Blood Feud: The Hatfields & The McCoys (9 page)

Tolbert McCoy was so outraged by whatever occurred on that mountain path with the Hatfield posse that he rushed to a justice of the peace and obtained warrants for the arrest of Devil Anse Hatfield and all the others who had rescued Johnse. Three months later, reluctant feudist Good Elias Hatfield and his cousin Floyd Hatfield of Hog Trial fame were arrested and incarcerated. A Kentucky Hatfield bailed them out, and some McCoys testified in their defense. The charges were dropped, further humiliating the enraged Tolbert.
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Meanwhile, Roseanna McCoy’s warning to Devil Anse Hatfield about Johnse’s arrest—which could easily have resulted in the deaths of whichever male relatives were Johnse’s captors—estranged her even more from her family and neighbors. Especially cold and unforgiving, her father was disgusted by her liaison with Johnse Hatfield, her efforts to save him at the expense of her own brothers, and her pregnancy.
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In the spring of 1881, aided by her aunt Betty, Roseanna McCoy gave birth to a daughter, Sarah Elizabeth.
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Johnse Hatfield was nowhere to be seen. It was said that Roseanna’s father and brothers had threatened him with death if he came sniffing around again—but he was also otherwise engaged: drinking too much moonshine and courting Roseanna’s cousin Nancy McCoy, who was sixteen.
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“Tall and lithe with a strange dark beauty all her own,” Nancy McCoy had black hair so long that she could reportedly sit on it.
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Many young women in the mountains married by age sixteen, and some as young as fourteen. But Nancy was still a schoolgirl, and Johnse Hatfield was courting her by giving her rides to the schoolhouse on the back of his horse.
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It was Nancy with whom Patty Cline McCoy had been pregnant when she discovered Harmon’s bullet-riddled body in the forest and dragged him home through the snow. Bad Jim Vance, Harmon’s purported murderer, was Johnse Hatfield’s great-uncle. Patty opposed her daughter’s romance with Johnse for this reason.
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Johnse’s father, Devil Anse, had also recently taken five thousand acres of Patty’s father’s land from her brother Perry Cline.

But the horseback courtship succeeded, and the couple married on May 14, 1881, despite the objections of Nancy’s mother.

The winter after Johnse Hatfield’s marriage to Nancy McCoy, his woods-colt daughter with Roseanna McCoy, Sarah Elizabeth, died of measles and pneumonia. Roseanna mourned for hours every day beside the child’s grave on a pine-treed hillside behind Aunt Betty’s house. When Roseanna’s sister Alifair contracted typhoid, Sarah McCoy finally persuaded Roseanna to come home and nurse her ailing sibling. After Alifair’s recovery, Roseanna moved to Pikeville to nurse another child with typhoid, this one belonging to Perry Cline, whose niece Nancy McCoy had just married Johnse Hatfield. Roseanna remained with the Clines to help them care for their six children.
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It must have been difficult for her to accept the role of spinster aunt after the passion she had so recently experienced with Johnse.

Truda McCoy reports a dramatic, perhaps dramatized, episode recorded by no one else in which Johnse Hatfield comes to the Cline house in Pikeville and begs Roseanna McCoy to marry him, which she refuses to do.
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This scenario seems unlikely since Johnse was presumably married to Roseanna’s cousin Nancy by this time, but who knows? A well-known womanizer, Johnse may have continued to pursue Roseanna while he was married to Nancy, just as he had pursued Nancy when Roseanna was living with him and his family. He could never get enough, of alcohol or of women. Truda McCoy calls him a “chronic lover.”
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Truda McCoy also reports that, before his marriage to Nancy McCoy, Johnse Hatfield had assuaged his grief over the loss of Roseanna in the arms of Belle Beaver of Happy Hollow, West Virginia. Belle had previously been tarred and feathered and ridden out of a North Carolina town on a rail by obedient husbands of jealous wives. The upright wives of the Tug Fork Valley also insisted that their menfolk get rid of her. So some men bound her hands, tied the skirt of her dress over her head in a knot, and suspended her—naked from the chest down—from the rafters of her shack by a rope under her armpits. When someone finally freed her twenty-four hours later, she announced that she had decided to leave Happy Hollow.
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Some researchers downplay the significance of the romance between Roseanna McCoy and Johnse Hatfield as a cause for the brutal, bloody feud violence that followed.
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Coleman C. Hatfield maintains that their blighted romance played little part in the course of the feud—until the tabloids got hold of it at the end and turned it into a hillbilly
Romeo and Juliet
to titillate their prim Victorian readers in Northern cities.

