by Dean King
The officers dragged Phillips partway into the jail. It would not do to actually lock him up: in addition to being a former deputy sheriff, Phillips was a wealthy and influential citizen from an old local family, with formidable friends like Colonel Dils and Perry Cline. He had married into the McCoy clan and was a father supporting seven children and stepchildren. To many, he was also a hero for fearlessly riding down the Hatfields. So instead, the officers left him sprawled on the floor, his body in the cell and his feet outside. His alcoholic coma would keep him out of trouble until the execution was over, and even then, they had ensured that he would not feel much like causing trouble.7
BY MIDMORNING, the hillsides surrounding the gallows—a natural amphitheater—were teeming with people. Rumors raced through the crowd that the Hatfields were coming and that the McCoys had sent guards to defend the two passes leading to town. Nerves were on edge. Pregnant Eliza Tibbs was so overwhelmed that she fainted. Later, when her son Oscar was born, he turned out to be a deaf-mute, yet another tragedy that would be chalked up to the feud.8
If others seemed restless or unnerved by the proceedings, Cotton Top did not. He came from stock that had the dubious distinction of displaying great equanimity on the scaffold, dating back to his great-great-grandfather Abner Vance, a hunter and a preacher who lived near Abingdon, Virginia. Seventy years previously, Vance, before being strung up for the murder of Lewis Horton, calmly composed a ballad lamenting his plight. He had shot Horton, a doctor, for an affront of a sexual nature to his daughter and fled to the west. After many months on the run in the wilds of the Tug River Valley, he had returned to face the charges against him, hoping for leniency given the circumstances. But the frontier was not big on nuances. On the scaffold, the doomed man crooned his ballad, which became known as “Vance’s Farewell,” bidding good-bye to his wife, whom he called “my old sweetheart.” He then immortalized the perfidy of his foes, who “a lie against me swore.” Naturally, he pined for vengeance:
But I and them shall meet again
When Immanuel’s trumpet shall blow.
Perhaps I’ll be wrapped in Abraham’s bosom
When they roll in the gulf below.
Vance’s ballad also expressed his love for the land to the west, along the Virginia-Kentucky border, that he had discovered while a fugitive, some of which he had staked claim to:
Green are the woods through which Sandy flows.
Peace dwells in the land.
The bear doth live in the laurel green.
The red buck roves the hills.9
Before meeting his fate, Vance had not only composed his ballad but also parceled out his claim to his children. They went there to start a new life. Vance, a violent man who hoped for better for his family, had thus directed them to a place where, contrary to his lyrics, peace did not dwell. In fact, it was a place of reduction and extraction, and violence was as much a part of life as childbirth and homemade spirits. The seminomadic Cherokee, Shawnee, Delaware, and Mingo had used this territory as a hunting ground for buffalo, bear, elk, deer, and, eventually, white men. In turn, white men would kill the Indians, the bears, and one another for more than a century before the day that Cotton Top Mounts was to be hanged, a killing that could be seen in these parts as not a retribution but a partial atonement for the whole cycle of slaughter.
Vance was not the only one of his kin who had performed nobly in the proximity of death. In 1885, his Kentucky cousin Ransom Hatfield had served as a special guard to a man about to be hanged in Catlettsburg and had “exhorted the doomed man to exert every power of mind and muscle, as well as to call on God for help, to enable him to meet his end with becoming fortitude.” He had so bolstered the man that he faced his execution with “heroic composure.”10 But Ransom had not been the one with the noose around his neck.
