Blood Feud: The Hatfields & The McCoys (3 page)

Night was falling when they at last reached the foot of the forest. They picked up their abandoned pack baskets and strapped them on their backs. The Mounts cabin sat nearby. They were Confederate friends of Devil Anse Hatfield, but surely they would take pity on their newly widowed neighbor.

Patty knocked at the door. When Mounts answered, she explained the situation and asked if she and Pete could stay in their cabin overnight and head back home the next morning at first light. Mounts replied that she could sit by the fire, since she was obviously with child and frozen nearly to death, but Pete wasn’t welcome. Patty asked if they could bring Harmon’s body inside, safe from wolves, so that Pete could go home to sleep, returning in the morning to retrieve the body. Mounts refused.

Pete built a fire on the path, wrapped himself in a blanket, and kept watch over Harmon’s body through the long, cold night, a mountain cat screaming in the forest, snow in the pasture sparkling in the moonlight.

The next morning Mounts relented and let Pete and Patty borrow his horse and sled to drag Harmon McCoy’s body back home.
7

Separating Ranel McCoy’s farm in Kentucky from Devil Anse Hatfield’s land in West Virginia, the Tug Fork flows into the Big Sandy River some 160 miles north of its source in the Cumberland mountains of southwestern West Virginia. The Big Sandy, in turn, joins the Ohio River. Calm and shallow for much of the year, the Tug Fork rises and rages in springtime, which allowed loggers in days gone by to ride bucking rafts of primeval timber to sawmills and lumber markets downriver.

But before the loggers came, this region of steep, heavily forested mountains, intersected by narrow creek-carved valleys, sheltered several hundred generations of Native Americans. The Paleo Indians, who arrived after the last ice age, hunted mammoths, mastodons, and buffalos in a landscape much more open than today. When overhunting and climate warming drove those large game animals to extinction around 6000 BC, the descendants of the nomadic hunters settled down in small villages to a life of hunting, fishing, and gathering, fashioning pottery and tools, and constructing ceremonial mounds.

For the next six thousand years or so, their villages and mounds grew larger, and they eventually added the cultivation of corn, beans, and squashes to their menu of subsistence activities. They also added jewelry to their personal adornment, petroglyphs to their spiritual rituals, and games to their leisure hours.
1

In the seventeenth century, when European settlers first arrived on the Cumberland Plateau, in which the Tug Fork nestles, they found very few natives living there. As with every episode of human migration, there are several explanations: the difficulty of the terrain, the devastation of the Native population by diseases introduced to the Americas by European explorers and traders, and a deliberate vacating of what became West Virginia and Kentucky by the Iroquoian Five Nations to the north, who wanted control of the area in order to monopolize the fur trade with French outposts along the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. But some tribes still had villages there—the Lenape and Shawnee, Mingo and Wyandotte—and the Cherokee to the south used the region as a hunting ground.
2

Toponymist George R. Stewart maintained that the name Tug comes from the Cherokee word
tugulu,
referring to the forks of a stream.
3
An alternative explanation for the name Tug comes from a 1756 incident in which an army of Cherokees and Virginians tried to traverse the Tug Fork Valley from southwestern Virginia in order to attack Shawnee tribes along the Big Sandy and Ohio Rivers, intending to punish them for raids on Virginia settlements. The mountain trails were too scrambled and precipitous for horses, though, and the creeks too rock strewn and fast running to use as paths. When supplies ran out and hunting proved difficult, both men and horses grew exhausted and hungry, the soldiers threatening mutiny. They had managed to kill and eat two buffalos, hanging their hides in a tree. In desperation, they cut the hides into strips, called “tugs,” and roasted and ate those as well. Then they disbanded and straggled back home to Virginia.
4

The Cumberland Plateau opened to European settlement in the wake of the various treaties involved in the British defeat of the French in the French and Indian War and the American defeat of the British in the Revolutionary War. By 1783, what had been a trickle of intrepid settlers had increased to a steady stream, if not yet a flood. Disgruntled bands of displaced natives continued to attack the new forts and settlements, and the settlers formed independent militias to combat them. Dragging Canoe, a Cherokee chief trying to stave off this European invasion, is said to have warned the settlers that their new home was “a dark and bloody ground,” referring to prior wars among Native tribes there.
5
His warning was prophetic.

Because of the hardships involved in occupying this wilderness—steep and densely forested mountains, Native raids, and the need to clear first-growth timber before crops could be planted on the scarce level ground—only the most determined or desperate left behind the more settled regions to the east. Those who accepted this challenge often had nothing to lose: former indentured servants, escaped or freed slaves, and criminals, all fleeing westward from the Virginia coast; retired soldiers with land grants on the frontiers; new immigrants in search of unoccupied farmland. Many of these people had faced extreme hardship in their previous lives and were fiercely protective of their independence.

Accidents, crop failures, storms, epidemics, attacks by natives and bandits, and all manner of other disasters could occur daily. In a largely lawless wilderness with few schools, churches, courts, or doctors, people were on their own. As with the natives before them, “justice” for these early settlers usually involved eye-for-an-eye retaliation. A man’s reputation for violence was often what protected his family and animals from harm.
6
As one reporter during the feud years dryly put it, “It is a region which develops eccentricity of character and excessive independence of thought.”
7

These settlers lived in small log cabins just above the floors of the narrow but fertile coves that often flooded in springtime and during heavy rains. Their cabins generally had one or two rooms downstairs for cooking, eating, sitting, and sleeping around a stone hearth, with a sleeping loft upstairs. Sometimes a second such cabin joined the first by means of a roofed “dog trot.” A mortar of orange clay chinked the spaces between the logs. The floors were either packed dirt or puncheons split from logs and stabilized with pegs. Roofs were clad with wooden shakes.
**

The fields of most Tug Fork farms extended up the steep hillsides. Cattle and hogs, marked with their owners’ brands, ranged freely throughout the unfenced forests. Horses provided both labor for plowing and transportation along the steep mountain paths and streambeds. Farm families supplemented the yield from their crops and livestock by hunting wild game, fishing, and gathering nuts, berries, and wild plants. Venison, bear meat, and buffalo meat were important staples. Ginseng, dug in the forest, could be bartered at stores for manufactured goods, as could furs and hides. Farmers distilled corn and apples not needed for human or animal consumption into whiskey and brandy as cash crops for trade or sale, and for family meals and recreation.

