The Feud: The Hatfields and McCoys: The True Story

by Dean King

  “I’m going to see that squirrel,” he responded.

  “What’s that?” he asked. “You got no gun.”

  Chafin said, “You go on and do what I tell ya. I heard a squirrel barking, going to see what it is.”

  The “squirrel” was Cap, and he was with a fellow named Radford and four others. They were hungry. “Tell you what you do,” Cap said to Chafin. “You up and tell your mother to fix a good mess of chicken and dumplings.” And so he did.

  For a night rendezvous, Chafin carried a miner’s lantern. When he needed it to go dark fast, instead of blowing out the lantern, which was slow and inconvenient, he pulled it up under his long shirt. During whispered conversations in the woods, he kept it that way, ignoring the heat of the lantern, which he had learned to tolerate.11

  Devil Anse’s brother Smith, one of a set of twins who were fifteen years his junior, also pitched in whenever necessary. Before Big Ellison was killed, Smith, who operated a gristmill at the mouth of Mark’s Creek, had had a bitter relationship with him, as Ellison was careless with logs he sent downstream and had damaged Smith’s mill. Indeed, Smith, who was closer in both age and relationship to his nephew Johnse, detested Ellison, his own brother, more than he hated any McCoy and was never directly involved in the feud. However, he would defend his kin, and he helped his brothers dig out a rock house under a ledge and then barricade it with split rails. A consummate woodsman, Smith could tell by smell if a groundhog was in its den or if a copperhead, with its scent of hot cucumber, was nearby. Like Chafin, he often slipped through the woods without a trace to deliver food or intelligence to those hiding out.12

  Cap Hatfield (third from right) at a cave near Main Island Creek that served as a hideout during the feud. (West Virginia State Archives)

  However, the family’s defenses were not foolproof. One bounty hunter managed to infiltrate Devil Anse’s farm as a handyman. He had been there for nearly six months when he accompanied Anse and Chafin on a hunt. After Chafin shot a raccoon, Devil Anse hoisted it up on his shoulder. The handyman raised his gun and pointed it at Devil Anse. “Just drop the coon,” he said. “I’ve been looking for this opportunity a long time. I’m a detective.”

  Devil Anse dropped the animal and stood with his hands hanging at his sides. The detective began to read him his rights. In a flash, Devil Anse pulled a pistol from his pants. “The gun cracked and he was gone, and that was all there was to it,” Chafin later said. “Just like a piece of lightning.” They buried the man on the spot and never spoke about him again.13

  ON INFORMATION FROM NANCY PHILLIPS and possibly with expense money from Randall (though he could ill afford it), Dan Cunningham and a posse of detectives, including Alf Burnett, Kentucky Bill Napier, and Treve Gibson, traveled out west to bring in Johnse. They had one thing going for them: even in his thirties, the handsome Johnse still stood out in a crowd. At a timber camp on the Snoqualmie River, they spread the word that they were looking for a West Virginian with dirty blond hair and blue eyes who went by the name of Jim Jacobs.14

  But Johnse, who had never stopped being a ladies’ man, had a helpful friend, a young woman named Midgie McCarthy. She dispatched a messenger with a note to the foreman of Johnse’s logging crew, telling him to warn Jim that trouble was on the way. At dawn the next day, Johnse looked down the valley to see riders approaching. He had just enough time to drop his ax and run into the woods. Seven detectives swept up through the valley combing the area. The messenger, half Siwash Indian, guided Johnse to a hiding place near a river.

  “I never spent such terrible hours as I did watching them hunt for me,” Johnse would later say. A flock of Canada geese surrounded the thicket he was in and made a racket that he thought was a dead giveaway. But the detectives looked everywhere except where the geese had landed.15

  After they left, Johnse swam the river, made his way to Seattle, caught a steamer for British Columbia, and disappeared for the next two years. Meanwhile, in an effort to give Johnse a fresh start, Sam Vinson, the bar owner, sent Devil Anse and Vicey a lock of Johnse’s hair along with a note telling them that he was dead.

  Chapter 23

  The Last Murders and Manhunt

  1896

  Sometime in the spring of 1896, a good-looking man in a sharp suit showed up unannounced at Devil Anse and Vicey’s cabin door. The dearly departed walked again: Johnse had returned from the Pacific Northwest. After so many years on the lam—though not, as reported, in a better place—he gave Vicey a big hug.

