by Dean King
Andy Chafin, a cousin who later served as a messenger boy for the Hatfields, would say that in his opinion, Johnse was actually the meanest of the bunch, but Cap was the dodgiest. “Cap wasn’t mean,” Chafin explained. “If you troubled ’em, he’d shoot ya, and he’d shoot ya mighty quick, too…. He was dangerous. He just, he didn’t care to kill ya, that’s all. But, he was one of the best neighbors you ever seen.” If, that is, you were on his side.23
Devil Anse was in a rage and lashed out at the men who had dared to ambush his son. But he had no reason to kill anyone yet—he had the upper hand and a clear mission to accomplish, not a war to start. In fact, Anse would later express a favorable opinion of Randall McCoy, and since Big Jim worked for him making moonshine, they had a conspiratorial bond, a thing not taken lightly in these parts. As Andy Chafin explained: “They were friends before they got in this feud, you see. Anse thought a lot of the old man McCoy and his wife. Now I know he did, because I talked to him about it, talked with him. Heard him tell about it. But, uh, the boys he didn’t like.”24
It was Devil Anse’s restraint that prevented a shootout or any other violence against the outmanned McCoys. However, Tolbert later filed a complaint with the Pike County sheriff: not only had Devil Anse and his gang forcibly taken Johnse, whom Tolbert had legally captured and was holding in custody, but they had detained the McCoy posse and “kept them as prisoners for a long time, cursed and abused them.” Tolbert successfully prevailed upon a Pike County justice of the peace to issue warrants for the arrest of Devil Anse and his men. He did not, however, accuse Devil Anse of attempted murder, as some would claim.25
In many societies, in similar situations—when the chastity of a female was violated—family honor required a retaliatory murder, leading to the classic blood feud. If the woman was suspected of being promiscuous or of initiating the act, family honor sometimes further required that she be killed by her own relatives. (A practice, sadly, not extinct.) However, in southern Appalachia, women had more control over their sexuality. They sometimes had sex before marriage and sometimes even changed husbands. Promiscuity did not necessarily dishonor the family, and in fact, where available men were few and far between, it was not only accepted but expected that a young woman or a rapidly aging one—over fifteen—would employ her wiles to secure a mate. Moreover, strong-willed women were not uncommon here, and as women were important providers in the household, their status was, in some regards, relatively high. In fact, while a husband’s behavior was often brutish and a wife was expected to be subservient, the beating of women was rare.26
Though the seduction of a woman in this part of Appalachia might give rise, as in this case, to retaliation, it was seldom at the level of murder or an extended feud. Here, feuds were more likely to arise from theft, drunken brawls, or economic power struggles, especially in the illicit whiskey trade or, in the postwar period, between those advancing commercial interests, such as mining and timbering, and those discouraging outsiders from making inroads into perceived local domains.27
Like so many other Hatfield-McCoy clashes, this one and its ensuing accusations would go unresolved. Kentucky law officers ultimately refused to deal with the interstate legalities or to attempt to detain the Hatfields. Resentment from this confrontation would fuse with the gathering storm of hostility, a tempest that would eventually rain down violence upon them. However, for one person—Roseanna McCoy—the repercussions of this day were immediate and devastating.
Chapter 6
The Wages of Love
1880–1882
The 1880s would be a decade of both progress and turmoil in the United States. In 1881, Clara Barton established the Red Cross; the Tuskegee Institute opened its doors in Alabama; and Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell formed the Oriental Telephone Company. A hurricane ravaged the southeast coast, killing seven hundred people, and a wildfire, known as the Thumb Fire, blistered more than a million acres in Michigan, killing almost three hundred people. Kansas became the first state to ban the drinking of alcohol, a watershed in the temperance movement, which would parch throats and singe collars for the next half century.
In Montana, the Sioux chief Sitting Bull surrendered to federal troops. An infamous Texas shootout, known as the Four Dead in Five Seconds Gunfight, began with a feud in El Paso over cattle rustling. In the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, in a mere thirty seconds, thirty shots were fired in the town of Tombstone, Arizona, wounding two Earp brothers and killing Billy Clanton and two McLaury brothers. In the New Mexico Territory, the outlaw and gunslinger William Bonney, better known as Billy the Kid, escaped from a county jail, killing two men and then riding off on a stolen horse, only to be shot dead a few months later by Sheriff Pat Garrett.
