The Feud: The Hatfields and McCoys: The True Story

by Dean King

  And then in 1872 came Devil Anse’s notorious claim that Cline had cleared timber off his land with the result that Cline was forced to sign over to Devil Anse his property, including his family’s Old Home Place. In 1887, with the imminent arrival of the railroads, the value of that tract of land was mounting. It is small wonder that Cline welcomed an opportunity to make Devil Anse regret his actions.

  Cline was the lawyer whose assistance Randall had sought when his three sons were being held by the Hatfields. So far, the law officers of Pike and Logan counties had demonstrated that they were not up to the task of curbing the Hatfields’ aggression. Cap’s merciless beating of Cline’s niece and her daughter and murder of his nephew within the past year were confirmation of that fact.2

  The failure of the legal system in Kentucky was not just a Pike County problem. Kentucky’s lone state prison, a cramped 780 -cell facility in Frankfort dating back to 1798, was so insufficient that prison sentences were regularly truncated. Nearly all of the inmates suffered from scurvy, pneumonia, or some other disease. Appalled by these miserable conditions, the previous governor, Democrat Luke Blackburn, a doctor who had served as a yellow fever expert during the war, had overhauled the prison system and orchestrated the building of a new facility in Eddyville, but it would not open until 1889. In the meantime, he had pardoned more than a thousand inmates, earning himself the nickname “Lenient Luke” and jeers at the 1883 Democratic nominating convention. Through the 1890s, convicted murderers would serve an average of fewer than eight years of their sentences.3

  In the final year of his term, the current governor, Proctor Knott, Blackburn’s successor and also a Democrat, had also taken full advantage of his power to pardon, both to alleviate the strain on the Frankfort prison and to curry favor with certain voters. Nonetheless, Perry Cline set about trying to procure rewards for the arrests of the men indicted for the murders of the three McCoy brothers. Knott, whose four-year term had been plagued by lawlessness and feuds in eastern Kentucky and particularly by a violent two-year feud in Rowan County, came through, though with a somewhat tepid hundred dollars per head.4

  It was not much, but Cline had thrown his first punch.

  He immediately set to work on his next, and it would be accompanied by a flurry that would change the complexion of the fight. The politically deft Cline began campaigning for Simon Bolivar Buckner—never mind that he was a Confederate veteran—to be the next governor of Kentucky. He was well aware that if he could help deliver Pike County to Buckner, he would have political capital to spend, and he knew just what he would spend it on.

  IN THE NEAR TERM, the sons of Harmon McCoy were not willing to allow the beatings of their sister and niece and the murder of their brother to go unavenged. Venturing into Cap’s realm was too risky, but that spring, they heard that Tom Wallace was working on the railroad extension along the Big Sandy, and they recognized an opportunity. Bud and Jake managed to get the drop on Wallace on their first foray and delivered him to the county jail in Pikeville.

  Wallace was placed in a cell with a friend named Charlie Mitchell. One morning, Perry Cline’s son John Sinclair, better known as Sink, an eighteen-year-old deputy sheriff who had graduated from a military school and was studying to be an attorney, brought in breakfast. One of the two cellmates grabbed the coffeepot and hit him on the head. Sink sank. The pair opened the other cells and let out all of the prisoners, including one John C. McCoy, who was accused of a stabbing unrelated to the feud. Wallace, who had been in jail less than a month, and Mitchell fled toward the West Virginia line and eventually managed to wade across the Tug.5

  Wallace went straight to Cap for help. Cap gave him a horse and enough cash to get out of the valley. Wallace rode east into Virginia, where he disappeared into the Blue Ridge Mountains. Though it seemed unlikely that they would find Wallace again now that he knew they were after him, Jake, Lark, and Bud McCoy offered a reward for his recapture.

  A drifter who needed to earn his keep, Wallace could not simply lie low. Authorities in Virginia soon arrested him for selling moonshine. While this was a minor offense and a nuisance that Devil Anse and Johnse dealt with on a regular basis, for the fugitive Wallace, it would have serious repercussions. His punishment was a fine, but the fine was reported in newspapers, and interested parties in Kentucky took notice.

