by Lisa Alther
Children provided the labor for these home industries, and families were huge. Ranel and Sarah McCoy produced sixteen children, and Devil Anse and Levicy Hatfield, thirteen. Researchers have made much of the isolation of inhabitants of the southern Appalachians,10 but clearly these researchers have never tried living in a small cabin with sixteen children—with similar cabins located down the creeks and across the ridges.*** Families often gathered for group activities like sewing quilts, hoeing and harvesting crops, shucking corn, slaughtering hogs, and building cabins and barns. Neighbors gathered on Election Days, for militia musters, to hear circuit-riding preachers and judges, to buy from itinerant peddlers, to attend weddings and funerals, to help each other when babies were born or when people fell sick or died. The men and boys rode their log rafts to the large towns along the rivers and returned home, walking or poling flatboats upriver against the current, laden with store goods and news. Isolation wouldn’t have concerned these people, though privacy might have.
Such was the world into which the progenitors of both the Hatfields and the McCoys moved early in the nineteenth century.
Devil Anse Hatfield’s family believed themselves descended from Capt. Andrew Hatfield and Joseph Hatfield, both famous frontier scouts and Indian fighters. The former had built Hatfield Fort prior to 1770 on a tributary of the New River in Virginia as a refuge for settlers during Native attacks.11
The first Hatfield to arrive in the Tug Fork Valley was Ephraim, who moved around 1820 from southwestern Virginia to Pike County, Kentucky, with his second wife, Anne Musick, and their ten children. His nickname was “Eph-of-All” because every Tug Fork Hatfield descended from him. His son Valentine moved across the river to what was to become West Virginia during the Civil War. Valentine and his wife produced twelve children, including a son they named Ephraim (“Big Eph”), after Valentine’s father.12 Couples typically named their first son after his paternal grandfather, and they often named later sons after favorite brothers or uncles or maternal grandfathers. This sometimes resulted in half a dozen men of varying ages with the exact same name within an extended family. As in ancient Rome, nicknames describing physical or behavioral traits helped clarify identities.
A half-brother of Valentine Hatfield remained in Kentucky and spawned a line of Kentucky Hatfields. One of these, “Preacher Anse” Hatfield, played the good angel to Devil Anse’s bad boy during the feud, through his usually unsuccessful attempts at mediation. Most Kentucky Hatfields tried to remain neutral, but several ended up testifying on behalf of the McCoys in the trials that finally ended the feud.
Big Eph Hatfield and Nancy Vance married when he was sixteen and she fifteen.13 Known as the strongman of the Tug Fork Valley, Big Eph, the father of Devil Anse, grew to six feet four inches tall and 260 pounds.14 Some even maintain that he was seven feet tall and 300 pounds.15 Men constantly arrived from near and far to wrestle him and thereby establish their reputations as tough guys. Fabled for killing a panther with only a hunting knife, Big Eph was sometimes known as “Old Panther Killer.” But he was also a justice of the peace, widely respected by his neighbors for his quiet but firm enforcement of the law.16
Nancy Vance Hatfield—whose most striking feature was a prominent nose that Devil Anse and several of her other children inherited—was a midwife, “tall and strong with handsome facial features . . . hawk-faced with a high forehead, a jutting nose, and a squared-off chin.”17 Given the staggering number of offspring that Tug Fork couples produced, she undoubtedly never worried about unemployment, although overwork might have been a concern. Unlike most in the valley, she was said to have been literate and to have owned some medical texts.18
The fourth of her ten surviving children (out of eighteen born), William Anderson “Devil Anse” Hatfield was born on September 9, 1839, at the family’s home on the Straight Fork of Mate Creek. Stories of Devil Anse’s skills in hunting, shooting, and riding abound. In his teens, one tale goes, he killed his first bear by kicking it in the rear until it climbed a chestnut tree to escape him. He then sat beneath the tree to prevent its descent for two days and nights, without food or water, until a search party found him and gave him some bullets so that he could shoot the bear out of the tree. The bear was said to be so huge that it took eight men to carry it home, slung from a pole.19 Even Paul Bunyan couldn’t have topped that.
One theory about the origin of the nickname Devil Anse maintains that after he fought a catamount with his bare hands, his mother exclaimed that he “wasn’t afraid of the Devil himself.” Another theory goes that he got his nickname after Ranel McCoy said of him, “He’s six feet of devil and 180 pounds of hell.” Yet another claims that he single-handedly defended a mountain ridge called the Devil’s Backbone against an entire platoon of Union soldiers during the Civil War. Some attribute the nickname to his behavior, which stood in such contrast to that of his mild-mannered Kentucky cousin, Preacher Anse Hatfield.20
Devil Anse came honorably by his need to perform feats of valor. When he was growing up, his great-grandparents, Eph-of-All Hatfield and Anne Musick Hatfield, lived on Blackberry Creek in Kentucky, through several miles of dense forest and across the Tug Fork from Big Eph’s home in Virginia. Devil Anse no doubt heard from the lips of Anne herself the story of her capture by Shawnees in 1792: Two of her sons from her first marriage were gathering firewood near the family’s cabin in southwestern Virginia when they spotted an Indian raiding party and rushed back home. Their father, Anne’s first husband, David Musick, discovered that his rifle was damaged and wouldn’t fire. A native shot him through the thigh. He bled to death as they scalped him and abducted Anne and their five children.
