The history of our nation is rife with stories of feuding families. Some interfamilial dustups, such as the so-called Pleasant Valley War of Arizona and Texas’ Sutton-Taylor Feud, claimed countless victims and helped to define the West of the 1870s and ’80s as truly wild. No homegrown family conflict, however, has captured the popular imagination as intensely as the decades-long strife between the Hatfields of Logan (now Mingo) County, West Virginia, and their mortal enemies, Pike County, Kentucky’s McCoy clan.
The two names, familiar to most Americans, have become inextricably joined, a euphemism for any parties locked in irreconcilable conflict. The story of the feud has engendered numerous articles, books, plays, movies, courtroom cases, and annual family reunions and festivals. A dinner theater in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, has staged a version of the saga as—of all things—a musical comedy. On one momentous occasion, with descendants of both families attending, the governors of Kentucky and West Virginia jointly declared June 14, 2003, to be Hatfield-McCoy Reconciliation Day. In 2012, the History Channel aired a record-breaking, three-part miniseries purporting to tell the true story and starring some of Hollywood’s most bankable stars.
Yet, the more publicity the feud has received, the harder it has been to separate fact from fiction—and in many cases, romance. Ultimately, thanks largely to the irresponsible and sensationalist reporting of period journalists and newspaper caricaturists, it was the feud as much as anything else that gave rise to the stereotypical picture of the so-called “hillbilly”—an ignorant, moonshine-swilling, gun-toting, bewhiskered denizen of the Southern mountains. Long before the guns of the feud were stilled and the last participant hanged, this false and demeaning image had taken root across the country and the world.
The truth of the feud is much less simplistic. It involved the extended families of two mountain patriarchies, each finding irreconcilable offenses in the actions of the other, and each committing intermittent acts of violence over a 25-year period that—while perhaps understandable within the context of their time and place—are nonetheless shocking. On a larger scale, the feud was set against a swiftly changing background of industrial intrusion and development such as the region had never known, and that would forever alter the very way of life that had given rise to the bloody conflict.
Setting the Stage
One of the defining characteristics of many feuds is the eventual blurring of the actual causes of the mayhem. Nowhere is this truer than in the story of the Hatfields and McCoys. Ironically, for years before the opening of hostilities, the two clans had enjoyed friendships, working relationships and even marriages. There are several theories that purport to describe how the trouble started; the reality would seem to lie in a melding of them all. It began with the homecoming of Asa Harmon McCoy.
By the time the Civil War was drawing to its bloody close, the two families had long been living on opposite sides of the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River, which divided Kentucky and the recently formed state of West Virginia. Here among the border states, sentiments toward the war had been hopelessly divided, with hostilities often focused less on state versus state than on family against family and neighbor against neighbor. The loyalty of many of the people living along this stretch of the Tug—including most members of both the Hatfield and McCoy clans—strongly favored the Confederacy.
Throughout the war, the formation of so-called militia and home-guard regiments provided an excuse for partisan extremists to wage private wars against their neighbors. Bands of irregulars from both sides rained havoc on the region, bushwhacking and killing those who espoused the opposing cause. Hatfield patriarch William Anderson “Devil Anse” Hatfield, whom one contemporary described as “six feet of devil and 180 pounds of hell,” played an active part in these raids, having formed his own Rebel guerrilla band.
It was against this backdrop of sectional violence that Asa Harmon McCoy, a dedicated Union man and brother of family chief Randolph “Old Ran’l” McCoy, enlisted in Co. E, 45th Regiment, of the Kentucky Infantry. As a result, he was viewed by many—including some members of his own family—as a traitor.
Asa was shot in the chest in battle and mustered out of the army near the end of 1864, whereupon he returned to his wife and his mountain home. Shortly thereafter, a Southern-leaning vigilante band that included Devil Anse Hatfield tracked him through the snow and shot him to death. Historians maintain that the actual murder was carried out by Anse’s volatile relative, James Vance, known locally as “Uncle Jim” and, perhaps more aptly, “Crazy Jim.” Possibly because Asa McCoy’s own kin saw him as a turncoat, no reprisals were taken, although relations between the two clans soured considerably.
