Blood Feud: The Hatfields & The McCoys (25 page)

In 2007, Revi Matthew, an endocrinologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, published research indicating that some contemporary McCoys suffer from a disease called Von Hippel–Lindau syndrome (VHL). Tumors occur in the eyes, ears, pancreas, kidney, brain, or spine, causing blindness, deafness, dizziness, kidney cancer, or brain damage. He reported that three-quarters of the McCoys with VHL whom he tested had tumors on their adrenal glands, increasing their production of adrenaline. Symptoms of this version of the syndrome include high blood pressure, racing heartbeat, severe headaches, facial flushing, nausea, vomiting, and violent outbursts. One McCoy child with this disease had been diagnosed at school as having ADHD.
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VHL is autosomal dominant, meaning that the syndrome can manifest in those who receive a mutated gene from only one parent. Given the amount of cousin marriage among the McCoys of the Tug Fork Valley, it’s possible that many suffered from VHL. The irrational behavior of some McCoy males—Ranel’s repeated lawsuits, Tolbert’s knife attack on Ellison Hatfield, Squirrel Hunting Sam’s and Paris’s murder of Bill Staton—might suggest such adrenaline surges. Ron McCoy, who helped organize a reunion in 2000 for both Hatfield and McCoy descendants, acknowledged in response to this medical discovery, “The McCoy temperament is legendary.”
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However, he rightly maintains that many other issues also played a part in the conduct of the feud.

However, the McCoy cases of VHL don’t explain the equivalently enraged behavior of the Hatfields, unless we conclude that there had been so much intermarriage between the clans that both families suffered from this syndrome. Nor does this genetic explanation begin to account for the hysterics of feudists unrelated to the McCoys, such as Bad Frank Phillips, Craig Tolliver, Bad Tom Smith, and many more. Also, much McCoy anger seems justified, given the murders and arson that they suffered at the hands of the Hatfields.

Altina Waller, in her book
Feud,
offers one of the most convincing explanations for the feud. She concludes that local hostilities were a reaction to a region-wide shift under way since the close of the Civil War, with Northern industries moving into the defeated South to replace a rural farming, timbering, and herding economy with an industrialized one based on large-scale coal and timber extraction, the profits of which flowed to absentee capitalists. Though the feud participants themselves didn’t realize it, of course, they were acting out their despair at the impending loss of their traditional culture and personal autonomy.
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In the first half of the feud, Devil Anse Hatfield channeled his neighbors’ resentment because his small-scale timber business was successful, in contrast to those of Perry Cline and Daniel McCoy. Devil Anse also ruthlessly acquired Perry Cline’s land, flying in the face of the pioneer ethic of community, in which residents were expected to help one another rather than to compete with and crush their neighbors. In that sense, Devil Anse himself was an early mountain capitalist, with a payroll and employees.

By the second half of the feud, though, the modernizers in Pikeville—Colonel Dils, Perry Cline, and others—joined Ranel McCoy’s heretofore ineffectual campaign against Devil Anse Hatfield. Colonel Dils was never an overt antagonist of Devil Anse during the feud years, but there is little doubt that he was pulling strings behind the scenes, and he certainly had motives for wanting to engineer Devil Anse’s downfall, given his many wartime clashes with the former Confederate guerrilla leader.

Modernizers in both Pikeville, Kentucky, and Logan, West Virginia, wanted to attract national and international corporations that would bring in railroad lines so as to harvest the area’s timber and coal reserves, using the labor of the local people to fill their own pockets. The feudists quickly became stumbling blocks in the path of progress because these capitalists wouldn’t commit their resources to an area inhabited by what they saw as “white savages.”

For many, Devil Anse, with his small-scale timber business, employing friends and family on his own land, was a champion of local autonomy in the face of the huge and remote coal, timber, and railroad consortiums that were sharpening their knives over the region. In the beginning, Devil Anse would have felt for these absentee capitalists in Northern and European cities the same contempt he had felt during the Civil War for the plantation owners in the Virginia Tidewater who counted on soldiers much poorer than themselves to protect their property. “A rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight” was the rallying cry of those appalled that subsistence farmers who owned no slaves were fighting and dying to preserve slavery for wealthy planters.

The Pikeville modernizers championed Ranel McCoy because they wanted an end to the feud so that big industry could claim the area. But those same Pikeville businessmen, several with family ties to the McCoys, must also have felt compassion for Ranel, who had become a sad shadow of a man, endlessly repeating the story of the New Year’s Night Massacre to passengers as he piloted his ferryboat on the Levisa Fork, a lamenting Charon who wouldn’t shut up.