The same year, on July 2, a man who believed he was called upon to save the Republican Party and prevent another civil war stepped up on a railroad platform in Washington, DC, and shot the nation’s twentieth president twice in the back with a pearl-handled .44. That president was James A. Garfield, the former general who had made his name in part by briefly taming the Tug Valley during the Civil War. Garfield, a war hero in eastern Kentucky, clung to life until mid-September and then died after having served only six months in office.1
And that was just 1881.
Like the rest of the nation, the Tug Valley entered a period of rapid change and economic expansion. Logan County’s population, 7,300 in 1880, would grow by more than 50 percent, to 11,100, by the end of the decade. The railroad was on its way, and the arrival of trains meant the exit of coal, with the potential to turn piles of rock into piles of money.2
Most accounts of the feud hold that a period of tranquillity followed the contretemps surrounding the love affair of Johnse Hatfield and Roseanna McCoy. But that is overstating it by a good bit. It was undoubtedly a time of reflection for Devil Anse, who married off his two oldest sons, Johnse and Cap, which had the welcome effect of freeing up space in the cabin for more offspring. He and Vicey would have thirteen. In addition, Devil Anse’s father died, at the age of sixty-nine. The family buried Big Eph in the Hatfield cemetery on a steep knoll above Mate Creek.3
Father and son had had their differences; Big Eph, who, unlike Devil Anse, was a quiet man, had given Anse’s brothers tracts of land to launch their family lives, but he had not given any land to Anse. Did he think Devil Anse had been too ruthless during the war? Had they had a falling-out over business matters? Or had Devil Anse already taken care of himself enough that Big Eph thought it better to distribute his resources elsewhere? There is little to give us a clue.
However, designating a child as a namesake was an important aspect of Appalachian culture and an outward acknowledgment of significant ties. Devil Anse and Vicey named their firstborn Johnse, after Johnson McCoy (a nephew of Sally McCoy), who was married to Vicey’s sister Sarah and who rode with Devil Anse during the war. Cap’s real name was William Anderson, after Devil Anse, and they named subsequent sons after Robert E. Lee and Willis Wilson, the West Virginia governor who would later protect the Hatfields. It is telling that they did not name a son after Big Eph.4
In some regards, the fact that Big Eph bequeathed Devil Anse nothing worked in Anse’s favor. Out of necessity, he had become a shrewd and assertive businessman, whether it came to whiskey, timber, or land.
THREE MONTHS AFTER THE HATFIELDS intervened in Johnse’s arrest, Elias and Floyd were detained in Pike County and put in jail for their roles in disrupting the Kentucky legal process. From his days as a Confederate marauder, Devil Anse still lingered heavily in the psyche of Pike County, and it was widely feared that he might once more unleash his wrath to protect his kin. However, again, the conflict was defused. This time two of Tolbert McCoy’s own cousins, Reuben and Sylvester McCoy, came forward to testify in defense of the Hatfields.
Roseanna was still at Aunt Betty’s, and that spring she gave birth to a baby girl, whom she named Sarah Elizabeth, after her mother and Aunt Betty. She called her Little Sally. Her mother c
ame to visit, but her stubborn father and brothers considered her betrayal unforgivable and continued their boycott.
Born under tragic circumstances, Little Sally was to know nothing else: an epidemic of measles struck the area in the winter of 1881; she caught the disease and then developed pneumonia and died. It was a crushing blow to Roseanna and would prove to be too much for her. Randall managed to set aside his bitter feelings long enough to pay his respects to his lost granddaughter. Sally tried to convince Roseanna to come home again, but she refused. Little Sally was buried in a hillside cemetery above Aunt Betty’s house.5
Roseanna intended to stay at Aunt Betty’s, but when she found out that her next older sister, Alifair, had come down with typhoid and had been calling out for her in her fever dreams, she agreed to go back. Alifair lay near death for almost three weeks, but she came around. Saved for now, she would play a tragic role later in the feud.
The vigil had helped keep Roseanna’s mind off her own recent loss. Soon she was called back to Pikeville to help nurse another victim of typhoid, which was sweeping through the area. This time she went to the bedside of one of Perry and Martha Cline’s daughters. The couple had four children at the time—Allen, age nine; Rocksey, six; Butler, four; and one-year-old Mamie—so Roseanna stayed on to help even after the typhoid epidemic passed.