Just after noon, Harm Maynard, for whom one term as sheriff would be enough to propel him back to the farm, repaired to the jailhouse and in a gruff voice read the death warrant. Cotton Top, who had been feeling ill for several days and whose left arm still troubled him, had not slept at all the previous night. Despite his bad behavior in stuffing up the pipes, he was granted a last request. As last requests go, his lacked the flair of Red Fox’s just two years later. Sentenced to hang for the quadruple murder of a family near Pound Gap, Virginia, twenty miles south of Pikeville, the mystical red-haired charlatan doctor would be granted his unusual wish: Before he died, he wanted to dress in the white linen robes that he planned to don in heaven and preach his own funeral sermon; afterward, he wished his body to remain unburied for three days so that he could rise up to preach again before continuing on to the pearly gates. Cotton Top, who had confessed to his feudist sins in multiple documents on multiple occasions, merely asked for a cigar, which he puffed on, occasionally blowing smoke rings.11
The battered Maynard would not preside over the execution; Deputy Sheriff Harry Weddington would have that honor. The Reverend Dr. J. W. Glover, a scowling, mustachioed Methodist preacher, said prayers with the condemned man before he was conveyed on a wagon the half mile to the execution ground. He rode atop his own coffin.12
GUARDS SCANNED THE CROWD TO detect any signs of opposition, but it was as quiet as a jury. Cotton Top was now firmly clamped in the jaws of justice—or partial justice, anyway—and of history and lore. There needed to be a definitive end to this story of feuding and murder. Cotton Top—a love child of the war, a violent simpleton—apparently was it.
That is, unless, as was still expected by many, his uncle Devil Anse and a gang of Hatfields wielding Colts and Winchesters were just over the hill ready to storm the execution ground and free him.
Standing on the gallows, his time dwindling, Cotton Top felt the urge to sing, like Abner Vance before him, but not in a musical way like Abner. Instead, at the penultimate moment of his life, the twenty-five-year-old sang, like the desperate fall guy he was, a croaked and anguished plaint: “The Hatfields made me do it!” 13
PART I
BAD BLOOD
1854–1882
Chapter 1
War Comes to the Big Sandy
1854–1862
Prior to the Civil War, the Tug River Valley essentially ignored calendars and resisted progress. There were no roads, no rails, no schools, and no churches in the area. The transcontinental telegraph system, which crossed the nation in 1861, bypassed the region. Telegraph service would not arrive in the valley for three more decades. Barricaded as they were in mountainous cul-de-sacs, locals spoke a dialect barely recognizable to outsiders, a tongue more Elizabethan than modern Victorian, using yit for yet, mought for might, seche for such, and the word allow to mean “figure.” They added es to form plurals like nestes. They afeared witches and haints. Questions from outsiders made them techeous (a state in which they were best avoided). The forest that enveloped them and, along with the hills, shaped their lives—a part of what the botanist-explorer William Bartram dubbed the sublime forest—was still dense, vast, and virginal.1
One day in the fall of 1854, when he was fifteen, Anse Hatfield went out in the forest to bag some squirrels for the stew pot, something he had done many times before. Gangly, on his way to six feet, Anse, whose mother called him Ansie, was always on the move, slipping adroitly through the trees, already with the signature Hatfield slouch in his gait. His hawk-nosed intensity and nasal twang were cut by a penchant for practical jokes and a raucous and infectious laugh. Like his father, Big Eph (pronounced “Eef”), he liked to wrestle, but not more than he liked to hunt. Wearing a buckskin coat and carrying a rifle, powder, and balls, he set loose his pack of hounds, led by three trustworthies named Rounder, Fife, and Drum. No sooner had he let the dogs go than they scared up a large spike-horn deer.2
The trio went tearing off after it. As the buck topped the ridge of Big Pigeon Mountain, Anse took into account the distance and the rise, leveled the barrel of his gun considerably above it, and squeezed the trigger. But his prey was too far away. It disappeared ov
er the ridge with the dogs in hot pursuit. Anse was concerned. This buck had legs and might lead his dogs beyond return. There was plenty of trouble to get into among the intricate bends and folds of the woods here, almost no stretch of which was flat. Boulders, roots, and rocky streams hid beneath the leaf cover and behind rotting logs. In slicks, where lightning strikes and landslides had felled the trees, grew thick snarls of laurel, myrtle, huckleberry, and rhododendron that could trap a hell-bent hound like a steel cage. It was easy to get lost here, no matter how acute one’s sense of smell or direction. Anse, worried yet confident in his mastery of the place, set off at a fast trot.3
He raced through the undulating wilderness, past trees festooned in ghastly hues of old-man’s beard. Here and there antler lichen clung tombstone-like to trunks living and dead. The Mingo chief Logan, like many of the Indian tribes that had once roamed the place, had welcomed white traders and settlers to his tribe’s vast sacred hunting ground, until 1774, when they murdered his family. Then Logan had attacked white settlements with ferocity. “When the good soul had the ascendant, he was kind and humane,” the chief later explained, “and when the bad soul ruled, he was perfectly savage and delighted in nothing but blood and carnage.”
