Blood Feud Read online

  BLOOD

  FEUD

  Also by Lisa Alther:

  Nonfiction

  Kinfolks: Falling Off the Family Tree—the Search for My Melungeon Ancestors

  Fiction

  Kinflicks

  Original Sins

  Other Women

  Bedrock

  Birdman and the Dancer

  Five Minutes in Heaven

  Washed in the Blood

  Copyright © 2012 by Lisa Alther

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission should be addressed to Globe Pequot Press, Attn: Rights and Permissions Department, PO Box 480, Guilford, CT 06437.

  Lyons Press is an imprint of Globe Pequot Press.

  Family trees designed by Sally Neale

  Maps by Melissa Baker © Morris Book Publishing, LLC

  Text design: Sheryl P. Kober

  Project editor: Meredith Dias

  Layout: Justin Marciano

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  ISBN 978-0-7627-7918-5

  Printed in the United States of America

  E-ISBN 978-0-7627-8534-6

  For Ava, who inspired this project and enriches my life

  The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.

  —OSCAR WILDE

  Maps

  Introduction: Murderland

  PART 1: ORIGINS

  1 The Path to Pikeville

  2 Dark and Bloody Ground

  3 Border States

  PART 2: AVENGEMENT

  4 Hog Trial

  5 Montagues and Capulets of the Cumberlands

  6 Pawpaw Murders

  7 Devil Anse and the Hellhounds

  8 New Year’s Night Massacre

  9 All Over but the Shouting

  10 “The Hatfields Made Me Do It!”

  PART 3: AFTERMATH

  11 Survivors

  12 Other Feuds

  13 The Corsica of America

  14 The Inner Hillbilly

  15 Man Toys

  Epilogue: The Hatfield-McCoy Industry

  Acknowledgments

  Appendix: “Green Are the Woods” by Abner Vance

  Endnotes

  Selected Bibliography

  Murderland

  I don’t know when I first heard about the Hatfield-McCoy feud; I can’t recall ever not knowing about it. Nor can I remember ever being unaware of the stereotype of the hillbilly that the feud spawned: the dullard with bib overalls, messy beard, slouch hat, and bare feet, rifle in one hand and jug of moonshine in the other. This character appeared in the cartoon strips Snuffy Smith and L’il Abner, at which I chuckled every Sunday in the funny pages in my East Tennessee hometown of Kingsport. Later, once my family owned a television set, this same caricatured creature showed up on Hee Haw, The Beverly Hillbillies, The Real McCoys, and Petticoat Junction.

  The Waltons and The Andy Griffith Show provided more sympathetic variations on the theme, portraying Southern mountain people as merely innocent and backward, rather than as stupid, lazy, drunk, and venal—or, as one feud reporter described them: “dull as death when sober and . . . when drunk . . . simply quarrelsome and murderous.”1

  Although we lived in a river valley in the heart of the southern Appalachians, my family, friends, and I didn’t think of ourselves as hillbillies. We, too, mocked the panting and the gospel music of the evangelical preachers on the radio. We worked hard to erase our accents and the dialect common to Appalachian people. We ridiculed the grammar “mistakes” (that I have since come to value as remnants of ancient speech patterns). L’il Abner, Snuffy Smith, John Boy, and Jed Clampett weren’t us. We were sophisticated, clean, well-dressed, intelligent, peace-loving, polite folks, more like Scarlett O’Hara and Ashley Wilkes than Daisy Mae Yokum and Jethro Bodine.

  Hillbillies were the farmers who gathered downtown by the train station on Saturday mornings. They came into town in battered trucks, dressed in suit jackets, overalls, and starched white shirts. They chatted and spat tobacco juice on the sidewalk while their wives and children window-shopped at Woolworth’s Five and Dime. Hillbillies inhabited the shacks my family passed when we drove to our farm in the hills outside town on weekends. Hillbillies had chickens on their front porches, petunias growing in bald tires in their front yards, colored glass bottles stuck on the branches of their trees, and fighting cocks chained to blue plastic cages. Their children rolled naked in the dirt, while their menfolk, in tattered T-shirts, tinkered with the carcasses of junked cars.

  But when I went to college in Massachusetts during the civil rights years and watched the racial convulsions of the Deep South, I began to realize that the mountain South differed somewhat from the plantation South. There had been slavery in the Southern mountains, but the terrain had been too rough for plantations, so those who had slaves had very few. When I was growing up, only about 7 percent of our town was black.2

  I began to suspect that I was not a fugitive from Tara after all—I was a hillbilly. This harsh truth had been concealed from me because, according to the stereotypes in circulation, hillbillies were supposed to be quaint and impoverished rural folks. But our town was a booming industrial center where most citizens made living wages, and some did much better than that.

  My grandfather and father were physicians, and my grandparents belonged to the local professional set that had sought, welcomed, and befriended industrial entrepreneurs from the North when the town was founded early in the twentieth century. Colonel Palmer from New Hampshire, who ran the Kingsport Press, lived just down the street from us, and his wife played bridge with my grandmother. So did the wife of Max Parker from Boston, who ran a textile mill. John B. Dennis, the Columbia graduate from Maine who had incorporated the town, lived just across the river from my grandparents in a mansion that had survived the Civil War. These Yankees lived large in Kingsport, like the British in India under the Raj, and my grandparents had tried to copy their example.

