The Feud: The Hatfields and McCoys: The True Story
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14. Hatfield and Spence, 178–79, and Jones, 108, 111.
15. Mutzenberg, 73; Hatfield and Spence, 179–80 ; and Wheeling Intelligencer, “New Developments in the Hatfield-M’Coy Feud.”
16. Spears, “Mountain Feud”; Waller, 198–99 ; and Louisville Courier-Journal, “Hatfields Arrive.”
17. Crawford, American Vendetta, 77–79.
18. The original of this arrest warrant is in the papers of Governor Simon Buckner in the Archives Research Room, Hatfield and McCoy Feud reference file. Nancy C. Hatfield and Richard Blankenship joined Thompson in making the complaint. John Phillips was also among those indicated for the murder of Bill Dempsey; he was either Frank’s brother or his uncle. (He had both an uncle and a brother by that name.) Sam McCoy (68) said that the brother had no part in the Hatfield-McCoy “troubles.”
19. Sam McCoy, 79.
20. Louisville Courier-Journal, “No Troops for Pike” and “The Legislature,” which concludes: “From the best advices received here, the man who fired that shot was Sheriff Phillips, of Pike County, who, strange to say, is related by blood to the Hatfields, whom he is now making war to the death upon.”
21. Louisville Courier-Journal, “Contest of the States.”
22. Wheeling Intelligencer, “The New York World,” and Louisville Courier-Journal, “No Troops for Pike.”
23. Wheeling Intelligencer, “The War Is Over.”
24. Louisville Courier-Journal, “Peace Reigns in Pike” and “Innocents at Home.”
25. Louisville Courier-Journal, “Peace Reigns in Pike,” and Ely, 61.
26. Governor Buckner’s letter to Governor Wilson of Jan. 30, 1888, as reproduced in Mutzenberg, 75–76. According to Mahon v. Justice, “Statement of the Case”: On Jan. 30, Wilson informed Buckner that he declined to issue his warrant for the arrest of Plyant Mahon in compliance with the requisition made upon him because he had become satisfied, upon investigation of the facts, that Mahon was not guilty of the crime he was charged with in the indictments. On Feb. 1, Wilson demanded that Buckner release Mahon from the Pike County jail and grant him safe conduct back to West Virginia. Buckner declined to comply on the ground that Mahon was in the custody of the judicial department of the commonwealth and that the question of his release on the grounds alleged in the demand was one that the courts alone could determine, and was not within the purview of his powers as governor.
27. Cincinnati Enquirer, “Still Buying Winchesters,” and Louisville Courier-Journal, “Pike County’s Troubles.”
28. Hill; Louisville Courier-Journal, “Two Sides to a Story”; and Wheeling Intelligencer, “The Vendetta.”
29. Mutzenberg, 77–78.
30. Ibid., 82–83.
31. Louisville Courier-Journal, “Hatfield-McCoy Mess.” The article named Tom Chambers, Andy Varney, Selkirk and L. D. McCoy, Mose Christian, David Mahon, D. D. Mahon, and Plyant Mahon. Jones (109, 278, n. 6) noted that there was confusion over the arrest of Tom “Guerilla” Mitchell, alias Tom Chambers, apparently unaware that it was his stepfather, Tom Chambers, who had mistakenly been arrested and jailed in Pikeville.
32. Wheeling Intelligencer, “The Hatfild [sic] M’Coy Feud.” The Intelligencer called Mahon “Mahan.” Ely (61) referred to the “Big Sandy Criminal Court.”
33. Louisville Courier-Journal, “Two Sides to a Story,” and Hill (see Kentucky Documents 1888 for complete correspondence). Hill missed a few other essentials too, dating the start of the feud to Devil Anse’s interception of Tolbert McCoy as he was carrying Johnse to jail. He did not mention the romance between Johnse and Roseanna or speculate on Tolbert’s motivations for arresting Johnse. He maintained that this confrontation led to the Election Day fight of 1882 (which, he reported, “ ‘Big’ Ellison Hatfield… provoked”) and thus the death of Ellison and the murders of the McCoy brothers. Hill described the murder of the boy Bud, blaming it on Devil Anse. Hill was clearly charmed by Wall, saying, “I think if Anson Hatfield and his two boys were brought to justice that would be an end to it”—the exact case that Wall was making for himself. Five days later, the state senate passed a resolution requiring Buckner to turn over his official correspondence with Governor Wilson as well as the report from Hill.
