Publisher's Synopsis
Sacrificing the lives of their families as well as their own, the mountaineers of western Virginia fought the wars and conquered the wilderness, ensuring the sovereignty of the fledgling United States. Their needs were ignored, however, by the very government they fought to create. Forced to pay taxes and then forced to remain part of a slave state that would rape them of their natural resources, the war-savvy but war-weary mountaineers of western Virginia took advantage of the civil unrest of the 1860s and aplayed both ends against the middle, a claiming the mountains of western Virginia as their own.