Johnse came to see her and tried to convince her to marry him. But she had experienced too much grief, and too much had passed between them. She was caught in a purgatory somewhere between him and her own family, and she was resigned to staying there. She asked him to leave, and the two never saw each other again.6
JOHNSE, THE WHISKEY PEDDLER, took to the jug, and consoled himself by indulging in low company. He shacked up with a prostitute named Belle Beaver in a now unknown locale that was called Happy Hollow. Tarred and feathered and run out of North Carolina on a rail, Beaver was doing a brisk trade in West Virginia, according to feud historian Truda McCoy, but was happy to be paid by the handsomest Hatfield in squirrel meat and white lightning. The righteous local women, however, quickly recoiled at Beaver’s presence in their community and sent their men to set things straight. They visited her place at night and ended Johnse’s profligate pursuits, at least with her:
The next day she was found hanging suspended from a rafter of the shack. Her hands were tied together at the wrists with ropes. Another rope was tied under her armpits and her mother hubbard dress was gathered over her head and tied in a knot. A rope was tied well under the knot and to the rafter. Belle had been hanging there twenty-four hours naked from the armpits down.7
Beaver was still alive, but she decided to move on to greener pastures.
At the same time that he had been cavorting with Beaver, Johnse was courting not only Nancy McCoy but also Mary Stafford. When Stafford’s family discouraged a union, Johnse turned his full attention to Nancy, a curvaceous, dark-haired fifteen-year-old living on Peter Creek. The odds were even longer here. Nancy had been the unborn child inside Patty McCoy as she searched for, found, and buried her husband, Harmon. And Patty, whose Cline relatives had grown close to Roseanna, firmly opposed the idea. Enough was being said about that scandalous affair already. She did not want her daughter mixed up with the likes of Johnse Hatfield.
Although Nancy had reached marrying age, she was still in school and had to walk two miles each way on a path that sometimes merged with a creek. Johnse, who was often abroad, would meet her and give her a ride on his horse. Before long, he persuaded her that they should get married. Support came from an unlikely quarter in her older brother Lark. In 1875, Lark, then nineteen, had married the girl next door, Bill Coleman’s eighteen-year-old daughter, Mary, whose father had also been killed in the war. Although Lark carried a heavy burden and had a hot temper—he got so mad that his mouth quivered—he argued that Johnse had had nothing to do with the death of their father. Furthermore, he had not behaved dishonorably toward Roseanna because he would have married her if their fathers had not prevented it. Patty still forbade her daughter to marry Johnse. Nancy, who was known for her strong will, did it anyway, in Pikeville on May 14.8
As was the tradition, Hatfield family members and friends teamed up and built the newlyweds a home, in this case on Grapevine Creek, across the Tug and a little downstream from the Peter Creek cabin where Nancy had grown up. The couple were a bridge between the two families, an unlikely one, to be sure, built on the silt of a mountain stream. Though they could not know it, the newlyweds would have but a year of grace to meld and start a family; then Nancy, like Roseanna, would find herself in the most tenuous of positions, pulled in two different directions by the two opposing clans. But she was made of much sturdier material than Roseanna, even if Johnse loved her less, and she would prove to be instrumental to the designs of not one, but both sides.
