by Dean King
“A girl came to the door dressed in dark clothes,” as Cotton Top told it. “Cap and Johnse Hatfield said, ‘You, Big Man, goddamn, kill her.’ ”
Cap had his rifle raised to his shoulder. So did Cotton Top, who squeezed the trigger of his .32 -caliber Winchester. A ball pierced Alifair’s nightgown just over the left breast. Fanny, still standing in the kitchen doorway, heard her sister call out Cap’s name and saw her fall but could not see who had fired because the shooter was hidden behind the well box. Addie crept out to her and asked, “Was it Cap Hatfield?”
“Yes, it was Cap Hatfield,” Alifair gasped, “and nobody else.”15
With a burning torch in one hand, Mitchell climbed up the logs to the roof and held the flame to the roof shingles. Randall squeezed the trigger of his revolver several times, blowing off three of Mitchell’s fingers to the knuckle. Mitchell dropped the torch and fell.16
Through a rooftop loophole, Cal shot his .32 -caliber Winchester, hitting Cotton Top. The relatively light shot of the .32 did not drop the burly albino, but it drilled his forearm, entering at his wrist and exiting just below his elbow. Cal’s shooting drove the other Hatfields around the far end of the main house to the covered passageway between the two buildings, where they kept up a steady fire on the front door and at the attic above them while renewing their efforts to ignite the roof with torches. Finally they succeeded. Smoke filled the attic around Cal. He headed downstairs.17
With lead flying and blood flowing on both sides, Sally, who had heard the girls scream that Alifair was shot, slipped out of the main door. As she went through it, Johnse fired inside the house at a form on the bed, and the bullet sliced through the quilt. The Hatfields, especially Cap, would later joke that he was shooting at his own son. John Spears would propagate this idea in the New York Sun, writing that the boy, supposedly the seven-year-old son of Johnse and Roseanna, “escaped death at the hands of his father by the thickness of a piece of muslin.” Since it is generally agreed that Roseanna and Johnse’s child was Little Sally, a girl who never survived infancy, the boy was probably Tolbert’s seven-year-old son, Melvin.
As Sally passed between the buildings, Crazy Jim swore at her and ordered her to go back inside. Either out of ammunition or hesitant to shoot an unarmed woman (despite his command to Cap), he raised his gun by the barrel end. “I saw it was wrong-end,” Sally later told Spears, “and kept on.” Crazy Jim swung the gun butt at her, breaking two of her ribs and knocking her flat. Sally rose to her hands and knees and crawled toward Alifair until Johnse waved his pistol in her face.
“For the Lord’s sake, let me go to my girl,” she pleaded.
“Go back, you, or I’ll kill you,” Johnse warned.
Sally reached a hand out toward her daughter, who lay in a pool of blood. “Oh!” she wailed, “she’s dead. For the love of the Lord, let me go to her. Oh, my God!” she howled. “My God!” Johnse struck her so hard with the backside of his pistol that the hammer penetrated her skull. She was knocked out cold.18
The battle lasted an hour and a half, according to Cotton Top. Firing and reloading rifles, shotguns, and pistols, Randall and Cal kept the raiders at bay and at one point drove some of them back behind the pigpen. But it was only a matter of time before they would have to abandon the burning house. Cal told Randall that he was going to try to reach the corncrib, about a hundred yards away. From there, he would provide cover for his father, and then both might be able to cross the creek and make it to the woods.19
With a box of cartridges in one hand and his rifle in the other, Cal burst through the door and dashed across the yard. As he cleared the corner of the house, the attackers opened fire. On the cue of the guns’ roar, Randall, clad only in a nightshirt and long johns, eyes red and bugging from the smoke, emerged. Looking like a madman, he leveled his double-barreled shotgun at Johnse, pulled the trigger, and blasted him in the right shoulder, though his thick coat absorbed most of the pellets. He wheeled and fired the other barrel at Mitchell, peppering his gut, but his cartridge belt saved him from worse.
