The thing about Joe Wade was that he wasn’t a bad guy. Not inside. He’d come up in the valley too. His family had had to choose in the end, just like he was asking these farmers to. But that’s exactly why they resented him: he was a local face to an outside menace. The big man here to squash the small-timers, even though he was just trying to hold the whole place together.
He felt for the farmers, he really did. He’d grown up here on his father’s homestead. He admired the way of life: deeply-rooted in the land, noble, yet completely beholden the whims of nature and the raging torrents of the river and the modern economy.