by Dean King
Some maintain that Randall cut out right away to seek assistance in Pikeville. He wanted justice to take its course in the courtroom and had little confidence that the Hatfields would allow the legal process to take place at all. They would certainly hold his sons in West Virginia, not in Kentucky, and if Ellison died, they would just as certainly demand blood for blood. However, it appears that Randall stayed on a while longer, as he later testified about subsequent events that he witnessed: The party turned back, he recounted, and as he suspected, the situation began to deteriorate even more. They had gone between a quarter and a half mile when they stopped at Dials Branch. Wall was loading the three prisoners onto a corn sled when Devil Anse and a heavily armed band showed up to join them.21
The Hatfield lawmen were vastly outnumbered by their own cousins from the other side of the river and their cousins’ hired hands. Among Devil Anse’s party were Cap and Johnse; the three roughneck Mahon brothers; Alex Messer, a gunslinging drifter and former Union soldier who also worked on Anse’s timber crew; and Charlie Carpenter, the schoolteacher at Mate Creek, who was held by many to be a rabble-rouser and by some to be delusional. Once the prisoners were in the corn sled, they were pulled by a mule to their next stop. This mode of transport served the Hatfields’ purposes by both speeding up their travel and further debasing the McCoys—the more helpless, in the eyes of their captors, the more detestable. Now it was only a matter of time until the pretense of the situation being in any way legal vanished entirely.22
The growing throng reached Preacher Anse’s house before noon. They stopped for dinner, the midday meal in southern Appalachia. This is where Big Jim saw his brothers once more, but like his father, he could do nothing to help them. After dinner, Wall would later testify, he decided to have a shave. Meanwhile, Devil Anse summoned his fellow West Virginians outside to the yard, where they discussed the situation. Though most of the men were too young to have been involved in the war, which had ended seventeen years before, Anse reverted to his quasi-military ways, calling out in a commanding voice, “All friends of the Hatfields fall in line.” About forty men did so. Growing increasingly uncomfortable with the proceedings, Preacher Anse told Wall and Devil Anse to leave his property.23
Instead, Devil Anse called for a rope and told Carpenter, who fetched one from his horse, to lash the prisoners together by their arms. The overzealous schoolteacher cinched the rope until it cut off the circulation to their hands. Pain aside, this was a distinct demotion in status. With the rope, the presumption of innocence was symbolically stripped away, and the line between security on the one hand and humiliation and torture on the other blurred. Devil Anse nodded to Preacher Anse and announced to the Kentucky officers, “We’re taking charge of the murderers.” Carpenter tugged on the rope and forced the McCoy brothers back onto the corn sled.
Randall could see where this was heading and knew he had no time to lose. As the group with the prisoners set out toward the Tug, he lit out for Pikeville. Before he went, Wall warned him that his boys would die if an attempt was made to take them back. “This is the last time I ever saw them alive,” Randall later testified.24
The group headed down Blackberry Creek, Wall riding along as a guard part of the way. Big Jim accompanied them for about a mile and a half, at which point, he later testified, Devil Anse told him he had “no business further down.” According to Big Jim, Devil Anse also said in his presence “that he had a notion to tell the Officers along that he had no further use for them.” Big Jim, who well knew the codes of respect for elders in the area, said only, “I stopped.”
At a ford near the mouth of Blackberry Creek, where William McCoy lived and with Randall’s brother James and Bill Daniels, a son-in-law of Patty McCoy, watching, Wall, Cap, and Johnse Hatfield, Charlie Carpenter, and Joe Murphy loaded the brothers onto a skiff and poled it across the Tug to West Virginia. Once across the river and back in Devil Anse’s territory, the group of forty men drove their prisoners about a mile up Mate Creek to Rutherford Branch. With rain threatening in the middle of the afternoon, they secured them in a dilapidated, out-of-use schoolhouse. The dismal one-room log structure now became the brothers’ holding cell and the last roof they ever had over their heads.25
PART II
THE RAGE AND
THE OUTRAGE
1882–1887
Chapter 8
Mountain Justice
August 9–10, 1882
Monday’s election and its agreeable result should have been a harbinger of better times for everyone. Supported by both families, Tom Stafford had been elected a justice of the peace in Pike County. If the stars had aligned differently, it might even have reinforced the notion of common cause and hinted at new possibilities for the two families. But, instead, moods on both sides of the Tug were fast souring as Big Ellison’s chances of surviving his internal lacerations grew increasingly slim. The deathbed vigil continued in Anse Ferrell’s house; pure corn was passed, deadening the pain but raising volatility and sharpening tempers.
