Blood Feud: The Hatfields & The McCoys (4 page)

One theory about the origin of the nickname Devil Anse maintains that after he fought a catamount with his bare hands, his mother exclaimed that he “wasn’t afraid of the Devil himself.” Another theory goes that he got his nickname after Ranel McCoy said of him, “He’s six feet of devil and 180 pounds of hell.” Yet another claims that he single-handedly defended a mountain ridge called the Devil’s Backbone against an entire platoon of Union soldiers during the Civil War. Some attribute the nickname to his behavior, which stood in such contrast to that of his mild-mannered Kentucky cousin, Preacher Anse Hatfield.
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Devil Anse came honorably by his need to perform feats of valor. When he was growing up, his great-grandparents, Eph-of-All Hatfield and Anne Musick Hatfield, lived on Blackberry Creek in Kentucky, through several miles of dense forest and across the Tug Fork from Big Eph’s home in Virginia. Devil Anse no doubt heard from the lips of Anne herself the story of her capture by Shawnees in 1792: Two of her sons from her first marriage were gathering firewood near the family’s cabin in southwestern Virginia when they spotted an Indian raiding party and rushed back home. Their father, Anne’s first husband, David Musick, discovered that his rifle was damaged and wouldn’t fire. A native shot him through the thigh. He bled to death as they scalped him and abducted Anne and their five children.

The Shawnees slaughtered a family cow, made a bag of the hide, and filled it with the raw meat. Then they marched the family toward the Shawnees’ settlement in Ohio. A redheaded son was allowed to ride the family horse because the natives revered the color of his hair. When the youngest son refused to eat the raw beef from the hide bag, however, they ground his face against the bark of a pine tree until the flesh was shredded badly enough to leave lifetime scars.

That night the raiding party camped on an island, where a posse of settlers caught up with them. Anne grabbed her youngest child and herded her four others toward the posse as a Shawnee hurled a tomahawk at them. She and all her children survived and were saved, and she later took up with Eph-of-All, a widower with several small children of his own. Some say he had been a member of the rescue party.
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Several other tales of settlers in Native captivity also circulated during Devil Anse’s youth—such as that of Mary Draper Ingles, kidnapped by Shawnees in 1755 along with two of her children. During a raid on their neighborhood alongside the New River in Virginia—not far east from where Anne Musick was kidnapped—four other settlers were killed and two wounded. Mary was taken to a Shawnee town near present-day Cincinnati, where she sewed shirts for French fur traders and made salt in the marshes. Her children were sent to villages farther north.

Mary and an old German woman from Pennsylvania, also a captive, escaped and traveled eight hundred miles south through dense forests for six weeks, eating only what they could scavenge in the woods. Twice the German woman tried to kill Mary to cannibalize her. Mary stumbled out of the bushes at her home settlement, naked, skeletal, and completely white-haired, even though she was only twenty-three years old.
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Another captivity tale concerned a woman named Jenny Wiley, kidnapped by a group of eleven natives in 1789 from her home in Virginia while her husband was hauling a load of ginseng to market. Her brother and three of her children died during the raid, and her fourth child was killed soon afterward while she was sleeping. Her captors took her to a camp some twenty-five miles northwest of the Tug Fork Valley and held her there for several months, during which time she gave birth to a baby, whom her captors also killed. She managed to escape and sought refuge at a blockhouse, where an intrepid settler rescued her from a river and fought off pursuing natives. She returned home to her husband, and they had six more children.
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Shawnee attacks continued in Kentucky and southwestern Virginia throughout the early years of the nineteenth century and ceased only after Tecumseh’s death in 1813.
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In addition to these models of courage and perseverance held up to Devil Anse Hatfield as a boy, he would also have heard the story of his great-grandfather Abner Vance, a Baptist minister who lived near Abingdon, Virginia. Nancy Vance, Devil Anse’s mother, was said to be a “woods-colt” child of Abner Vance’s daughter Betsy.
Woods-colt
is a poetic regional term meaning “illegitimate” and refers to the frequent result when a domestic mare wanders into the forest and encounters wild stallions. Nancy’s younger brother, Bad Jim Vance, widely believed to have murdered Harmon McCoy in an opening episode of the feud, was another woods-colt child of Betsy Vance.
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Lewis Horton, the son of a well-to-do local family, took a daughter of Abner Vance to Baltimore while attending medical school there. He brought her back home pregnant and unmarried. He allegedly delivered the young woman to her father, Abner Vance, the Baptist preacher, with the words, “Here’s your heifer. You take care of her.”
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Understandably (at least to Appalachians), Abner Vance shot Dr. Horton as he was watering his horse at a river. It is unknown whether the gunshot killed Horton or whether he drowned after plunging into the water.

Following the murder, Abner Vance escaped to western Virginia. Some say that while Vance was a fugitive, he visited the Tug Fork Valley and staked claim to several thousand acres there, later dividing the land among his children.
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Eventually, Vance’s conscience got the better of him, and he returned to Abingdon, hoping his crime had been forgotten or at least forgiven. Unfortunately, it hadn’t been.