Then there was the younger generation, which produced the fiercest feudists of all—Hatfield’s Hellhounds and McCoy’s sons and nephews. Hailed as heroes, Eph-of-All Hatfield’s peers early in the nineteenth century settled the Tug Fork Valley and fought off native attackers. After midcentury, Devil Anse’s peers fought heroically in the Civil War, even if those who fought for the Confederacy lost the struggle. But the generation of Devil Anse’s and Ranel’s children had no equivalently heroic deeds they could perform.

Large farms required large families to work them, but those farms in the Tug Fork Valley had been split up among the many heirs time after time, growing smaller and smaller with each passing generation. Many young men from families that had once owned huge tracts of land now owned no land at all, having to work as laborers or loggers on other people’s land.
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Downwardly mobile, they needed manly deeds to perform to make them appear as heroic as their fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers.

Because of the easy availability of moonshine, they drank too much. Because they drank too much, they got into fights over trivial matters involving challenges to their fragile sense of self-worth. Because they all carried knives and guns for hunting and for display, their fights often turned into bloodbaths.

But beneath all this seemingly incomprehensible violence lay anxiety. Their culture of freedom and autonomy was becoming extinct—and they knew it. When you have no land of your own, you have no domain over which you are sole ruler. You are no longer the master of your own fate. The world as they knew it was crashing to an end. Home distilling—a centuries-old technique for preserving excess produce, passed down the generations—became a federal offense in 1862 in what appeared to many mountaineers as an attack upon their culture. In the early 1880s, about the time of the Pawpaw Murders, hundreds of revenue agents flooded the southern Appalachians, destroying stills and arresting those who operated them. These agents bribed neighbors for information and sent out spies disguised as peddlers, surveyors, and cattle and timber merchants. They engaged in shoot-outs with moonshiners and fueled the atmosphere of suspicion and mayhem that ruled this hill country.
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Both Devil Anse and Johnse Hatfield were indicted at different times on charges of dealing in illegal liquor.

In 1887, in response to the dwindling supply of wildlife due to overhunting, West Virginia adopted its first fish and game laws.
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Timbering and the silting of lakes and streams with topsoil eroded from clear-cut forest floors were also destroying the habitats of fish, birds, and wild animals. Without the income from whiskey and pelts, and without the sustenance provided by wild game and fish, the households of the Tug Fork were facing a burgeoning economic crisis—and the stress that loss of livelihood entails.

Outsiders were building a railroad up the valley. If the young men were to have a role in the emerging economy of large-scale lumbering and coal mining, they had to change their entire way of life, morphing into wage laborers who went to work at a certain time every day, all year round, always performing the same tedious and often dangerous tasks. Such a life was unthinkable for young men accustomed to relaxing when they wanted and to working at a variety of jobs, according to the weather, the season, and their own whims.

Feuding gave them a chance to do something heroic. They could ride out in gangs and right what their leaders told them were wrongs. They could showcase their courage and their skills with weapons and horses. They became a generation of hillbullies—and they were proud of it.

Recent psychological studies have suggested that those who are inconsistent and unpredictable in their behavior command other people’s attention more than those who behave in a steady and reliable fashion. This is not news to those who have ever attended kindergarten. This watchfulness has survival value. You must observe those who are unpredictable to see what they are going to do next and to make certain that it doesn’t harm you or your loved ones. This is one reason for the appeal of the bad boy.
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The bad boys of the Tug Fork Valley attracted attention. Much of this attention was fearful, but some of it was admiration from people wanting or needing protection.

Pushed too far, the bad boy ethos verges on psychopathology, and some of the Hatfield behavior does appear sadistic. Whipping women, young or old, with the tail of a butchered cow certainly falls into that category. So does shooting a young woman handicapped from polio as she attempts to draw well water to quench the flames destroying her house, or beating an elderly woman with a rifle butt when she rushes to comfort a dying child.

Coleman C. Hatfield claims that Devil Anse Hatfield “got a charge from scaring people silly. . . . Anse’s own grandchildren were often his prey when he decided to tell scary stories.”
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His younger brothers called him “the boogerman.”
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His favorite source of amusement after he killed a bear was to throw its skin around himself and terrify his children and grandchildren.
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This behavior is on a par with tickling children unmercifully and then claiming that it’s all in fun.

Truda McCoy maintains that Devil Anse Hatfield promised Sarah McCoy to bring her three sons who had killed his brother back to Kentucky alive.
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That he brought them to Kentucky alive, as promised, and then promptly shot them, would strike many as sadistic. So would Cap Hatfield’s promise to Jeff McCoy that he would let him live if he could swim the Tug Fork, followed by his shooting Jeff as he clambered up the Kentucky bank.
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These are the actions of men who might have tortured small animals when they were boys, as Truda McCoy claims Cap Hatfield did.
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