Blood Feud: The Hatfields & The McCoys (7 page)

Ranel McCoy did eventually retaliate, though, however blandly. Fifteen months after Harmon’s death, in April 1866, he charged Devil Anse Hatfield with stealing a horse from his farm in 1864. Legend maintains that Devil Anse refuted this charge by claiming that he was stationed in Saltville on the date in question with the 45th Battalion Virginia Infantry. Therefore he couldn’t have stolen a horse from Ranel’s farm in Kentucky. Devil Anse also claimed that Ranel McCoy was with him. But Ranel’s name, as we have already seen, doesn’t appear on the roster for that battalion among his ten McCoy relatives. So who was actually where, when, and why remains a mystery.

Ranel McCoy and Devil Anse Hatfield filed several similar civil suits against each other in the years following.
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Clearly there was no love lost between the two men. Each sought to annoy the other and express his contempt—but peacefully and via existing legal channels.

Many in the Tug Fork Valley—said to be a lawless land of personal vendettas—spent much of their leisure time traveling back and forth to their county courthouses at Pikeville, Kentucky, and Logan, West Virginia, to file suits against one another. Both towns lay twenty-five miles away from the Tug Fork Valley along narrow mountain paths, so these were not simple day trips. After the war, many of these cases concerned livestock and supplies seized without compensation by Union and Confederate troops, Home Guards, and guerrillas. Those charged with such thefts invariably justified their actions as essential for the war effort.

Devil Anse Hatfield’s younger brother Ellison and three others were sued in 1863 for hijacking four hogs that belonged to two first cousins of Ranel McCoy. One of Ranel McCoy’s brothers and several others “requisitioned” six hogs by force in 1863, and their Hatfield owner demanded compensation after the war. Ranel McCoy’s father and several others were accused of stealing leather from Thomas Hatfield at gunpoint in 1864, destroying a bee gum in the process. Ranel McCoy’s cousin Pleasant, of bovine love fame, was charged with kidnapping three horses in 1863—for what purpose, one shudders to imagine.
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Col. John Dils brought a suit against members of the Virginia State Line and Gen. Vincent Witcher’s rangers for looting his store and tannery in Pikeville.
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So it goes on, an endless litany of litigation—but not the vigilante retaliation that the stereotypes about the region have led us to expect. Many had used the excuse of Civil War hostilities to take whatever they wanted or needed from their neighbors. But the victims sought compensation through the court system, rather than revenge through midnight attacks. The attacks came later.

It seems likely that Ranel McCoy and his family were simply afraid to avenge his brother Harmon’s murder more forcefully than with annoyance lawsuits. The Logan Wildcats and Rebel Bill Smith, the guerrilla king, were still policing the district after Harmon’s death, administering their own bloody version of justice wherever and however they saw fit. “The law is not enforced, and the courts are powerless to protect the inhabitants,” said a reporter of the area.
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Thirteen years elapsed before the next major installment of the feud—the infamous Hog Trial in 1878—and some cite this period of apparent peace as evidence that these Civil War clashes had no relation to what came later. Yet most McCoys who eventually joined the feud weren’t even teenagers when Harmon McCoy was murdered. Harmon’s own sons were twelve, nine, six, and three at the time. Ranel’s sons were fourteen, eleven, ten, three, two, and one. Sam McCoy, Harmon’s and Ranel’s brother, had sons who were ten and four. All these young men later fought in the feud on behalf of the McCoys, and five of them died. Even Harmon’s two daughters played a part, albeit in supporting roles. Like cicada nymphs, the bitterness inspired by Harmon McCoy’s murder appears to have gone underground for thirteen years, until Harmon’s children and nephews had acquired the strength to emerge and avenge it.

In the meantime, another annoyance lawsuit was to influence the entire course of the feud.

Descended from German immigrants from the Palatinate, Jacob Cline, known as “Rich Jake,” owned six thousand acres in the Tug Fork Valley on both the Kentucky and West Virginia sides of the river, as well as at least three slaves. His nearest West Virginia neighbor was Devil Anse Hatfield. When Rich Jake died in 1858, he willed five thousand acres of West Virginia timberland to his son Perry. Perry was nine years old at the time and continued to live at his father’s house in West Virginia with a brother and a sister.

When the Civil War broke out, Perry Cline was too young to fight, but two of his brothers joined Col. John Dils’s 39th Kentucky Mounted Infantry.
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Allowed to choose his own guardian after the war, Perry picked Dils. Dils also acted as guardian to nine other young people whose fathers had been killed fighting for the Union. One of these was Frank Phillips, later an important feud leader for the McCoys.

