by Lisa Alther
It was January 9, 1865, night would soon fall, and Harmon McCoy’s mouth was parched. His water jug lay empty, but he felt too weak to drag himself to the cave’s edge to collect some snow. The sweat dampening his black hair made it even curlier than usual. His wife, Patty, loved his curls, but he always tried to slick them down. She also liked him clean shaven, which made him just about the only man he knew who didn’t have a beard or at least a mustache. Those curls and bare cheeks made him look younger than his thirty-seven years. So to command respect when serving with his Union regiment, the 45th Kentucky Mounted Infantry, he had let his beard grow out.1 He would be with his regiment still but for his leg.
When Harmon had mentioned returning to the cabin so that Patty could tend to him, Pete, his former slave, had urged him to stay hidden in the cave. Pete had promised to bring Patty here, leaving his wife, Chloe, with the children. But Harmon could no longer bear the thought of Patty’s struggling through the snow in her condition. Their baby was due in a few weeks. He needed to go to her instead.
Harmon shoved his sack of rifle shells into a saddlebag and struggled to his feet. Hanging his saddlebags over one shoulder, he wrapped his wool army blanket around himself like a shawl. Then he grabbed his rifle and lurched across the dirt floor to the mouth of the cave.
Down below he could just pick out his log cabin alongside the silver thread of Peter Creek. Smoke was drifting up from the chimney into the glowering sky. It would be warm inside. Patty would put him to bed and cover him with quilts and bring him water from the well. The tussling of his four rowdy boys would cheer him up. Pete’s footprints in the snow far below led from the cabin across the silent pasture to the woods—like stitching on a muslin quilt backing.
Leaning on his rifle, Harmon squatted outside the cave to scoop up a handful of snow. Pete’s boots had packed the snow around the cave’s entrance. He and Patty were lucky to still have Pete and Chloe to help with the crops and the animals, the housework and the children, especially while Harmon was fighting with his regiment. When Lincoln had emancipated the slaves—over a year ago now—many headed north to escape the wrath of their owners, who had supported the Union in the belief that they would be allowed to keep the slaves they already had, or would at least be compensated for their loss. But Pete and Chloe had wanted to stay even after Harmon told them they were free to leave. They had asked him where he thought they could go instead, as old as they were.
Harmon nibbled the snow, letting it melt in his mouth and soothe his raw throat. By going back home, was he putting Patty and the children at risk—both from this lung disease and also from the Logan Wildcats? On the path to Pikeville, the day after he had arrived home, he ran into “Bad Jim” Vance, tall, muscular, still mean as a snake, and with that droopy black mustache. Vance had a condition that made his eyes bulge and roll. He couldn’t focus on you when he talked, but to think he wasn’t paying attention was a mistake: He could draw his pistol faster than a copperhead could strike. Jim wore a gold watch chain looped across his vest and a bowler hat. Harmon had eyed the bulge of Bad Jim’s holster beneath his suit jacket and the rifle in its sheath attached to his saddle.2
Harmon McCoy, younger brother of family leader Ranel McCoy and father of four second-generation feudists, was killed by Bad Jim Vance in January 1865, thereby igniting the tensions that helped spark the feud. Courtesy of West Virginia State Archives
Posed for a photo prior to a hunting trip, left to right, Devil Anse Hatfield and Jim Vance. Courtesy of West Virginia State Archives
Until his desertion last year, Bad Jim had ridden with Gen. Vincent Witcher’s raiders, who had plagued Union supporters all over southeastern Kentucky and southwestern Virginia. They once made a wide sweep across the Tug Fork Valley, flying a black flag as they rode, seizing food and livestock, killing Unionists and burning down their houses and barns. Bad Jim had stolen horses for these raiders, several from his own cousin, some said.
Jim Vance had now become the most ruthless of the Logan Wildcats, a guerrilla group led by his sister Nancy Hatfield’s son, Bad Jim’s notorious nephew, “Devil Anse” Hatfield. The Wildcats, mostly Confederate deserters, hailed from the West Virginia side of the Tug Fork. Now that West Virginia had seceded from Virginia to rejoin the Union, the Wildcats set themselves the mission of defending Confederate farms and families from avenging Union troops. The Wildcats were furious that the Confederacy was about to lose this wretched war, and they especially hated Harmon for having fought for the Union—though he was far from the only man in the Tug Fork Valley to have done so.
