The Feud: The Hatfields and McCoys: The True Story

by Dean King

  Burnett and Campbell started with a predawn visit to Stratton’s house, at the mouth of Knox Creek. They woke his wife, who told them that Stratton was not there, but she inadvertently revealed that he was out flatboating on the river.

  The detectives combed the riverbanks. At daybreak they discovered half a dozen men still asleep under blankets on a sandbar on the West Virginia embankment. Though they were outnumbered three to one, they had surprise on their side. Silently, they crossed the Tug, picked out Stratton, and pounced on him. He lurched awake with a pistol barrel at his throat, unable to reach for either the Winchester or the Colt concealed beneath his blanket. His cohorts wanted nothing to do with the businesslike detectives with their weapons drawn and did not move. Stratton raised his hands above his head as he was commanded, and they handcuffed him and led him away.8

  In short order, the Eureka detectives managed to seize four other Kentucky posse men—none of them McCoys—and ferry them across the river to face charges of kidnapping and murder. If Kentucky could do it, West Virginia could too.9

  WHILE BURNETT AND HIS MEN were stalking the banks of the Tug, the brawny redheaded Dan Cunningham looked to take care of unfinished business in Jackson and Roane counties with the gang that had run his family into the ground. But it was an uphill battle. The Jackson County prosecutor told law enforcement officers that it would cost the state too much to pursue and prosecute the Consolidated Band and that it would “destroy his town.” Cunningham, not surprisingly, considered him “a miser and a coward.”10

  In the summer of 1888, a list of those who had witnessed the gang’s deliberations and murders at Lynn Camp was introduced at court in the town of Spencer. The judge was ready to act on it, but the foreman of the grand jury (a minister, no less) was under the influence of the Consolidated Band and sandbagged the proceedings. At a second grand jury, matters only grew worse—malign, in fact. Two jurymen bore grudges against Cunningham. He had exposed one’s brother as an accessory to murder, and the other had been a political foe of his pro-Union father. This dynamic still governed allegiances: you were either a Union man and a Republican or a Secessionist and a Democrat. Overwhelmed by anti-Union sentiment, the jury, incredibly, indicted Cunningham as an accessory to the murder of Father Ryan. It was an attempt to run him out of the county. Bristling, Cunningham informed the county prosecutor, John A. A. Vandale, that he would most certainly be on hand for the trial at the next term of court. In the meantime, the Band set about finding false witnesses. When the trial came, however, Cunningham did not even testify, and the jury did not leave the courtroom to deliberate before pronouncing him innocent. Vandale, who had assembled eighty bogus witnesses, was humiliated. The Band, noted Cunningham, “slunk out of the courthouse.”

  But then the winds changed. Bob Skean was arrested and indicted for the murder of George Duff. The circuit court judge refused to try the case, so Huntington-based judge Thomas A. Harvey was called in. Eleven of twelve jurors voted to find Skean guilty of first-degree murder, the holdout being a son of a leader of the Band. The case was carried over to the next court term. The state again presented ample evidence to convict, and it seemed inevitable that Skean would be hanged or imprisoned for life. However, another twist was in the works. Out of the blue, Judge Harvey ordered the clerk to enter a nolle prosequi, vacating the charges and closing the case forever.

  The legal system had once again been subverted by what Cunningham called “Secessionism.” Harvey, a Confederate veteran wounded at Fort Donelson and educated at Washington College (now Washington and Lee University), where Robert E. Lee had signed his legal diploma, had exonerated a blatantly guilty man because of his ties to the Confederacy. The deaths of Robert and George Duff, who had striven to bring law and order to the region, were for naught.11

  In the end, Cunningham would not get Wade Counts, the man who had murdered his brother, either. But perhaps, as he had come to believe, divine assistance was on his side. One day, Counts was passing near the murder site of Coon and Robert Duff when, as Cunningham described it, a “bolt of avenging lightning broke forth from a cloudless sky… and smote him dead.” With evident satisfaction, Cunningham related that Counts’s body sat for four days in the August heat before it was found and “hauled in a wagon past the place where he helped murder my brother, a swarm of green flies following him.”