When Perry Cline was old enough, he worked briefly on Devil Anse Hatfield’s timber crew. Then he began logging the land left him by his father. In 1872 Devil Anse accused him of logging across the boundary between their properties and initiated a lawsuit against him.
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Rich Jake’s will read: “I give to my son Peary [
sic
] H. Cline a tract of land on Tug River in Logan County and state of Virginia bounded as follows to wit Beginning at two maples standing about 1 quarter of a mile above the south of Grapevine Creek thence running up the river including all the land I hold on the river up to Jackson Mounts line.”
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These terms defining Perry Cline’s boundaries are so vague that it’s hard to imagine Devil Anse Hatfield
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excusing him for straying off his own land while timbering. The Cline family, like both the Hatfields and the McCoys, were among the earliest settlers in the Tug Fork Valley. They had been Devil Anse’s closest neighbors for many years. Nevertheless, six years later this suit was settled out of court, and Devil Anse received all five thousand of Cline’s acres in recompense.
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Why was Perry Cline willing to give up all his inherited land without a trial? The reason remains a mystery. In a letter to the West Virginia governor in 1887, nine years later, Cline writes of the Hatfields, “These men has made good citizens leave their homes and forsake all they had, and refuse to let any person tend their lands.”
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Reading between the lines here suggests that some kind of intimidation persuaded Cline to forfeit his land.

There were also rumors that the Logan County courthouse was so in thrall to Devil Anse Hatfield that Perry Cline knew it was pointless to pursue the matter any further. Devil Anse served as deputy sheriff at various times, and his brothers as constables. Some of Devil Anse’s friends were county officials. His oldest brother, Wall Hatfield, often sat on the county court, the center for all community decisions in those days.
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Four respected citizens of the county posted the bond required for Devil Anse’s court case against Perry Cline, and Devil Anse named his fifth child after one of them.
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Young Cline surely felt all of Logan County’s leadership arrayed against him.

Prior to the acquisition of Perry Cline’s five thousand acres, Devil Anse Hatfield had owned no land, apart from a small plot given to him by his wife’s family. He was living in a cabin on land his father had already willed to his brother Ellison, and he was running a small lumbering operation on leased properties. Once he took possession of Perry Cline’s five thousand acres, however, he increased the scale of his operation, hired more workers, and obtained lines of credit for supplies with store owners. He also sold off pieces of Cline’s land to friends and family.
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He had gone, in that one legal settlement, from being virtually landless to being one of the largest landowners in the valley, amassing profits from both lumbering and real estate.

Soon after the lawsuit was filed, Perry Cline accepted defeat and moved with his wife and child to Pikeville, where his guardian, Col. John Dils, lived. Making the best of a bad situation, Cline became deputy sheriff and was elected sheriff the following year. He also became deputy jailer. In 1873 he served in the Kentucky House of Delegates and participated in the state’s Democratic convention. By 1884 he had become a lawyer, just in time to champion the McCoys against Devil Anse Hatfield during the closing episodes of the feud.
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Cline had ties of kinship to Ranel McCoy. Two of Cline’s older brothers had married first cousins of Ranel. One of Cline’s sisters had also married a first cousin of Ranel, and Perry’s sister Martha (Patty) was the widow of Harmon McCoy, Ranel’s younger brother. Which made Harmon McCoy Perry Cline’s brother-in-law. (But to further illustrate the complicated ties between the feuding families, another of Cline’s sisters married a cousin of Devil Anse Hatfield.)

No doubt for Ranel McCoy, the acquisition of Perry Cline’s land by Devil Anse Hatfield salted the wound of Harmon’s cold-blooded murder. Ranel McCoy was no doubt looking for a way to register his displeasure with Devil Anse Hatfield’s rapacious ways—but in his usual passive-aggressive manner.

He soon found one.

Devil Anse’s first cousin Floyd Hatfield joined the feud when Ranel McCoy accused him of stealing one of his hogs, but Floyd retired to the background after the Hog Trial.
Courtesy of West Virginia State Archives

Building and maintaining fences is demanding work, even more so in rocky, mountainous terrain, so frontier farmers in the nineteenth century often allowed their livestock to range freely through the woods. The half-wild razorback hogs flourished in this arrangement because they could feast on the rich mast of steep hillside forests—acorns and beechnuts, chestnuts and hazelnuts. Territorial, the hogs didn’t often wander far from home, and each farmer made specific notches in the hogs’ ears to identify his own.

