Blood Feud: The Hatfields & The McCoys (18 page)

Upon his return from Oklahoma, Elias Hatfield began working at a saloon in Kentucky just across the Tug Fork from Williamson, West Virginia, a new coal town. On the Fourth of July, 1899, Elias—said to be a good-looking young man with black hair and blue eyes—was posting mail in Williamson when Doc Ellis, the man who had arranged the capture of Elias’s older brother Johnse, arrived on a train to participate as a master of holiday ceremonies for the afternoon events. A popular and civic-minded man, Doc belonged to the Masons, the Eagles, and the Odd Fellows. No one knows exactly what happened, but some report that Elias called Doc a son of a bitch.
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“I’ll show you who’s an SOB,” Doc Ellis replied, grabbing a rifle and shooting at Elias, whom a friend pushed aside just in time. Elias shot back, the bullet hitting one of Doc Ellis’s gold cufflinks and ricocheting upward to break his neck.
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But this is the Hatfield version. Others maintain that Doc Ellis, on spotting Elias, retreated into the train car to grab his pistol. Poised for his return, Elias shot him the moment he stepped out of the coach.
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While Elias Hatfield was awaiting trial, his brother Cap, caught in the firm grip of the well-earned Hatfield family fear of the gallows, helped him to escape, and they fled once again to Oklahoma. Returning later to West Virginia, Elias was tried and sent to prison but soon received parole.
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Twelve years later, in 1911, Elias and Troy, Devil Anse and Levicy’s eighth and ninth children, opened a saloon together in a new coal-mining town. A competitor cut prices to lure away their customers, employing an Italian to take orders and make deliveries to the large community of Italian miners.

In a confrontation in a miner’s kitchen, the Italian bootlegger shot Elias three times, and Troy six. The brothers, in turn, shot him four times. The Italian died immediately. Elias and Troy reclined on the back porch, discussing their wounds, for the ten minutes it took Elias to die. Troy died twenty minutes later.
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In 1882, the then eighteen-year-old Cap Hatfield had had a girlfriend, his first cousin Nancy Elizabeth Smith, the daughter of Devil Anse’s sister Emma. Some say her uncle was the notorious Confederate guerrilla leader Rebel Bill Smith.
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While Cap was pursuing feud-related activities, Nancy married a merchant from Georgia who was having a dispute with his business partner. In September 1882, not long after the Pawpaw Murders, Nancy’s husband was shot in ambush while doing chores outside his house. Some claimed his business partner shot him; others, that Cap Hatfield shot him because he was still in love with Nancy.
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Cap’s grandson Coleman C. indignantly denies this last possibility: “It takes a very small mind to accuse a 15-year-old woman of marrying her husband’s killer. Nancy Hatfield did no such thing.” He further points out that his grandparents weren’t married until more than a year after the murder of Nancy’s first husband.
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Though a year later might still sound suspiciously soon to some small-minders.

In any case, Cap and Nancy Hatfield’s marriage seems to have been a happy one. Nancy was said to be a better rider and shooter than Cap. One day Cap, his son Coleman A., and several others tried to shoot a blue heron in flight and missed. Nancy grabbed the gun and blasted it out of the sky.
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Why anyone would want to shoot a blue heron is, of course, another question.

During the final years of the feud, Nancy taught Cap to read and write. Like Calvin McCoy, whom he had helped to kill, Cap appears to have been very intelligent and to have loved learning. He and Nancy bought books and subscribed to magazines, and he could recite passages from the classics by memory.
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Employing his new literacy, Cap wrote a letter in 1889 to the governor of Kentucky offering to surrender, though he never followed through on this generous offer.
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After the convictions of his comrades for the Pawpaw Murders, Cap Hatfield—still subject to the outstanding indictments—had a hard time putting out crops and tending livestock because he had to be on the lookout constantly for bounty hunters. He fled often to the hills to hide out. No one wanted to hire him for other kinds of work because of his unfortunate reputation—and presumably his sporadic attendance.
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Nancy said of those years, “It was a horrible nightmare to me. Sometimes for months Cap never spent a night in our house. He and Devil Anse, with others, slept in the nearby woods to guard our homes against surprise attacks.”
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Attacks not unlike the one they themselves had launched on the McCoy cabin, one would imagine.

Cap and Nancy Hatfield moved their family to Matewan, West Virginia, in 1895. Unlike other new company-owned coal-mining towns, Matewan was independent, with its own mayor and police force. It was located, coincidentally, just across the river from the sinkhole in which the three McCoy sons had been tied to pawpaw trees and shot among the putrefying corpses of sheep-killing dogs. Cap built a house and worked at a new sawmill there.

Disillusioned with the Democratic party, to which most children of former Confederates belonged, Cap Hatfield became a Republican, believing that that party offered more hope for a solution to the economic problems of his region. This wasn’t a popular decision in a traditionally Democratic area, but his grandson Coleman C. regarded it as Cap’s political declaration of independence from his father, Devil Anse.
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Unfortunately for Cap Hatfield, his reputation as both a Republican and also a dangerous man had preceded him. But Matewan already had its neighborhood bully: the Democratic postmaster, John E. Rutherford. John’s father, Dr. Elliott Rutherford, had been a close friend and supporter of Devil Anse, who had named his fifth child after him. Devil Anse, Good Elias, and Elliott had established a school together, the one run by the sinister Charlie Carpenter with the bulging eyes. The school folded, and the building was later used to incarcerate the McCoy brothers prior to the Pawpaw Murders. Elliott had also lent Devil Anse money with which to pursue the case of illegal timbering against Perry Cline.
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But they had had a falling out over a shoot-out that Elliott had had with a first cousin of Devil Anse’s wife, Levicy. Elliott had shot Levicy’s cousin in the spine, crippling him for life.
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Another son of Elliott was now the mayor of Matewan, and one of Eliott’s daughters had married Ranel McCoy’s second son, the diffident Floyd McCoy.
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John E. Rutherford had been joking around Matewan that he wanted to put Cap Hatfield over in Kentucky—equivalent to saying that he wanted to turn Cap over to Kentucky authorities under the old indictments, which could result in his hanging. Dreading such a possibility, Cap always carried a gun.