Roseanna may have behaved like Juliet, but Johnse was no Romeo, with or without his yellow boots and celluloid collar.

The tragedy that ensnared Roseanna McCoy when she met Johnse Hatfield at the 1880 Election Day didn’t teach the McCoys to avoid the polls. On Monday, August 7, 1882,
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they traveled across their ridge and down to the polling grounds under the beech trees for an Election Day even more lethal than the last.
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Meanwhile, Good Elias and Ellison Hatfield rode their horses across the Tug Fork to join the festivities and to support a kinsman running for office.
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By afternoon most of the men in attendance were drunk and napping in the shade of the beech trees when the handsome war hero Ellison Hatfield got into a scuffle with three of Ranel’s more obstreperous sons, Tolbert, Pharmer, and Bud.

Tolbert McCoy was twenty-eight years old and, like his brothers, owned no land. He and his new wife lived with another family, for whom Tolbert worked as a farm laborer. One writer describes him as “a handsome man with a beard like General Winfield Scott Hancock of Civil War fame.”
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Another researcher observes that “Tolbert would fight at the slightest provocation, especially after downing a few drinks.”
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Tolbert McCoy must still have felt chagrined by the Hatfields’ rescue of Johnse Hatfield following Roseanna’s bareback ride across the river to warn Devil Anse. If Devil Anse really had ordered Tolbert to kneel, and he had done so while his older brother Jim then refused and remained standing, Tolbert’s sense of humiliation would have doubled. When his own McCoy relatives testified in defense of Good Elias and Floyd Hatfield after Tolbert had arranged to have those two arrested for their role in freeing Johnse, his humiliation would have been complete.
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Ranel McCoy was said to be gunning for Ellison Hatfield that day because of Ellison’s testimony against Paris and Squirrel Hunting Sam McCoy, nephews of Ranel, in their trials for the murder of Bill Staton two years earlier.
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Perhaps Ranel was also still angry about Devil Anse’s appropriation of Perry Cline’s land; about the loss of what Ranel claimed were his hogs to Floyd Hatfield; about Devil Anse’s supposed refusal to let his son Johnse marry Roseanna; and about Johnse’s subsequent marriage to his niece Nancy McCoy, the daughter of his murdered brother, Harmon. It was a significant collection of aggrievements, and he had no doubt been filling his sons’ ears with recitatives concerning all these Hatfield transgressions and more.

The three McCoy sons, Tolbert, Pharmer, and Bud, already liquored up, came racing up on their horses, shouting. Ellison Hatfield was wearing a large straw hat, which he jokingly offered as feed for their horses. Tolbert, sporting his luxuriant beard, leapt off his horse.

“I’m hell on earth!” he announced.

“You’re a damned shithog,” replied Ellison—shithogs being those that fed on undigested grain from manure in the roads, as opposed to the more noble hogs that fed on chestnuts high up the mountainsides.
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Enraged, Tolbert McCoy slashed Ellison Hatfield with his knife. Bud McCoy joined in with his pocketknife, and then Pharmer McCoy shot Ellison in the back.
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Some claim that Ranel McCoy was holding a piece of fence post with which he intended to wallop Ellison once he was down, but that the crowd restrained him.
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But this is an account of Ellison’s murder, as told by his great-nephew, Coleman A. Hatfield.
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Truda McCoy insists that Ranel wasn’t even present at this fight.
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Truda McCoy’s version has Tolbert buck dancing to a banjo on a platform for a long time. He was evidently widely admired for his clogging, if for nothing else. Black Elias Hatfield, Preacher Anse Hatfield’s brother, an ornery fellow with a drinking problem,
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joined Tolbert. Black Elias, said to have a swarthy complexion, outweighed Tolbert by twenty pounds.
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Tolbert was a head taller, with a fair complexion and light brown hair. Tolbert repeatedly accused Black Elias of owing him money for a fiddle.
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Black Elias repeatedly insisted that he had already paid this debt. Eventually Black Elias slugged Tolbert in the chin to shut him up. They began to fight, and Tolbert knocked Black Elias out.

