The Feud: The Hatfields and McCoys: The True Story

by Dean King

  From the minute it happened, the hanging of Cotton Top Mounts was widely construed as the lancing needed to end the Hatfield-McCoy feud. “A vast crowd gathers to see the last act in a famous tragedy,” the Thursday morning, February 20, Louisville Courier-Journal announced.

  That year, even the geography was changing; the town of Matewan was being laid out at the mouth of Mate Creek by a Norfolk and Western Railway civil engineer. It was named in honor of both Richard Ferrell’s lost hunting dog, Mate, and the engineer’s hometown, Matteawan, in upstate New York.5

  However, despite everyone’s hopes, it was premature to designate the hanging as the feud’s last act. The struggles between the families and the greater forces they had set in motion did not come to a sudden halt on that fateful day. Devil Anse, Cap, and Johnse, still wanted for the murders of the McCoy brothers and the latter two for the New Year’s Day raid as well, remained at large. And no one had forgotten about them, least of all the McCoys. Bud boasted that he could put together on short notice a posse of a hundred men to hunt Hatfields. Feeling heady, the Pikeville authorities decided to leave the scaffold standing for the time being, in case they needed it again soon.

  A few days after the hanging, a package from Randall’s supporters arrived at Devil Anse’s house. Inside was a length of the rope used to string up Cotton Top.6

  Chapter 22

  After the Hanging

  1890–1895

  Among the crowd of thousands gathered in Pikeville to see Cotton Top Mounts swing were some who possessed more than just a passing interest in the proceedings: they were bounty hunters hoping that the Hatfields would actually turn up, or at least that they might be able to sniff out some clues to help them find the chinks in the family’s armor.

  For many of the feudists and lawmen, Cotton Top’s hanging did provide closure of sorts. Some of the feudists set about turning around their lives in remarkable ways. Wall, who was now locked up for life, was not one of them. He would never again hear his son Smith, a professional musician, play the fiddle and never again see his daughter Nancy, who was known for the cloth she made on her old spinning wheel. Nancy and Smith were but two of many, and the free-spirited Wall, who it is said left behind fifty-five children and certainly a slew of broken hearts, did not have the will to last behind bars. He died in prison after only two years. His family had no contact with him and never even found out where he was buried. His sons-in-law Doc and Plyant would serve fourteen years before being pardoned and released.1

  In March of 1890, one of the guns that had been sent to Logan Courthouse to help the militia bring peace was used in the murder of Jerry Hatfield. Jerry, who had been a Pike County deputy sheriff and then a prosperous merchant in Logan County, was shot in a brothel by a man named Mike Lee wielding the rifle.

  The following month, Bad Frank Phillips was back in the news when it was reported that he was killed by Rebel Bill Smith, who had once terrorized the Kentucky Unionists and brazenly attacked Colonel Garfield’s forces as they traveled up the Big Sandy River by push boat. Rebel Bill had led Devil Anse during the war; his son Larkin was married to Devil Anse’s sister; and their daughters—Eska and Nan—were married to French Ellis and Cap. Though flawed, Bad Frank was still a hero to many in Kentucky, the one man who had dared to marshal troops and plunge into the lions’ den. He certainly hated Rebel Bill, who had captured his father during the war and sent him to his eventual death in a Richmond prison. As the story went, Rebel Bill had been sawing ties for the Norfolk and Western railroad in the Peter Creek area when he and Bad Frank ran across each other. Bad Frank threatened to kill Rebel Bill and the next night broke into his room while he was sleeping and shot him. But the shot caused only a scalp wound. Rebel Bill swore out an arrest warrant for Bad Frank and was said to have killed him on April 19 or 20 while trying to serve it.

  In fact, although it was not clear exactly where Bad Frank was, he was not dead. And several prominent men were called upon to vouch for the fact that Rebel Bill had neither arrested nor killed him. It was yet another case of reported fiction getting well ahead of verifiable fact. The volatile Bad Frank lived on, to be shot to death another day.

