The Hatfields and the McCoys (11 page)

About the same time a delegation from Logan County presented Governor Wilson with a petition, signed by some of the most prominent men of the county, calling upon him either to provide troops to defend them or arms with which they might protect themselves. The petition drew attention to the recent deaths of Jim Vance and Bill Dempsey at the hands of desperados from Kentucky and pointed out that Dempsey was a sheriff's deputy who was killed while attempting to discharge his official duties.
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Spokesmen for residents of Pike and Logan counties maintained that the disturbances involved more than a hard-core of feudists in the Hatfield and McCoy families. S. G. Kinner, the commonwealth attorney for the Sixteenth Judicial District of Kentucky, declared that each side in the feud then had about thirty men, most of whom were among the best people of their sections. He pointed out that the Hatfields were men of means and standing in their communities but noted for vindictiveness, while their Pike County adversaries included “as good people as you will find anywhere.” State Senator John B. Floyd of Logan County denied that the conflict was confined to the two families and contended that it had become essentially one between the civil authorities of Logan County and the murderers of Jim Vance. He declared further, “The Hatfields are not interested in the difficulty more than other citizens of Logan County and, while the McCoys are among the Kentucky men, they constitute but a small portion of the gang.”
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Floyd, whose family had been closely connected with the Hatfields and who himself lived for twenty years within eighteen miles of the principal feudists, also provided a history of the trouble between them and the McCoys. His account, printed in the
Wheeling Intelligencer
on January 27, 1888, stressed the Civil War origins of the vendetta. After detailing some of the main events in the increasing hostility between the two families, including the killing of Ellison Hatfield and three sons of Randolph McCoy, Floyd laid the blame for the resurrection of the troubles, which most people thought were over, squarely upon Perry Cline. He charged that Cline had deliberately looked up the old indictments against the Hatfields after six years and induced the governor of Kentucky to offer $2,700 in rewards in order that he might extract money from the well-to-do Hatfields as a price for getting the rewards withdrawn.
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While elements on both sides of the Tug Fork sought some political settlement of the Hatfield-McCoy trouble, newspapers continued to whip up public excitement with sensational articles. The
Pittsburgh Times
found events along the Kentucky-West Virginia border of sufficient interest to dispatch a correspondent, Charles S. Howell, to the scene. Howell spent three days in Pike County and returned with a one-sided version of the feud which he touted as a definitive account. Published as a five-column feature in the
Times
of February 1, 1888, his article contained more than a score of serious factual errors and highly garbled accounts of the troubles growing out of the election of 1882, the killing of Jeff McCoy, and other incidents in the feud. Reproduced in numerous other journals, his account did much to color popular views of the vendetta.

Howell succeeded in obtaining interviews with Randolph and Sarah McCoy and with the Hatfield partisans who had been captured by Frank Phillips and lodged in the Pike County jail. Howell had deep sympathy with the McCoys, whom he visited at their house in Pikeville, which he found almost devoid of furniture. The couple, he declared, showed “unmistakable evidences of the intensity of their sufferings.” Contrary to most descriptions of Randolph, he pictured “a man who had been bent and almost broken by the weight of his afflictions and grief,” but who had only once given any thought to retaliation. He quoted McCoy as saying, “I used to be on very friendly terms with the Hatfields before and after the war. We never had any trouble till six years ago. I hope no more of us will have to die. Ill be glad when it's all over.”

Howell painted a very different portrait of Devil Anse, whom he never saw. The leader of the Hatfield clan emerged as an absolute monarch who brooked no challenge to his authority and who cold-bloodedly embarked upon a war of extermination of the McCoys without any real provocation. The newspaperman blamed Devil Anse and his associates for the Hatfield-McCoy war, which he characterized as “simply a succession of cowardly murders by day and assassinations and house-burnings by night.”