By 1824, the Indians were gone, and the Virginia General Assembly created Logan County, which would eventually form nearly half of the state of West Virginia. Within a year, the last known bison in the county (and, indeed, in all of Virginia) were killed. Still, young Anse stalked a stretch of the Great Forest where elk roamed and where wolves and wildcats—the latter called variously cougars, catamounts, pumas, panthers (pronounced “painters”), or mountain lions by the locals—prowled.4
When Anse did not return home for supper, his mother, Nancy—the illegitimate daughter of the scandalized daughter of Abner Vance—began to worry. She told Big Eph that she was afraid that Anse was hurt. He told her not to worry: the boy was every bit as “stout as a bear.” Big Eph, a six-foot-tall, dark-complected, blue-eyed, Bunyanesque man of 250 pounds who had once treed and killed a wildcat with a butcher knife he carried in a scabbard, was a shrewd judge of these things. He laughed when Nancy suggested that a bear might have attacked Anse. “If a bear even gets a glimpse of a man in the woods, then he goes the other way,” he assured her. “Besides, Ansie has hunted so much, he’s a dead shot.” The boy was used to pursuing not only deer and squirrels but raccoons, possums, and groundhogs, along with grouse, wild turkeys, and ducks. He even knew how to shoot a swimming turtle in the head so that it would not sink. “No bear is going to get in speaking distance of him,” Big Eph declared. And then he added, “Why, I seen him shoot a squirrel’s eye out in the top of a tall hickory when I couldn’t even see the squirrel before it fell.” Anse, he knew, could do a man’s work and could fend for himself.5
But the next day, Nancy was even more worried that a bear might have gotten Anse, who, no matter how stout and sure of shot, was still just a boy. Nancy, like her son, was tall, strong, and smart. She was graced with her mother’s features: a high forehead, a thin nose, and a square chin. Only ten of her eighteen children would survive childhood, but those who did were, like her, sturdy and intelligent. Able to read and write, she owned a medical book and served as the area’s midwife, which yielded her a wide network of friends. Between her tutoring and the will of the family to improve its lot, eight of her grandchildren would go on to become doctors.6 Now Nancy decided something must be done to find her boy. Big Eph and their oldest son, seventeen-year-old Wall, rode over to Ben’s Creek, to the east, where two Hatfield uncles lived, to see if Anse had stayed there or stopped by for a meal. He had not.
In fact, as the stag thrashed off through the woods, Anse had set out too fast, stumbling to his knees before he even made it up Big Pigeon. Cursing, he jumped up and moved his gear back in place as he made his next stride. But a breathtaking mile later, when he gained the top of the ridge, the buck had vanished. Stopping to consider his next move, Anse sensed that something was not right. He reached down to his shot pouch—it was too light. When he stumbled, he realized, the shot had all fallen out.
“There I was with my gun shot empty, bullets lost, and that spike buck aleadin’ every dog I had clean out of the county,” he would recall. He decided he could not afford to go back, for if he did, he might never see his hounds again. He had to stay on their heels.
Following the buck’s and dogs’ trail along the top of the ridge, Anse lost track of time. It might have been an hour or two later when he looked down and saw something that stopped him cold: about sixty yards below the ridge, curled up on a carpet of leaves, lay a colossal black bear. Anse’s eyes grew big. This was a rare chance to bag a monster that would keep the family in bear steaks and grease for months to come. Then the truth of his predicament caught up with him: His bullets lay in the dirt several miles back. His pack of hounds was running wild after the spike-horn. He was standing before this incredible prize with no way to claim it.
