Summary of Part II:
The late 1880s saw the years-old bitterness between the Hatfields and McCoys grow in scope and violence. By 1888, Devil Anse Hatfield realized that he had less to fear from Old Ran’l McCoy than from the courts. The six-year-old murder warrants and indictments for the slaying of three of Ran’l’s sons had been revitalized through the efforts of McCoy’s in-law and attorney, Perry Cline, who was pursuing retribution for a land swindle Devil Anse had perpetrated on him years before.
Cline had used his influence with the governor of Kentucky to empower gun-for-hire Franklin “Bad Frank” Phillips to cross the Tug River and return the indicted Hatfields for trial. Meanwhile, nine members of the Hatfield clan staged a late-night raid that resulted in the burning of Ran’l McCoy’s cabin, the deaths of two more of his children, and a grave injury to his wife and cousin, Sarah “Sally” McCoy.
Bad Frank and his posse repeatedly crossed the Tug, arresting several suspects. Frank also killed Anse’s uncle, “Crazy Jim” Vance, the man who had led the raid on the McCoy cabin. On his third foray, Bad Frank and nearly 40 posse members engaged a dozen or so Hatfields in a firefight on Grapevine Creek. The only fatality was special deputy William Dempsey, whom Bad Frank brutally slew.
By now, the nation’s newspapers had blown up the feud to epic proportions. Ultimately, the law would take a hand in settling accounts in an effective effort to put an end to the bloody affair.
Second Thoughts
By this time, neither Devil Anse Hatfield nor Ran’l McCoy was anxious to continue the conflict. McCoy once told a journalist of the sensation-hungry Northern reporters who swarmed to the region. “I used to be on very friendly terms with the Hatfields,” he said. “I hope no more of us will have to die. I’ll be glad when it’s all over.” He seemed, noted the journalist, “like a man who had been bent and almost broken by the weight of his afflictions and grief”—understandable, considering he had already lost five children to the violence.
For his part, Devil Anse was finding that his section of West Virginia was growing too hot for him and his family. To distance themselves from Kentucky posse men and bounty hunters, Anse and his family left their home on the Tug Fork and moved deeper into the woods, where he built a bullet-resistant, windowless fortress out of huge logs. Over the hearth of his now-empty house on the Tug hung a lithograph with the bland homily, “There Is No Place Like Home,” a sentiment on which some wag later penciled, “Leastwise, not this side of hell!”
Anse had to sell off much of his land to out-of-state coal companies for less than it was worth—and considerably below what its value would soon be to the railroads. This included the property that he had taken from Perry Cline years before.
Anse’s son, Cap, who had almost certainly slain Alifair McCoy during the infamous New Year’s raid, caught a train for Texas, while Johnse Hatfield beelined for Colorado. By this time, all three Hatfields, father and sons, had significant Kentucky bounties on their heads.
Meanwhile, West Virginia law was focusing on Bad Frank and his minions. The constable who had accompanied Officer Bill Dempsey and knew the details of his murder swore out a complaint, and a local justice issued murder warrants for Frank Phillips and 27 members of his posse, including Perry Cline’s son and nine McCoys, Old Ran’l among them. Arrests were made, but the trial took place in a venue sympathetic to Phillips, who by now had become something of a local hero. As a result, the judge dismissed all charges.
Trial and Punishment
In an effort to secure the release of the nine Hatfields and supporters taken by Phillips’ posse, West Virginia’s governor had brought suit against the Commonwealth of Kentucky, asserting that they had not been lawfully arrested but rather forcibly abducted across state lines. In April 1888, the case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the justices decided that Kentucky could indeed bring the men to trial. In late August, the defendants were marched into a Pikeville courtroom to face multiple murder charges.
The prosecution’s best hope of a general conviction lay with the mentally challenged Ellison “Cotton Top” Mounts, Devil Anse’s illegitimate albino grandson. Cotton Top had participated in the execution of the three McCoy brothers as well as the New Year’s raid on Ran’l’s cabin, and, with little prompting, he chronicled both events in great detail. He also confessed to killing Alifair McCoy—an act of which he almost certainly was blameless. As she lay dying, she had clearly identified Cap Hatfield as her slayer. According to some members of the McCoy family, Cotton Top had openly admitted that Cap had paid him to take the blame.
