The Feud: The Hatfields and McCoys: The True Story

by Dean King

  With legal matters still in disarray in Kentucky and West Virginia, and the political leaders, media, and local citizens in a state of agitation, two New York City heavies were dispatched to the scene. They were both experts at their work: adroit pugilists, trained to detect lies and traps, and masters of assassination—character assassination, that is. They were reporters.

  Chapter 19

  Yellow Journalists on the Bloody Border

  February–October 1888

  While the term yellow journalism would not be coined until 1895, after the sensationalist New York World ran a colorized cartoon featuring the Yellow Kid (a boy in a yellow nightdress), the appeal of lurid stories with graphic descriptions and exaggerated headlines was already recognized by the industry. With the shocking explosion of violence in the exotic Appalachian Mountains resulting from a feud that threatened to draw two Civil War border states back to arms, the race was on to capture the most riveting news story in America—and in late September two of the most legendary yellow journalists of the day were given the assignment.

  The two had been beaten to the punch in January, however, by the New York Herald’s ace reporter Jim Creelman, who had recently interviewed Sitting Bull after the defeat of Custer and who during his career would converse with such luminaries as Leo Tolstoy and Pope Leo XIII. As Creelman rode the train on the Kentucky side of the Tug from Catlettsburg (which he described as “full of unkempt, frowsy idlers, who slouch about like human buzzards”) to Peach Orchard, along what he called “the bloody border,” he heard one inflamed passenger swear that if the Hatfields attacked Pikeville, the people of Kentucky would “invade Virginia, and wipe the whole State out of existence.”

  New York Herald correspondent James Creelman.

  Creelman planned to ride right into Devil Anse Hatfield’s stronghold and confront the feudist face-to-face. After crossing the Tug, he was repeatedly urged to abandon this ill-advised scheme. A Pittsburgh Times reporter, he was told, had thrown in the towel just three days earlier. Despite the fact that no one he asked would guide him, the bulldoggish reporter continued on, begging directions as he went. Finally, he was accosted by a stout, furtive, malign-looking horseman who warned him to turn back or be shot. Creelman told the man that he had nothing to fear and would carry on. With a shrug, the man rode off.

  It was not until the roar of a Winchester reverberated deafeningly off the close mountain walls and a bullet sped in his direction that Creelman changed his mind. If he survived the next few seconds, he promised himself, he would do an about-face.

  Creelman was in luck. No lead hit home. It was perhaps a warning shot, for he had been a sitting duck. He tugged on the reins of his mount and spurred it on in the opposite direction. Deciding hastily to go see Randall McCoy instead, he rode for two days to get to Pikeville. He found the town in a state of high alert. Frank Phillips, sporting his war trophy—Jim Vance’s pistol—in his holster took him to visit Randall and Sally, who were being guarded around the clock by armed men. Deputy sheriffs, edgy and bearing rifles, prowled around the county jail while the young enlistees of Adjutant General Sam Hill’s new National Guard company traversed the town eagerly transforming themselves into soldiers. Creelman settled in and harvested the facts of the feud from the McCoys.

  The notion that a new civil war might ignite on this old fault line was certainly not far-fetched, he discovered. To a certain extent, it already had.1

  ALTHOUGH CREELMAN HAD GOTTEN the scoop, returning to Gotham with the first comprehensive description of the nation’s most infamous family feud and marking another notch in his quill with a colorful account in which he branded West Virginia governor Windy Wilson “a poltroon and a coward,” he had, in poker parlance, left the game with money still on the table. To capture its share of the spoils, the New York World dispatched Theron “T.C.” Crawford, a flamboyant egoist with a rapierlike pen, while the more staid New York Sun sent the relatively moderate and congenial John R. Spears. Both knew that Creelman had tried and failed to reach Devil Anse’s lair.

