Blood Feud: The Hatfields & The McCoys (19 page)

Devil Anse Hatfield’s younger brother, Good Elias, the reluctant feudist, was indicted but never arrested or tried for the Pawpaw Murders. Although Devil Anse’s grandson Coleman A. Hatfield felt that Good Elias helped to incite the New Year’s Night Massacre by insisting that the McCoys were trying to assassinate him and that a counterattack “would have to be did,” Good Elias had always done his best to avoid direct participation in the feud. After it ended, Good Elias sought safety by moving away from the feud zone to Logan, West Virginia,
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just as the governors of Kentucky and West Virginia had always recommended to both families, just as Ranel and Sarah McCoy and their sons Jim and Sam had already done on the other side of the Tug Fork, just as the family of Ava Reed McCoy’s husband, Homer, had also already done. In Logan, Good Elias became a councilman, constable, and chief of police.
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Good Elias Hatfield finally nailed down respectability for his family through the achievements of his sons, double first cousins to Devil Anse’s children, since their fathers were brothers and their mothers, sisters.
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His son Greenway, shedding an early reputation as a moonshiner,
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became a deputy US marshal and a three-term sheriff for Mingo County.
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Sons of Greenway became the postmaster, jailer, and mayor of Williamson, West Virginia.

Good Elias Hatfield’s third son became a physician.
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His second son, Henry D. Hatfield, also earned a medical degree and worked as a surgeon for the Norfolk and Western Railway, later starting two hospitals in West Virginia. After winning election to the West Virginia Senate and then presidency of the state senate, he became governor of West Virginia in 1913 at the age of thirty-seven.
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Later he became a US senator.
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His daughter married the president of the United States Steel Corporation.
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One of Henry D. Hatfield’s goals as governor was to reassert local control over the coalfields and timber stands of West Virginia, largely subjected to absentee ownership since the turn of the twentieth century. This appears to be his only unsuccessful undertaking.

Devil Anse and Levicy Hatfield’s third child, Bob, whom Levicy had perhaps persuaded to drop out of the New Year’s Night Massacre, and who had shot Bud McCoy in the gun shoulder during the Battle of Grapevine Creek, became a successful merchant and owned a great deal of real estate.
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Their fifth child, Elliott, became a prominent physician, graduating from City College in Louisville.
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Their tenth child, Joe, born not long after the Pawpaw Murders, became the first Republican sheriff of Logan County. Tennis, their thirteenth and final child, born during the year of Ellison Mounts’s hanging, succeeded his brother as sheriff of Logan County.

As usual, nothing is recorded about Devil Anse and Levicy Hatfield’s four daughters.

It is striking how many of Devil Anse and Levicy Hatfield’s sons, grandsons, and nephews, as well as one great-granddaughter, took up careers related to law enforcement following the feud years—almost as though they felt obliged to uphold the laws their elders had flaunted, thus policing the potentially violent sides of their own natures. Eight grandchildren of the midwife Nancy Vance Hatfield also became physicians, as though from a need to heal the wounds their elders had inflicted on the body politic.

Of the two families, Coleman A. Hatfield wrote: “In later years, Hatfields have been known to visit the family graveyard overlooking the old home place of the McCoys and to kneel upon the earth and shed tears for their one-time enemies who lost their lives in that terrible family conflict. . . . The shock of the death of Allifair [
sic
] was lamented by the Hatfields, as well as the grief-stricken McCoy relatives. There was no intention by either side to wage war against women and children.”
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Such an assessment would have come as news to Sarah McCoy, whose bones Jim Vance’s rifle butt had crushed; to Mary Daniels and her mother-in-law, beaten unconscious with a cow’s tail by Cap Hatfield and Tom Wallace; to the ghost of Alifair McCoy, murdered in cold blood by Cap Hatfield or Cottontop Mounts when she limped outside to draw well water. Perhaps it was the later generations of Devil Anse Hatfield’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren, innocent heirs to the damage inflicted on these women, to whom Coleman A. Hatfield was referring in this passage. His own son said that Coleman A. regarded the feud as “a tragic misfortune for both families.”
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After the imprisonment of his supporters and the deaths of his brother Wall and his nephew Cottontop Mounts, Devil Anse Hatfield settled into a quiet life on his mountainside, his fort standing ready nearby in case bounty hunters tracked him to his lair. After Cottontop’s hanging, someone anonymously mailed Devil Anse a piece of the rope.
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Haunted by the story of the hanging of his great-grandfather Abner Vance by Virginia authorities, Devil Anse was determined not to let himself fall into the hands of Kentucky authorities. Those already convicted for the Pawpaw Murders and the New Year’s Night Massacre were among the feudists least guilty of the crimes charged against them. Devil Anse no doubt knew that he, the perceived mastermind, would hang, just as his great-grandfather had, just as his nephew had.

Through timber sales and leases on some of his land to coal companies, Devil Anse Hatfield earned a comfortable living. He eventually replaced his log cabin with a large white frame house with a two-story front porch, a design more commonly found in nearby towns than in the countryside.
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As he had all his life, Devil Anse farmed and hunted, made moonshine, and raised hogs. He hunted bears until he was seventy-five, shooting three in one winter when he was sixty-five.
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He also kept bees, as had Eph-of-All, Valentine, and Big Eph before him.
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A neighbor told a reporter that Devil Anse was “universally regarded in this community in a favorable light.”
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When Devil Anse went into Logan, he always carried a rifle across the pommel of his saddle or held it in his hand as he walked. When he talked with others, he stood with his back to a tree or a wall and scanned the surroundings with wary eyes. If he entered a room, he sat or stood with his back to a wall.
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The feud had left its mark on him, just as it had on so many others.

Two of Devil Anse Hatfield’s brothers, Wall and Ellison, had died from feud-related events. His younger twin brothers had always distanced themselves from his undertakings. Five of his sons—Johnse, Cap, Troy, Elias, and Willis—had been on the lam and in and out of prison for murders they had committed. Devil Anse must have suspected, in the dark of the night, that he hadn’t set a very good example for his brothers or his sons. Coleman C. mentions that his great-grandfather was quoted as saying that “he was sorry the troubles began.”
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The wisdom of old age is often a function of lacking the energy for the nefarious deeds of one’s youth. Sometimes, too, it’s hard to remember exactly whom one hated and why. A certain peace also comes from knowing that you have outlived your enemies, and Perry Cline and Frank Phillips had already died. In 1911, Devil Anse was seventy-two years old and still kicking.

Three weeks before his sons Elias and Troy were shot to death in their dispute with the Italian bootlegger, Devil Anse Hatfield was “saved” by his old friend and hunting partner Dyke Garrett.
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Tall, lean, and quick, Garrett was an expert fiddle player. Deaf in one ear, he had been made a chaplain during the Civil War. Forced to participate in the execution of deserters, he began to take his assignment seriously. After the war, while playing his fiddle at a square dance, a lightning bolt knocked the instrument from his hands. This electrifying experience triggered a religious conversion. He was baptized and went on to found a Church of Christ congregation in West Virginia.
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Devil Anse Hatfield’s extended family gathered on the banks of Island Creek to witness their patriarch’s immersion on September 23, 1911.
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Some claim that Devil Anse had a pistol in his pocket.
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If God had refused to accept Devil Anse into the fold, there’s no telling what might have happened to Him. But apparently all went well, and God prevailed over the Devil. Unfortunately, it came too late to benefit those who had had to endure the living hell of the feud years.