  Johnse, now thirty-four, promptly set about establishing a new life, getting involved in the business he knew, timbering, and, to be safe, staying away from the Tug River and Kentucky. He launched an operation on the Guyandotte, which flowed through Logan Courthouse on its way to Huntington. Being Johnse, he also soon found a new wife, his third of four. On July 28, 1896, he married twenty-one-year-old Roxie Browning. Their firstborn child was a girl, and they named her Midgie—after the woman who had saved his life, or at least his liberty, out west.1

  Although Cap, like Johnse, was still wanted for murder in Kentucky, he had no qualms about leaving his mountain farm and taking his fourteen-year-old stepson, Little Joe Glenn, to Matewan on Election Day, which fell on Tuesday, November 3, that year. Cap had moved from Main Island Creek over to Mate Creek, about five miles from town, the year before. With the coming of the railroads and the sudden growth of the coal industry, life and landscape were changing rapidly. However, a lingering depression had descended on the country three years earlier, and Cap announced that he planned to buck the family trend and vote Republican in the hope of making things better.

  Cap and Little Joe—“my boy,” as his stepfather called him—were both armed: Cap carried a Model 1873 Winchester rifle, and Little Joe a double-barreled shotgun that he used for hunting squirrels. Each also had a Colt pistol stuffed under his shirt.

  They had been at the polls only briefly when they encountered John and Elliott Rutherford, locals who had sided with the McCoys in the feud. They were the sons of Doc Rutherford, a Hatfield friend until he was involved in a shootout with Vicey’s brother John Chafin. Chafin was hit in the spine, leaving him barely able to walk, and the families had been bitter enemies ever since. Just months before, the Rutherfords had accused Cap of shooting up John Rutherford’s house.2

  At a Pike County saloon just across the river from Matewan, John—who was a fearless roughneck with an explosive temper—told a group of Democratic campaign workers that Cap was voting Republican and being noisy about it. John and his buddies had reason to worry about their candidate’s chances. Elias’s son Henry, a twenty-one-year-old doctor who had gotten his medical degree from the University of Louisville, would walk twelve miles to Matewan that day to vote for the pro-business Ohio Republican William McKinley over Nebraska Democrat William Jennings Bryan, and a majority of West Virginians would be of like mind. The state would also elect a Republican governor, former U.S. marshal George W. Atkinson—who had made his name as a revenuer busting moonshiners—ending a streak of six Democratic governors and beginning a Republican run of five. The last of these would be Henry himself.

  But Henry Hatfield was not their concern on this day. Cap was. “If he comes down here and votes the Republican ticket,” John told his drinking pals, “let’s put him over in Kentucky.” They all knew what that meant regarding certain Hatfields: they would be arrested, and the old murder charges pressed.3

  Overhearing this, Cap’s double cousin Greenway looked at John and said, “You’d better kill him if you’re gonna do anything, ’cause if you start something, he’ll hurt some of you.”

  As Cap and Little Joe walked onto the polling grounds, where the vanity fair of drinking, arguing, laughing, gossiping, and courting was under way, they passed a store owned by Doc Rutherford. Inside and outside, more of Doc’s sons and their friends were throwing back whiskey and carrying on. Among them was his son Lewis, whom Cap had quarreled with over a woman several years earlier. Lewis had been
“jealous,” according to Cap, and had demanded an apology for a grievance. Now he saw Cap and tried to bait him into an argument. Cap tried to ignore him, at least that is how he would tell it.

  Others, however, say that as the day progressed, Cap continually glowered at the Rutherfords, and after a while, they felt it would be wise to leave. Before that could happen, according to unnamed witnesses cited by journalist Charles Mutzenberg in 1917, Cap turned on them, whipped his Winchester to his shoulder, and began shooting.

  Cap’s son Coleman would later claim that it was the other way around: “John Rutherford walked up behind Dad and shouted, ‘Look here, Cap Hatfield. Look here!’ and fired his shotgun twice.” One shot singed the skin of Cap’s ear. The other blistered his neck. As John pulled a pistol from a holster and fired again, Coleman explained, Cap shot him in the side.4

  Cap snatched the double-barreled shotgun from Little Joe. A bullet struck the barrels, shattered, and spit lead fragments into Cap’s knuckles. (Cap would later point to the dent on the underside of the gun barrel as proof that Rutherford had shot at him first.) Cap fired his rifle twice with his good hand and then his Colt with his bloody hand. Amid a spattering of buckshot and bullets, Rutherford fell in the dust.