But Devil Anse Hatfield had plenty of other reasons to hate Harmon McCoy. At the start of the war, Harmon had served as a Union Home Guard under “General Bill” France.3 Devil Anse crossed the Tug Fork with two friends to watch the Home Guards drill. General France decided that they were spying for the Confederates and ordered Harmon to fight Devil Anse. Although Harmon lost the fight, he helped his fellow Home Guards chase Devil Anse and his friends back across the river to Virginia—still undivided then—by throwing rocks at them.4
Harmon, Pete, and General France later shot a friend of Devil Anse through the chest while stealing horses from him. Devil Anse tracked down General France and shot him down at dawn as he urinated off his porch. Forty of General France’s troops crossed the Tug Fork to arrest Devil Anse for the murder. But Devil Anse’s wife, Levicy, somehow sensed that they were coming and pushed Devil Anse out the back door to hide in the forest.5 A rumor started that Harmon himself was planning to kill Devil Anse for murdering General France. Though Harmon had denied it, the rumor continued to circulate.
In the meantime, during a skirmish, Harmon had taken a bullet that entered at his collarbone and exited between the ribs on the opposite side of his chest. He lay in bed for months, his wounds oozing pus, lucky to be alive. A passing Confederate cavalry unit searched his cabin and found him. They marched him, weak with fever, a hundred miles to a railhead in Virginia, where they put him in a cattle car and shipped him to a prison in Richmond. When he was released in a prisoner exchange several months later, his wounds still oozing, he returned to his bed in the Peter Creek cabin.6
After recovering, Harmon McCoy enlisted in the 45th Kentucky—partly to get out of the area. Devil Anse Hatfield had by now deserted from his Confederate battalion and come back home to head up the Logan Wildcats. Harmon had dared to hope that Devil Anse’s fury toward him might have faded while Harmon was away serving in northern Kentucky. But on the road to Pikeville the other day, Bad Jim Vance, eyes rolling, had rested his hand on his rifle butt and warned Harmon that the Wildcats would soon come looking for him.
A few days later, as Harmon was drawing water from the well in his yard, a bullet from the woods zinged past him. He ran inside, stuffed supplies into his saddlebags, grabbed his rifle, and limped up the hill to this cave, where he had been hiding out for several days now.
Standing at the mouth of the cave, his thirst sated, Harmon started coughing. It was a dry hacking cough that didn’t let him catch his breath. He was freezing. At least at home he would have a chance of getting well before having to deal with the Wildcats again. He had spent this entire war either sick or injured—first his infected gunshot wounds, then his fractured leg, now pneumonia. What next?
He started down the path toward home, dragging his aching leg. Below him he spotted two men among the bare branches of the winter trees, their features indistinct in the forest gloom. As he threw aside his blanket and raised his rifle, gunshots sounded up the hill, and an explosion bloomed inside his chest.
When Patty learned from Pete how sick Harmon was, she rushed around the cabin packing two baskets with food, blankets, teas, and ointments. Donning her warmest clothes, she left the cabin with Pete. They followed Pete’s tracks through the snow across the pasture, pausing often for Patty to rest and catch her breath since she was carrying a nearly full-term ba
by in her belly and the pack basket on her back. As they reached the wood line and began their ascent to the cave, they heard gunshots farther up the hill. Dropping their provisions, they scrambled up the steep trail as fast as Patty could manage.
They reached a junction at which new boot prints emerged from the woods to join Pete’s tracks up the hill toward the cave. Pete pointed them out, suddenly afraid that they themselves were about to be ambushed by whoever had fired the shots. But they kept going, more anxious for Harmon’s life than fearful for their own. That his tracks in the snow had likely led the Wildcats to Harmon’s hideout made Pete feel sick.