  It was not long before two bounty hunters came riding into Pike County to claim the reward on Wallace’s head. They did not have Wallace with them, but they had evidence of his capture: a bloody scalp with that telltale shock of white hair. This evidence was deemed sufficient.

  One of those two bounty hunters, as the story goes, was Dan Cunningham.6

  ON A WARM DAY IN JUNE ten years after Nathan Cunningham was gunned down by the Consolidated Band, a man rode into the fledgling town of Kentuck, West Virginia, about eight miles north of Charleston, the state capital. He wore a plain black suit, a linen shirt, and a black tie. He looked to be an itinerant preacher. By necessity the people of the remotest parts of the southern Appalachians had a tradition of “funeralizin’ ” their dead well after the fact. Since a parlor or porch usually served as the mortuary, families buried their deceased as soon as possible, but, with men of the cloth few and far between, they often had to await the arrival of just such an itinerant or circuit preacher for a proper service to be held. The wait also allowed for the consideration of weather and crops and for word to be passed to friends and relatives. It was not unusual for a funeral to take place on the anniversary of the death, but a decade later was stretching it a bit.7

  A local greeted the black-suited stranger with deference and then studied the strapping six-footer with his powerful build, no-nonsense look, and bit of a slouch. His manner changed abruptly. This was no preacher. “Lookin’ fer a school, Dan?” he sneered. “Old trouble all fergot, eh?”

  Back in the heart of what had regrettably become Skean, Counts, and Kiser country for the first time in a long time, Cunningham sat impassively on his mount. An observer would never have known from his demeanor that the local’s clan had ruined his father, killed his brother, and run him off his ancestral land, or that he had returned after a decade of preparation to give his brother a proper funeral. He would have no way of knowing that Cunningham’s life was now dedicated to exacting justice, or vengeance if that was what you wanted to call it.

  But this was not a man worthy of Cunningham’s ire. “I haven’t forgotten,” he replied. Cunningham was no longer simply a teacher either. Lawlessness was all around. Gangs of outlaws were a plague. Nearby, the Kelly Gang—a dozen men from West Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio—had started a crime spree in the summer of 1886, crossing all three states’ borders to rob, murder, and steal and to avoid capture. Cunningham, who now worked for Charleston-based private detective Alpheus Wick “Alf” Burnett’s agency, Eureka Detectives, was determined to fight such public enemies. “Nathan is still dead,” he said calmly but ominously. “Tell your gang that.”8

  Teaming up with Burnett, one of the leading private detectives of his day, had been pivotal for Cunningham. Burnett, the son of an Irish immigrant from County Tyrone and his New Jersey–born wife, was then thirty-seven, the same age as Cunningham. Slight of stature, he had learned to fight by necessity. He was college educated, quick of body and mind, and he feared no one. A peace-loving man, who opposed quarreling, he had nearly entered the ministry in the Methodist Episcopal Church in Pennsylvania but instead began an itinerant career as a schoolteacher, bookkeeper, merchant, editor, and publisher. In 1876, he moved to Charleston and left the newspaper business to work for the U.S. Revenue Service before going into private practice, attracting such men as Cunningham to his successful law-enforcement operation.9

  A FEW DAYS AFTER HIS return to Jackson County, on a Sunday evening, Cunningham found what he was looking for—trouble.

  As he was riding home through the woods, he heard voices coming from a deep ravine. Smelling smoke too, he dismounted and crept up to the site. Through t
he trees, he saw a large still and a scene of gross debauchery. Working the still was Winfield Scott Kiser, an albino, distinctive even at a distance. Recently released from prison for bootlegging, Kiser was already at it again. Around him, a number of men and women engaged in a drunken orgy. In his diary, Cunningham would later observe: “Hell’s headquarters is sure in Jackson County.” He backed away, climbed up on his horse, and departed.10

  Armed with a warrant for Kiser’s arrest and a mandate to perform special work for the federal prosecutor, Cunningham and his twenty-six-year-old nephew Robert Duff later returned to the still. They arrested Kiser, impounded the distilling equipment, and held them both until the deputy marshal arrived.11