The Shawnees slaughtered a family cow, made a bag of the hide, and filled it with the raw meat. Then they marched the family toward the Shawnees’ settlement in Ohio. A redheaded son was allowed to ride the family horse because the natives revered the color of his hair. When the youngest son refused to eat the raw beef from the hide bag, however, they ground his face against the bark of a pine tree until the flesh was shredded badly enough to leave lifetime scars.
That night the raiding party camped on an island, where a posse of settlers caught up with them. Anne grabbed her youngest child and herded her four others toward the posse as a Shawnee hurled a tomahawk at them. She and all her children survived and were saved, and she later took up with Eph-of-All, a widower with several small children of his own. Some say he had been a member of the rescue party.21
Several other tales of settlers in Native captivity also circulated during Devil Anse’s youth—such as that of Mary Draper Ingles, kidnapped by Shawnees in 1755 along with two of her children. During a raid on their neighborhood alongside the New River in Virginia—not far east from where Anne Musick was kidnapped—four other settlers were killed and two wounded. Mary was taken to a Shawnee town near present-day Cincinnati, where she sewed shirts for French fur traders and made salt in the marshes. Her children were sent to villages farther north.
Mary and an old German woman from Pennsylvania, also a captive, escaped and traveled eight hundred miles south through dense forests for six weeks, eating only what they could scavenge in the woods. Twice the German woman tried to kill Mary to cannibalize her. Mary stumbled out of the bushes at her home settlement, naked, skeletal, and completely white-haired, even though she was only twenty-three years old.22
Another captivity tale concerned a woman named Jenny Wiley, kidnapped by a group of eleven natives in 1789 from her home in Virginia while her husband was hauling a load of ginseng to market. Her brother and three of her children died during the raid, and her fourth child was killed soon afterward while she was sleeping. Her captors took her to a camp some twenty-five miles northwest of the Tug Fork Valley and held her there for several months, during which time she gave birth to a baby, whom her captors also killed. She managed to escape and sought refuge at a blockhouse, where an intrepid settler rescue
d her from a river and fought off pursuing natives. She returned home to her husband, and they had six more children.23
Shawnee attacks continued in Kentucky and southwestern Virginia throughout the early years of the nineteenth century and ceased only after Tecumseh’s death in 1813.****
In addition to these models of courage and perseverance held up to Devil Anse Hatfield as a boy, he would also have heard the story of his great-grandfather Abner Vance, a Baptist minister who lived near Abingdon, Virginia. Nancy Vance, Devil Anse’s mother, was said to be a “woods-colt” child of Abner Vance’s daughter Betsy. Woods-colt is a poetic regional term meaning “illegitimate” and refers to the frequent result when a domestic mare wanders into the forest and encounters wild stallions. Nancy’s younger brother, Bad Jim Vance, widely believed to have murdered Harmon McCoy in an opening episode of the feud, was another woods-colt child of Betsy Vance.24
Lewis Horton, the son of a well-to-do local family, took a daughter of Abner Vance to Baltimore while attending medical school there. He brought her back home pregnant and unmarried. He allegedly delivered the young woman to her father, Abner Vance, the Baptist preacher, with the words, “Here’s your heifer. You take care of her.”25 Understandably (at least to Appalachians), Abner Vance shot Dr. Horton as he was watering his horse at a river. It is unknown whether the gunshot killed Horton or whether he drowned after plunging into the water.
Following the murder, Abner Vance escaped to western Virginia. Some say that while Vance was a fugitive, he visited the Tug Fork Valley and staked claim to several thousand acres there, later dividing the land among his children.26 Eventually, Vance’s conscience got the better of him, and he returned to Abingdon, hoping his crime had been forgotten or at least forgiven. Unfortunately, it hadn’t been.