Having bought Cal some precious strides, Randall now turned and ran with everything he had left, exiting the glaring light of the fire into the ghastly glow of the full moon. Cal was well away—seventy-five yards by one estimate—in the shadow of some trees when he was hit in the head by a bullet. At that distance, in that light, it was a fluke shot. No one even saw him drop to the ground, instantly dead. Both Cap and Johnse later claimed to have shot Cal, “in a bragadocia manner,” according to Cotton Top, who believed that from the way they were positioned, Cap had done it.20
Randall now attracted their attention, but he had gotten a jump on them. With Mitchell and Cotton Top down, the others blazed away in the direction Randall was running. Reaching the corncrib, he paused to gulp the frigid mountain air, then set off again, crossing the creek and fleeing up the mountain on the other side. Once he was in the dark of the woods—woods he knew better than anyone—he was gone. Wet and shivering, he reached a neighbor’s farm. Instead of waking the residents, the shocked old man went into their barn, routed their hogs, and burrowed into the hay that had been warmed by their bodies, saving himself from death by exposure.
With the house burning to the ground, the Hatfield gang—injured and otherwise—fetched their horses and secured their wounded. Then they rode off, leaving behind the carnage.21
Chapter 15
The Death of a Soldier
January 1888
In 1947, Willis Staton, a retired circuit court judge of Pikeville, would finish writing a book about the Hatfield-McCoy feud, a subject that had fascinated him since his youth. In his book, which he called Hatfields and McCoys: True Romance and Tragedies, Judge Staton combined his recollections of events and people with dramatic re-creations of the scenes of the feud. He wrote in prose and verse, and he transcribed court records, which, as a judge, he greatly valued, into his own pages. Although he had published several other works, he never found a publisher for this one. The manuscript ended up in the bottom of a chest stashed in a barn.
Four decades later, a farmer who had taken over the property discovered the chest and notified Staton’s granddaughters. They published the work in a very limited edition for the family; thus, in 1993, Staton’s preserved court records and enigmatic history came back to light, as did the account of the one aspect of the feud that he had experienced himself.1
Staton was twelve years old when he attended what he would call “the saddest and most horrifying funeral of all ages.” It occurred on the afternoon following the Hatfields’ attack on the McCoy home place. Still crackling and hissing, the embers of the cabin’s massive beams glowed an evil ruby, and the incinerated articles of daily life emitted a powerful stench. Although the victims had not been dead for even twenty-four hours, there was an urgency to bury them—they were young, and to see or be near their corpses was excruciating. A number of McCoys and their friends and neighbors, mostly women, prepared the bodies for burial and discussed in hushed voices the likelihood that the Hatfields were still in the surrounding woods, as if they might actually be close enough to hear. They feared that the Hatfields, knowing that the McCoys would assemble for the burial, would attack and do them in for good. Young Staton watched Roseanna. So demoralized that she could barely stand, she did not utter a word.
Staton could feel the fear and the sense of vulnerability that lurked in the burned-out and bloody clearing. He listened to the women talking about what had happened. After the shooting ended, Addie and Fanny escaped from the burning house. Melvin, who had been clutching Randall’s leg when he ran out, fell at the door, crawled around a corner of the house, and hid. Suddenly he realized that little Cora, who was a cripple, was still inside, and he dashed into the smoke-filled annex. He found his sister and pulled her out by the hand just before the roof collapsed. Addie and Fanny had placed Alifair on some old bedding and dragged her away from the burning house. They returned and got Sally, who had fallen beside Alifair, and dr
ew her, still unconscious, to safety. The two sisters built a fire, and the five of them huddled by it until morning, when Big Jim and some neighbors arrived and found them. Sally, whose ribs had been broken near the spinal column, was unable to walk, and her bloody hair was frozen to the ground. Addie’s feet were badly frostbitten.
On the day of the funeral, there were so few McCoy men available that the women had to send for men from other families to come help. Staton’s father, Joe, was one of the few to answer the call. He did not believe that the Hatfields would attack, but just in case, he warned his son: “If shooting should start, you fall to the ground and lie there until it is over.”
The men dug one large hole in the winter-hard earth next to the graves of the four McCoy brothers, the three who had been shot and the fourth, Bill, who should have been with them but instead was said to have died—of guilt and grief—because he was not. They carried the two coffins up the hill to the grave site, which sat beneath an old peach tree and was protected by a split-rail fence. Staton nervously crept up to Alifair’s crude coffin and gazed on a sight he would never forget. He thought she was beautiful and later described his feelings in verse:
T’would be better she hadn’t been born,
Or that she had died when she was young.