  Duff had already enraged the Consolidated Band by taking part in Kiser’s previous arrest, through the deputy U.S. marshal in Parkersburg. Now he was a doubly marked man. So was his uncle. But Cunningham knew it would be this way because he meant to bring the gang, whose members had been “against the Flag in time of war” and “violators of the law since,” to its knees.12

  With Kiser in a Charleston jail cell awaiting trial, about thirty men of the Band met in secrecy at a schoolhouse and argued over how best to derail his return to prison. Wade Counts proposed that they kill the men pressing charges against Kiser. All the Skeans and Countses voted in favor of the idea, but the proposal fell short by two votes. Instead, they decided to try intimidation first. Cunningham, whose family still had allies in the area, had an inside source who slipped through the woods the next day to tell him of his narrow reprieve.

  Then came the Band’s threat, delivered anonymously: Cunningham and the brothers Robert and George Duff must leave the county within one week, or they would be killed.

  ON AUGUST 30, 1887, the state of Kentucky inaugurated as governor the former Confederate general Simon Bolivar Buckner, a man whose most notorious act during the war was becoming the first Confederate general to surrender an army. Afterward, he sat in a Union prison cell writing poetry until he was exchanged and promoted, at which point he took part in the failed Confederate invasion of Kentucky.

  Following the war, however, Buckner, a West Point graduate with a flamboyant handlebar mustache, became a business and political force. As governor, he would be known for wielding his veto power against special interests and for combating lawlessness and feuding in eastern Kentucky, where, in addition to the Hatfield-McCoy conflict, power struggles raged in Harlan, Letcher, Perry, Knott, and Breathitt counties.13

  After Cline delivered his corner of the state to the governor, he moved swiftly to reap his reward. It soon became clear to the Hatfields that Cline meant to cause them serious trouble. In response, the day before Buckner’s inauguration, Cline received a threatening letter. The writer identified himself as Nat Hatfield and gave his location as the Logan County Courthouse. “We have been told by men from your county that you and your men are fixing to invade this county for the purpose of taking the Hatfield boys,” wrote the fictional family member, “and now, sir, we, forty-nine in number at present, do notify you that if you come into this county to take or bother any of the Hatfields, we will follow you to hell or take your hide.”

  The writer warned Cline that the Hatfields were “the men who regulated matters at this place a short time ago” (a reference to the war), and they could get as many more men as they needed in six hours. “If you don’t keep your hands off our men, there is not one of you will be left in six months,” he wrote. “Our hangman tied a knot for you and laid it quietly away until we see what you do.”14

  Like Dan Cunningham, Cline was not inclined to be cowed by threats. On September 6, at his request, the Pike County Court clerk made copies of the murder indictments against the Hatfields and their allies. With those in hand, Cline set out for Frankfort, 150 miles away, in the company of county attorney Lee Ferguson and Deputy Sheriff Bad Frank Phillips, a friend of Cline’s, to ask Governor Buckner to increase the reward for the wanted men to a level where it would be taken seriously and to formally requisition them from the governor of West Virginia. Cline’s efforts had immediate and tangible results.

  On September 10, Buckner officially requested that West Virginia governor Willis Wilson extradite the indicted Anse Hatfield and his followers to Kentucky for the murder of the three McCoy brothers. Furthermore, by the time Cline left Frankfort, not only Devil Anse, but also Johnse, Cap, and Guerilla Mitchell had substantial rewards on their heads.15 All a man had to do was catch one of them and deliver him to the Pike County jail to find himself five hundred dollars the richer.

  At Cline’s request, Buckner appointed Frank Phillips to receive the prisoners. This was perhaps Cline’s most clever move. Burned before by the legal system and now entrenched in it himself as an attorney, jailer, and police officer, Cline well knew the vagaries of the legal process and the influence that sheriffs, politicians, and other interested parties held over it in these parts. As crooked poker was the norm, he knew better than to put all his cards on the table. He also knew that leverage could be brought to bear in a number of ways. Despite some obvious flaws, Bad Frank was driven, single-minded, and fearless. He possessed the heedless and quick-witted nature so crucial to a bounty hunter. Best of all, he was loyal to Cline.