  The injustice of these cases (celestial wrath notwithstanding)stuck with Cunningham for the rest of his life. In his memoir decades later, he inked an open letter to Tom Ryan, prodding: “If you have one jot of evidence… [concerning] that Kentuck Band of Rebels with what few dirty followers they enlisted to commit the crimes they did… go with me and we will… ask for a prosecution…. There are some few of the murderers living.”

  It seems somewhat inevitable that at this point Cunningham (who would remain unattached until 1893, when, at forty-three, he wed Beulah Greenleaf, half his age) would pull up stakes and head south to apply his obsessive pursuit of justice to the nation’s most notorious feud.

  ONE OF CUNNINGHAM’S first visits was to the Hatfields, a dangerous family to drop in on unannounced, especially if Cap, who did not mess around with small talk, was on guard duty. Cunningham’s account of what transpired with Cap on this August day was cryptic: “All was gone except Cap Hatfield, who was setting on a sled in the yard with a Winchester across his lap and two large revolvers hanging to his side.” Cunningham introduced himself. “Cap said he had been sick and he had come to the conclusion that in less than two days another strange face would appear in hell.”12

  Whatever transpired between the two after that is unknown. A tireless investigator, Cunningham was no doubt doing his due diligence on his quarry, Bad Frank and the McCoy posse. Afterward, he headed to Pikeville for some reconnaissance and to work on a map of the McCoys’ locations. He did not have to use it, however, since they came to him.

  On August 22, he was eating dinner at the Williamson Hotel in Pikeville when he was interrupted by a group of men he called the McCoy faction. They arrested him, charged him with kidnapping, and held him prisoner for two days, trying to scare him into a confession. Finally, realizing that the stone-faced lawman was not going to break, they let him go and sent him unescorted back to West Virginia. That was a mistake. Cunningham headed for the Tug, yes, but on his way he detoured to follow one of his leads and arrested “one of the McCoy gang.” He hustled the man across the Tug and took him to Logan Courthouse, where he was put in jail. One more wanted man down.

  Then on a late August or early September night, Cunningham returned to Kentucky with two Eureka men, Kentucky Bill Napier and Treve Gibson, to search for Peter Smith, a member of Bad Frank’s posse. In the moonlight, they walked along the road beside Peter Creek, and when they were about two miles from Smith’s farm, Cunningham heard a voice behind him. He swiveled and saw men crossing the road into the creek. Two more groups of men appeared, one ahead in the road and one even with them across the creek. The Kentuckians—more than forty of them—were determined to put an end to the bounty hunting on their turf.

  Deputy U.S. Marshal Dan Cunningham as depicted in McClure’s Magazine in June 1904.

  Cunningham may have felt somewhat invincible at this point. Back in Jackson County, word had spread that he was “ ‘witched’ against bullet and poison.” The Band would try both. “The bullet, fired with a close and steady aim from ambush, cut through the breast of his coat, barely burning the skin,” one journalist later wrote, “the arsenic, skillfully prepared in an apple by the ‘yarbwitch’ of the Band, he tried on a hen.” The hen would die.13

  On Cunningham’s command, the three detectives bolted from the road toward a beech tree. They leaped over a low fence into a cornfield and sprinted toward the foot of a mountain thirty yards away that might offer them shelter. The patrolmen unleashed their full fusillade, blasting the cornfield and ripping the clothes of the three detectives. Unharmed, they stopped, returned fire, and moved forward again. As they did so, a haversack w
ith biscuits in it was shot off Kentucky Bill’s back. Again they stopped and returned the fire, repeating this pattern until at last they managed to climb into the waiting arms of the dark woods on the mountainside.14

  As quickly and quietly as they could, the detectives made their way to the top of the beehive-shaped mountain. The Kentuckians positioned themselves strategically in the passes that separated it from the peaks on either side and at the base to block the trio’s access to the Tug River, which they would have to cross to reach safety.

  At the first light of dawn, Cunningham, Kentucky Bill, and Gibson, who had fortified themselves during the long hours on the mountain with pork jerky and raw onions, made their move down the mountain. Ready for action, a patrolman saw them and began to shoot. The detectives returned the fire and bobbed and weaved down the slope, heading for a hollow that would lead them to the river. They had about four hundred yards to travel. Calculating their trajectory, the patrolman moved in that direction to cut them off.