Cotton Top was only one among more than 20 witnesses. After hearing the evidence, the jury found all nine defendants guilty, and the judge sentenced eight to terms of life imprisonment. While some would serve sentences of varying lengths before obtaining early release, Devil Anse’s brother Wall died after only two years behind bars. For him, it truly proved to be a life sentence.
If Cotton Top was under the impression that his testimony would buy him leniency, he was mistaken. Based on the strength of his confession, Ellison “Cotton Top” Mounts—the simple-minded son of Big Ellison Hatfield, whose murder six years before had precipitated so much violence—was sentenced to hang on Feb. 18, 1890.
Pike County had not hosted a hanging in four decades, and now that one had been mandated by the court, the authorities were resolved not to be deterred by a state law prohibiting public executions. In accordance with the law, they ordered the gallows to be surrounded by a fence that would ostensibly remove the proceedings from public view. However, they then sited the scaffold at the foot of a hill, giving all comers an unobstructed view of the event.
And come they did, by the thousands. If it was the intention of the Kentucky legal machinery to send a message that the decades-long feud must end, they could not have chosen a more impactful vehicle. It mattered little who was being hanged or for what specific offense. What signified most to the observers, and the law, was that it would hopefully put an end to the bloodletting.
The event was an entertainment as well as a morality play. Liquor—much of it home-distilled—was readily available, and Bad Frank Phillips took full advantage of it. He got falling-down drunk and reeled through the proceedings, shooting his pistols into the air and shouting that he had cleaned out the Hatfields and would do the same for Pikeville. After a fight in which he broke four of the sheriff’s ribs, the volatile killer was beaten into submission and unceremoniously deposited on the jailhouse floor.
Word had spread throughout the region that Devil Anse and his brood were planning to swoop down on Pikeville and stage a last-minute rescue of their kinsman. As a precaution, the local sheriff swore in 20 new deputies and organized an armed 50-man citizens’ guard. By the time morning broke on a chilly Feb. 18, there had not been—nor would there be—an attempt to break the condemned man from his cell.
Shortly after noon, the 25-year-old Cotton Top ascended the gallows steps, apparently unconcerned over the awful fate awaiting him. He calmly stated his readiness to die and his wish that his friends would meet him in heaven. Only when the black hood was being lowered over his face did he cry out in an anguished voice that reverberated up the crowded hillside, “The Hatfields made me do it!”
Aftermath
Hostilities did not simply cease at the death of the addled youth. Kentucky murder warrants were still out for Devil Anse, Cap and Johnse Hatfield, and there were plenty of bounty men eager to earn the posted rewards. In addition to being on the alert to man-hunters, Anse had to maintain a constant lookout for officers of the U.S. Marshals Service and—because some of the family’s activity was devoted to the distilling of whiskey—revenue agents.
Over the next few years, there would be an occasional killing with roots in the feud. In 1896, Cap, who had returned from Texas on the assumption that all past transgressions had been forgiven, was involved in a stand-up gunfight with members of the Rutherford clan, a family of McCoy sympathizers. Three Rutherford family members died, while Cap sustained only a superficial wound. After his arrest, he broke jail and successfully evaded a manhunt.
Johnse was not so fortunate. Having returned from his self-imposed exile in 1898, he was captured by a bounty hunter and jailed in Pikeville. Sentenced to life in prison, he eventually was pardoned for saving the warden’s life.
That same year, younger brother Elias exchanged fire with a man who had aided in Johnse’s capture. The man died, and Elias was sent to prison for murder; however, a sympathetic governor, William O’Connell Bradley, soon paroled him. Fourteen years later, Elias and Troy, another of Devil Anse’s sons, would die in a gunfight unrelated to the feud.
Franklin “Bad Frank” Phillips also died by the gun in 1898 after being shot by a friend in a drunken quarrel.
And in late March 1902, yet another Rutherford, seeking to serve a warrant on Ephraim Hatfield, broke down the door of the Hatfield home. Gunfire immediately erupted, and Rutherford, his sidekick, Hatfield and his father all fell dead.
