Chapter One

Jim Farley lived on the other side of life, which in the Kanawha Valley, meant the other side of Charleston, and up on the hill. South Hills, as it was called, may not have had 90 percent of all the money of the valley to be enjoyed by the 5 percent of the valley's population that lived there, but they worked hard to convince the rest of the world that they did. Many people called it "Snob Hill."

Jim didn't live amongst the elite, nor was he wealthy by any means; rather, he lived on the fringe of the most exclusive subdivision and made a good living in the small business he had started.

The modest home he had built with his own hands was situated on part of what had originally been the farm of his grandfather, a proud though dirt-poor individualist of pioneer stock, who was extremely covetous of his land.

Before the Civil War, the land and the people of western Virginia had always been different. East of the mountains was a country of vast plantations, a slave state whose people were largely of English ancestry. There the political power of Virginia resided, and there the legislature spent the public's money for schools, roads, and other internal improvements. West of the Appalachian ridges was a land of small hill-country farms tended by non-slave-owning individualists of Scotch-Irish, German, Welsh, and English descent. Jim Farley was truly an original West Virginia hillbilly, having a mixture of all the abovementioned blood coursing through his veins.

The focus of these counties was to the north and west, away from the slave-dominated society of