34. Like Kentucky, West Virginia braced for a border war with a certain evident pride. “The difficulty grows out of an old war feud, the Hatfields being Confederates and the McCoys Unionists,” noted the Huntington Advertiser (“It Is to Be Hoped That the Deplorable Necessity for Sending Troops…”). “The people of this State will sustain Governor Wilson in his determination to protect the lives and property of our citizens from the assaults of Kentucky desperadoes. The prompt and gallant action of many of the military companies offering their services to settle the disturbance is a matter of pride and gratification.”
Chapter 17: Disorder in the Courts
1. Louisville Courier-Journal, “Signs of Enterprise.”
2. A major front-page story covering the event appeared in the Louisville Courier-Journal on the morning of Friday, Feb. 17, 1888 (“Hatfields Arrive”), and included photos and drawings of the mountaineer captives.
3. Mose Christian was the grandson of Perry Cline’s aunt Margaret Cline Mounts.
4. Index to Order Books, County Court, Pike County, Kentucky, 181.
5. The reporter gave Randall McCoy’s age as fifty-five. In fact, he was sixty-three. Louisville Courier-Journal, “Hatfields Arrive.”
6. Louisville Courier-Journal, “Hatfields Arrive,” and Ely, 332.
7. Louisville Courier-Journal, “Enjoying Prison Life.”
8. Wheeling Intelligencer, “The Inter-State War.”
9. Ibid., “Eustace Gibson’s Mission” and “West Virginia Wins,” and Louisville Courier-Journal, “Wants Her Citizens.”
10. Jones, 129, and Louisville Courier-Journal, “Holcombe at the Jail.”
11. Although West Virginia argued this, it is not strictly true, since Jim Vance was not wanted in the murder of the three McCoy brothers and was not known to be involved in the raid on the Randall McCoy house until after he was killed.
12. Louisville Courier-Journal, “In Favor of Kentucky.”
13. Wheeling Intelligencer, “Kentucky Is Winner.”
14. Spears, “Mountain Feud”; G. Elliott Hatfield, 180–81 ; Waller, 198–99 ; and Louisville Courier-Journal, “Hatfields Arrive.”
15. Louisville Courier-Journal, “Back to Pikeville.”
16. Ibid., “Hatfields Arrive.”
17. Ibid., “Back to Pikeville.”
18. Spears, “Mountain Feud.”
19. Jones, 145.
20. Wheeling Intelligencer, “Argument Begun in the Famous Hatfield-McCoy Cases in the United States Supreme Court.”
21. The decision and dissent are adapted from the original, which can be found in its entirety at www.supreme.justia.com/us/127/700/case.html; Wheeling Intelligencer, “The Hatfield-M’Coy Case.”
22. Mahon v. Justice and Kathryn Selleck, “Jurisdiction After International Kidnapping: A Comparative Study,” Boston College International and Comparative Law Review, 249–50. In the landmark 1829 case Ex Parte Scott, Susannah Scott, wanted in England for perjury, was arrested in Brussels by an English police officer and carried to England. Scott argued that the English court did not have jurisdiction to try her because she had been illegally arrested and wrongly brought into the country. The court ruled that it could not consider the circumstances of her arrival in the jurisdiction, saying only that if Belgian law gave Scott a cause for a grievance, she could pursue it there, but that this circumstance would not affect the English court’s jurisdiction over Scott.
Chapter 18: The Lawmen
1. Louisville Courier-Journal, “Middleton’s Murder,” “A Boy Resents an Insult to His Mother,” “A Very Bad Man,” and “Shot to Pieces.”