  Bad Frank Phillips. (Courtesy of Boyd Phillips)

  Perry Cline had introduced a forceful new catalyst to the feud, the counterpunch to Devil Anse’s haymaker that Randall had lacked.

  IN OCTOBER 1887, Dan Cunningham was lynched after robbing and murdering a preacher. Or at least, that’s what the October 19 New York Times reported. It was an act of vigilante justice, the newspaper said. The mention was brief—and spurious.

  True, Cunningham had refused to heed the Band’s warnings to leave the county, and a hit team had ambushed him. When their bullets inexplicably did not strike him, he came to believe that he was being watched over by God. And while his opponents did not articulate their feelings, their response spoke more profoundly than words: In the face of this one determined vigilante, the usually mule-stubborn ring of outlaws decided to hightail it. They retracted their operations out of his county—Jackson—and moved east into even more remote Roane County. But this would not rid them of him any more than a false report of his lynching would.

  That same month he went into Kentuck on business pertaining to Nathan’s funeral, which was to be preached the following Sunday. Before he left, he put feed in the stable for the horse of an expected visitor. He then rode west two miles to Kentuck and stayed there until after nine thirty. The distance from Kentuck to Countsville was twelve miles. These were important facts, because he would be accused of murder in Countsville.16

  Cunningham belonged to the Methodist Episcopal Church, and he had engaged the Countsville minister Thomas Perry Ryan—known to all as Father Ryan—to perform the overdue service on October 16. At ten o’clock on the night of October 13, however, Father Ryan, a fifty-three-year-old husband, father, and community stalwart, was shot in his bedroom. Frank Skean, a brother of Joe Skean, had ordered the murder because Ryan—a Republican Unionist—opposed them. The bullet that killed Ryan was fired from the outside and passed through the wall of the house, through the footboard of the bed, through Ryan’s bowels, and through the headboard before lodging in the ceiling. As he lay dying, Father Ryan told his family that he had heard a voice outside that sounded like that of a man named Perry Drake.17

  The rest of the Ryan family did not leave the house to deliver the news of his death until the next morning. There was no message sent, no telegram, no other way for the news to spread, but at dawn that morning, Frank Skean and the Consolidated Band’s Kentuck faction set out for Countsville, ready to take action concerning the murder. Other members of the gang coming from Jeffreys, twenty miles from Ryan’s house, had set out even earlier. The only way they could have known of Ryan’s death was if they were involved in the plot. Skean and the other leaders met at a store on the county line.

  That morning, Alf Burnett found a .38 shell u
nder Ryan’s window and determined that he had been shot with a Winchester rifle. In the afternoon, the Band started after the Duff brothers, who were both teachers when not serving the law, and Ches Coon, all allies of Cunningham who had helped bust up the Band’s stills and make arrests. They found Robert Duff at work in the small cottage he shared with his wife. Those stalking him were illiterate and contemptuous of his learning. They easily overpowered and bound him and then ransacked his home. Next they set out to get his younger brother at their parents’ house near Kentuck. Frank Skean’s son Bill and twenty men silently ringed the house. George, twenty-two, was reading with his friend Coon, a Texan, when the gang fired a volley through the windows.18

  Alf Burnett, founder of the Eureka Detectives in Charleston, West Virginia.

  George ran to the door. Bill Skean and another man stood there with their rifles raised. Without warning, they fired again. Hit in the stomach and knocked down, George rose and staggered to get his revolver. He and Coon fought the gang, wounding several, including Skean, but they were badly outnumbered and outgunned. Spilling blood from his wound, George soon passed out, fell to the floor, and writhed in death. Coon surrendered, and the gang bound him and took him to Peter Skean’s, where they had also taken Robert. More members of the Band arrived, one conveying ropes, and they told the two they intended to hang them for the murder of Father Ryan.

  The next morning, the county coroner was summoned to the scene of Ryan’s murder. A jury of six men held an inquest over the body. Mrs. Ryan and her son Tom said they did not see anyone and that Ryan told them he heard a voice that sounded like Perry Drake’s. The names of Robert and George Duff and Ches Coon never came up. Tom swore out a warrant for Perry Drake, accusing him of the crime under oath, based on his father’s last words. But the Ryans would soon about-face.