Annoyed to see his cousin defeated (or possibly trying to break up the fight),
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Ellison Hatfield took to the dance floor. One researcher speculates what might have been going through Tolbert McCoy’s liquor-benumbed brain at this point: “Ellison was everything Tolbert was not: a large, physically strong man; a war hero; a respected officer of the law in Logan County; a landholder; and, most important, Devil Anse Hatfield’s brother. All the stories drummed into Tolbert by Ole Ranel must, at that moment, have congealed into an irrational fury. The Hatfields cheated and lied but they were successful, feared, respected and admired. Tolbert was going to give them what they deserved.”
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So Tolbert McCoy taunted Ellison Hatfield by calling him “a cross between a gorilla and a polecat.”
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Tolbert and Ellison started fighting as though their lives depended on the outcome—which, as it turned out, they did. Tolbert was exhausted from buck dancing and his struggle with Black Elias, and Ellison, carrying two hundred pounds of well-positioned muscle, was taller and larger than Tolbert. Tolbert and his brothers, however, were carrying knives.

Ellison Hatfield began to force Tolbert McCoy’s head backward, trying to break his neck, in a ploy not uncommon in frontier fighting, during which noses and ears were sometimes bitten off and eyes gouged out. Tolbert reached for the knife in his belt and stabbed Ellison in the stomach several times. Tolbert’s brother Bill also started slashing at Ellison with his pocketknife.
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Ellison Hatfield, his shirt soaked in blood, threw Tolbert McCoy to the ground and reached for a rock with which to bash his head. Someone in the crowd tossed a pistol to Pharmer McCoy, who shot Ellison, saving Tolbert’s life—for the time being.

Reluctant feudist Good Elias Hatfield (not to be confused with his cousin Black Elias Hatfield, the fiddle debtor presumably still lying unconscious on the dance floor), who had tried to stay home when Devil Anse organized the posse to rescue Johnse from his McCoy captors, forced the pistol from Pharmer McCoy’s hand. Then he tried to shoot Pharmer with it but missed, making him an incompetent feudist as well as a reluctant one. The McCoy sons raced for the woods but soon returned to face their fate.
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Good Elias Hatfield had his severely wounded brother Ellison placed on a stretcher fashioned from two saplings and a blanket and carried to a friend’s house near the river. He also sent messengers to his brothers Devil Anse and Wall in West Virginia to inform them of the situation.

Preacher Anse Hatfield, a justice of the peace for Blackberry District, ordered local constables Tolbert Hatfield and Joseph Hatfield to escort the three McCoy brothers to the Pikeville jail some twenty-five miles distant.
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Although the constables were themselves Hatfields, they were Kentucky Hatfields, normally sympathetic to the McCoys, several later testifying on their behalf in the trials that ended the feud. Some were also related to the McCoys through their mothers.