2. Atkinson, 915–18, and Velke, 3. Burnett’s partners in the Eureka Detectives were William Baldwin, Tom A. Campbell, I. Hammond, and W. J. Hotchkiss. The partners al
l listed their place of residence as Charleston, except for Campbell, who hailed from Wellston, Ohio.
3. Mutzenberg, 93; Atkinson, 915; Velke, 3, 43–44, 51–53, 105; and Acts of the Legislature of West Virginia at the Nineteenth Regular Session Commencing Jan. 9, 1889. G. Elliott Hatfield made mistakes when writing about the detectives, placing the Eureka detectives in competition with Dan Cunningham, whom he called a Baldwin-Felts detective. Thomas Felts would not become a partner of William Baldwin’s until 1900, and the name of the agency, Baldwin’s Detectives, would not incorporate Felts’s name until 1910. Baldwin, who worked at Eureka beginning in 1885, later established an agency in Virginia and hired Felts in 1892. Cunningham was working for Baldwin by 1902 while still a deputy U.S. marshal.
4. Spears, “Mountain Feud”; Truda McCoy, 231; and Velke, 105.
5. Mutzenberg, 88–8 9, and James M. Callahan, History of West Virginia, Old and New, 76–77. Mutzenberg identified Keadle as the sheriff of Mingo County, but his timing was off. Keadle was not appointed sheriff until 1895, when Mingo County was created. Records show that he was a printer who in 1887 established a newspaper in Logan Courthouse, the Logan Democrat, which became the Logan Banner in 1888. Following this success, Keadle was appointed deputy revenue collector for southern West Virginia in 1889.
6. Spears, “Mountain Feud”; Wheeling Intelligencer, “Hatfields and M’Coys”; and G. Elliott Hatfield, 137–38. Nancy McCoy Hatfield, a canny survivor who was nothing if not flexible in her loyalties, would also be accused of spying for the McCoys and helping them track down Ellison Mounts. Truda McCoy learned of Frank Phillips’s relationship with Nancy from Phillips’s daughter Elsie Ford. Polly Adams told Truda (229, n. 17): “Nancy was as pretty a woman as you ever laid eyes on, but she was a crackerjack. She was the best thing you ever saw if she liked you, but if she didn’t like you—look out!”
7. Spears, “Mountain Feud,” and Harry Leon Sellards Jr., Hatfield and Phillips Families of Eastern Kentucky and Southwestern West Virginia, 274. “When Phillips learned of her duplicity he simply laughed at her and continued his unlawful relations,” wrote the National Police Gazette in 1893 (“He Held Life Cheaply”). “Because he was a hero in her eyes and kind to her as well, she was faithful to him thereafter.”
8. Wheeling Intelligencer, “Hatfields and M’Coys,” and Waller, 188. Some sources say it was Campbell and Burnett who captured Stratton, though the Intelligencer said that Burnett was sick for several days, making it unclear whether he was one of the two men who captured Stratton.
9. Spears, “Mountain Feud”; Swain, 341–42 ; Atkinson, 469; Waller, 142, 188, 200, 219–20 ; and G. Elliott Hatfield, 87–89.
10. Cunningham, Memoirs, 42, and “Warren Miller” entry in West Virginia Legislative Hand Book, 727.
11. There was a minor triumph, however. About a year after Cunningham’s friend Robert Duff was killed, the Skean clan moved into Mud Sock (now Mt. Alto) and started making whiskey. But Mud Sock’s law-abiding citizens soon flushed out Skean and his cohorts, who went back to Kentuck. Cunningham followed them there, captured Frank Skean’s son Peter, and took him to Parkersburg for trial, thus breaking up what he called the “Mud Sock whiskey crowd.”
12. Cunningham, “Horrible Butcheries,” 36–37, and G. Elliott Hatfield, 197.Original text changed from “handing at his side” to “hanging at his side.”
