Echoes of Appalachia

How a humble mountain root turned neighbor against neighbor—and sometimes, killer against killer

Roy Combs never locked his doors. Not his truck, not his toolshed, certainly not the old cedar chest where he kept his dried ginseng roots wrapped in newspaper. In the holler where he’d lived all his 58 years, everyone knew Roy. And everyone knew better than to touch another man’s sang.

That changed the fall the outsiders came.

They arrived in late September 2012—three men in a dented Ford pickup with Tennessee plates. At first, they just asked around Pineville, Kentucky about good digging spots. Polite enough. But by October, whispers spread through the county: they’d been seen on protected land in the Daniel Boone National Forest. Then private property. Then Roy’s family tract up on Big Double Creek.

Roy confronted them near the old mining road on October 11. His brother Asa would later tell investigators Roy came home shaking, not with fear but with cold anger. “They showed me a pistol,” Roy said. “Told me these hills don’t belong to nobody no more.”

The next morning, Roy went out digging alone.

The Bloody Harvest

They found his body at dusk, just as the autumn light was fading. Fifty yards from his favorite sang patch, Roy lay sprawled face-down in the leaf litter, the back of his skull crushed by what the coroner would later determine was a rock or maybe a shovel. His burlap sack, usually full this time of year, held just seven roots.

In most places, this would be a straightforward murder investigation. But in Appalachian Kentucky, where ginseng digging follows its own unwritten rules, Sheriff’s deputies faced a wall of silence.

“People here have been digging sang since before this was America,” explained retired game warden Carl Ledford. “There’s codes. You don’t take small roots. You replant the berries. And you sure as hell don’t steal another man’s patch.”

The Tennessee men disappeared the day after Roy’s body was found. Their abandoned truck turned up near the Virginia border, the bed loaded with nearly 40 pounds of freshly dug ginseng—enough to fetch $20,000 in the right markets. The keys were still in the ignition.

A Root Worth More Than Gold

Ginseng has fueled Appalachian economies since the 1700s, when traders first discovered Chinese merchants would pay a fortune for the gnarly, human-shaped roots. Today, with wild American ginseng selling for 500−500−1,000 per dried pound in Asian markets, the pressure on remaining patches has turned deadly.

“These aren’t just plants,” said University of Kentucky ethnobotanist Dr. Marybeth Collins. “For many families, this is the difference between keeping the lights on or not. When outsiders come in and strip an area clean, they’re not just taking roots—they’re stealing someone’s winter heat money.”

The violence isn’t new. Court records show ginseng-related assaults dating back to the 1920s. But the recent boom has brought a new brutality. In 2014, a Clay County man was beaten unconscious over a disputed patch. Two years later, wildlife officers in West Virginia found a poacher’s camp with a handwritten sign: “Trespassers will be buried with the sang.”

The Land Settles Its Own Debts

Back in Pineville, Roy’s case remains officially unsolved. The Tennessee men never resurfaced. Some say they got smart and left the state. Others tell darker stories—of deep-woods justice, of how the mountains have always dealt with thieves.

Asa Combs still digs ginseng on the family land. He’s added a new ritual: every autumn, when he finds the first mature plant, he presses a single silver dollar into the soil beneath it.

“Payment for what we take,” he says. “And reminder of what we owe.”

At the head of the holler, where the spring runs clear, a simple wooden cross stands between two young poplars. There’s no name, just three words carved into the wood:

Ginseng don’t forget.

About This Story:
This account is based on true events documented in Kentucky court records, interviews with law enforcement, and Appalachian oral histories.

-Tim Carmichael