Things remained relatively calm for more than a decade. Then, in 1878, Old Ran’l formally accused Floyd Hatfield, a cousin of Devil Anse, of stealing one of his hogs—a serious charge, given the worth of such an animal in a poor mountain community. Purportedly, the justice of the peace who presided over the resultant trial was another Hatfield cousin. The verdict was a foregone conclusion, especially after testimony favoring the defendant was given—to the stunned surprise of the McCoys—by their relative, Bill Staton. Floyd was acquitted, and within two years, Staton would die at the hands of two of Old Ran’l’s nephews.
The third supposed impetus for the feud was born of love—at least in the beginning. In the summer of 1880, Johnse Hatfield, Devil Anse’s 18-year-old son, met and wooed Old Ran’l’s young daughter, Roseanna. Aware of the hostility between the two families, Roseanna moved in with the Hatfields, further infuriating her father.
At one point, Roseanna—then pregnant with Johnse’s illegitimate child—returned to the bosom of her family, and when Johnse crossed the river to visit her, Old Ran’l had him seized. In a scene straight out of a period melodrama, Roseanna rushed to warn Devil Anse of the capture of his son. Anse, along with several others, freed Johnse at gunpoint, spiriting him back to the West Virginia side of the Tug. Ignoring his responsibility to the pregnant Roseanna, young Johnse abandoned her to marry her cousin, Nancy.
Roseanna’s health soon began to fail, and when her mother asked the reason for her debilitation, she reportedly answered, “It was Pa. Every time Pa looked at me, I couldn’t stand the hate in his eyes.”
Novelists and scriptwriters have made much of the story of Johnse and Roseanna, painting it as a backwoods Romeo-and-Juliet romance. While in reality it was a fairly commonplace tale of seduction and abandonment, it certainly contributed to the already harsh feelings between the two clans.
Blood for Blood
The most immediate cause of the feud, however, was an incident that occurred on Pike County’s Election Day in August 1882. As on election days past, people gathered from their remote cabins and farms to cast their votes and partake in some jawboning. Traditionally, the event had been a scene of animated debates, fueled in large part by the liberal consumption of spirits. One such heated discussion was taking place between three of Old Ran’l’s young sons—Tolbert, Pharmer and Bud—and Devil Anse Hatfield’s younger brother, Ellison, a six-foot tall, 200-pound Confederate veteran.
According to historian Dean King, Tolbert began the quarrel by verbally abusing “Big Ellison,” as he was known. Matters quickly escalated, with both men drawing their knives. Tolbert’s brothers then joined the fray, and the three McCoy youths stabbed Ellison 27 times and shot him in the back.
The McCoy brothers were immediately arrested. The dying Ellison was conveyed home, where—knowing the likelihood of reprisals—he begged brother Anse to let the authorities deal with the McCoy brothers.
This family affront, however, was not to be left to the law. Devil Anse—in company with a dozen or so friends and relatives—took the prisoners by force as they were being conveyed to the county seat. The boys’ mother pleaded with Devil Anse for her sons’ lives, but her tears failed to move the patriarch. If Ellison died, he told her, so would her boys.
Upon receiving word of Ellison’s death two days after the attack, Anse and his posse tied the brothers to a copse of pawpaw bushes and fired more than 50 rounds into them. The photograph of the three young men peacefully laid out on their father Ran’l’s cabin porch clearly shows the white bandages that were used to hold Tolbert’s and Bud’s shattered skulls together.
Pike County indictments were handed down, and warrants were sworn out for the apprehension of Anse and his men for the crime of murder. However, the local Kentucky lawmen were less than enthusiastic about crossing into Logan County, West Virginia, in pursuit of the Hatfields. By the time the next court term commenced six months later, the sheriff had simply written beside each fugitive’s name on the warrants, “Not found in this county.” It appeared as though the Hatfields would escape unscathed. Retribution would come, however; it was just a matter of time.
For the next few years, an uncomfortable truce prevailed. Then, in the autumn of 1886, Anse’s 22-year-old son, William Anderson “Cap” Hatfield—often described as the most volatile of the Devil’s brood—brought matters to a boil once again.
According to chronicler King, the Hatfields were planning a raid on the McCoys when, somehow, word of it was leaked. It was strongly suspected that two McCoy-related women, a mother and daughter, were responsible. Cap and an ally named Tom Wallace were ordered to address the situation. At the head of a dozen or so masked men, the two broke into the women’s cabin in the night and beat them mercilessly.
