Blood Feud: The Hatfields & The McCoys (14 page)

In the district court the West Virginia lawyers argued that a citizen of one state couldn’t enter another state to extract suspects in crimes committed in that citizen’s home state. The Kentucky side replied that once a suspect was in another state, however he had gotten there, that state had a right to try him for a crime committed within its boundaries. Both sides maintained that a district court couldn’t settle a dispute between two states, that only the US Supreme Court could.

The judge of the district court agreed that the case didn’t lie within his jurisdiction and ordered the prisoners returned to Pikeville. West Virginia took the case to the US circuit court, which agreed with the findings of the lower court. Then the case was referred to the US Supreme Court.

The prisoners returned to the Pikeville jail, bored from a month of sitting quietly listening to a lot of legal wrangling that they didn’t understand. They had enjoyed their time in the Louisville jail, though, listening intently as other prisoners read to them from books and lustily singing hymns in perfect pitch during religious services. Keeping to their mountain schedules, they had gone to sleep at dusk and arisen noisily at dawn—much to the annoyance of more urban prisoners who wanted to sleep in.
26

Shifty-eyed Wall Hatfield had impressed the reporters with his quiet intelligence, despite the fact that one of his Pikeville guards had outed him to reporters as having five wives.
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He steadfastly maintained the innocence of himself and of his fellow West Virginian prisoners, pinning blame for the McCoy murders on his brother Devil Anse; his nephews Cap, Johnse, and Bob; and several others, none of whom had yet been apprehended. “They are all bad men,” he said. He also denied the rumor that he had multiple wives.
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A newspaper sketch of Wall Hatfield at this time shows an older man, partially bald, with a walrus mustache, the prominent Hatfield nose, and heavily lidded eyes. He looks almost as though he is wearing an ascot with his suit jacket. He gives the impression of being a thoughtful, distinguished country squire, rather than a hardened killer, which he probably wasn’t.

As the Hatfield prisoners languished in the Pikeville jail, waiting to hear whether the Supreme Court would order their release, Nancy McCoy Hatfield decided to leave Johnse Hatfield. At the time, he was hiding out from the McCoy posses in a secret location. Fed up with his drinking and womanizing, she was also, no doubt, appalled by his role two months earlier in the murders of her cousins Calvin and Alifair McCoy, the beating of her aunt Sarah, and the burning of her aunt and uncle’s cabin and smokehouse. She packed her belongings and crossed the Tug Fork with Johnse’s and her two children, returning to her mother’s house on Peter Creek in Kentucky.

An attractive twenty-four-year-old woman with a twenty-three-inch waist, unlaced,
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she soon caught the eye of Bad Frank Phillips, the McCoy champion who had organized the Kentucky posses that had captured the Hatfield prisoners. They moved in together that year and had a child the following year, even though Johnse Hatfield didn’t divorce her until several months after that.
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Her family rejoiced in the knowledge that Frank Phillips would protect her and her children from any revenge that Johnse Hatfield might decide to take.
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The lawyers for Kentucky and West Virginia went to Washington for the Supreme Court hearing on April 23, 1888. The decision handed down by the justices, with two dissenters, was that prisoners, even if seized illegally, could be tried once they were detained in the state in which their crimes had been committed.

Given official permission by the US Supreme Court to kidnap people and hijack them across state lines, private detectives and bounty hunters arrived in the Tug Fork Valley in droves, hoping to claim the rewards offered by Kentucky for the Hatfields, and by West Virginia for Bad Frank Phillips’s posses. By now, those rewards totaled some $8,000 (close to $200,000 today).
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In June two detectives from Charleston, West Virginia, set out in search of Dave Stratton, a West Virginian who had joined Bad Frank Phillips’s posse because of a political grudge against Devil Anse Hatfield. Stratton had been with Bad Frank when Phillips shot both Jim Vance on the mountainside and also Bill Dempsey in the fodder crib. The detectives found Stratton, now living in Kentucky, asleep on a sandbar just inside the West Virginia state line, his flatboat beached beside him. One pounced on him and put a gun to his temple. Stratton surrendered, and the detectives delivered him to the Logan County jail and collected the reward.
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A detective who wore fringed buckskins and asked to be called Wild Bill—claimed by one researcher to be the notorious Confederate guerrilla leader Rebel Bill Smith himself
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—reported hunting near Peter Creek for some McCoys, who turned the tables and started stalking him instead. To escape, Wild Bill placed his cap and coat in a pathway well beyond a hollow log, as though they had been shed in flight. Then he returned to the log and crawled inside it. The pursuing McCoys arrived and sat down on the log to discuss what they were going to do to him when they caught him. He hid in the log for two days.
35

During this summer of 1888, when bounty hunters were haunting the hills of the Tug Fork searching for their human prey, the
New York World
sent a reporter named T. C. Crawford to West Virginia to find and interview Devil Anse Hatfield. Crawford secured permission to visit Devil Anse with the help of John Floyd, Devil Anse’s friend at the statehouse.
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Crawford wrote a book called
An American Vendetta: A Story of Barbarism in the United States,
dictating “the first chapter and the essential parts of the story” in three hours upon his return to New York, after ten days of misery in West Virginia.
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This book, and the pen and ink sketches of mountaineers by a Mr. Graves that it included, established and circulated, more than anything else, the emerging stereotype of the venal hillbilly.
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The primary value of the book to researchers is the descriptions it gives of some of the major feudists by someone who met them in person, unlike most other feud reporters. It also includes statements from the mouths of some of the feudists themselves about their actions and motives, however self-serving these may have been.

Devil Anse Hatfield told Crawford that he had a bodyguard of nine men and explained, “I simply will not be taken.”
39
He described the hardships involved in being pursued by posses and detectives: “I have been out hiding in the brush. I have been kept away from my wife and babies many and many a time. I do not like to be kept away from my babies.”
40
Temper any sympathy arising from that statement with thoughts of Harmon, Tolbert, and Jeff McCoy, who never saw their own babies ever again, and of Pharmer, Bud, Calvin, and Alifair McCoy, who never even had the chance to conceive any.

Claiming that Devil Anse Hatfield resembled Stonewall Jackson, Crawford portrayed him as a “jovial old pirate,”
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rather like an early Keith Richards. But he described West Virginia itself as a “barbarous, uncivilized and wholly savage region.”
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Previously the
New York Times
had labeled Kentucky “Corsica of America.”
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The mythmakers of America were off and running, using mountain life as grist for their media mills.