Meanwhile, the various local authorities refused to get involved, and there was no state police force in either Kentucky or West Virginia to step in. In both states, if things got really out of hand, local officials might appeal to the governor to turn out the state militia, but that was done only in drastic situations and usually after an investigation by the state adjutant general. When the West Virginia Department of Public Safety—its state police—was finally created by the legislature, in 1919, it was not to address criminal activity, which abounded, but to quell violence resulting from labor unrest following World War I. Even then, West Virginia was only the fourth state to create its own police agency.1
TUESDAY AFTERNOON, on the banks of the Tug, a deepening tragedy was unfolding, one that would set in motion more than a decade of heedless violence. It was mostly a time of tense waiting. The medicine the Hatfields had access to was rudimentary, and almost all of their resources came from nature: a buckeye, or horse chestnut, rubbed smooth in pockets warded off rheumatism; a bezoar stone extracted poison from a venomous bite; willow bark tea alleviated pain; the juice from black walnut hulls tackled ringworm. For just about any other ailment, from infants’ teething pains to depression, a dram or more of pure corn was the remedy.2
But even pure corn could not cure twenty-seven stab wounds and a bullet in the back.
Men armed with rifles, shotguns, and jugs of liquor continued to arrive at the abandoned schoolhouse where the McCoys were being held, which lay only about a mile from Ferrell’s house, on land given by Big Eph.3
While Elias stayed by Ellison’s bedside, messengers went back and forth to the schoolhouse with news. Anse and Wall visited their brother, who at times was lucid and managed to give them a whispered account of the fight, damning all three McCoys. When they asked him what he thought they should do with the McCoys if he died, he replied: “Give them the civil law,” but the law was not necessarily what Devil Anse had in mind.
Inside the schoolhouse, which had been replaced by a newer one on Elias’s property at the mouth of Mate Creek and had sat empty for several years now, the three brothers lay bound by the rope on a filthy floor. Anse, Wall, Johnse, and Cap took turns standing watch. The inside of a schoolhouse was a place they scarcely knew. In these parts, the school year typically lasted for only two months, after “foddering time.” Girls did not enroll at all, and the boys learned all too little from itinerant teachers who were perhaps not overly motivated by their salaries, which consisted mostly of furs, bear bacon, corn liquor, and tobacco, the last of which was designated as legal tender in Kentucky. Though clever, Randall and Devil Anse (who served as a school trustee) were almost entirely illiterate.4
To pass the hours, the Hatfield party threatened and bullied the three McCoys. Within their prisoners’ earshot, they speculated on the most painful places to be shot, sniggering in anticipation of testing their theories. Any response from the McCoys only led to further jeering and ridicule.5
Th
e three brothers were told that they would be tried the following afternoon, Wednesday, by Wall, a proposition that did not cheer them. Although Wall was unusually cool-headed and had given Paris and Squirrel Huntin’ Sam a fair shake in their trial for the murder of Bill Staton, he was visibly out of sorts, pacing about grimly. Rain poured down with biblical ferocity, blackening the surrounding woods and turning the ground to mud. “Prayer to the Almighty is not only a duty, but a pleasure in time of tribulation,” Wall admonished the brothers. “And it won’t hurt even should Ellison’s recovery permit you to escape death.” In the midst of the deluge, a messenger arrived with the news that Ellison was, on the contrary, slipping away.6
Fearing the worst, McCoy family members were also in motion. At dusk, Sally arrived at the derelict schoolhouse to see her sons and plead for mercy. A generally well-respected woman, she was religiously devout and no patsy. She had, as most knew, publicly lambasted her own cousin for being a cow fornicator. (He had countered that she was a vicious gossip.)7
With Sally was Tolbert’s young and attractive wife, Mary, clutching their four-month-old daughter, Cora, in her arms. Before the shocking events of the past two days, things had been proceeding well for the newlyweds. They had the new baby, and Tolbert’s trade in timber was thriving. Now Mary found herself with her mother-in-law kneeling in front of Anse and Wall and, choking back sobs, begging them to allow the brothers to have a fair trial. If bringing Cora was an attempt to elicit sympathy, it did not work.