  One summer afternoon in 2007, I attended a reunion of my father’s family, the Reeds, held at a Dunkard church in Kentucky some ten miles, as the crow flies, from the Tug Fork Valley, where the Hatfield-McCoy feud took place.* After running away from his sister’s farm in Virginia following the deaths of his parents when he was a boy, my grandfather Reed lived first with his older brother, Madison, on Johns Creek, just over a ridge from the Tug Fork, which separates Kentucky from West Virginia. Then he moved to his brother Robert’s house, not far from this Dunkard church.

  The matriarch of the Reed clan, who has organized our reunion for many years, is Ava Reed McCoy. She is the youngest daughter of my grandfather’s brother Robert, a carpenter and a Dunkard preacher. “Dunkard” is a nickname for the Church of the Brethren, originally a German sect that based its beliefs and practices on the New Testament and especially on the Sermon on the Mount. One of the three historic “peace churches,” along with Quakers and Mennonites, Dunkards traditionally embrace simplicity, humility, and pacifism.

  Ava is a tall, slender, handsome woman with silver hair and high cheekbones. Her father was said to have been seven feet tall, as was her uncle Madison. At just six feet four inches, my father and grandfather were the family shrimps. Ava also has the same distinctive long earlobes as my father and grandfather. My father and Ava, who hadn’t known each other as children, became close friends in their later years. Each could talk to the other about long-dead relatives whom no one else still alive knew anything about.

  Ava was a McCoy
by marriage, but I didn’t give it much thought. A couple of years after the reunion, when I was visiting her in her neat, cozy house in Huntington, West Virginia, she asked me, “Did you know that my husband, Homer, was one of the Fighting McCoys?” I said no, and she proceeded to tell me what had been passed down to her from her husband and her family members who were alive at the time of the feud. She said that everyone she knew talked about the feud all the time, whereas other McCoy descendants to whom I spoke while writing this book said that no one in their households would ever utter a word about it.

  Ava spoke of the fear she used to feel while visiting friends on the West Virginia side of the Tug Fork when she heard a band of drunken men gallop by outside at night, shooting their guns into the air. She wasn’t born until twenty-five years after the feud ended, but she spec­ulated that she might have absorbed that fear from her elders, who had lived through an era when thundering hoofbeats outside could spell death and disaster.

  Ava said that her husband, Homer, wasn’t closely related to Randolph “Ranel” McCoy, the feud leader of the McCoy clan. But a look at their family tree revealed that Homer’s grandfather, William, was a first cousin to Ranel and a brother of Ranel’s wife, Sarah. Neither William’s name nor that of his son Johnson, Homer’s father, appears in the extensive feud literature. They, like several other McCoy families, left the feud region to escape the hostilities, moving to Catlettsburg, Kentucky, and returning only after the feud had ended. Just to further confuse family loyalties, one of Johnson’s sisters married a Hatfield. It was startling to find such a close connection to the feud right within my own family, and it turned out to be the first of several that I later discovered.

  I had always regarded the Hatfield-McCoy feud with derision, at what I saw as the drunken antics of dim-witted psychopaths fighting over the ownership of a hog. But as I researched the topic, it soon became clear not only that I myself have more than one dog in this unfortunate fight but also that derision is hardly an appropriate response to a tragedy with such far-reaching consequences.

  The Hatfield-McCoy feud took place during the last decades of the nineteenth century along the Tug Fork, which forms the boundary between Kentucky and West Virginia. A newspaper reporter, writing during the feud, christened this region Murderland.3

  Depending upon which episodes you consider feud related, somewhere between one dozen and two dozen people died. Of course, even one death is too many, but a dozen and a half is not a high casualty rate when compared to the number of victims in other Kentucky feuds during that era. However, these dozen and a half deaths had far-reaching ramifications both for the region and for the nation as a whole.

  Attempts to extradite the Hatfields from West Virginia to stand trial in Kentucky for some of these deaths resulted in a US Supreme Court case. Several Hatfield supporters went to prison. An uncle and a younger brother of William Anderson “Devil Anse” Hatfield, the Hatfield feud leader, were killed. His older brother died in prison, and his nephew was hanged. Seven children of Ranel McCoy died as a result of the feud. Ranel’s wife, Sarah, was handicapped by a severe beating. Ranel also lost a younger brother, a cousin, and a nephew to the violence.

  Many more members of both families suffered emotional scars for life, and the newspaper-hyped stereotypes inspired by the feud have scarred the generations of Appalachian people born after it ended, contributing to the so-called Appalachian Brain Drain, during which any resident who could figure out how to leave the region did so. A reporter who came to the Tug Fork during the feud years uncharitably described the population who didn’t flee as “strange, half-civilized natives who live in the blood-stained wilderness.”4

  After the feud ended, railroad, timber, and coal corporations moved into the region to exploit the natural resources and the labor of its remaining inhabitants under the guise of bringing Progress to this race of feuding “white savages.”5 These corporations left in their wake poverty, maimed and diseased workers, and poisoned moonscapes where once towering forests and clear-running, fish-filled streams had thrived.

