A link to Joan Boyd's aforementioned "Fountain Filled With Blood" in the DT archives.

If you find Harry Caudill's Night Comes to the Cumberlands relevant, you might also consider Kai Ericson's Everything in Its Path, a sociological study of the Buffalo Creek Flood (caused when a mining dam gave way) and why the community was unable to put itself back together following the disaster--the traumas of the mining wars era impacting a much later time period. It's a book with scholarly footnotes, but it reads like a great novel.

--Charlie Baum