Anse’s frustration turned to rage. “The longer I stood,” he later said, “the madder I got.” He cursed the god who would do this to him and, after leaning his now worthless gun against a black pine, ran down the slope of the mountain yelling and waving his arms. The startled bear awoke and scrambled to its feet after a maniacal Anse planted a boot in its backside. The bear tore off down the slope, covering twenty paces to get to a chestnut oak large enough to climb. It shinnied up the tree, lodged in a fork thirty feet off the ground, and stared down at its pursuer. Breathing hard and still in a rage, Anse stared back. Then he stripped off his jacket and shirt and began flailing the tree with them, all the while shouting at the animal above.
The bear decided to wait it out aloft. Caught between his missing dogs and his spilled shot, Anse did the same below.
Two hours later, the dogs found him. They had given up on the buck and circled back. Now they got wind of the treed bear and started howling. Anse stood watch all night as the passing moon lit the woods around him.
He stayed in the same spot through the next day. He had nothing to eat and nothing to drink, and his mouth grew drier and drier, but he refused to stand down.
It was sometime after midnight on the second night when he looked up and saw on the ridge what he recognized as the light of a pine torch. He hooted like an owl, a Hatfield family signal. A hoot came in return. Hearing the call of their clan, the dogs began to bay. Soon Wall and a neighbor, Peter Brooks, stood next to Anse. When they asked him if he was hurt, he responded, “Hurt? The devil! The only one that got hurt here is a four-year-old bear. I kicked his behind so hard with my boot that he took to a tree.”
They gave Anse a slab of venison that his mother had sent for him. He divided it among his hungry dogs, having decided that he would eat nothing until he took his prey. The only problem was that Wall and Brooks had brought neither guns nor shot. They tried to convince Anse to come back with them, but he refused. Realizing it was futile, Wall finally asked Brooks to go get bullets for Anse’s gun. Before he could return, however, Big Eph and a gang of men showed up. They handed Anse a gourd full of water. He pulled out the corncob stopper, tilted his head back, and gulped it down. Then, taking the bullets they offered him, he loaded his gun, took aim, and bagged his first bear.
A short time later, after he returned home with a panther he had shot, Nancy declared her boy “not afeared of no kind of varmint nor of the devil hisself!” She called him Devil Anse after that. The nickname would prove apt to friend and foe.7
A CONTEMPORARY OF DANIEL BOONE, who pushed through the Cumberland Gap in 1775, opening up the “West” to settlement, Devil Anse’s great-great-grandfather Joseph Hatfield was considered one of the ablest scouts and woodsmen on the western frontier. The family had arrived in western Virginia from England by 1770, building forts for protection against the Indians and hunting bears in the Alleghenies. Intermarried with Dutch, French, and Germans, the Hatfields were a staunch blend, “tall and muscular, with a good share of brains and will-power,
” according to an observer in 1887. “They are a high-spirited family, but are kind, neighborly, and just to all who treat them just.”8
In 1776, some Hatfields, along with the Bromfield family, were living by the New River near Big Stony Creek. One night, unbeknownst to each other, a Bromfield and a Hatfield both went to the same salt lick. One—though it is not known which—took the other for a bear moving in the brush and shot him dead.
In the years to come, as neighbor turned against neighbor, not every killing would be so accidental.
Of the four sons of Joseph Hatfield’s son Eph (known as “Eph of All”), three—Joseph, George, and Jeremiah—lived on the Kentucky side of the Tug, mostly in Pike County. Only one, Valentine, Devil Anse’s grandfather, settled on the West Virginia side. Eph of All’s four sons would sire more than fifty children, and brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, and cousins would move across the Tug with ease—on foot where it was shallow.
Likewise, the McCoys, who had reached Kentucky by 1804, lived on both sides of the Tug and came and went as they pleased. The families were on good terms with each other and were intermarried on both sides of the river. In fact, Tug Valley dwellers in general were so intertwined that in 1849 they petitioned to move the Virginia-Kentucky state line so that the entire valley would lie within Virginia. “The present line,” they noted, “divides neighborhoods, friends and relations.” Among the signers were more than a dozen McCoys and Hatfields, families linked together by business and politics, in addition to marriage.9