But a new life God can give and adorn,
Where hate, strife, and killing is now known.
As for the Hatfields, Staton was not so sanguine:
Where is the joy for those who kill?
Can they who bathe in hell know heaven?
Oh, if they shed man’s blood for revenge,
What shall the answer be in heaven?
In mountain fashion, lacking a preacher, they buried the dead without a service. By the time the bodies were in the ground, a contingent of McCoys, including Randall, Big Jim, and Sam, was well on its way to Pikeville. There, the distraught family members would take refuge and plot their revenge.2
EVEN IN THIS TOUGH REGION, the bald-faced brutality of the New Year’s Day raid was shocking, particularly the murder of helpless Alifair, which, according to John Spears, “roused Pike County as it had not been roused since the Civil War.”3 “A Murderous Gang” ran the headline in the Louisville Courier-Journal on January 8, “Mother and Son Murdered, While Father and Daughters Escape a Fiery Grave.” This brief (and not completely accurate) report linked the raid to the killing of the three McCoy brothers and the recent arrest of one of the gang (which could have been the wrong Tom Chambers, Selkirk McCoy, or Mose Christian, who had all been arrested shortly before). The Courier-Journal wrongly reported that Sally, not Alifair, had been killed, but with a reasonable foreboding concluded that although the Pikeville jail was well defended, “fears were entertained at the hour of writing that an attempt would be made to release the member of the gang confined there.”4
The following day, the Wheeling Intelligencer called the attack “one of the most wanton and diabolical cases of arson and murder ever committed in the State of Kentucky” and announced that a total of $2,700 in rewards was being offered for the capture of the guilty men. These and other early newspaper accounts of the raid were received with some skepticism. As the story spread across the country and more details became known, however, the skepticism gave way to revulsion. This was not just another inflated tale of bloody retaliation from the backwoods but the true story of a premeditated midnight raid against an entire family, including women and children. It involved the intentional burning of their home, the savage clubbing of an innocent woman—a grandmother—and the gunning down of two of her children, one an unarmed girl. The Hatfields were called a murderous gang. The editorials assailed the authorities of Kentucky and West Virginia for allowing the conditions that had led to such needless violence.5
Locally, constable Matt Hatfield’s wife, Maw, now barred her cellar door. Devil Anse and his brothers and sons were blood relatives, but they were no longer welcome. “I don’t want anything to do with anyone that had a part in killing a woman or a child,” she said adamantly. And Squirrel Huntin’ Sam, who had tried to remain apart from the feud—he had considered Big Ellison a dear friend but was also close to Randall—now took up arms against the killers.6
The governors of Kentucky and West Virginia were now on red alert, and state guard units in both states were ordered to be prepared to intervene along the Tug Fork if violence flared up again. Governor Buckner was outraged. Governor Wilson, finding himself in an increasingly precarious position, braced himself for the next epistolary blow or—diplomacy having been stretched to its limits—legal maneuver.
In Pikeville, Bad Frank Phillips, having already sidestepped legality, figured he now had the moral authority to track down the Hatfields no matter where, no matter how. “If the governor of West Virginia is determined to continue the protection of his murderous pets,” he declared, “I will protect the citizens of Kentucky, or die in the attempt.” Fueled by the local outrage, he raised a posse. Despite claims to the contrary, Squirrel Huntin’ Sam reported that Randall joined it. “I were for peace and tried to keep things down and let the law work it out,” wrote Sam. “Randolph nothing would do but he must go. I done my best to keep him back and I could not, so I went along. I knew I could keep Randolph from killing some of them.”7
Bad Frank knew just where he would start tracking, too. Someone in the raiding party was badly wounded and had left behind a blood trail. Early on the morning of January 6, before reports of the tragedy hit the Louisville papers and only four days after Alifair and Cal were laid to rest, Bad Frank and twenty-three riders, including Big Jim and his brother Sam and a Pinkerton detective named John Yates, left Pikeville headed toward West Virginia. With them was Pikeville lawman and politico Bud Rutherford, whose grandfather and uncle (Asbury and Flem Hurley) were killed at the hands of Devil Anse during the war and whose father, Doc, who had tended to Big Ellison on his deathbed, had since had a bitter falling-out with the Hatfields.8
After riding all day from Pikeville and picking up the blood trail at the McCoy place, where nothing was left of the cabin except charred timbers and two stone chimneys, Bad Frank and his posse headed for the Tug. On the way, he showed his remorseless side, arresting two locals—John Gooslin and Stonewall Cline—who had done nothing but who he feared would try to warn the Hatfields of the coming posse. The first seeds of dissension within his own ranks had been sown. Squirrel Huntin’ Sam, for one, objected. “You ain’t going to take those boys with us, are you? If that be the case, I’ll go back home,” he drawled through his walrus mustache. “I will not go with any such crowd. I believe in making friends at home in place of enemies. Suppose you take them over there and get into a fight, which you expect to, and they get killed. What about it?”