13. Adams, 218, 220; Spears, “Murderous Mountaineers”; Cunningham, “Horrible Butcheries,” 37; and G. Elliott Hatfield, 135. Spears said the third detective was T. M. Brown, not Treve Gibson. Cantley reported Cunningham telling stories with pious asides, such as “I never felt like I was alone in my journeys, but always relied on a higher power to guide my footsteps and to protect me from evil” (22) and, later, upon escaping the Hatfields, “God answered my prayers again” (24). Adams is confusing on this point, quoting Cunningham on the decline of his enemies: “The hand of God has been laid on these men in dreadful forms.” Adams commented, “Thus the faith of Dan Cunningham shines out in his diary” (219). But then he quoted Cunningham again—“God will not let me be killed while one of Nathan’s murderers is above ground”—and commented, “That is the one tenet of his creed; otherwise he is not a religious man” (220). By most evidence, it seems that he was.
14. In Cantley’s account (22), the detectives killed two of the McCoys in the gunfight. Cantley tended to overdramatize events.
15. Cunningham, “Horrible Butcheries,” 37; Spears, “Murderous Mountaineers”; and G. Elliott Hatfield, 86. Hatfield called him Wild Bill Napier and said that he “looked, talked and liked to eat like Buffalo Bill, his patron saint” and came from “the Southwest, where bad men were really bad, and the notches on the young cannons in his holsters proved it.” He told a story, repeated from Crawford, of Napier hiding for two days inside a hollow log to avoid being captured by the Hatfields. (The Nov. 8, 1888, Wheeling Intelligencer put that at a more reasonable “several hours.”) Other writers called him Kentucky Bill. In an 1892 New York Times article, Kentucky Bill was identified as William Napier. Harrison (Logan Banner, 1957) called him Kentucky Wild Bill. The Intelligencer said Kentucky Bill was John L. Napier, originally from Wayne County, though he obtained his nickname while in Colorado, and said he was connected with a Louisville detective agency.
16. Cunningham, “Horrible Butcheries,” 36–37. In G. Elliott Hatfield (87–94), Cunningham was against the Hatfields from the start. In Truda McCoy, he switched in the opposite direction, from a hunter of Hatfields to a hunter of McCoys. In all Cunningham-originated accounts, however, he started out against the McCoys and then decided that he was morally obligated to pursue the Hatfields.
17. Spears, “Murderous Mountaineers,” and Louisville Courier-Journal, “The Hatfield-M’Coy Feud.” In the Atlanta Constitution (“Cunningham’s Historic Hunt for the Hatfields”), Adams said that the Eureka agency had learned that Gillespie was hiding out at an aunt’s house on a remote mountainside in Tazewell County, Virginia, where the Gillespie family was well established.
18. The Cincinnati Enquirer (“Hatfield-M’Coy: Origin of the Deadly Feud”) described the capture differently, giving young Gillespie more bravado: “With a revolver a few inches from his heart, Gillespie was ordered to throw up his hands, but he coolly remarked: ‘You’ve got me dead to rights: shoot if you want to, but recollect a Hatfield never throws up his hands. Treat me like a man, though, and I’ll go quietly with you.’ ”
19. Wheeling Intelligencer, “The Hatfield Gang”; Louisville Courier-Journal, “Hatfield-M’Coy Feud.” The Louisville Courier-Journal identified Tom Campbell as Lon Campbell.
20. Wheeling Intelligencer, “The Hatfield Gang”; Louisville Courier-Journal, “Hatfield-M’Coy Feud”; Cincinnati Enquirer, “Hatfield-M’Coy”; Atlanta Constitution, “Cunningham’s Historic Hunt”; and Cunningham, “Horrible Butcheries,” 37. n. 19. The Enquirer identified the man who captured Gillespie not as Dan Cunningham but as Detective Campbell. The mistake was perpetuated by G. Elliott Hatfield (137), who confused matters further when he used Cunningham’s first name and credited the arrest to “Detective Dan Campbell and his partner, Treve Gibson.”