  One of Bad Frank’s chief deputies was not so lucky. On May 14, Dave Stratton was expected home but did not arrive. The next morning his wife went out to look for him and found him lying unconscious on the ground not far from the house. His skull was split and bloody, and there was a massive hematoma on his chest from a terrible blow. He never regained consciousness. Word went around that he had been beaten to death by Devil Anse, Cap, Johnse, and Indian. Kentucky Bill rushed from Charleston to Brownstown, swore out warrants for the arrest of these men and three others suspected of being involved, then headed off into the mountains to find them. In the meantime, it was determined that Stratton had in fact gotten drunk, passed out on the train tracks, and been hurled aside by the cowcatcher of a Chesapeake and Ohio locomotive.

  Kentucky Bill was incommunicado for some time. Then in July, it was heard that his body had been found in Hatfield country with a bullet through the heart. It was not true, but the rumor went undenied for two weeks, until he was found testifying in a moonshining case in the town of Oceana, West Virginia. When Kentucky Bill was shown his own death notice, he allowed that he was “the liveliest corpse to be found in those back woods.”2

  While Bad Frank, Dave Stratton, and Kentucky Bill were dominating the news, Charley Gillespie finally and mysteriously escaped from the Pike County jail. The jailers considered the exits so secure that at first they believed he was still somewhere inside, hiding. But their search failed to produce him or any evidence of his escape. Some believed that he eventually managed to make it back to West Virginia, but he never returned home, so it was impossible to know.

  ALTHOUGH MEN WERE STILL WANTED by the law on both sides of the Tug, West Virginia governor Aretus Fleming, who took office in February 1890 (the fourth of five consecutive Democratic governors), decided it would be best for the state to put the feud behind it. The railroads had at last brought modernization to West Virginia. Timber, minerals, and especially coal were now being exploited on a larger scale, and the money at stake was much greater. Law and order were vital to this progress. Recognizing that one of the catalysts for the feud was the bounties placed on the heads of the wanted men, Fleming withdrew the rewards for the Kentuckians.

  In Pikeville, in the fall term of the criminal court, the cases involving the Hatfields stayed on the docket but were given little attention and little hope of being resolved. At the moment, the residents were more concerned with a pair of scandals rocking the small town’s legal fraternity. Two Civil War veterans had accused Lee Ferguson of stealing their pensions after helping set them up, and a woman had accused the prominent attorney A. J. Auxier, a member of one of the Big Sandy Valley’s oldest and most exalted families, of having fathered a child by another man’s wife. A salacious slander suit followed, with Auxier being lambasted in the media.

  Meanwhile, the McCoys’ tribulations continued to mount. The most prominent feudist to actually die during this period was Harmon’s son Bud (not to be confused with Randall’s son Bud, killed at the pawpaw patch), who had ridden with Bad Frank on his expeditions in West Virginia. Bud was riddled with bullets outside a Peter Creek timber camp. The brutal slaying—eighteen slugs were counted in his body—was initially blamed on the Hatfields but was actually carried out by a McCoy. Ples McCoy, a teenager, with the help of a friend, murdered Bud over an unresolved grudge.

  With Pikeville’s attention captured by the scandals and an apparent lack of interest in pursuing the rest of the wanted men in West Virginia, Johnse, who had turned twenty-eight the month before Cotton Top’s death, seemed none too worried and nothing like a fugitive now. He married again, on October 28, 1890, putting Nancy, from whom he was divorced, behind him and settling down. He and his new wife, Rebecca Browning (also twenty-eight and, like him, a descendant of Abner Vance) would have two children, Moss and Vickie. But
no matter how domestic Johnse’s life appeared to be, he was not out of the woods.

  That December, Elias and his son Greenway made the journey to Charleston to face federal moonshining charges. Like Devil Anse, they were acquitted—and it was back to business as usual.3

  On the other hand, Devil Anse’s fourth son, Elliott, who had trained as a doctor, came back home to make good. One day, Lark McCoy, who had lost his father and a brother in the feud, was saddling up a horse to ride over the mountain to Pikeville for medical help for one of his granddaughters when Elliott happened by. “Pa was troubled plumb fantastic, for ma had done all she could with home yarbs and sich, but nothing seemed to holp the child,” Lark’s son Bud later recounted. “Old Doc Slusher, the yarb doctor, was past goin’, and his eyesight played out.” When Lark saw Elliott, he summoned him.

  “Lark,” said Elliott, according to Bud, “you don’t aim to serve me like they served Jeff, do you?”