As usual, the Hatfields couldn’t seem to stay away from Election Days, however poorly those events had always worked out for them.
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Cap Hatfield and his fourteen-year-old stepson Joe Glenn attended an Election Day in Matewan on November 3, 1896. Upon his arrival, Cap passed a Rutherford-owned store, where John’s brother said to him, “I’m surprised you’re down here today. I can smell the nigger on you.”
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This was a way of insulting Republicans for their support of emancipation during the Civil War and of Reconstruction following it. It also stemmed from the fact that many freedmen were Republicans.

Not taking the bait, Cap passed by. But at the end of the afternoon, when almost everyone had drunk too much, John Rutherford fired his shotgun twice at Cap, grazing his ear and neck. Cap, in turn, shot John in the side, according to Cap’s son Coleman A. Other researchers maintain that bystanders couldn’t say who had fired first.
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Either way, five of Rutherford’s friends began shooting at Cap.

John Rutherford’s brother-in-law, standing on the steps of the polling site cheering John on, was shot and killed—some say by accident, others say by Cap’s stepson Joe Glenn. Cap and Joe fled, chased by Rutherfords. Sheltered by a railroad bridge, Cap and Joe fired at their pursuers until another Rutherford fell dead, just across the river from the site of the Pawpaw Murders.
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Cap Hatfield and Joe Glenn hid out in a friend’s attic while a posse of twenty-five searched for them down below.
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The next day they hopped a baggage car that roared through Matewan without stopping. In Huntington, West Virginia, they turned themselves in and were charged with involuntary manslaughter.
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Others say that detectives captured Cap and Joe while they were sleeping in a crevice near a natural rock fort on Grapevine Creek, which had been used as a hiding place during the feud.
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Whatever the case, Joe Glenn was sent to reform school,
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and Cap was incarcerated in the Williamson jail.
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Learning of a plot to kidnap him upon his release and take him to Kentucky to face trial for the McCoy murders, Cap asked his wife, Nancy, to bring him a drill. (Others say that Cap chopped open his cell wall with a hatchet during one of the many noisy parties he was allowed to host while in jail.
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) Somehow Cap managed to get out of his cell. He met the ever-patient Nancy on the road out of town, where she gave him a basket containing clothes, money, and a pistol. He escaped to a remote region in the Cumberland Mountains, emerging to rescue his brother Elias from jail after the murder of Doc Ellis and flee with him to Oklahoma.
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A few years later, the Hatfield prisoners convicted of the Pawpaw Murders were released from the penitentiary for good behavior.
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I have found no reports concerning whether they ever met up again with their comrades who had escaped punishment, or of what was said if they did.

In 1908, once again distancing himself from those who wanted to escort him to Kentucky for his crimes, Cap attended law school in Tennessee. Returning to West Virginia after six months, he continued to study law on his own and was later admitted to the bar.
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The only case Cap Hatfield reportedly handled was that of his younger brother Willis Hatfield, Devil Anse and Levicy’s twelfth child, charged in 1912 with the murder of a West Virginia doctor. Willis, his wife, and baby were living in a West Virginia town, where he worked in a saloon. One day when he had been drinking heavily, he ran out of whiskey and went to see a physician at a local lumber company to ask for a prescription so that he could purchase more at the drugstore. Realizing that its use wasn’t medicinal, the doctor refused. Willis cursed him, and the doctor slapped him. So Willis shot him six times, killing him.
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Cap Hatfield’s grandson Coleman C. reported that “Cap thought that Willis had brought on unnecessary trouble for the rest of the family.”
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It is unknown whether Coleman C. recognized the full irony of this statement, coming as it did from the family’s chief troublemaker. Devil Anse Hatfield attended Willis’s trial with a rifle on his knees. Willis was charged with voluntary manslaughter and received a sentence of four years in prison. He served his term and afterward lived a quiet life, working as a personnel officer for a coal company.
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Cap Hatfield set up a law practice with his son Coleman A. and Coleman’s daughter Aileen, the first woman admitted to the bar in Logan County.
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Cap didn’t involve himself in the day-to-day running of the law office. Some claim he spent his time away from the office making moonshine.
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He went on to become a deputy sheriff, a deputy US marshal, and a private security guard. Ambidextrous, he loved to approach a miscreant with his right hand poised above his holster and then to sucker punch him with his left.
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Cap Hatfield died at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore in 1930 of complications from the old bullet wound that had damaged his intestines when he was fifteen. The scar tissue had become cancerous. As the Greeks used to say, “Though the mills of the gods grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small.”

Joe Glenn, Cap’s stepson, who was with him at the Matewan polls when the three Rutherfords were killed, left reform school after several years and later became a respected attorney.

Of Cap Hatfield’s children with his wife, Nancy, one became an attorney and judge; another a magistrate; and a third a deputy sheriff.