’ll probably watch part 1 friday.

[katieParticipant]

Haha brad when you posted about it on Facebook I texted my boyfriend to remind him it was on… So you can take credit for this.

So murder was very rare… Does this mean the hatfeilds/mccoys really did just kill each other? They were the weird ones who killed people all the time?

[BradParticipant]

Here’s the wiki on the incidents. It wasn’t a long standing war that had daily violence or anything like that, just a few acts in between many months. The miniseries might make it look like 1 continuous event for simplicities’ and drama’s sake though. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatfield%E2%80%93McCoy_feud

[matchaParticipant]

I’m related through my great(great? I can’t remember)grandmother to the Hatfields. I found this out while I was in high school and was really surprised.

[ChemEParticipant]

I just watched this over the weekend and I thought it was good. I ever really knew much about the feud, just the names. And these guys were in the east, in WV and KY, not necessarily considered “the west”.

It was weird that they kept socializing. But at the same time, back then families didn’t seem to spread out much and it seemed like there were a hell of a lot of Hatfields and McCoys in each of those towns, so I think just the proximity of it probably made them interact more than they wanted. But then, they seemed to enjoy being around each other and killing each other, so maybe they didn’t try separate themselves.

I’m not sure about the wounds/sickness. I imagine a lot of people survived gunshot wounds and a lot didn’t, but it may just be circumstances. It seemed like they were either shots that went all the way through and in non-critical areas, or grazes like the kid who got shot kissing the girl. But then who knows.

Just seemed kind of odd/unfair that the 2 patriarchs of the families survived while all their family members got killed over their initial dislike. And on top of that, those families must not have liked each other that much before the feud really took off, they were really quick to start hating each other when it seemed that perhaps the families were friendly at one point.

[BradParticipant]

I think before the war they were friendly/neutral towards each other before the war. The problems started when one of the McCoy’s fought for the North (the frist guy that the uncle murdered). Then things just snowballed from there.

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