  The lanky thirty-eight-year-old Spears set out, like Creelman, from Catlettsburg, but he proceeded directly to Pikeville. An alumnus of the U.S. Naval Academy, Spears had recently covered the international yacht races between the Mayflower and the Galatea (1886) and the Volunteer and the Thistle (1887), stories that were a far cry from the dispute that had begun, as he would write, over “two long-nosed, razorback, elm-peeler hogs.” The trip did, however, begin with a water view on the train ride up the Big Sandy River fifty-seven miles to the last town on the line, where he caught a hack—in this case, a three-bench, platform-spring wagon hitched to a brace of mules.

  On the way into Pikeville, the hack driver recalled his last visit there, as a cook for a floating sawmill. A leading citizen, angry because the mill’s saw could not cut his four-foot-wide sycamore log, had pulled out his Winchester and threatened to blast them all. “There’s [a] right smart of shooting done thereaway,” he said, “but nobody’ll never harm you unless they take you for a detective, nor nobody as attends to his own business.”

  They stopped at a tavern in Prestonsburg, where a Winchester-toting sheriff with a box of cartridges in his coat pocket nonchalantly kept a lookout for the family of a man he had shot and killed for resisting arrest after murdering a deputy. They were coming to shoot him at any time, a matter that did not seem particularly alarming to anyone but Spears. Several miles beyond Prestonsburg, the hack stopped again, and a new passenger, a man with an assiduously trimmed mustache and a stern countenance, climbed on board. It was Dan Cunningham. The square-jawed and stoutly built lawman was on his way to Pikeville to claim his reward for arresting Charley Gillespie, one of the Hatfield gang. The drive gave Spears ample time to learn about the role of the lawmen in the feud from a bona fide source, and Cunningham was persuasive: “The only hope of clearing out the criminals and ending the feud,” Spears would write in the Sun, “is in the efforts of detectives working for the rewards.”

  After the hack forded the river marking its arrival in Pikeville, Cunningham leaped off, darted up an alleyway, and disappeared. Despite his effort at stealth, a number of people on the street saw him and immediately went to warn Randall and Big Jim that Cunningham had just arrived in town. Not only that, but he had brought a well-dressed stranger—clearly a detective—with him, a mistake that would make Spears’s first hours in Pikeville rather tense.

  The McCoy cohorts tracked down Cunningham and told him to leave town and take the new bounty hunter with him. They would not allow a gathering of detectives, who had a checkered reputation, at best, in Pikeville. Cunningham tried to convince them that the new man was just a reporter, an argument they scoffed at on principle. That night Big Jim, his brother Sam, and their comrades loaded up their Winchesters while they figured out what to do with the stranger.

  In the meantime, Spears checked into a hotel owned by the prominent attorney W. M. Connolly. Spears convinced Connolly of his profession and purpose for being there and earned his stamp of approval, which not only opened up access to the parties he wanted to talk to around town but, even more importantly, ended discussions over what to do with him. Over the next two days, Sunday and Monday, Spears interviewed a variety of people, including Randall and Sally, the prosecutor Lee Ferguson, and the Hatfields being held in jail. He found the McCoys straightforward, even regarding Bad Frank’s cold-blooded dispatching of the wounded Bill Dempsey. “They admitted that this was an awful crime,” he would report. Nevertheless, they told Spears that they had to “stand by Phillips for the sake of the good things he had done.”

  His impression of the Hatfields was not so positive. The flickering light of a chimney-less kerosene lamp painted Wall’s cell in chiaroscuro as Spears interviewed him through the jail bars. Head tilted down, Wall looked at him haughtily through spectacles and claimed that he was being unjustly held for the crimes of Johnse and Cap. Spears was not convinced.

  On Tuesday morning, Spears set out in the dire
ction of Logan Courthouse, eighty miles to the east, in a hired one-horse buckboard driven by Big Jim. They rumbled over a narrow, bone-jarring road that traveled in the streambeds when possible and up over passes between mountains when necessary. Most of the houses along the route were windowless cabins, ventilated through the chinks between the logs. All had piles of soft coal in the yard, dug from ready seams, for heating and cooking. (Many of the locals would soon sell their mineral rights for nothing more than a personal lifetime supply of this same coal.) After traveling twenty-three miles, Spears and Big Jim spent the night with a man named Mont Runyan, who had a frame house and a cast-iron stove and charged a dollar for room and board for the two men and the horse. Big Jim slept with his Winchester by the bed.