Many farmers cut a few of the giant trees, often with diameters of six to eight feet, that grew on their hillsides—especially tulip poplar, red oak, and black walnut—and lashed them into rafts. They branded the cut trunk ends and raced them down the creeks during springtime floods to the timber markets along the Ohio River, guiding them with forty-foot rudders at the back and fifteen-foot oars on the front corners.
8

Beautifully embossed with scenes of mountains, forests, deer, and town street scenes, the concrete floodwall at Matewan, West Virginia, runs for nearly half a mile along the riverbank. (One panel even portrays the Hatfields and the McCoys, facing one another across a stream.) The wall was built in response to thirty-six floods, some catastrophic, that devastated the town in the last half of the twentieth century.
9
Similar floods have ravaged the area throughout its history. The floodwall towers like a defensive wall around a medieval French village. Just looking at it conveys a sense of the force of the raging waters that carried those rafts of lumber downstream to the sawmills 150 miles away—and a sense of the dangers faced by those riding and steering the rafts, like crickets perched on autumn leaves being swept along by a torrent.

Children provided the labor for these home industries, and families were huge. Ranel and Sarah McCoy produced sixteen children, and Devil Anse and Levicy Hatfield, thirteen. Researchers have made much of the isolation of inhabitants of the southern Appalachians,
10
but clearly these researchers have never tried living in a small cabin with sixteen children—with similar cabins located down the creeks and across the ridges.
***
Families often gathered for group activities like sewing quilts, hoeing and harvesting crops, shucking corn, slaughtering hogs, and building cabins and barns. Neighbors gathered on Election Days, for militia musters, to hear circuit-riding preachers and judges, to buy from itinerant peddlers, to attend weddings and funerals, to help each other when babies were born or when people fell sick or died. The men and boys rode their log rafts to the large towns along the rivers and returned home, walking or poling flatboats upriver against the current, laden with store goods and news. Isolation wouldn’t have concerned these people, though privacy might have.

Such was the world into which the progenitors of both the Hatfields and the McCoys moved early in the nineteenth century.

Devil Anse Hatfield’s family believed themselves descended from Capt. Andrew Hatfield and Joseph Hatfield, both famous frontier scouts and Indian fighters. The former had built Hatfield Fort prior to 1770 on a tributary of the New River in Virginia as a refuge for settlers during Native attacks.
11

The first Hatfield to arrive in the Tug Fork Valley was Ephraim, who moved around 1820 from southwestern Virginia to Pike County, Kentucky, with his second wife, Anne Musick, and their ten children. His nickname was “Eph-of-All” because every Tug Fork Hatfield descended from him. His son Valentine moved across the river to what was to become West Virginia during the Civil War. Valentine and his wife produced twelve children, including a son they named Ephraim (“Big Eph”), after Valentine’s father.
12
Couples typically named their first son after his paternal grandfather, and they often named later sons after favorite brothers or uncles or maternal grandfathers. This sometimes resulted in half a dozen men of varying ages with the exact same name within an extended family. As in ancient Rome, nicknames describing physical or behavioral traits helped clarify identities.

A half-brother of Valentine Hatfield remained in Kentucky and spawned a line of Kentucky Hatfields. One of these, “Preacher Anse” Hatfield, played the good angel to Devil Anse’s bad boy during the feud, through his usually unsuccessful attempts at mediation. Most Kentucky Hatfields tried to remain neutral, but several ended up testifying on behalf of the McCoys in the trials that finally ended the feud.

Big Eph Hatfield and Nancy Vance married when he was sixteen and she fifteen.
13
Known as the strongman of the Tug Fork Valley, Big Eph, the father of Devil Anse, grew to six feet four inches tall and 260 pounds.
14
Some even maintain that he was seven feet tall and 300 pounds.
15
Men constantly arrived from near and far to wrestle him and thereby establish their reputations as tough guys. Fabled for killing a panther with only a hunting knife, Big Eph was sometimes known as “Old Panther Killer.” But he was also a justice of the peace, widely respected by his neighbors for his quiet but firm enforcement of the law.
16

Nancy Vance Hatfield—whose most striking feature was a prominent nose that Devil Anse and several of her other children inherited—was a midwife, “tall and strong with handsome facial features . . . hawk-faced with a high forehead, a jutting nose, and a squared-off chin.”
17
Given the staggering number of offspring that Tug Fork couples produced, she undoubtedly never worried about unemployment, although overwork might have been a concern. Unlike most in the valley, she was said to have been literate and to have owned some medical texts.
18

The fourth of her ten surviving children (out of eighteen born), William Anderson “Devil Anse” Hatfield was born on September 9, 1839, at the family’s home on the Straight Fork of Mate Creek. Stories of Devil Anse’s skills in hunting, shooting, and riding abound. In his teens, one tale goes, he killed his first bear by kicking it in the rear until it climbed a chestnut tree to escape him. He then sat beneath the tree to prevent its descent for two days and nights, without food or water, until a search party found him and gave him some bullets so that he could shoot the bear out of the tree. The bear was said to be so huge that it took eight men to carry it home, slung from a pole.
19
Even Paul Bunyan couldn’t have topped that.