Abner Vance was convicted of the murder of Dr. Horton and was sentenced to death. While awaiting execution in jail, he composed a long song about his plight, including accusations of false testimony against several witnesses in his trial. He had saved the life of one of his jurors by insisting on the juror’s innocence in a previous trial, yet this juror had worked for Vance’s conviction. At his hanging in 1800, Abner stood on his coffin and sang this song (see appendix). Then he preached a sermon for an hour and a half. Hatfield family legend maintains that Governor James Monroe, later president of the nation, sent a pardon that arrived just after the hanging. The officials held camphor beneath Abner Vance’s nostrils to try to revive him—without success.
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This story haunted Devil Anse throughout his life and influenced some of his more unfortunate decisions during the feud. The lesson for him may well have been that when the government gets involved, injustice occurs, and that a man should seek his own justice, unaided and unhindered by legal institutions. As with the Native captivity narratives, the underlying message spoke to the need for total self-reliance in a dangerous and unpredictable world.

At the start of the Civil War, Devil Anse Hatfield married Levicy Chafin. They raised their thirteen subsequent children on the Tug Fork in West Virginia. One writer said of the Hatfields, “An enemy . . . might as well kick over a bee-gum in warm weather, and expect to escape the sting of the insect, as to tramp on the toes of one of these spirited, tall sons of the mountains, and not expect to be knocked down.”
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From the beginning of European settlement in the region, parents had divided their land among their adult children to provide each of them with farms on which to raise families of their own. Big Eph Hatfield gave land to five of his sons but none to Devil Anse. He also willed the land on which Devil Anse had already built a cabin to Devil Anse’s younger brother Ellison.

Devil Anse, for his part, didn’t observe the tradition of naming his first-born son after his father. In fact, he named none of his nine sons after his father, suggesting a rift between them.
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This rift must have predated the birth of Devil Anse’s first son (named Johnson instead of Ephraim) in 1862, even though the will that excluded Devil Anse wasn’t written until 1866. Alike in their physical prowess and courage, perhaps they felt competitive with one another. Or perhaps Big Eph, widely respected for being calm and fair, detected a ruthless streak in his second-born son, of which he disapproved. Hatfield family tradition maintains that Devil Anse’s mother, Nancy Vance, worried about him constantly, though no specific reason is ever given.
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A newspaper reporter writing toward the end of the feud said that Devil Anse Hatfield resembled Stonewall Jackson: “He has a powerful frame and is broad-shouldered and deep-chested, but with that curve to his shoulders that goes with all the mountain types that I have seen in this neighborhood. . . . [He] has not a gray line in the brown of his thick hair, mustache, and beard. He has a pair of gray eyes set under the deepest of bushy eyebrows. His nose is such an enormous hook as to suggest the lines of a Turkish scimetar [
sic
].” This reporter described him as wearing a brown coat, black hat, blue shirt, and blue jeans tucked into tall boots, with a revolver at his hip and a rifle in his hand.
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He was said to have a “high-pitched, nasal voice,” in which he often told tall tales and jokes.
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A photograph of Devil Anse Hatfield taken during the feud years shows him wearing a tie, suspenders, an unbuttoned vest, and a suit jacket with a pin on the lapel. His curly beard hangs partway down his chest, and he wears a peaked hat with a brim. He is frowning slightly, and his eyes look anxious. For all his bluster, Devil Anse often appears wary in his photos. Presumably, a truly self-confident man wouldn’t need to drape himself with guns and cartridge belts as Devil Anse often did. But then again, a man’s reputation for violence at that time often protected his family and homestead from harm.

In photos, Devil Anse’s wife, Levicy Chafin, is a solidly built woman, with her gray hair drawn back into a bun. Her steady gaze through dark eyes appears solemn and not unkind. A reporter said she was the “strongest and most muscular-looking woman I have ever seen [with] intensely black hair, a very broad swarthy face, and a stout, powerful figure.”
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This same reporter claimed that all the wives and daughters of the feudists were “passive spectators” and “faithful slaves.”
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It is indeed hard to view them as anything other than enablers. Many look older than their actual years because of the great toll the physical demands of their lives took on them. They were constantly pregnant or nursing. Some gave birth yearly, most at least every two or three years. They did all the housework—cleaning, cooking, preserving, sewing, spinning, weaving, and carrying firewood and water. Often they performed the farm work as well while their husbands and sons ran around creating havoc and hiding from their enemies. Judging from the huge numbers of children they bore, the women apparently never employed against their husbands their only available weapon: the withholding of sex.

Imagine butchering a hog while pregnant, and you have a picture of what their lives were like. Then imagine watching your husband and children murdered right in front of you and your house burned down around you on a cold winter night. Yet the wives of the feudists continued to conceive children every year or two, and some of these sons grew up to continue the killing.

William McCoy arrived in Pike County, Kentucky, from southwestern Virginia in 1804, and one of his thirteen children, Daniel, moved across the Tug Fork to what became West Virginia. Daniel raised his thirteen children there with his wife, Margaret “Peggy” Taylor, who was sixteen when they married. Their third son, Randolph “Ranel,” born on October 30, 1825, became the McCoy feud leader.
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We know much less about Ranel McCoy’s upbringing than about that of Devil Anse because Ranel’s descendants didn’t leave behind appreciative stories concerning him. Possibly he wasn’t memorable, or perhaps so many of his children died in the feud that the few left to tell the tale were just trying to forget the multiple tragedies that had blighted their family.