  On Wednesday morning, he took Spears as far as the old McCoy place on Blackberry Fork. All that was left was the two massive sandstone chimneys standing among the ashes. Although they were still nine miles from West Virginia—over the divide to Blackberry Fork, past the election grounds where Big Ellison had been fatally stabbed six years earlier, and then across the Tug—Big Jim would venture no farther. He was not willing to risk meeting up with a West Virginia posse that might nab him and take him to jail or shoot him. Beyond this point, the road narrowed to two feet, where it was not washed away entirely, and the buckboard could go no farther. Before he turned back, Big Jim passed Spears off to a seventeen-year-old boy, who he promised could lead him to the pawpaw patch where Big Jim’s brothers had been killed. The boy would take Spears there and then across the Tug to Shang Ferrell’s place, where he could engage another guide. The Hunts had only one horse, so Spears walked.

  As they got closer to the pawpaw patch, the boy suddenly denied knowing the way. They asked for directions at a schoolhouse, but when they approached the site, Spears could tell the boy was scared and was not surprised when he claimed he could go no farther, making an excuse about having to return his borrowed horse.

  Spears paid the boy the dollar he was promised and then crossed the Tug on a raft of logs that had been lodged on a sandbar, ready to be floated down the river on the spring current. On the West Virginia side, he went to the house and store of a Bill McCoy, who fed him lunch but refused to go with him to Ferrell’s. So Spears set off again on his own, not without trepidation. “I was getting anxious to have a guide,” he later wrote, “for I thought that in case I met the Logan Regulators, they would be more likely to welcome me if I were accompanied by a friend of theirs.”

  He was told that Ferrell’s was the third house he would come to following the river, about three miles on. Partway there, he ran into three men. Much to his relief, they were not Hatfields but surveyors working for the Norfolk and Western railroad, laying out the line that was about to be built along the Tug. The three wore heavy leather leggings. They explained to him that the riverbank was snake-ridden and that as they hiked along their route, they sometimes stepped into nests of rattlers. The snakes struck their leggings with such ferocity that their fangs stuck, and their heads remained attached even after the men hacked off their bodies.2

  “You’ll find this the devil’s own country, but they won’t disturb you,” one of the surveyors told Spears, with reassurance that was less than convincing. “You’re all right if they don’t mistake you for a detective. They are suspicious of strangers though.”

  “After you’ve learned all about these mountain bushwhackers you’ll feel like shaking hands with the next rattler you meet,” said another. “The rattler never strikes without first warning his victim.”

  Spears found Shang Ferrell, a large and hardy man, working in his fields. Ferrell secured Spears a new guide, George Duty, and two horses. He told Duty to tell anyone who asked “that I said the gentleman is from New York, and he is all right.” And they needed little more than to see him ride to authenticate the claim. It was Spears’s first time on a horse. The two men rode back down the Tug and then headed up Mate Creek, where Duty showed Spears what remained of the schoolhouse in which the McCoy brothers had been detained before they were killed. The wooden structure had been burned to the ground. Though Duty would not directly accuse anyone of torching the place, he mentioned that rumor had it that Pike County raiders had done it.

  After roughly twelve miles of riding horseback and another dozen walking on a bridle path, they stayed the night at the house of Steve Atkins. The valleys were so narrow here and the fields pitched at such steep angles that even a mule was useless, and the earth had to be tilled with a hoe. Streams and brooks defined the fields on the lower side, and on the upper, virgin timber stretched to the ridgeline.

  Atkins, like Shang Ferrell, was a large and outgoing man who had met with success in life. His roomy house had a separate building for cooking and a coal fire around which the family gathered to smoke stoneware pipes with fish-pole stems or chew snuff. The mountain women, who wore plain dresses of calico or homespun cotton or wool and who kept their hair pulled back although bangs were then fashionable, joined in the pipe smoking. One daughter, however, a shapely seventeen-year-old, refrained and was, they said, being groomed for city life. Spears was smitten and reported that she was so pretty, she would have made a scene even in New York City.