  It is important, therefore, to see the Hatfield-McCoy feud as it really was and to understand why and how relatives, neighbors, and friends who had lived together in peace for half a century could end up wanting to kill one another—and then did so. We have seen this tragic pattern play out repeatedly through human history, most recently in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Sudan. Perhaps the microcosm offered by the Hatfield-McCoy feud can provide some fresh insights.

  Not surprisingly, existing accounts of the Hatfield-McCoy feud each reflect the bias or agenda of the teller. Most participants were illiterate and signed official documents with X’s. None left a written eyewitness testimony to what actually happened. Quotes taken from them for newspaper articles were often inaccurate or self-serving. Many official documents that could have provided information were destroyed or were never executed during the chaos of the Civil War and Reconstruction. The courthouse at Logan, West Virginia, the county in which the Hatfield feudists lived, was burned during the Civil War, and one researcher calls the courthouse records from the 1880s “abysmal.”6

  So like all oral histories, the various versions of the Hatfield-McCoy feud have been embellished, pruned, and honed, like rocks roiled to smoothness in a creek bed, by generations of tellers, some creating myths, others righting wrongs, most trying to explain or justify the bad behavior of their ancestors or relatives. Chronologies are scrambled. Hearsay appears as evidence, anecdotes as facts. Motives that may never have occurred to participants are sometimes provided for their atrocious acts.

  Both the Hatfields and the McCoys have their own official compilations of feud stories as told by family members who were alive at the time. In 1976, the Preservation Council Press of Pike County, Kentucky, published Truda McCoy’s The McCoys: Their Story as Told to the Author by Eye Witnesses and Descendants. A teacher and poet, she wrote an account that reads like a novel—and is probably about as reliable as one. Often, people who experienced the feud years firsthand wouldn’t talk about them to outsiders because they were embarrassed to have had relatives who behaved so badly and because they were afraid that any negative comments might trigger a renewal of the hostilities. But Truda, a McCoy by birth, married one of her distant cousins, a grandson of Ranel McCoy, which gave her privileged access to many McCoys, especially her mother-in-law, Martha, the wife of Ranel’s son Sam, himself a feudist. Martha McCoy lived through the feud years with Sam, and she was very close to Ranel’s wife, Sarah, and their daughter Roseanna. Both Sarah and Roseanna suffered greatly from feud-related events.

  The Hatfield family historian was Coleman A. Hatfield, a West Virginia attorney who recorded much information about the feud in journals and on tape. His primary sources included his grandfather Devil Anse Hatfield and his father, William Anderson “Cap” Hatfield, who was Devil Anse’s second son and most trusted deputy during the feud years. Coleman A. Hatfield’s son Dr. Coleman C. Hatfield, an optometrist, shaped his father’s information and interviews of his own into The Tale of the Devil: The Biography of Devil Anse Hatfield with the help of historian and journalist Robert Y. Spence. The Hatfield book reads like a rather dry legal brief when compared to Truda McCoy’s more florid prose. At the points where the two versions diverge—and of course there are many—reality probably lies somewhere near the crossroads.

  The most concise and coherent secondary source about the feud is Otis K. Rice’s The Hatfields and the McCoys. Altina Waller’s Feud: Hatfields, McCoys, and Social Change in Appalachia, 1860–1900 is the most thorough and well documented. A history professor, Waller was teaching at West Virginia University when she researched and wrote her book. Coleman C. Hatfield had written, “I honestly believe . . . that the history of this feud has been told for the last two generations in a light more favorable to the McCoy family of Pike County, Kentucky, than to the Hatfields of Southern West Virginia.”7 Waller’s book corrects this imba
lance and also constructs a plausible chronology from all the confusing and conflicting oral histories and prior books on the subject.

  My version of the feud derives from these sources and others. It may be that some anecdotes I deemed implausible and excluded actually happened; it may be that some I did include didn’t happen. In the end, it comes down to the judgment of each person who tries to write about this confusing and often upsetting saga.

  My goal in writing this book has been to learn what actually happened during the most famous feud in American history, insofar as that is possible, rather than to assign blame at this late date. There is no one overriding Truth about this bloody tragedy, just many private individual truths as experienced by each participant and observer. These personal truths agree sometimes and contradict at others—exactly like the accounts of every other episode in human history.

  * “As the crow flies” is an important distinction when discussing the Appalachians. The distance required to get somewhere via a road may be two or three times longer than that a crow would fly because the roads twist and meander endlessly in order to cross or to avoid the steep mountainsides.

  PART 1:

  ORIGINS

  1

  THE PATH TO PIKEVILLE

  He lay in a forest cave, shivering with fever and coughing in the smoke from the smoldering fire. Snowflakes drifted down the mouth of the cave that overlooked his Peter Creek farm in Pike County, Kentucky. His leg ached at the site of its poorly healed break, but at least he had made it home from Catlettsburg in time for New Year’s.