Nor did Howell form a more favorable opinion of the West Virginians whom he visited in the Pikeville jail. “The prisoners,” he declared, “are good types of their locality. Old ‘Wall' Hatfield is a tall, powerful, well-proportioned man. He has iron gray hair and moustache to match, while a pair of rough, shaggy eyebrows almost conceal eyes of a greenish gray that are forever evading the eyes of the person with whom their owner may be talking. Cool and self-possessed at all times, ‘Waif never allows himself to be led into making any entangling statements.” The Mahons, two of whom were Waifs sons-in-law, he reported as masters of “bravery and cunning.” Howell noted that Wall had not participated in the attack of January 1, 1888, and had advised against it. His refusal to take part had allegedly produced a breach between him and Devil Anse.

Howell evinced considerable admiration for both Frank Phillips and Perry Cline. “Frank Phillips has made himself so conspicuous in his efforts to capture and suppress the Hatfield gang,” he wrote, “that he has been removed from his position as Deputy Sheriff. The Sheriff of Pike County is Basil Hatfield, a connection of the heads of the Hatfield gang, and himself is charged with giving them aid and comfort in removing Phillips and substituting his own. Phillips, however, has been appointed agent of the Governor of Kentucky to recover the Hatfields, for whom requisitions were issued. He says he will capture them all eventually and do all in his power to bring about their punishment.” Howell described Cline as “the demon of the prosecution” and a man “prolific of resources, patient, brave and untiring.”

In concluding his story, Howell declared, “There is a gang in West Virginia banded together for the purpose of murder and rapine. There is also a gang in Kentucky whose cohesive principle is the protection of families and homes of men and women. An unresisting family has been deprived of five of its members, a father and mother of five of their children, their homes burned, their effects sent up in smoke, their little substance scattered to the wind, themselves forced out at midnight as wanderers on the bleak and inhospitable mountain side, almost naked in the blasts of winter. A mother stands by and sees her son killed before her very eyes without being allowed to speak to him. Farms are destroyed, religious meetings are broken up, men and women whipped, state and county elections interfered with and terror holds complete sway. To repress the gang that has committed all these crimes was the Kentucky gang organized. These are the gangs, their respective histories, objects and achievements.”

Newspaper accounts such as that of Howell undoubtedly exacerbated feelings of hostility between the two states in which the feud occurred. Even before the publication of Howell's one-sided account, the
Wheeling Intelligencer
noted that, “with one or two exceptions, all the press dispatches relating to the matter which have appeared, have been sent from Kentucky towns.” It further declared that they had “a decided coloring in favor of the McCoy faction, and are evidently calculated to make it appear that the Hatfields are the aggressors. Pains are taken in the accounts sent out by these Kentucky corespondents
[sic],
also, to create the impression that the affair is a case of ‘West Virginia outlawry,' much to the discredit of the State. The truth of the matter is that it is a Kentucky feud, and is the result of a difficulty which occurred at a local election between the rival factions in Pike county, Kentucky, some years ago.” The
Intelligencer
contended that there had been nothing in the events to justify such distortions by the press, which reflected unfairly upon West Virginia.
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By the end of January 1888 most of the blood in the feud had already been shed. What until then had been a vendetta between two relatively obscure Tug Valley families was by then, however, in the process of becoming an interstate cause celebre, a windfall for muckraking newspapers and magazines, and a conspicuous element in the legendry of the southern Appalachians.