  That night, after the guests had gone to bed, a band of riders galloped up to the house, frightening everyone. It was immediately assumed that Spears was not a reporter but a detective and that the riders were Hatfields or McCoys coming to get him. Spears noted that Atkins was ready to hand him over before he discovered that the riders were not, in fact, regulators but an eloping couple with an escort of half a dozen young men.

  On Thursday, Spears and Duty had traveled another nine miles when Duty stopped to ask an old couple for directions to Logan Courthouse. This surprised and disturbed Spears. Shang Ferrell had said that the direct route was straight up Mate Creek and over the pass to the Mud Fork of Island Creek. “We aren’t going that way, are we?” he asked Duty.

  “No, seh,” Duty responded. “We’ll shortly git thar this way.”

  Spears determined that because Devil Anse and Cap lived on the Mud Fork of Island Creek, Duty had taken it upon himself to bypass the area, even though it would take an extra five miles of traveling, through country he did not know.

  After riding twenty-seven miles, they at last reached Logan Courthouse on the banks of the Guyandotte River. Spears checked into Buskirk’s Hotel, owned by J. B. Buskirk, who was also the town’s postmaster and jailer, and soon arranged to meet a Hatfield—in this case, Elias. Like Wall, Elias placed the blame for the feud on Johnse and Cap. “Cap is a fool,” he said, explaining that twice Cap had tried to shoot one of Elias’s sons for refusing to join the New Year’s Day raid on the McCoys. The only reason he had not gone after Cap himself, Elias claimed, was that then he would be at war with his own brother Devil Anse.

  Several of Frank Phillips’s posse, captured by the Eureka detectives, were incarcerated in the Logan County jail attached to the boxy redbrick courthouse, which had replaced the frame courthouse burned to the ground in 1864 by Union troops. That fall, a mother bear had chosen to come down the mountainside daily to frolic with her cubs in the cornfields across the river in full view of the courthouse. Each day a portion of the town’s population of two hundred, plus visitors, gathered outside the shops and hotels and blazed away at them. Fortunately for the bears, the locals generally carried three-foot-long muzzle-loading rifles, whose light shot cost about half a cent, compared to six cents for a Winchester’s brass cartridge. The muzzle-loaders were useful for knocking squirrels out of trees but were no match for bears.

  Logan Courthouse, circa 1890. (Courtesy of F. Keith Davis)

  Spears reported that the trials of Bad Frank’s posse men Dave Stratton, John Norman, John B. Dotson, and Joseph Franklin Smith for aiding and abetting in the murder of special sheriff Bill Dempsey at Grapevine Creek would be heard in town on October 2. These high-profile prisoners were under heavy guard for their own safety in Hatfield country. The firm of Mc
Comas and Kelly, Smith and Stratton, fronted by Major William Stratton, a Logan County circuit clerk, Confederate cavalry veteran, and the father of Dave Stratton, represented the defendants while the Confederate veteran Judge Thomas Harvey, who had had the charges dropped against Bob Skean in the murder of George Duff, was presiding. A similar result would occur in this case. But Spears, eager to file his story and perhaps compelled to leave town in a hurry for other reasons that he did not care to admit, did not stick around to hear it.3

  While Spears, like Creelman, had gathered an admirable amount of information about the feud, he too abandoned his efforts to meet Devil Anse. Logan Courthouse had only two horses for hire, and both were already spoken for. Instead of waiting for the horses to return, Spears took to his boots, setting out for Brownstown, on the Kanawha River fifty-two miles away over a mountainous wagon trail. There he would be able to catch a train on the Chesapeake and Ohio line. Spears walked a grueling twenty-seven miles on the first day. After six miles the following day, he was able to hire a horse.

  A COUPLE OF DAYS behind Spears, rival reporter T. C. Crawford, a man of admirable pluck and amusing bombast, arrived in Charleston declaring that he wished to seek out Devil Anse Hatfield because he was eager to help settle the feud. Somehow he managed to persuade John B. Floyd and Clarence Moore, a clerk at the federal courthouse, to take part in the mission and accompany him on the eighty-six-mile journey south to Logan Courthouse.