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Thomas Price loved horses. In fact, he loved animals of all kinds. He also loved the southern mountains. He discovered Haywood County, North Carolina, during a vacation just before World War I and, like many, grew to love the region’s natural landscape and mild climate. He also developed a love and admiration for the people of western North Carolina that, while infused with paternalism, reflected real emotion. He established an extensive estate on Lickstone Mountain just south of Waynesville to which he took many sojourns from his job as secretary to the president of the Union Pacific Railroad. It was a place where he could spend his days surrounded by the mountains he loved and indulging his outdoor interests. By 1933, he had retired to a permanent residence in Haywood County, where he could enjoy the landscape, the wildlife, and his relationships with his neighbors. On the warm and clear morning of September 24, 1933, he and two companions —Virge Williams and Charlie Buchanan—rode up Lickstone Mountain, a ride through beautiful country that Price took regularly. They traveled together for most of the morning, Price on horseback and his companions on mules, and in the afternoon they turned back down the trail. About 2:30, near the top of the mountain and close to where his property abutted the Big Ridge mica mine, a man called out, “You’ve gone far enough.” “Who?” Price asked, reining his horse to a stop. “All of you,” the voice replied. Gunfire broke the day’s solitude. Williams and Buchanan were both wounded, but that horseback ride up Big Ridge would be Price’s last.1 At first glance, Price’s death appears to be a simple case of murder. A closer examination shows that the murder and the trial that followed offer The Murder of Thomas Price Chapter 13 Image, Identity, and Violence in Western North Carolina 380 Richard D. Starnes The Murder of Thomas Price 381 a glimpse at the persistent connections among image, identity, and violence in the Appalachian South. Since the Civil War, violence seemed a central component of Appalachia’s regional image. The bitter, divisive fighting that swept the region during the Civil War, the Hatfield-McCoy feud, labor unrest, and other widely circulated stories of mountain bloodshed provided ample evidence in the minds of many Americans that southern highlanders were a people defined by violence. Such perceptions often stemmed from the writings of missionaries, social reformers, and local colorists who flocked to the Mountain South to win souls, reform society, and document a place and a culture seemingly out of step with a modernizing America. Horace Kephart, who penned widely read observations of mountain life in nearby Swain County, North Carolina, described mountaineers as “unchecked by any stronger arms, inflamed by a multitude of personal wrongs, [and] habituated to the shedding of human blood,” a people accustomed to living a violent existence.2 Violence, specifically a primitive and visceral type of violence, seemed an essential and expected part of mountain life well into the twentieth century. Too often this perceived link between violence and Appalachian identity has been dismissed as the result of outsiders stereotyping southern mountaineers, but both Appalachians and outsiders influenced the ways violence affected regional identity. Outsiders did play powerful roles in shaping what being Appalachian meant, but Appalachians themselves were keenly aware of the ways outsiders perceived them, and they took steps to shape those perceptions. Therefore, to ask questions about Appalachian violence is to ask questions about the components—real or perceived—of regional identity. The Price murder presents an interesting study of the links between violence, image, and identity. When a prominent industrialist like Price met his end at the hands of mountaineers, the incident brought to the forefront the question of what it meant to be Appalachian . The murder and reaction to it at the local, state, regional, and national levels demonstrate that the construction of Appalachian identity remained a process mediated by both outsiders and mountaineers themselves and that for both, violence continued to play a central role.3 Although many facts in this case were disputed, one thing remained clear: Thomas Price was an outsider to the North Carolina mountains. Born in Wrexham, Wales, in 1875, Price migrated to America as a boy and soon became a clerk with Union Pacific. He worked his way up the corporate ladder, becoming secretary to the president in 1907. Price became prominent in Union Pacific’s railroad empire, serving as...

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