Blood Feud: The Hatfields & The McCoys

BLOOD FEUD. Copyright © 2012 by Lisa Alther

All rights reserved. 

 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.

For Ava, who inspired this project and enriches my life

I don’t know when I first heard about the
Hatfield-M
cCoy
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.