21. Spears, “Murderous Mountaineers.”
22. Howard, “Descendants of Tom Chambers.”
Chapter 19: Yellow Journalists on the Bloody Border
1. Creelman, “Bloody Border War,” and Deed of Conveyance between Sarah McCoy and Randolph McCoy and Thomas G. Farley, May 4, 1889.
2. Spears, “Murderous Mountaineers” and “Mountain News Getting.”
3. Spears, “Mountain Feud.” Smith was married to Frances McCoy, the daughter of a Peter Creek Union soldier and a cousin of Harmon McCoy. The Wheeling Intelligencer (“Visiting the Hatfields”) reported that the “indictment against Dave Stratton will be nollied,” meaning he would be set free without a trial.
4. Crawford, American Vendetta, 7, 12, 54, 90–92, 103, 115.
5. Ibid., 48–94, 98–102, 108–10, 115–16.
/> 6. Ibid., 55–58, and New York Sun, “Sport in Wood and Field.”
7. Crawford, American Vendetta, 59, 73, 84–85, 116.
8. Ibid., 65–66, 82–86, 101–2.
9. New York World, “A Bloody Vendetta,” and Crawford, American Vendetta, 91–92, 121–22. The headline for Crawford’s story in the World, “An American Vendetta: Mountaineers Who Have Been Killing Each Other for 25 Years,” clearly asserted that the feud had taken root in the Civil War.
10. The 1880 federal census showed one Jeff Skean in Logan County, with a wife, Arminda, and two children. In 1888, he would have been thirty-five, and Arminda thirty-one. Cunningham, “Horrible Butcheries,” 37–38, n. 20, and Memoirs, 33, and U.S Census of 1880, Magnolia, Logan, West Virginia, Jeff Skean household, sheet 301B, family 0.
11. G. Elliott Hatfield, 137.
12. Harrison remembered Kentucky Bill only as a McCoy partisan. Recounting his story in 1957 at the age of ninety-one to the Logan Banner (“Last Survivor”), Harrison confused and compressed some episodes. I have tried to correct this confusion and provide the most likely chain of events regarding Kentucky Bill.
13. Atlanta Constitution, “Cunningham’s Historic Hunt”; Cunningham, “Horrible Butcheries,” 38; G. Elliott Hatfield, 137–38 ; Staton, 170–71 ; and Spears, “Murderous Mountaineers.” Some accounts give the date of this capture as Oct. 1. The Weston Democrat (“Hatfield-McCoy Vendetta”) gave Oct. 29, 1888, as the date of the capture. In this report, Mitchell was shot and knocked down by Gibson but still managed to get away, the “leaves being so dry that he could not be tracked.” This report also said that the detectives took Mounts to Pikeville, “where he was lodged in jail and the detectives paid $500, the amount offered by the Kentucky authorities for his arrest.” Staton told a variation of this incident. According to him, it was John T. Vance, Devil Anse’s future son-in-law (he would marry Nancy Hatfield in May 1889), who guided Cunningham and Kentucky Bill (whom he called “Pinkerton, or Wild Bill”) to a place called Johnnie Cake, where a secret trail leading to the Hatfield hideout on Pigeon Creek crossed the main trail at the head of Mate Creek. Staton said that Mounts was accompanying Guerilla Mitchell to the doctor to have his wounded hand treated. Mounts and Mitchell were shocked to see that Vance had betrayed them. Afterward, Cap volunteered to kill him and proceeded to do so. However, records show that John T. Vance lived to the age of eighty-one and died Dec. 3, 1939 (West Virginia, Deaths Index). The New York Times, picking up a report from Charleston, titled its story of the arrest of Mounts “Rough-and-Tumble Battle” and simply merged the two fighting families into one menacing “Hatfield-McCoy gang,” the Hatfields being the gang’s “West Virginia contingent.” The Times said that Chambers was “shot in the hand,” though that was most likely the wound from the New Year’s Day raid, and that he had shot Napier, as opposed to Gibson.