  Cunningham looked at Kentucky Bill, a tall, gangly ruffian with long hair à la Buffalo Bill—his hero—and whiplike mustaches that flew out several feet from his chin. “What’re we gonna do now?” he shouted.15

  “We gonna give ’em a helluva fight!” Kentucky Bill called back.

  There was only one problem with that plan: the detectives each had only three rounds left. Nevertheless, Cunningham agreed. “We best play Lewis Wetzel on ’em,” he responded, referring to the famous Ohio Valley Indian fighter whom the Indians had dubbed Deathwind for his skill in shooting and reloading at a dead run.

  Cunningham, Kentucky Bill, and Gibson descended on a dry creek bed to the south and east. The guard crossed through woods to cut them off again. About a quarter mile down, the trio suddenly stopped in their tracks, doubled back, and went up and over another mountain, losing their pursuers. When they appeared again at the river’s edge, they were out of firing range. They dove into the water and swam for it. On the other side, Cunningham counted nine bullet holes in his coat.

  Back in Logan County, he made for the home of Jim Vance’s widow, Mary. Apparently he was a known quantity there and was welcomed in. But on this visit something profound happened: Mary Vance and her children told him what they considered to be the truth about the feud. Cunningham was shocked. As he listened intently, he recorded on six pages of foolscap paper a stunning indictment of Crazy Jim and the Hatfields, including the details of the burning of Randall McCoy’s house. Mary blamed her husband and even considered Bad Frank’s killing of him justified.

  Cunningham suddenly saw that he had taken up with the wrong faction in this fight. He now understood the lay of the land, and this land looked a lot like the one he had just come from. The Hatfields were unreconstructed Rebels—the Skeans, Kisers, and Countses of their realm. He could even link the Hatfields to his archenemies Zeke and Cain Counts, whom he called “pals of the Hatfields all through the war.” The parallels were clear. They were Secessionists, scofflaws, bootleggers, extensively intermarried. They were bent on dominating their region by any means. Some Hatfields came from the Clinch River Valley, and there were even loose family connections between them and the Consolidated Band.

  Disregarding the danger, Cunningham got on his horse and rode back into Kentucky to find Lee Ferguson. After he related what he had learned, the two agreed to bury the hatchet. Dan Cunningham was now allied with the McCoys.16 This was a little-recognized watershed moment in the late stages of the feud.

  Cunningham, who well knew the vicissitudes of detective work—how innocent questions might lead to solving a crime and how a solid case might be derailed by corrupt officials—was by luck and diligence set on a course to wreak havoc on the Hatfield clan, insofar as that could be accomplished.

  CHARLEY GILLESPIE, THE TEENAGER who had participated in the New Year’s Day raid, had had a falling-out with Devil Anse. The Hatfield patriarch had taken a liking to Gillespie’s mother, quarreled with his father, and then run his father out of the county. As Devil Anse now split his time between his home on Main Island Creek and the Gillespie house, the youth, who had taken his father’s side in the dispute, felt like he was constantly in jeopardy. He fled to a cousin’s house in Knapp’s Valley, in southern Virginia along the West Virginia border, an area where the Gillespies held sway. Cunningham happened to be in the area and caught wind of a newcomer who had ties to Devil Anse. When he discovered that it was Charley Gillespie, he devised a plan to catch him.

  Clean-cut and handsome, Cunningham still had the appearance of a circuit rider. When he arrived at the cousin’s house, he introduced himself as a friend of Gillespie’s with important news for him. He had forged a letter addressed to Gillespie saying that his two sisters were dying from the flux (as dysentery was then known), which at the time was the scourge of the region. Gillespie was not there, but the cousin’s wife read the letter and was fooled into thinking that Cunningham was simply a good-hearted messenger and a family friend. She was more than happy to welcome such a fine specimen of a man into her house. She talked easily with him and told him that Charley spent his days out in the woods, returning only at night to bed down.17

  Not wishing to arouse suspicion, Cunningham took his leave and went into the countryside and sniffed out the trails. That evening, September 15, he spied Gillespie, a tall, erect eighteen-year-old, rifle in hand, walking toward him along a remote path in a clearing. Cunningham adopted a nonchalant air and began whistling a tune as he strolled toward Gillespie. The ploy worked. The teen was not alarmed by the cheerful hunter coming his way. As they came face-to-face, Cunningham moved with a whippet’s speed, catching the fugitive by the wrists. Gillespie struggled, but Cunningham had viselike strength in his hands and closed steel cuffs around the youth’s wrists with a couple of deft moves.18

  He handcuffed Gillespie to himself, and the two set off. By dawn the next morning, they had already traveled twenty miles from the cousin’s house.