For the most part, however, scores of family members on both sides of the feud were more interested in pursuing a peaceful coexistence than in engaging in life-and-death altercations over a generation-old quarrel. Some even went on to become respected public figures. Henry Hatfield, Devil Anse’s nephew, became a highly regarded doctor and was elected as the youngest governor ever to serve the state of West Virginia.
Randolph “Old Ran’l” McCoy lived to the age of 88, but the years weighed heavily. He had suffered the loss of five children to gunfire and daughter Roseanna to illness. He saw his home destroyed and his wife terribly injured, and it had all taken a terrible toll. A broken man, for several years he operated a ferry at Pikeville, where he reportedly would shamble through the streets at odd hours, mumbling to himself and cursing the Hatfields. Ran’l died in early 1914, months after tripping into a fireplace and horribly burning himself.
William Anderson “Devil Anse” Hatfield saw his 82nd birthday, dying of pneumonia in 1921. By that time, he had become a legend, and approximately 5,000 people attended his funeral. His family ordered a monument and a larger-than-life-size statue, built of Carrara marble, to be placed over the old patriarch’s grave.
Looking Back
With the war between the two clans presumably at an end, the local populace could turn its attention to a much more immediate threat to its well-being: coal. While the national press was busy capturing the public attention with tales of murderous “hillbillies,” the railroads were snaking their tracks through the hills and valleys, wealthy investors were financing huge tracts of land for the minerals below its surface, and an entire way of life was changing almost overnight.
The new war would be waged not between two clannish mountain families but between the mine owners and the miners, with the advantage ever on the side of big money. It would plunge the region into a struggle that would span generations, cost countless miners’ lives, and wreak havoc on the hills and hollers of both Kentucky and West Virginia.
The conflict between the Hatfields and the McCoys was unquestionably a dismal, bloody affair. However, in terms of regional feuds, it was not the longest-running, nor was it the costliest in terms of human life. Neither side could be considered the winner and, despite the best of Hollywood traditions, it was never a contest between good and evil. Men from both sides committed unspeakable acts of violence and mayhem, each believing his actions to be justified by an ancient unwritten cultural and familial code of action and retribution.
There is no question that the war between the two families would have occurred below the level of historic scrutiny, as had countless other feuds of its kind, were it not for the enterprising journalists who shaped and molded both the players and their actions to fit a national readership ravenous for sensational news. Just a few years after the McCoy and Hatfield guns were stilled, William Randolph Hearst’s brand of so-called yellow journalism would play a major role in fomenting a senseless war in Cuba. Hearst’s form of distorted, sensationalist reportage saw its beginnings in the post-Civil War period, with such subjects as a Southern mountain feud providing grist for its mill.
The reporters’ stereotypical hillbilly image of the Hatfield-McCoy feud has survived—and thrived—for well over a century. It initially enhanced the pages of the newspapers, “penny dreadfuls” and dime novels of the late Victorian Age. More recently, it has been used for everything from a punchline to sell products to a metaphor for today’s political divisiveness.
It also has given Americans countless hours of home entertainment. From the earliest days of television, millions of viewers were treated to such broadly caricatured programs as Hee Haw, The Beverly Hillbillies and the derivatively titled The Real McCoys. And the image has been passed on to our children. In the 1950s, Warner Brothers released a Merrie Melodies cartoon featuring Bugs Bunny and titled Hillbilly Hare. It is a thinly disguised spoof of the Hatfield-McCoy feud, with the characters depicted for laughs, in all their hostile, barefooted ignorance.
Ultimately, the hawkers of what now is referred to as “fake news” were aided by the rapid changes taking place in the Southern mountains. Writers contrasted progress and industrialization with the “backward” ways of largely illiterate, extended families that had made the mountains their home since the 18th century. In an unforgiving environment, these clans had scratched for their living, practiced the same traditions, and abided by the same unwritten rules of behavior that had guided their ancestors when they first arrived from Scotland, Ireland and England.
In the end, it is a sad fact that, while the world changed around them, they frequently did not. The ever-increasing gulf between mountain folk and the more “civilized” members of American society encouraged the spoon-fed readers of the nation’s newspapers and magazines to assume a condescending “us-and-them” view. This, in turn, has perpetuated an image of the ignorant, gun-toting hillbilly that is still very much with us today and has earned the Hatfield-McCoy feud its dark place in America’s oral and written tradition.