Alongside the trail, just below the cave, they spotted a fallen oak tree. Across its trunk sprawled Harmon McCoy. The snow on the ground around him was stained scarlet. They rushed to him, and Pete turned him over. Harmon’s jacket was soaked dark red. His eyes were wide open, his dark curly hair damp with sweat, his lips a bloodless blue. Patty closed his eyelids with her fingertips, bowing her head and closing her own eyes as despair swept over her.
They stood there in silence for a long time, trying to work out what to do next. Finally Pete plunged through the snow to an open area in which a neighboring farmer named Mounts had been cutting and skinning logs for an addition to his cabin. Pete found a large sheet of curled bark and dragged it over. He and Patty pulled Harmon’s body off the oak trunk onto a blanket and wrapped him up in it. Then they rolled the blanketed bundle into the bark, laying Harmon’s rifle and saddlebags alongside him. Pete went into the cave and emerged with a rope. He and Patty tied the bark casket shut and fashioned handles from loops of the rope. Slowly they pulled Harmon’s bloody body back down the trail toward home.
Night was falling when they at last reached the foot of the forest. They picked up their abandoned pack baskets and strapped them on their backs. The Mounts cabin sat nearby. They were Confederate friends of Devil Anse Hatfield, but surely they would take pity on their newly widowed neighbor.
Patty knocked at the door. When Mounts answered, she explained the situation and asked if she and Pete could stay in their cabin overnight and head back home the next morning at first light. Mounts replied that she could sit by the fire, since she was obviously with child and frozen nearly to death, but Pete wasn’t welcome. Patty asked if they could bring Harmon’s body inside, safe from wolves, so that Pete could go home to sleep, returning in the morning to retrieve the body. Mounts refused.
Pete built a fire on the path, wrapped himself in a blanket, and kept watch over Harmon’s body through the long, cold night, a mountain cat screaming in the forest, snow in the pasture sparkling in the moonlight.
The next morning Mounts relented and let Pete and Patty borrow his horse and sled to drag Harmon McCoy’s body back home.7
2
DARK AND BLOODY GROUND
Separating Ranel McCoy’s farm in Kentucky from Devil Anse Hatfield’s land in West Virginia, the Tug Fork flows into the Big Sandy River some 160 miles north of its source in the Cumberland mountains of southwestern West Virginia. The Big Sandy, in turn, joins the Ohio River. Calm and shallow for much of the year, the Tug Fork rises and rages in springtime, which allowed loggers in days gone by to ride bucking rafts of primeval timber to sawmills and lumber markets downriver.
But before the loggers came, this region of steep, heavily forested mountains, intersected by narrow creek-carved valleys, sheltered several hundred generations of Native Americans. The Paleo Indians, who arrived after the last ice age, hunted mammoths, mastodons, and buffalos in a landscape much more open than today. When overhunting and climate warming drove those large game animals to extinction around 6000 BC, the descendants of the nomadic hunters settled down in small villages to a life of hunting, fishing, and gathering, fashioning pottery and tools, and constructing ceremonial mounds.
For the next six thousand years or so, their villages and mounds grew larger, and they eventually added the cultivation of corn, beans, and squashes to their menu of subsistence activities. They also added jewelry to their personal adornment, petroglyphs to their spiritual rituals, and games to their leisure hours.1
In the seventeenth century, when European settlers first arrived on the Cumberland Plateau, in which the Tug Fork nestles, they found very few natives living there. As with every episode of human migration, there are several explanations: the difficulty of the terrain, the devastation of the Native population by diseases introduced to the Americas by European explorers and traders, and a deliberate vacating of what became West Virginia and Kentucky by the Iroquoian Five Nations to the north, who wanted control of the area in order to monopolize the fur trade with French outposts along the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. But some tribes still had villages there—the Lenape and Shawnee, Mingo and Wyandotte—and the Cherokee to the south used the region as a hunting ground.2
Toponymist George R. Stewart maintained that the name Tug comes from the Cherokee word tugulu, referring to the forks of a stream.3 An alternative explanation for the name Tug comes from a 1756 incident in which an army of Cherokees and Virginians tried to traverse the Tug Fork Valley from southwestern Virginia in order to attack Shawnee tribes along the Big Sandy and Ohio Rivers, intending to punish them for raids on Virginia settlements. The mountain trails were too scrambled and precipitous for horses, though, and the creeks too rock strewn and fast running to use as paths. When supplies ran out and hunting proved difficult, both men and horses grew exhausted and hungry, the soldiers threatening mutiny. They had managed to kill and eat two buffalos, hanging their hides in a tree. In desperation, they cut the hides into strips, called “tugs,” and roasted and ate those as well. Then they disbanded and straggled back home to Virginia.4
The Cumberland Plateau opened to European settlement in the wake of the various treaties involved in the British defeat of the French in the French and Indian War and the American defeat of the British in the Revolutionary War. By 1783, what had been a trickle of intrepid settlers had increased to a steady stream, if not yet a flood. Disgruntled bands of displaced natives continued to attack the new forts and settlements, and the settlers formed independent militias to combat them. Dragging Canoe, a Cherokee chief trying to stave off this European invasion, is said to have warned the settlers that their new home was “a dark and bloody ground,” referring to prior wars among Native tribes there.5 His warning was prophetic.