  The detective did not make a beeline for Pikeville, where he would eventually go to pick up his reward for the capture of the young fugitive. Instead, he transported him across West Virginia to Charleston. How he did this covertly and under whose orders are now unknown. In Charleston, the Eureka Detectives secretly held Gillespie at the home of Alf Burnett, and he confessed to Burnett’s wife, Fanny. Then, for reasons that remain obscure but perhaps to avoid thorny jurisdictional issues, they transported him across the state line to Ohio, to the home of Eureka Detectives partner P. A. Campbell in the small town of Wellston. Gillespie made a second confession, which Campbell’s wife recorded and Gillespie signed in the presence of Wellston’s mayor. Finally, the detectives took him to jail, half a day’s ride away in the town of Ironton, Ohio. There, Gillespie became, as the Louisville Courier-Journal later put it, a “mysterious inmate of the Ironton jail.” The identity of the handsome dark-haired, dark-eyed young man was carefully concealed by those who were aware of it, and news of the arrest would not be made public for nearly a month.19

  During the day, Gillespie, whom the Cincinnati Enquirer would describe as “very gentlemanly in appearance,” was allowed to move around the town under Campbell’s watchful eye. No one bothered him. At night, he returned to his cell. Although Gillespie was committed to jail for only fifteen days, the Courier-Journal would report, he had voluntarily recommitted for another term to stay in a place where he was well treated and safe from any reprisals.

  On Thursday, October 11, Lee Ferguson and Alf Burnett arrived with requisition papers from Kentucky, and Gillespie was offered a deal: if he testified against the others, he could secure his own release. He had admitted that he participated in the house burning, but he claimed that he and Indian Hatfield were stationed on the road as guards and did not take part in the shooting. (Perhaps that was the understanding he came to with his confessors to spare him the gallows, but the claim also defied logic: if he was on the road, how could he describe the raid in such detail?) News of his statement broke in the October 13 Lou
isville Courier-Journal and the October 14 Cincinnati Enquirer. By then, Gillespie had already been transported to the Catlettsburg jail and from there delivered by Big Jim McCoy to the Pike County jail.20

  WHILE CUNNINGHAM WAS DEALING WITH Gillespie, Kentucky Bill was getting acquainted with Bad Frank Phillips. When a West Virginia fugitive named Jim Hurley, who had a hundred-dollar bounty on his head, came to the Peter Creek area, Bad Frank arrested him and promptly escorted him back to his home county in cuffs to claim the reward. It was a brash and foolhardy move; Bad Frank was riding into the Hurley stronghold, and he himself was wanted in West Virginia, with a price on his head of one thousand dollars—ten times that of Hurley. The Hurley clan chased Bad Frank all the way back to the Kentucky line. They did not intend to stop there either. They engaged the well-known bounty hunter Kentucky Bill as their guide, and together they all went on a hunt for Bad Frank.

  On Friday night, September 21, they found him, along with some of his allies, and they fought like trapped badgers. In the clash, one Hurley was hit by a life-threatening bullet that passed all the way through his body, and Kentucky Bill was shot through the heel. Bad Frank got away, and the Hurleys suddenly lost the taste for pursuing their grievance with him.21

  THE SEPTEMBER 12, 1888, Wheeling Register led with the simple truth: “They Were Not Tried.” The report out of Catlettsburg revealed that despite the sound and the fury, including a hearing in the U.S. Supreme Court, none of the Hatfield gang indicted on murder charges had been tried. On top of that, some of the captured men had been let go. False—and, to many, troubling—reports of the acquittal of several of them came out, according to the Register, after Andy Varney, Selkirk McCoy, and L. D. McCoy were freed because they had turned state’s evidence. Guerilla Mitchell, Mose Christian, and Plyant Mahon had been released on bail. Bail was denied only to Wall Hatfield, considered the leader of the gang, and Doc Mahon, said to be his lieutenant. Their cases would not be heard for five more months, however, meaning they would spend more than a year in jail before going to trial.22