Blood Feud: The Hatfields & The McCoys (2 page)

The Hatfield family historian was Coleman A. Hatfield, a West Virginia attorney who recorded much information about the feud in journals and on tape. His primary sources included his grandfather Devil Anse Hatfield and his father, William Anderson “Cap” Hatfield, who was Devil Anse’s second son and most trusted deputy during the feud years. Coleman A. Hatfield’s son Dr. Coleman C. Hatfield, an optometrist, shaped his father’s information and interviews of his own into
The Tale of the Devil: The Biography of Devil Anse Hatfield
with the help of historian and journalist Robert Y. Spence. The Hatfield book reads like a rather dry legal brief when compared to Truda McCoy’s more florid prose. At the points where the two versions diverge—and of course there are many—reality probably lies somewhere near the crossroads.

The most concise and coherent secondary source about the feud is Otis K. Rice’s
The Hatfields and the McCoys.
Altina Waller’s
Feud: Hatfields, McCoys, and Social Change in Appalachia, 1860–1900
is the most thorough and well documented. A history professor, Waller was teaching at West Virginia University when she researched and wrote her book. Coleman C. Hatfield had written, “I honestly believe . . . that the history of this feud has been told for the last two generations in a light more favorable to the McCoy family of Pike County, Kentucky, than to the Hatfields of Southern West Virginia.”
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Waller’s book corrects this imbalance and also constructs a plausible chronology from all the confusing and conflicting oral histories and prior books on the subject.

My version of the feud derives from these sources and others. It may be that some anecdotes I deemed implausible and excluded actually happened; it may be that some I did include didn’t happen. In the end, it comes down to the judgment of each person who tries to write about this confusing and often upsetting saga.

My goal in writing this book has been to learn what actually happened during the most famous feud in American history, insofar as that is possible, rather than to assign blame at this late date. There is no one overriding Truth about this bloody tragedy, just many private individual truths as experienced by each participant and observer. These personal truths agree sometimes and contradict at others—exactly like the accounts of every other episode in human history.

He lay in a forest cave, shivering with fever and coughing in the smoke from the smoldering fire. Snowflakes drifted down the mouth of the cave that overlooked his Peter Creek farm in Pike County, Kentucky. His leg ached at the site of its poorly healed break, but at least he had made it home from Catlettsburg in time for New Year’s.

It was January 9, 1865, night would soon fall, and Harmon McCoy’s mouth was parched. His water jug lay empty, but he felt too weak to drag himself to the cave’s edge to collect some snow. The sweat dampening his black hair made it even curlier than usual. His wife, Patty, loved his curls, but he always tried to slick them down. She also liked him clean shaven, which made him just about the only man he knew who didn’t have a beard or at least a mustache. Those curls and bare cheeks made him look younger than his thirty-seven years. So to command respect when serving with his Union regiment, the 45th Kentucky Mounted Infantry, he had let his beard grow out.
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He would be with his regiment still but for his leg.

When Harmon had mentioned returning to the cabin so that Patty could tend to him, Pete, his former slave, had urged him to stay hidden in the cave. Pete had promised to bring Patty here, leaving his wife, Chloe, with the children. But Harmon could no longer bear the thought of Patty’s struggling through the snow in her condition. Their baby was due in a few weeks. He needed to go to her instead.

Harmon shoved his sack of rifle shells into a saddlebag and struggled to his feet. Hanging his saddlebags over one shoulder, he wrapped his wool army blanket around himself like a shawl. Then he grabbed his rifle and lurched across the dirt floor to the mouth of the cave.

Down below he could just pick out his log cabin alongside the silver thread of Peter Creek. Smoke was drifting up from the chimney into the glowering sky. It would be warm inside. Patty would put him to bed and cover him with quilts and bring him water from the well. The tussling of his four rowdy boys would cheer him up. Pete’s footprints in the snow far below led from the cabin across the silent pasture to the woods—like stitching on a muslin quilt backing.

Leaning on his rifle, Harmon squatted outside the cave to scoop up a handful of snow. Pete’s boots had packed the snow around the cave’s entrance. He and Patty were lucky to still have Pete and Chloe to help with the crops and the animals, the housework and the children, especially while Harmon was fighting with his regiment. When Lincoln had emancipated the slaves—over a year ago now—many headed north to escape the wrath of their owners, who had supported the Union in the belief that they would be allowed to keep the slaves they already had, or would at least be compensated for their loss. But Pete and Chloe had wanted to stay even after Harmon told them they were free to leave. They had asked him where he thought they could go instead, as old as they were.

Harmon nibbled the snow, letting it melt in his mouth and soothe his raw throat. By going back home, was he putting Patty and the children at risk—both from this lung disease and also from the Logan Wildcats? On the path to Pikeville, the day after he had arrived home, he ran into “Bad Jim” Vance, tall, muscular, still mean as a snake, and with that droopy black mustache. Vance had a condition that made his eyes bulge and roll. He couldn’t focus on you when he talked, but to think he wasn’t paying attention was a mistake: He could draw his pistol faster than a copperhead could strike. Jim wore a gold watch chain looped across his vest and a bowler hat. Harmon had eyed the bulge of Bad Jim’s holster beneath his suit jacket and the rifle in its sheath attached to his saddle.
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Until his desertion last year, Bad Jim had ridden with Gen. Vincent Witcher’s raiders, who had plagued Union supporters all over southeastern Kentucky and southwestern Virginia. They once made a wide sweep across the Tug Fork Valley, flying a black flag as they rode, seizing food and livestock, killing Unionists and burning down their houses and barns. Bad Jim had stolen horses for these raiders, several from his own cousin, some said.