9

THE GOVERNORS INTERVENE

E
VENTS ALONG THE Tug Fork in January 1888 almost inevitably drew the governors of Kentucky and West Virginia more deeply into the problems relating to the feud. On January 9 Governor Buckner wrote Wilson that he had received reports of the attack upon the McCoys on the night of January 1 and inquired whether there was any good reason why the men indicted for the murder of the McCoy brothers in 1882 should not be rendered to Kentucky.
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Because of sickness in his family and his absence from office with the Board of Public Works, Wilson did not reply to Buckner's letter until January 21. He reminded Buckner that more than five years had elapsed before any application had been made by Pike County officials for extradition of the men charged with the murder of the McCoys, that those charged had lived in the vicinity continuously, and that the application for requisition had not been supported by any official authority of Pike County. Nevertheless, he had directed the issuance of warrants for all the persons named with the exception of Elias Hatfield and Andrew Varney. Wilson suggested that “neither [Perry] Cline nor [Frank] Phillips, nor any of the persons engaged in the recent violations of the law, are proper persons to entrust with process of either Kentucky or West Virginia.” He requested Buckner to make further inquiry in order that warrants might be issued only against those for whom there was some evidence of guilt.
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News of the battle of Grapevine Creek reinforced Wilson's decision to defer compliance with the request for extradition. He wired Buckner on January 25 that he had received information that “William Dempsey was killed while acting as deputy in assisting the officers of the law in arresting Frank Phillips and three of the McCoy boys on a warrant for the murder of James Vance.” Dismissing a return wire from Buckner, which stated that Buckner's information differed from that of Wilson and that steps were being taken to prevent any aggression by Kentucky citizens upon those of West Virginia, Wilson, on January 26, addressed a letter to Buckner with further details. He declared that he now had “positive information” corroborating facts set forth in his earlier message to Buckner.

Taking a position that constituted a strong endorsement of the Hatfield claims, Wilson wrote Buckner, “Recently the hope of reward has prompted a set of men quite as lawless as either the Hatfields or McCoys to the commission of heinous crimes against the laws of this state and upon its citizens while discharging their duty as officers of the law.” He stated that he had been unofficially informed that a number of West Virginians had been forcibly seized and taken from the state by a band of Kentuckians and confined in the Pike County jail. He told Buckner that he had sent a reliable agent to Logan County to ascertain the facts and expressed the hope that Buckner would follow a similar course in order that they might concert measures for the suppression of lawlessness on both sides of the Tug Fork.
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In response to Wilson's letter, Buckner wrote that he had sent Kentucky Adjutant General Sam E. Hill to Pikeville and had instructed him to confer with Wilson's agent, Colonel W. L. Mahan, with a view to quieting the situation along the borders.
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In the meantime, both governors ordered their state troops to stand by for possible service on the Tug Fork. The Kentucky State Senate debated a bill for the addition of six new units to the State Guard. With lukewarm interest, it considered several proposed amendments, one of which would have struck out a provision for sending guns to the counties in which the troops would be stationed and inserting a statement that “six good school teachers and two evangelists be sent to said counties, to remain until the disturbances are quelled/' Although both the governor and the adjutant general recommended passage of the militia bill, with the understanding that one unit would be sent to Pike County, the House of Delegates defeated the measure. Upon receipt of a petition from Logan County, Wilson called out the Goff and Auburn Guards of Ritchie County, who entrained at Pennsboro with the expectation of arriving in Charleston on January 31.
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Shortly after Wilson sent his letter to Buckner, Mahan returned from Logan County with confirmation of Wilson's assessment of the situation along the Tug Fork. Mahan reported that he found the Hatfields “good, law-abiding citizens,” who were respected in their neighborhood, and that the recent outbreak of violence had been caused by the resurrection of the old indictments against them by certain persons in Kentucky. He told Wilson that Kentuckians had crossed the Tug Fork into West Virginia and “kidnapped” nine men, killed Vance “without as much as calling on him to surrender,” and slain William Dempsey. Most residents with whom Mahan had talked believed that if the arrest of the Hatfields had been assigned to persons other than the McCoys, who “had sworn to kill the Hatfields and would have done so after they were disarmed,” no blood would have been shed. The Hatfields, he stated, simply could not trust their safety to McCoy partisans. On the strength of Mahan's report and in the belief that the clans had disbanded their forces, Wilson notified Buckner on January 30 that he had countermanded his order directing troops to Logan County.
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Kentucky Adjutant General Hill did not reach Pikeville until after Mahan had returned to Charleston. His investigation seemed to confirm the description that Mahan had given to Governor Wilson. Unlike Mahan, however, Hill concluded that responsibility for the disturbances lay with West Virginia rather than Kentucky and that former state senator John B. Floyd had obstructed justice by urging the governor to ignore the requisitions by Kentucky. Hill also reported that he had visited Perry Cline and found him a man of great courage. He failed to mention that Cline was accompanied at all times by three guards armed with Winchesters and revolvers.
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