Wall Hatfield. (Dr. Coleman C. Hatfield Collection, courtesy of Dr. Arabel E. Hatfield)
“Yo’ needn’t beg and yo’ needn’t cry,” Devil Anse coldly responded, according to Spears. “If Ellison dies, yo’ boys has got to die.”
While Wall and Anse were firm on this point, they were not immune to the women’s suffering or their courage in coming alone to the schoolhouse. The two Hatfields let them in to see their loved ones. Still lashed together on the floor, the brothers engaged in what would be their last conversation with the two women.
Outside the schoolhouse, more Hatfield men, wet and mud-spattered, arrived; so, too, did three McCoys: Selkirk, the hog-trial juryman who tipped the balance in Floyd Hatfield’s favor, and his sons L.D., thirty, and Albert, twenty-two, all timbermen who worked for Devil Anse and were loyal to him. At this point it would have required a small army to retake the three McCoy brothers.8
Night fell. Rain threatened again. Through the open door, the McCoys saw and tried to ignore the quasi-military guard bivouacked around a number of campfires. Having nothing else to do after pitching camp and tending to their mounts, these men idly played cards. Ribald songs and plaintive hymns, the only tunes they knew, drifted like the hickory smoke of their fires on the humid night air. Laughter was quickly stifled. Still, curses, grunts, and guffaws occasionally broke out as the ubiquitous jugs were passed. Then an argument erupted. It was not over money or cards or an insult—it was over the manner of death the brothers should be subjected to if Big Ellison passed. Some favored hanging, but they all were satisfied with the suggestion that “they make it a shooting match, with live targets.”
Wall sat on the schoolhouse porch with a double-barreled shotgun across his lap. By ten o’clock, Sally’s crying, praying, and pleading for mercy neared hysteria. This was irritating and set the men on edge. The schoolteacher, Charlie Carpenter, stationed in a stand of trees surrounding the clearing, told her to shut up. No one wanted to listen to her, but no one else did anything to interfere with her either, maybe out of respect or maybe out of fear of the long-term consequences.
Then someone arrived with a rumor on his tongue, and someone else shouted that Randall McCoy and a rescue party were forming across the Tug. The Hatfield men had been all too ready for something, anything, to happen, and the clack of gun breeches opening and closing punctuated the bug drone of the deep woods as the men checked their ammunition. Sally denied the news, knowing it was false because Randall had gone to Pikeville. But Wall took it seriously. He demanded that she and Mary depart, warning them that if Randall tried to interfere, the boys would pay the price.9
The miserable women left and felt their way through the dark, crossing rain-swollen streams and stumbling along the trail. Sometime around midnight, bruised, brokenhearted, and shivering, they arrived at Doc Rutherford’s house, where they were taken in for the night. The sixty-one-year-old doctor, who was away tending to Ellison, had close ties to both families in the feud: Not only was he a friend and financial supporter of Devil Anse’s (and the namesake of his fourth son, Elliott, who, like Doc, would go on to study medicine), but Rutherford’s daughter Mary was married to Sally and Randall’s son Floyd. As Tuesday became Wednesday, the women huddled inside by the hearth, regaining their strength and struggling to keep their hopes alive. They determined to return to the schoolhouse in the morning.
As for Randall, he was more than thirty miles away in Pikeville, where he had gone to consult with a lawyer and wait for his sons to arrive. He was now in the company of his spurned daughter, Roseanna, who was still living at the Cline house. As the dark hours passed, and his sons did not appear, he grew more disheartened and considered heading back to the Tug at daylight.
Outside the schoolhouse, a lantern hung near the door, providing the only light, a magnet to moths and beetles. Used to sleeping in snoring groups in drafty, overcrowded cabins or on the rocky forest floor, the Hatfield guards dozed off, impervious to the warm drizzle in the buggy, smoky, snake-ridden woods, the burning thirst that trailed the passage of pure corn slowly rising inside them.