Jim Vance had now become the most ruthless of the Logan Wildcats, a guerrilla group led by his sister Nancy Hatfield’s son, Bad Jim’s notorious nephew, “Devil Anse” Hatfield. The Wildcats, mostly Confederate deserters, hailed from the West Virginia side of the Tug Fork. Now that West Virginia had seceded from Virginia to rejoin the Union, the Wildcats set themselves the mission of defending Confederate farms and families from avenging Union troops. The Wildcats were furious that the Confederacy was about to lose this wretched war, and they especially hated Harmon for having fought for the Union—though he was far from the only man in the Tug Fork Valley to have done so.

But Devil Anse Hatfield had plenty of other reasons to hate Harmon McCoy. At the start of the war, Harmon had served as a Union Home Guard under “General Bill” France.
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Devil Anse crossed the Tug Fork with two friends to watch the Home Guards drill. General France decided that they were spying for the Confederates and ordered Harmon to fight Devil Anse. Although Harmon lost the fight, he helped his fellow Home Guards chase Devil Anse and his friends back across the river to Virginia—still undivided then—by throwing rocks at them.
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Harmon, Pete, and General France later shot a friend of Devil Anse through the chest while stealing horses from him. Devil Anse tracked down General France and shot him down at dawn as he urinated off his porch. Forty of General France’s troops crossed the Tug Fork to arrest Devil Anse for the murder. But Devil Anse’s wife, Levicy, somehow sensed that they were coming and pushed Devil Anse out the back door to hide in the forest.
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A rumor started that Harmon himself was planning to kill Devil Anse for murdering General France. Though Harmon had denied it, the rumor continued to circulate.

In the meantime, during a skirmish, Harmon had taken a bullet that entered at his collarbone and exited between the ribs on the opposite side of his chest. He lay in bed for months, his wounds oozing pus, lucky to be alive. A passing Confederate cavalry unit searched his cabin and found him. They marched him, weak with fever, a hundred miles to a railhead in Virginia, where they put him in a cattle car and shipped him to a prison in Richmond. When he was released in a prisoner exchange several months later, his wounds still oozing, he returned to his bed in the Peter Creek cabin.
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After recovering, Harmon McCoy enlisted in the 45th Kentucky—partly to get out of the area. Devil Anse Hatfield had by now deserted from his Confederate battalion and come back home to head up the Logan Wildcats. Harmon had dared to hope that Devil Anse’s fury toward him might have faded while Harmon was away serving in northern Kentucky. But on the road to Pikeville the other day, Bad Jim Vance, eyes rolling, had rested his hand on his rifle butt and warned Harmon that the Wildcats would soon come looking for him.

A few days later, as Harmon was drawing water from the well in his yard, a bullet from the woods zinged past him. He ran inside, stuffed supplies into his saddlebags, grabbed his rifle, and limped up the hill to this cave, where he had been hiding out for several days now.

Standing at the mouth of the cave, his thirst sated, Harmon started coughing. It was a dry hacking cough that didn’t let him catch his breath. He was freezing. At least at home he would have a chance of getting well before having to deal with the Wildcats again. He had spent this entire war either sick or injured—first his infected gunshot wounds, then his fractured leg, now pneumonia. What next?

He started down the path toward home, dragging his aching leg. Below him he spotted two men among the bare branches of the winter trees, their features indistinct in the forest gloom. As he threw aside his blanket and raised his rifle, gunshots sounded up the hill, and an explosion bloomed inside his chest.

When Patty learned from Pete how sick Harmon was, she rushed around the cabin packing two baskets with food, blankets, teas, and ointments. Donning her warmest clothes, she left the cabin with Pete. They followed Pete’s tracks through the snow across the pasture, pausing often for Patty to rest and catch her breath since she was carrying a nearly full-term baby in her belly and the pack basket on her back. As they reached the wood line and began their ascent to the cave, they heard gunshots farther up the hill. Dropping their provisions, they scrambled up the steep trail as fast as Patty could manage.

They reached a junction at which new boot prints emerged from the woods to join Pete’s tracks up the hill toward the cave. Pete pointed them out, suddenly afraid that they themselves were about to be ambushed by whoever had fired the shots. But they kept going, more anxious for Harmon’s life than fearful for their own. That his tracks in the snow had likely led the Wildcats to Harmon’s hideout made Pete feel sick.

Alongside the trail, just below the cave, they spotted a fallen oak tree. Across its trunk sprawled Harmon McCoy. The snow on the ground around him was stained scarlet. They rushed to him, and Pete turned him over. Harmon’s jacket was soaked dark red. His eyes were wide open, his dark curly hair damp with sweat, his lips a bloodless blue. Patty closed his eyelids with her fingertips, bowing her head and closing her own eyes as despair swept over her.

They stood there in silence for a long time, trying to work out what to do next. Finally Pete plunged through the snow to an open area in which a neighboring farmer named Mounts had been cutting and skinning logs for an addition to his cabin. Pete found a large sheet of curled bark and dragged it over. He and Patty pulled Harmon’s body off the oak trunk onto a blanket and wrapped him up in it. Then they rolled the blanketed bundle into the bark, laying Harmon’s rifle and saddlebags alongside him. Pete went into the cave and emerged with a rope. He and Patty tied the bark casket shut and fashioned handles from loops of the rope. Slowly they pulled Harmon’s bloody body back down the trail toward home.