  A son-in-law of Doc Rutherford, Henderson Chambers, who was a merchant and a prominent citizen, rushed from his store to intervene in the fight. Chambers was the brother of Tom Chambers, Guerilla Mitchell’s stepfather. Little Joe mistook him for another assailant and squeezed the trigger of his pistol. Chambers, a father of five, dropped to the ground, dead.5

  Cap and Little Joe now ran down an alley in the direction of the railroad tracks and the road out of town. They passed a policeman, and Little Joe shouted at him, shocking even Cap with his audacity, “Now you tell those goddamned men we’re the stuff!” As Ed Rutherford, Reece Halsey, and Doc’s sixteen-year-old grandson, Elliott, gave chase, Cap and Little Joe crossed the county road and dashed up along the Tug to the mouth of Mate Creek. From a railroad trestle that was built above the road, Elliott blazed away with two pistols while Little Joe ran up the creek and Cap crouched behind an abutment. When Elliott had emptied both barrels, Cap dashed again, aiming the Colt with his bloody hand, hitting Halsey in the foot and deleting several toes. As Cap caught up with Joe, Elliott finished reloading and fired two shots that hit between Joe’s feet. Joe pivoted and returned the favor with the Winchester but shot high.

  E. B. Chambers’s general store in Matewan, circa 1915. (Courtesy of F. Keith Davis)

  Cap grabbed the Winchester from Joe, wheeled, and aimed at Elliott, who was crouched and preparing to shoot. Cap squeezed the trigger and blasted Elliott in the chest. Doc Rutherford had now lost a son, a son-in-law, and a grandson.

  Cap and Joe crossed the dry bed of Mate Creek and climbed up a steep slope into the hills. They rested when they got to the top of the ridge, where they had a clear view all around through the trees that hid them and could hear the activity in the shaken town below: men shouting, women crying, dogs barking.6

  WORD OF THE SHOOTOUT REACHED Sheriff Doc Keadle in Williamson, a town experiencing unprecedented growth, enjoying its stature as the new Mingo County seat, and feeling eager to distance itself from the lawlessness and feuding going on around it. (In fact, Mingo County had been carved out of Logan County after a jurisdictional dispute in a moonshining case showed that Logan was too large to police properly.) Keadle organized a posse to track down Cap, and they set off on Wednesday morning, November 4. Keadle dispatched men to outposts along the only nearby railroad line with orders to search all trains and sent others to stake out the likely routes into Kentucky (and surely at least some appreciated the irony of the idea that Cap Hatfield would seek refuge in the bosom of Kentucky).

  At three o’clock on Thursday afternoon, the intense effort, which had gone on uninterrupted all night, paid off. A messenger reached Keadle outside Williamson, where he had returned to raise another posse, and told him that Cap and twenty men had been spied at Rock Fort. While this was good news, it was also ominous. On a tributary of the Guyandotte River, twenty miles from Williamson, the fort was tucked into a rock canyon, and approachable from only one side. It was, noted a Cincinnati Enquirer correspondent, “impervious to anything less than a 24 -pounder.” Keadle soon set out for the fort with fifty more men. They would arrive there by ten o’clock that night.

  He knew that outside detectives were undoubtedly on their way to come try to capture Cap and claim the reward on his head. “The whole country is aroused,” reported the Enquirer, “and the interest manifested in the outcome of the bloody encounter which is almost sure to ensue within the next few hours is intense.”7

  Many wheels were already in motion to suppress any such bloody encounter. Newspaper publisher Henry Clay Ragland, who had always held a begrudging respect for Devil Anse, denounced Cap in the Logan County Banner, the paper he had founded in 1888. A vocal Democrat and booster of a coal-mining and railroad economy, Ragland argued that a failure to stop the violence would retard the region’s growth. Meanwhile, detectives arrested Devil Anse and two of his sons—one of whom, eighteen-year-old Elias, was wanted for murder—and handed them over to Logan County authorities to prevent them from interfering with the effort to take Cap. They were briefly placed in jail, but no sooner had the detectives ridden off than the Logan County authorities, who were not looking for trouble with the Hatfields, saw fit to let them go. When the news of their release got out, Mingo County was in an uproar again.8