  “Ell’t,” his pa responded, “I wouldn’t harm a harr of your head. I’ve got nothin’ in this world agin you. You never harmed me nor mine and you can’t holp what your folks has done to mine. Come in and see what you can do to holp my pore little sick girl.” Dr. Hatfield dismounted, went inside the cabin, and tended to the sick girl. “She was soon well,” Bud recalled, “and the father never forgot the doctor’s kindness and help in his hour of need.”4

  ON FEBRUARY 24, 1891, Cap Hatfield, perhaps finding hope in the impending death of Perry Cline and necessity in the upcoming nuptials of a cousin, Aaron Hatfield, to Sophia McCoy, announced in a letter to the editor of the Wayne County News that an amnesty had been declared and that “the war spirit in me has abated.” He proclaimed an end to the fighting in language that once again evoked the Civil War: “I sincerely rejoice at the prospect of peace. I have devoted my life to arms. We have undergone a fearful loss of noble lives and valuable property in the struggle.” Even while trying to turn the other cheek, he could not escape a dig at the other side—and a biblical one, at that—adding, “we being, like Adam, not the first transgressors.” He concluded, “Now I propose to rest in a spirit of peace.”

  Perry Cline died of tuberculosis on March 19, 1891. The enigmatic man who essentially inherited the feud, escalated it, was accused of trying to profit from it, and both jailed the Hatfields and defended them in court was gone. The accusations of extortion against Cline, who was Lincolnian in appearance, profession, and passion and who was a pillar of the community, seem to have been spurious and tactical. As one of his legacies, the Pikeville attorney, county official, and state legislator had helped pass the 1886 bill that established free schools for black children in Kentucky. With his death, the political pressure to sweep the feud into the past would steadily rise. Only the bounty hunters—empowered by the Supreme Court decision and the rewards that remained in place in Kentucky—and the press, including the New York Tribune, the Wheeling Intelligencer, and the Louisville Courier-Journal, the last of which made hay with Cap’s letter, maintained a passion for the feud.5

  For Johnse, who had hoped for escape from past entanglements, the heat of this passion proved to be too much. He consulted with Devil Anse and decided to disappear again. Devil Anse recommended he head out to the new state of Washington, to Spokane specifically, where a friend named Sam Vinson, who was accused of killing Lon McCoy, had moved and where an experienced lumberjack could find a job. Johnse would be gone for more than two years. In Spokane, he was attracted to a bar advertising Kentucky whiskey, and there he found his man. Vinson, who owned the bar, helped him find work as a timber hand. Johnse was content to bide his time. But the tireless Dan Cunningham had a wide network of informers, and he too would soon take a jaunt out west.6

  ANDY CHAFIN was just four years old at the time of Cotton Top’s death, which occurred about the same time that his father, Holbert Chafin, Vicey Hatfield’s cousin, uprooted his family from their cabin. A blacksmith and miller, Holbert could make or fix just about anything a farm or timber operation needed, and he also operated a water mill, grinding corn for the local farmers. He shoed horses and sharpened plows, and he manufactured ox yokes, grabs, and chains for the Yellow Poplar Timber Company. The Chafins moved to a place on a creek fork down the mountainside about a mile from Vicey and Devil Anse’s farm and uphill from Cap’s. “Aunt Vicey just thought never a man lived like my dad,” Chafin later recalled. “She could always depend on him when Uncle Anse or Cap was in trouble and them was the same way.”7

  Trouble could come in the form of U.S. deputy marshals or Internal Revenue agents or an array of bounty hunters. “Cap’s wife, she bootlegged,” Chafin related. “They lived in a log house and they had to core a hole through the logs. And a fellow come up and tap on a piece of metal they had, to make a noise, and she’d scoop that chute out to him and he’d put in, a dollar, or whatever he put in, and she’d pull it back in, put the liquor in and put something back in the box. She had to do it or starve, that’s all there was to it; there was no other way. A little farm there, but then you couldn’t raise enough on the farm with all the kids.” And while Devil Anse raised cattle and hogs and owned three thousand acres of timberland, according to Chafin, he also ran a saloon and store in Kentucky where he sold corn liquor in half-gallon and gallon jugs.