Shortly thereafter, Jeff McCoy, son of the murdered Union veteran Asa Harmon McCoy, crossed into West Virginia along with a friend, looking for Cap and Wallace. They settled for shooting up Cap’s home, with his wife inside. When the absent Cap returned to a furious wife and a cabin in shambles, he swore out an arrest warrant for Jeff and his accomplice, nd had himself appointed a special constable to serve it personally.
Cap captured the two, but as he and Wallace were returning them to the Logan courthouse, Jeff attempted to escape by jumping into the Tug. He managed to swim across, with rifle bullets pinging the water all the way, but as he reached the far shore, a bullet ended his life. Whether Cap facilitated Jeff’s escape in order to personally execute him is a mystery that remains unresolved.
In Pursuit of the Devil
While the lunges and thrusts of the feud were taking place, Devil Anse was working to shore up and broaden his political connections within his home state. At one juncture, he rode in upon a local election at the head of dozens of armed men, “persuading” the locals to vote for his chosen candidate, John B. Floyd. Largely as a result, Floyd was elected state senator. Devil Anse Hatfield was indeed a daunting and powerful force in the state of West Virginia.
Immediately after the shooting death of Jeff McCoy, Old Ran’l asked an ambitious, politically well-connected attorney named Perry Cline to write to Anse Hatfield in the hope of ending the feud. Unbeknownst to either the Hatfields or the McCoys, hiring Cline would prove a game changer.
As it turned out, Cline entered the picture with his own agenda. He was clearly determined to see the Hatfields called to account for the murders, and he had two defensible and personal reasons for wanting to punish Devil Anse and his brood. For one, he was related to the McCoys by marriage and thus was an uncle to Jeff McCoy, whose recent death was being laid at Cap Hatfield’s door. More telling was the fact that Devil Anse had once cheated Cline out of thousands of acres of valuable family land.
Despite a lack of formal education, Devil Anse Hatfield was a natural-born businessman. In addition to profiting from the distillation of illicit alcohol, he had turned a simple timber operation into a going concern that employed dozens of locals. At one juncture, he had illegitimately laid claim to some 5,000 acres of timberland that Cline’s father had left to him. Adding insult to injury, Anse and his family then moved into the old Cline homestead on the property.
Stealing Perry Cline’s land was bad enough. Now, in these post-war times, Northern industrialists were clamoring for the coal, minerals and hardwood timber of southern Appalachia. These businessmen were blasting tunnels and laying railroad tracks throughout the region, and they would pay handsomely for both the timber and the right-of-way on the land that Anse had taken from Cline.
According to various accounts, Cline nurtured an abiding hate for Devil Anse and swore to repay the Hatfields for this injustice. It would take years, but ultimately he would get his pound of flesh.
As McCoy’s attorney, Cline did, in fact, honor Ran’l’s request and wrote to Devil Anse. In his response, Anse expressed his sorrow that “the Troubles occored [sic]” and avowed that he would have stopped them if it were possible. He denied, however, that his son, Cap, had had anything to do with the death of Jeff McCoy—an obvious lie. At that point, an exhausted Ran’l was content to place his family’s business and well-being in Cline’s hands, and it was there that matters would take a new and darker turn.
Cline immediately swung into action. First, he had the Kentucky courts reinstate the five-year-old arrest warrants against Devil Anse and the others for the killing of the three McCoy brothers. Cline then publicly announced that the state was offering rewards on the men’s heads, payable on their return to Kentucky for trial. If West Virginia’s administration at the time was unwilling to extradite the fugitives legally, it was Cline’s hope and expectation that private detectives and bounty hunters would do so by force.
To that end, one of Cline’s first orders of business was to enlist a locally known hardcase and gun for hire named Franklin Phillips, who went by “Bad Frank.” As the Hatfields would soon discover, it would prove to be an apt moniker.
The feud was about to enter its darkest phase. The events to follow would encompass a cowardly, murderous attack on an entire family, a full-scale gun battle fought between the Hatfields and their dogged pursuers, and the public execution of one individual, whose death—it was hoped—would put an end to the hostilities between two ancient and implacable families.
Part II of “Blood for Blood: The Hatfield-McCoy Feud” will appear in the June/July issue.