“I wouldn’t say anything,” Big Jim responded flatly.
“Let them go,” Squirrel Huntin’ Sam said. “Jim, you can uphold for such if you want to, but I don’t tolerate no such.” It was settled by Jake Mounts, one of the posse and a justice of the peace, who made Gooslin and Cline swear not to alert the Hatfields.9
The posse crossed the Tug, then remarkably was able to pick up the blood trail on the West Virginia side of the river. Night was coming on, however. Most of the posse made camp at Larkin and Emma Smith’s place at the mouth of Grapevine Creek. Emma was a younger sister of Devil Anse. Nerves were on edge, and Jake Mounts and another man decided not to stay. They headed back to Kentucky in the dark.
A contingent led by Big Jim continued on to Devil Anse’s place on the banks of the Tug. They pounded on his door late that night. Not surprisingly, only Vicey and the children were at home. Big Jim and five others decided they would stay and bivouacked on the property that night, waiting for Devil Anse to return. He never did.
Early the next morning, after Big Jim and his men rejoined them, Bad Frank’s posse—Spears called it “the mob”—set out for Thacker Creek. A letter later sent to John B. Floyd from a lawyer living in the area reported that Phillips ordered his men to sw
eep up anyone who might inform the wanted men of their presence, including women and children. The writer said that they drove Larkin and Emma Smith and their family, including their daughter Nan, who was Cap’s wife, and her children, “like beasts before them” four or five miles down the river to Shang Ferrell’s.
Over several days, the posse traveled swiftly, striking strategically at odd hours. When they showed up at Ferrell’s cabin, Bad Frank sent Squirrel Huntin’ Sam in to search it. He found three guns in the bedroom, but he hid them between the feather bed and the mattress; he had come to hunt the guilty, not to harass the innocent, many of whom—Ferrell included—were his friends. Bad Frank did not care whether Ferrell was innocent or not, and he seized the Hatfield associate to prevent him, too, from spreading the alarm. The lawyer reported to Floyd that Bad Frank ordered the women and children to be left here, threatening them with trouble if they sent warnings to the men they were after. With Ferrell in tow, the posse proceeded up a creek from Thacker to Jim Vance’s place. No one was there.10
AFTER THE RAID ON THE McCoys, the Hatfield gang had returned home by the same route they had come. Johnse was more stunned than hurt, but Cotton Top’s shattered left arm was a mess. On the way back, he passed out from the loss of blood. When he came to, Ellis, Gillespie, and Indian took turns leading him down the trail. Slowly, in the dark, they made their way to Cap’s place, where most stayed overnight. Crazy Jim and Johnse continued on to Crazy Jim’s house, up Thacker Hollow, where the others joined them the following night. Once they were reassembled, they made their way on remote paths to the head of Horse Road Fork of Mate Creek and from there to Slick Rock Fork of Pigeon Creek, where they hid in the woods for almost a week.
Operating in country only they and their kin knew, they visited allies on the Guyandotte River who provided them with food and provisions. At some point, Cotton Top was taken back to his home on Sand Lick Creek, a tributary of the Guyandotte, where a Dr. Brown dressed his wounds. In his confession, Cotton Top said, “I told him how I got shot.”11