Mary McCoy, wife of Lark. (Courtesy of Debbie McCoy Autry)
IN THE WINTER OF 1882, Squirrel Huntin’ Sam was holed up in the cave where Harmon McCoy had spent his last miserable days. It was an inauspicious hiding place not only for its history but also for the fact that the Hatfields had proven that they knew where it was. Paris had been arrested the previous year by E. S. Ferrell, a friend of the Hatfields. Sam now survived by shooting winter squirrels and collecting mast like the hogs. But even a hint of smoke from his fires could be detected by a keen-eyed hunter, and with the leaves off the trees, Elias Hatfield, the constable, noticed just such a hint. On February 23, he crept up to the mouth of the cave. He waited until dark and then leveled his gun on Squirrel Huntin’ Sam and ordered him to put his hands up. Sam knew the jig was up and did not resist.9
Elias took Squirrel Huntin’ Sam across the Tug and directly to his brother Wall, the justice of the peace presiding in the case, who delivered the captive to the Logan County jail to stand trial for the murder of Bill Staton Jr. It is notable that Elias did not try to exact vigilante justice. Bail was set at $2,500, and, although Truda McCoy reported that Squirrel Huntin’ Sam’s uncle Randall prepared the clan to rescue him by force if he was convicted, there seems to have been no effort to raise this sum of money so that he could post bail.10
More than a hundred armed McCoys showed up in Logan Courthouse on the day that Sam and Paris were brought to trial. Hatfields were everywhere too. Even with a Hatfield presiding over the trial, it was an uphill battle for the prosecution. The brothers swore that Staton had fired at them first. There were no witnesses to the fight, so only circumstantial evidence could be brought against them. After Staton’s corpse was found, investigators had combed the battle scene and found bushes that had been uprooted or crushed or had their limbs broken. It was clear that a violent struggle had taken place, meaning the three men had had their chances, which was about all any man could ask for under the circumstances.11
Wall Hatfield, who was forty-eight, was older and smaller than Devil Anse but large in authority and stature. He lived with his wife of twenty-nine years, Jane, and six of their eleven children at the mouth of Grapevine Fork on Beech Creek. He had built a sturdy cabin and barn on his property in 1861 from the logs of poplar and cucumber trees, the cold-hardiest and northernmost of the magnolias. Given the codes of the land, where carrying arms and attending to one’s self-defense were expected and where assault and murder convictions were all too rare, and despite his own brother Elias’s efforts to capture Squirrel Huntin’ Sam, Wall had little choice but to find Sam and Paris not guilty. There was too little to contradict the defendants’ claim that they killed Staton in self-defense.12
THE SPRING AND SUMMER OF 1882 were relatively peaceful. On the surface, relationships stabilized. Both families stuck more or less to their own realms and toiled away, planting and harvesting their crops and cutting timber for cash. But beneath the surface, tempers were simmering on each side. “When the McCoys talked about the Hatfields among themselves, it was ‘them Damn-Hatfields’ or ‘Hog Thief Floyd’ or that ‘Bunch of Bushwhackers,’ ” wrote Truda McCoy, who was both born a McCoy and married to
a McCoy. “When the Hatfields talked about the McCoys, it was ‘them Damn-McCoys’ or something equally bad.” And just as democracy was the strength of the American nation, now just over a century old, it was in some ways the weakness of the mountaineers, who thrived when left alone. Elections demanded that they come together every two years, and all minds were now focused on the upcoming August polls.13
Here Truda McCoy voiced the frustrations of her clan: “It was a well-known fact that Devil Anse Hatfield tried to dominate the Pike County elections, furnishing whisky and swaying the voters to his way of thinking.” A resident of West Virginia, he did not even vote in Pike County, but he did business there, in moonshine. “He came over with his clan to buy votes and put his man into office.”14 This rubbed the McCoys the wrong way.
It turned out that this day Randall McCoy and his brothers and sons would be working for the same candidate as the Hatfields—Tom Stafford, running for justice of the peace. Stafford was the McCoys’ neighbor who found Randall’s hogs and a brother-in-law of Ellison Hatfield.
However, on August 6, the day before the election, Randall’s twenty-nine-year-old son, Floyd, rode from house to house along Blackberry Creek warning his brothers and cousins to come prepared for trouble. That afternoon Tolbert McCoy, then twenty-eight and considered the toughest of Randall’s sons, sat on his porch almost within sight of the polling grounds, polishing his gun and cleaning his knife. Tolbert, who had married Mary Butcher a year and a half earlier, when she was sixteen, was already the father of two. But fatherhood had done little to mellow him.15
SOME HISTORIANS DATE THE START of the feud to Monday, August 7, 1882. In a region where political ambition knew no bounds and public office offered untold powers, political campaigns were notoriously hard-fought and corrupt. Votes were openly rewarded with tots of “campaign” whiskey. It was common for a partisan to set up a fifty-gallon barrel of spirits with a spigot and a tin cup and dole out servings, just as Lonnie Lee recalled the Hatfields doing for his relatives when they ran for government offices: “They put up a sign that said, ‘If you’re a Lee man, help yourself. If not, don’t touch it.’ ”16