Preacher Anse Hatfield warned the McCoys that they needed to get to the Pikeville jail quickly, lest the West Virginia Hatfields cross the river and take vigilante revenge on them. Ranel McCoy and his son Bill replied that the McCoys were fighters, too, and had “plenty old axes ’n’ things to fight with.”
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Ranel mounted his horse and rode ahead to Pikeville to hire a lawyer for his sons’ defense.
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Apparently not feeling Preacher Anse Hatfield’s urgency, the Hatfield constables and their prisoners stopped en route to the jail to eat supper and spend the night. In any case, it would have been dangerous to travel the twisting mountain paths in the dark. Sarah McCoy arrived to comfort her captive sons, but they shrugged off her concerns.
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She and Tolbert’s wife stayed overnight with the insouciant young prisoners.
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The next morning, Devil Anse Hatfield arrived at the house where his mortally wounded younger brother Ellison was being cared for and arranged to have him taken across the river to the house of another friend in West Virginia. Meanwhile, Good Elias and Wall Hatfield went in pursuit of the McCoy sons and their guards on the trail to Pikeville. They soon caught up with them, as the constables and their prisoners had traveled only about a mile from the house in which they had stayed overnight. Sarah McCoy and Tolbert’s wife had returned home, but Jim, Sam, and Floyd McCoy had arrived to accompany their brothers to Pikeville.
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Wall Hatfield was Devil Anse’s older brother and a justice of the peace in the Magnolia District of West Virginia. Called “The Old Man” by his relatives, he was known as “the most dependable and conservative member of the clan,”
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this despite rumors that he had more than one wife.
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He was “tall, powerful, well proportioned, with iron-gray hair, a full mustache, and rough, shaggy eyebrows, the last a screen from behind which eyes peeped rebelliously and made it difficult for him to maintain the proper degree of decorum as a justice of the peace.”
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Wall Hatfield persuaded his Kentucky Hatfield constable cousins that the three McCoys needed to be tried in the Tug Fork Valley, where the fight had occurred and where some elderly witnesses to it resided.
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He also expressed the wish of the Hatfield brothers to be near Ellison as he struggled for his life.
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In light of the tragedy to come, preventing the McCoy sons from reaching the safety of the Pikeville jail seems a somewhat sinister move on Wall’s part, but his overall behavior during the feud suggests idealism and naïveté more than cunning.

So the three McCoy prisoners were taken back toward the Tug Fork in a horse-drawn wooden box on runners that was used to haul harvested corn.
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When they reached Preacher Anse Hatfield’s house, Devil Anse and two dozen supporters were milling around the yard. Preacher Anse invited the constables, the Hatfield brothers, and several others to dinner and a discussion of what should happen next. The conversation no doubt involved a debate between Preacher Anse Hatfield, who felt the McCoy sons should be taken to Pikeville for trial, and Wall Hatfield, who wanted them tried in the Tug Fork Valley.

Fed up with the fine points of this legal debate, Devil Anse Hatfield abruptly ordered all the Hatfields to “fall into line.”
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The talking was over, and Devil Anse Hatfield, former leader of the Logan Wildcats, was taking charge. The McCoy sons were loaded back into the corn sled, tied into place, and dragged down the path toward the river.
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Devil Anse then dismissed Jim McCoy, who had remained with his brothers up to this point.

Ellison Hatfield, still alive after twenty-six knife wounds to his bowels and a gunshot wound in his back, was being tended by his mother and his pregnant wife at a friend’s house near the river in West Virginia. Toward dusk, under amassing storm clouds, Devil Anse’s band ferried the three McCoy sons across the river in an old skiff and marched them to an abandoned schoolhouse, forcing them to lie on the floor, their hands bound.
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What happened to them next would depend upon whether Ellison lived or died.

It was raining heavily by now, and the only light came from a flickering lantern at the door. Armed Hatfields guarded the schoolhouse and patrolled the yard, on the lookout for an assault by the McCoys to rescue the three prisoners.
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Twelve years earlier Good Elias Hatfield, aided by Devil Anse and a community leader named Dr. Elliot Rutherford, had arranged to have this schoolhouse, now deserted, built on land Elias had donated. The teacher had been a man named Charlie Carpenter, soon to play a crucial role in the unfolding feud drama.

Sarah McCoy, the boys’ mother, again accompanied by Tolbert’s young wife, rode through the rain to the schoolhouse and pleaded with Devil Anse for her sons’ lives. He assured the sodden women that he would return the young men to Kentucky alive, regardless of whether his brother Ellison lived or died. But he warned them that the prisoners would die if any McCoys tried to rescue them.

Devil Anse allowed the two women to talk with the McCoy sons. Ending up in tears, Sarah McCoy and her daughter-in-law spent the night at a nearby house and returned in the morning. Jim McCoy also arrived at the schoolhouse, standing silently, watching and waiting to see if he could help his captive siblings.
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