In autumn, farmers herded their hogs back home for fattening and slaughter, branded the ears of the piglets, and released the latter to the wilds. They butchered the adults, rendered their lard, and cured their meat for winter use. Identification marks sometimes became difficult to discern as the hogs grew to maturity, their ears growing along with their bodies.
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But, like herders the world over, most farmers could identify their own animals by sight.

Many have snorted at the idea of a stolen hog’s triggering a bloody feud, but hogs in the Tug Fork Valley in the nineteenth century were no laughing matter. One hog more or less could make the difference between surviving the winter or starving to death before wild greens sprouted in the spring. Livestock also served as a gauge of a subsistence farmer’s wealth. So the accusation of hog theft was deadly serious, and one that Ranel McCoy was about to level at a first cousin of Devil Anse Hatfield.

In the autumn of 1878, just six months after the settlement that awarded Perry Cline’s five thousand acres to Devil Anse Hatfield, Ranel McCoy and his sons went into the forests to gather in their hogs. It was time to fatten them for the winter slaughter. But one of their sows and her piglets were missing.
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Searching for his errant sow, McCoy passed the farm on which Floyd Hatfield was a sharecropper. A first cousin of Devil Anse Hatfield, Floyd worked on Devil Anse’s timber crew on Perry Cline’s former land across the Tug Fork in West Virginia. He had recently bought some of Cline’s land from Devil Anse at the bargain price of fifty cents per acre and was preparing to move to West Virginia.
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Floyd’s wife was a daughter of Ranel McCoy’s first cousin, so Floyd Hatfield and Ranel McCoy also had ties of kinship, though not so strong as Floyd’s ties to the Hatfields. Ranel thought he recognized his missing hog among Floyd’s drove—but Floyd indignantly denied it.

Ranel McCoy carried his charges to Devil Anse Hatfield’s cousin Preacher Anse Hatfield,
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who preached at the Old Pond Creek Baptist Church, attended by both Hatfields and McCoys. Preacher Anse also served as a justice of the peace for Blackberry District, in which Ranel McCoy lived. Preacher Anse and Devil Anse both descended from Eph-of-All Hatfield, but via two different wives. So they were half–first cousins once removed. They were removed from each other in other ways, too: Preacher Anse was mild-mannered and peace-loving, whereas Devil Anse was a wily prankster and guerrilla fighter. Preacher Anse ran a church, whereas Devil Anse told a reporter toward the end of the feud that he himself belonged to “the Devil’s church.”
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Preacher Anse assured Ranel McCoy that he would organize a hearing about the contested hog at his log cabin.

On the morning of the hearing, farmers in the Tug Fork Valley slopped their hogs, milked their cows, and scattered grain for their chickens. In their fields, fenced with split rails, stood rows of sheaved cornstalks, like Indian tepees, surrounded by ripe orange pumpkins. They saddled up their horses and rode double, carrying rifles and lunch baskets. Everyone wanted to see whether Ranel McCoy or Floyd Hatfield would be awarded the wayward hog. But most were happy just to have a break from routine and a chance to visit with neighbors. They had put on their best clothes—calico dresses, shawls, and sunbonnets for the women; suit jackets, overalls, starched shirts, boots, and hats for the men.

They crowded into Preacher Anse Hatfield’s cabin, sitting on his furniture and his bedsteads and on the steps up to his loft. Men squatted on their haunches along the inside walls and in the yard. From the long front porch, people looked in through open windows. The hog lay in the middle of the room, feet bound, eyes puzzled. Some say there were no marks on the hog’s ears,
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others that Ranel’s marks were obvious,
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still others that the marks were so damaged by the hog’s rooting and rutting that they couldn’t be identified.
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Preacher Anse Hatfield was anxious. He wanted, above all, to avert trouble. Trouble was what he would get if he himself rendered a decision about the rightful owner of this hog. But he hadn’t been able to persuade anyone else to join a jury. If Ranel McCoy won the hog, the Hatfields might punish the jurors. If Floyd Hatfield won the hog, the McCoys might do the same. Tug Forkers respected the law enough to submit to hearings and trials, but if a legal decision went against them, they sometimes administered their own personal justice. Preacher Anse had decided to copy Solomon’s example: He would appoint a jury of six Hatfields and six McCoys. Each man would vote with his own family, resulting in a hung jury. Then he could dismiss the case with everyone’s pride intact.

Preacher Anse first insisted that every man stack his guns, pistols, and knives in the front corner of the room, where no one could easily get at them. Then he announced his plan and picked his jury members, who sat down on benches along one wall.