THE NEXT DAY, Wednesday, August 9, Preacher Anse and a delegation of friends crossed the Tug to see the prisoners and Devil Anse. Preacher Anse asked his cousin to turn the McCoy brothers over to the Kentucky authorities. Devil Anse was a man who knew the court system well. Since the war, he had been in and out of the courtroom on many occasions, to face charges (on his wartime activities as well as for trespassing and moonshining), to press charges, and to defend himself in civil cases, most notably against Perry Cline and against a merchant who had tried to bilk him for timbering supplies. He was aware that things could go in your favor or not, sometimes in unpredictable and illogical ways, but he was an honest businessman, and most often things went his way. He had even been to an appeals court to overturn an unfavorable decision, so he understood the mechanisms of the justice system in a relatively sophisticated fashion. But this was different. Since Devil Anse was illiterate, his way of thinking had been shaped not by school and reading but by life and its experiences. From his youth, he was a woodsman, a hunter, and a predator. In matters of money and contracts, he had learned that he could take his disputes to court. In matters of life and death and family well-being, however, he fell back on his survival instincts and his war experience. He eyed his cousin and replied tersely: “If my brother Ellison gets well, the law can handle it.”10
People were Preacher Anse’s business, and he knew a stubborn soul when he encountered one. He had encouraged his cousin to do the right thing and could only hope that he might mull it over and accede. Perhaps God in all His grace would intervene. Preacher Anse held out no great hope, though. In the meantime, three souls were teetering on the brink of their judgment day, and he went to work with fervor.
“Old Uncle Anison Hatfield,” Sam McCoy later wrote, “stayed with the boys till he were told the third time to leave. They told him to leave or else.” As he was getting ready to depart, Preacher Anse urged the brothers to continue to pray. According to Sam, Bud said, “Uncle Anse, I don’t know how.”
Preacher Anse told him, “Say, ‘Lord, have mercy on me.’ ”11
That morning, Sally and Mary set out again for the Hatfield schoolhouse. When they reached the schoolyard and began pleading for mercy, some of the men, already weary of the two women, taunted them. If Ellison died, the brothers heard from inside the tumbledown schoolhouse, they were to be “filled as full of holes as a sifter bottom.”12
By two o�
�clock, it was clear that Ellison was not going to recover, and Big Jim arrived to join the women and try to help his brothers. Wall told all three to leave. When the two women resisted, he warned them that if they did not go immediately, he would physically remove them. Reluctantly, they left the cursed schoolhouse, knowing they would probably never see Tolbert, Pharmer, and Bud again.
At three o’clock on Wednesday afternoon, some forty-eight agonizing hours after the Election Day fight, Doc Rutherford pronounced Big Ellison dead. In one sense, after two decades, the circle was complete: The Hatfields had now forfeited their Confederate hero to the McCoys, compensation for the Union man that the McCoys had lost at the hands of the Hatfields. But two wrongs never add up to a right; they merely multiply, and no one recognized any balancing of the scales.
The Hatfield men had been quietly grieving this inevitable loss, and as Ellison’s wife and children knelt around his bed weeping, they moved to avenge it.
Elias and Anse stalked out to the yard and dispatched a messenger to let the others know.
When they heard the galloping horse, the schoolhouse guards jumped to their feet. The sweating horse stopped with a shiver. “Ellison’s done died,” the messenger shouted.13 An angry and distraught bellow rose from the shocked men, shocked even though the news had been all but a certainty. They lumbered around the schoolyard, averting their eyes from one another and regaining their bearings. Casting ominous looks inward through the chinks between the logs, they began to channel their emotions into something they could deal with—throat-ripping anger.
Elias took Ellison’s body to his house and then joined the force at the old schoolhouse, where the mood was like a brooding storm before a hair-raising lightning bolt. Although this was to be mob justice, the mob was not without order. A trial was held, but the verdict had already been handed down with Ellison’s last breath. The sentence: death for all three, though by now there was some question as to Bud’s involvement. They would make an inquiry if possible before killing him.