  By the time Sheriff Keadle reached Rock Fort, deputy sheriff J. H. Clark had learned from a mountaineer that the fugitives had left the fort headed for Kentucky. Clark and his men immediately set out after them. They did not have to go far, however. As they passed near a house belonging to some Hatfields, they made out two figures on a ridge above Grapevine Creek. Little Joe and Cap were bivouacked not far from the house, where they had gone to eat. After they settled in, Cap was supposed to stand guard, but he had dozed off. The lawmen stealthily worked their way up to the perch. November 5 was the darkest night of the month, and there was no moon to give them away. After they surrounded the duo, Clark yelled at them to wake up. Little Joe reached for his gun. Cap, realizing the jig was up, knocked it out of his hand to prevent him from getting himself killed.

  Clark and his men hustled the two captives to a railroad stop and escorted them aboard a train to Huntington. They arrived early the next morning. Later in the day, Cap and Little Joe, looking exceptionally well-groomed for two recently captured fugitives, sat for an illustrated portrait, which appeared in the next day’s Cincinnati Enquirer. Both wore jackets, buttoned vests, neckties, and felt hats. Little Joe, in homespun jeans, was clean shaven, while Cap sported a thick dapper mustache. In the accompanying article, the reporter noted that they “seemed to enjoy the notoriety which they were getting.”

  He was right about that, but, like so many journalists before him, he brought his coverage to a naive conclusion: “The probabilities are now that he has killed his last victim, for the officials of West Virginia will likely see that justice is meted out for the many murders which have been committed in that wild and mountainous region.”9

  On Saturday morning, November 7, Sheriff Keadle set out for Huntington to retrieve Cap and Joe, an effort that found little appreciation among his constituents, who had breathed a collective sigh of relief at the news of the captives’ imprisonment in another town. They feared that if the sheriff brought them to Williamson, trouble would soon follow with the Hatfield clan, who, they knew, could muster a small battalion of well-armed men.10

  IT TOOK SEVERAL MONTHS FOR Cap to come to trial. The way he would tell it later, the jury members were convinced that he was innocent, that he had fought only in self-defense, except for one old man, who felt that with three corpses to show for the shootout, someone had to pay. While the others argued to acquit Cap on all charges, the old man dug in. Finally, he offered to settle for a conviction of manslaughter. No one wanted to repo
rt a hung jury in this much-watched trial, so they compromised with a conviction of involuntary manslaughter, which carried a sentence of only one year in jail and a fine of five hundred dollars. Little Joe was sent to the state reform school at Pruntytown.

  The shootout of November 3 had finally put the most notorious Hatfield behind bars. But it did not keep him there long. In the diminutive county jail at Williamson, Cap was an outsize inmate with few restrictions. Once when his infant daughter, Louise, was sick and Sheriff Keadle and his deputy were out of town, Keadle’s wife, Lucie, allowed Cap to go home for a visit. He did and soon returned, as promised. At other times, Nan and various family members and friends visited him freely, often drinking moonshine and growing rowdy. But after three months, according to his son Coleman, Cap, who was a suspicious man, heard rumors that he might be sent to Kentucky on the old feud charges. So he decided to escape.11

  To do so, he needed funds, and he directed Nan to sell their land on Mate Creek to the Red Jacket Coal Company, which had recently formed, for five hundred dollars. On the night of Friday, July 30, 1897, Cap threw a party in his cell that was even rowdier than usual and kept the joint hopping until midnight. Nan smuggled in a hand drill, and while all the revelry was going on, Cap and his helpers used it to cut away at the jail’s sixteen-inch-thick brick wall. Meanwhile, Devil Anse sent Andy Chafin, who was now ten, to Williamson with two horses and two pistols. Chafin went where he was told and, as planned, sat on a particular bench. Soon he looked up and saw Cap coming. He had not broken out of jail, not exactly. They had cut a hole big enough for him to escape through, but in the end it had been easier for him to go out through the unlocked door. A jug of moonshine was better than a chisel. The Keadles, who lived in quarters at the jail, failed to notice that anything was amiss.