  Devil Anse had gathered his family in a tight protective web. Chafin’s family lived on the farm rent-free. His uncles John, Moses, and Tom Chafin owned land nearby and worked on Anse’s timber crew or partnered with him in one of his other businesses. Devil Anse and Vicey lived well, in a large cabin with eight children at home, including Willis, who was two years younger than Chafin, and a toddler, Tennis, born in August 1890. Their grandson Ken came around often, and so did a neighbor named Lonnie Lee, who was a year younger than Chafin. Vicey, whom the reporter T. C. Crawford described as “hard as iron,” had a soft spot for the children and served up foot-long loaves of hot corn pone with bacon cracklin’ to keep them full. Lee liked this and also admired the Hatfields for their wealth, noting that they “went hunting in better clothes than I could wear on Sundays.”

  Devil Anse had developed a siege mentality and remained constantly on the lookout for bounty hunters. Chafin recalled gunslingers working their way into the woods on Devil Anse’s property and shooting at him. “They just couldn’t get him out, that’s all,” he said. “They got in there, but they didn’t get him out.”8

  DEVIL ANSE HAD TAKEN CHAFIN under his wing. One morning when the boy was walking to school, he passed by Devil Anse. Pretty soon he passed by again, heading home. Devil Anse asked him what he was doing. He replied that the schoolmaster had sent him away. Devil Anse, who had built the schoolhouse, told the boy to come back later and then went to see the schoolmaster. When Chafin returned, Devil Anse told him to go on to school, and he did, whereupon he found the old schoolmaster gone and a new one in his place.

  “Anse Hatfield was one of the finest men that ever lived,” Chafin would later say about his mentor. “If you was sick, he’d send help to you right quick. If you needed, he’d see that you got help…. But he wouldn’t accept no foolishness. He didn’t take no foolishness.”

  Devil Anse soon discovered that Chafin had an innate ability to sense when trouble was approaching, and so he invited the boy to live with him. Chafin bunked with his cousins: Mary (age seventeen), Elizabeth (fifteen), Elias (twelve), Troy (nine), Joe (seven), Rose (five), Willis, and Tennis. The older girls looked after the little ones, and Chafin was a favorite. Devil Anse, who liked playing pranks on his boys and telling far-fetched stories, joked that he had a sixth son in the house, Chafin, and that his sixth son had a sixth sense.

  Devil Anse taught the boys how to hunt and shoot. Chafin could shoot a squirrel out of a tall tree by the time he was seven. Troy in particular inherited his father’s gift for marksmanship and was a deadeye with a revolver (though he and his brother Elias would be gunned down by a rival whiskey seller in 1911). Troy dazzled crowds by shooting half-dollar coins tossed into the air.
“Many donated their coins not fearing they would be hit, but in all such cases these ‘Doubting Thomases’ came up short fifty cents,” wrote a reporter.9

  When Lonnie Lee, whom Devil Anse also taught to shoot, went to work as a logger in 1904, at age eighteen, he packed a pistol on each hip as a matter of survival, since logging camps attracted outcasts and criminals. “They’d murder somebody and go to a logging camp to hide out…. They didn’t care if they killed you.” When he finally had to shoot a man, a drifter from Pennsylvania, in self-defense, Lee put a bullet in the stranger’s leg to knock him down without killing him, then hauled the wounded man to a doctor. “Well that’s a damn poor way to introduce yourself,” the doctor told the newcomer. “You shot at the best marksman around here.”

  Devil Anse and the boys often hunted the afternoon away and then, after an early-evening nap, went back out after dark. One such night, they shot three raccoons. Chafin strapped one across his shoulder and another across his body. He carried an ax and a lantern as well. As they descended through a culvert on their way home that morning, they suddenly heard singing. They had forgotten what day it was. “Ah, hell,” said Devil Anse, “it’s Sunday and they’re holding meetin’ right by the house.” They set down their weapons and the carcasses by a massive beech tree and joined in.10

  Cap was still roving in the woods for safety, staying in various cabins and hideouts. Chafin delivered messages and food and guided visitors through the woods. When he was out, he kept his ear to the ground, and if he heard anything that pertained to the safety of the Hatfields, he rushed home and reported it.

  To signal one another, they used animal calls that Devil Anse had taught them, like the barking of a squirrel or the hooting of an owl. One afternoon, Chafin was walking home from school with a dozen other kids when he heard a squirrel bark. He stopped and told his brother Oliver to go on home. “Where you going?” Oliver asked.