One by one, Preacher Anse invited his witnesses to sit in a cane-bottomed chair and to tell him and the jury what they knew about the hog in question. To no one’s surprise, every McCoy witness claimed the hog belonged to Ranel, and every Hatfield witness claimed it belonged to Floyd.

But then came Bill Staton. A large, powerful man with a swashbuckling manner, Bill Staton was the son of Nancy McCoy Staton, Ranel McCoy’s first cousin. But Staton’s sister Esther was married to Floyd Hatfield, and Staton’s sister Sarah was married to Ellison Hatfield, Devil Anse Hatfield’s younger brother. Not only were Floyd and Ellison Bill Staton’s brothers-in-law, they were also his best friends. Staton himself lived in West Virginia not far from the various Hatfield households.
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Like many in the audience, Staton had conflicting loyalties. But he testified that he had watched Floyd Hatfield brand the hog with his own mark and that she belonged to him.

Rumor credited Staton with a grudge against Ranel McCoy’s family because several of McCoy’s rambunctious sons had shot and broken some fishing poles that Staton had planted on the riverbank.
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Following Staton’s testimony, Paris McCoy, Ranel’s nephew, called Staton a “damned liar.”
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Some say the jurors moved to another room to render their verdict.
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Others maintain that the jurors had to declare themselves on the spot in front of the assembled crowd.
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But all report that one McCoy juror, Selkirk McCoy, voted with the Hatfields against Ranel McCoy, stating that Ranel had presented no evidence to disprove Bill Staton’s testimony.

Another person with divided loyalties, Selkirk McCoy was a son of Ranel’s first cousin and a nephew of Ranel’s wife, Sarah. But he had fought under Devil Anse in the Civil War, and he and his two sons were working on Devil Anse’s timber crew in West Virginia. Some privately questioned Preacher Anse’s claim to have selected a jury equally divided in its loyalties between the Hatfields and the McCoys.
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With such a Gordian Knot of entangled relationships and alliances, though, how could he have? That said, in the years before the trial, Selkirk McCoy owned no land and lived in Kentucky. In the years after the trial, he lived on 120 acres in West Virginia next door to Devil Anse’s brother Ellison.
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Quite a coincidence of fortune.

As one of Devil Anse Hatfield’s descendants suggested years later, the entire feud could have been avoided if only Floyd Hatfield had barbecued that wretched hog and invited everyone to supper.
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Instead, the cauldron of McCoy bile, simmering since Harmon McCoy’s death and Perry Cline’s land loss, began to boil in earnest. Ranel McCoy nursed his hard feelings, grumbling and complaining, but he avoided retaliation. A good Christian woman, his wife, Sarah, urged him to accept his lot in life and forgive those who had wronged him.
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Ranel McCoy was also a religious man, so he no doubt struggled to accept his wife’s counsel to turn the other cheek. Truda McCoy says of him that “he had a standard of right and wrong—a code that he lived by. He believed in God and the Devil. No man in his right mind could doubt the Devil—not after he had lived as close to the Hatfields as he had.”
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Some of Ranel McCoy’s sons and nephews, however, refused to forgive and forget. They insulted and sparred with both Bill Staton and Selkirk McCoy. One day when Staton and his brother were poling a boat upstream along the Tug Fork, another boat passed them, headed downstream, piloted by Calvin and Floyd McCoy. Quiet and reserved, Floyd McCoy, Ranel’s second son, had no gift for fighting. One researcher says that his enemies regarded him as “chicken-hearted.”
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He did his best to remain in the shadows whenever feud violence flared.

A studious young man, Calvin McCoy, Ranel’s sixth son, was so in love with learning that he supposedly repeated the eighth grade three times, constantly borrowing books from his teachers to read at home. One teacher praised his speaking ability and predicted that he would become a politician one day. But he lived in the wrong place at the wrong time to nurture such ambitions to fruition.
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Both boats pulled ashore on opposite banks of the river, and the two groups shot at each other until dark. Then they went home for supper.
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One autumn day soon after this skirmish, Squirrel Hunting Sam McCoy, Ranel’s nephew, came across Bill Staton and Ellison Hatfield as they hunted deer on a creek near their West Virginia homes. Squirrel Hunting Sam, obviously, loved to hunt squirrels. Some days he started on a mountain ridge and followed it twenty-five miles into Pikeville, slaughtering squirrels all along the way. His record was one hundred in one day. He usually donated the dead squirrels for church suppers.
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His relatives reportedly found him “queer”—pronounced “quair” in the mountains, meaning strange.
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