Because of the hardships involved in occupying this wilderness—steep and densely forested mountains, Native raids, and the need to clear first-growth timber before crops could be planted on the scarce level ground—only the most determined or desperate left behind the more settled regions to the east. Those who accepted this challenge often had nothing to lose: former indentured servants, escaped or freed slaves, and criminals, all fleeing westward from the Virginia coast; retired soldiers with land grants on the frontiers; new immigrants in search of unoccupied farmland. Many of these people had faced extreme hardship in their previous lives and were fiercely protective of their independence.
Accidents, crop failures, storms, epidemics, attacks by natives and bandits, and all manner of other disasters could occur daily. In a largely lawless wilderness with few schools, churches, courts, or doctors, people were on their own. As with the natives before them, “justice” for these early settlers usually involved eye-for-an-eye retaliation. A man’s reputation for violence was often what protected his family and animals from harm.6 As one reporter during the feud years dryly put it, “It is a region which develops eccentricity of character and excessive independence of thought.”7
These settlers lived in small log cabins just above the floors of the narrow but fertile coves that often flooded in springtime and during heavy rains. Their cabins generally had one or two rooms downstairs for cooking, eating, sitting, and sleeping around a stone hearth, with a sleeping loft upstairs. Sometimes a second such cabin joined the first by means of a roofed “dog trot.” A mortar of or
ange clay chinked the spaces between the logs. The floors were either packed dirt or puncheons split from logs and stabilized with pegs. Roofs were clad with wooden shakes.**
The fields of most Tug Fork farms extended up the steep hillsides. Cattle and hogs, marked with their owners’ brands, ranged freely throughout the unfenced forests. Horses provided both labor for plowing and transportation along the steep mountain paths and streambeds. Farm families supplemented the yield from their crops and livestock by hunting wild game, fishing, and gathering nuts, berries, and wild plants. Venison, bear meat, and buffalo meat were important staples. Ginseng, dug in the forest, could be bartered at stores for manufactured goods, as could furs and hides. Farmers distilled corn and apples not needed for human or animal consumption into whiskey and brandy as cash crops for trade or sale, and for family meals and recreation.
Many farmers cut a few of the giant trees, often with diameters of six to eight feet, that grew on their hillsides—especially tulip poplar, red oak, and black walnut—and lashed them into rafts. They branded the cut trunk ends and raced them down the creeks during springtime floods to the timber markets along the Ohio River, guiding them with forty-foot rudders at the back and fifteen-foot oars on the front corners.8
Beautifully embossed with scenes of mountains, forests, deer, and town street scenes, the concrete floodwall at Matewan, West Virginia, runs for nearly half a mile along the riverbank. (One panel even portrays the Hatfields and the McCoys, facing one another across a stream.) The wall was built in response to thirty-six floods, some catastrophic, that devastated the town in the last half of the twentieth century.9 Similar floods have ravaged the area throughout its history. The floodwall towers like a defensive wall around a medieval French village. Just looking at it conveys a sense of the force of the raging waters that carried those rafts of lumber downstream to the sawmills 150 miles away—and a sense of the dangers faced by those riding and steering the rafts, like crickets perched on autumn leaves being swept along by a torrent.