Abner Vance was convicted of the murder of Dr. Horton and was sentenced to death. While awaiting execution in jail, he composed a long song about his plight, including accusations of false testimony against several witnesses in his trial. He had saved the life of one of his jurors by insisting on the juror’s innocence in a previous trial, yet this juror had worked for Vance’s conviction. At his hanging in 1800, Abner stood on his coffin and sang this song (see appendix). Then he preached a sermon for an hour and a half. Hatfield family legend maintains that Governor James Monroe, later president of the nation, sent a pardon that arrived just after the hanging. The officials held camphor beneath Abner Vance’s nostrils to try to revive him—without success.27
This story haunted Devil Anse throughout his life and influenced some of his more unfortunate decisions during the feud. The lesson for him may well have been that when the government gets involved, injustice occurs, and that a man should seek his own justice, unaided and unhindered by legal institutions. As with the Native captivity narratives, the underlying message spoke to the need for total self-reliance in a dangerous and unpredictable world.
At the start of the Civil War, Devil Anse Hatfield married Levicy Chafin. They raised their thirteen subsequent children on the Tug Fork in West Virginia. One writer said of the Hatfields, “An enemy . . . might as well kick over a bee-gum in warm weather, and expect to escape the sting of the insect, as to tramp on the toes of one of these spirited, tall sons of the mountains, and not expect to be knocked down.”28
From the beginning of European settlement in the region, parents had divided their land among their adult children to provide each of them with farms on which to raise families of their own. Big Eph Hatfield gave land to five of his sons but none to Devil Anse. He also willed the land on which Devil Anse had already built a cabin to Devil Anse’s younger brother Ellison.
Devil Anse, for his part, didn’t observe the tradition of naming his first-born son after his father. In fact, he named none of his nine sons after his father, suggesting a rift between them.29 This rift must have predated the birth of Devil Anse’s first son (named Johnson instead of Ephraim) in 1862, even though the will that excluded Devil Anse wasn’t written until 1866. Alike in their physical prowess and courage, perhaps they felt competitive with one another. Or perhaps Big Eph, widely respected for being calm and fair, detected a ruthless streak in his second-born son, of which he disapproved. Hatfield family tradition maintains that Devil Anse’s mother, Nancy Vance, worried about him constantly, though no specific reason is ever given.30
A newspaper reporter writing toward the end of the feud said that Devil Anse Hatfield resembled Stonewall Jackson: “He has a powerful frame and is broad-shouldered and deep-chested, but with that curve to his shoulders that goes with all the mountain types that I have seen in this neighborhood. . . . [He] has not a gray line in the brown of his thick hair, mustache, and beard. He has a pair of gray eyes set under the deepest of bushy eyebrows. His nose is such an enormous hook as to suggest the lines of a Turkish scimetar [sic].” This reporter described him as wearing a brown coat, black hat, blue shirt, and blue jeans tucked into tall boots, with a revolver at his hip and a rifle in his hand.31 He was said to have a “high-pitched, nasal voice,” in which he often told tall tales and jokes.32
A master of public relations after the feud caught the attention of the outside world, Devil Anse Hatfield knew when to appear as a law-abiding citizen of West Virginia, dressed in a suit and tie, and when to appear as a mountain desperado. (See photo on page 200.) Courtesy of West Virginia State Archives
A photograph of Devil Anse Hatfield taken during the feud years shows him wearing a tie, suspenders, an unbuttoned vest, and a suit jacket with a pin on the lapel. His curly beard hangs partway down his chest, and he wears a peaked hat with a brim. He is frowning slightly, and his eyes look anxious. For all his bluster, Devil Anse often appears wary in his photos. Presumably, a truly self-confident man wouldn’t need to drape himself with guns and cartridge belts as Devil Anse often did. But then again, a man’s reputation for violence at that time often protected his family and homestead from harm.
In photos, Devil Anse’s wife, Levicy Chafin, is a solidly built woman, with her gray hair drawn back into a bun. Her steady gaze through dark eyes appears solemn and not unkind. A reporter said she was the “strongest and most muscular-looking woman I have ever seen [with] intensely black hair, a very broad swarthy face, and a stout, powerful figure.”33
This same reporter claimed that all the wives and daughters of the feudists were “passive spectators” and “faithful slaves.”34 It is indeed hard to view them as anything other than enablers. Many look older than their actual years because of the great toll the physical demands of their lives took on them. They were constantly pregnant or nursing. Some gave birth yearly, most at least every two or three years. They did all the housework—cleaning, cooking, preserving, sewing, spinning, weaving, and carrying firewood and water. Often they performed the farm work as well while their husbands and sons ran around creating havoc and hiding from their enemies. Judging from the huge numbers of children they bore, the women apparently never employed against their husbands their only available weapon: the withholding of sex.
Imagine butchering a hog while pregnant, and you have a picture of what their lives were like. Then imagine watching your husband and children murdered right in front of you and your house burned down around you on a cold winter night. Yet the wives of the feudists continued to conceive children every year or two, and some of these sons grew up to continue the killing.
William McCoy arrived in Pike County, Kentucky, from southwestern Virginia in 1804, and one of his thirteen children, Daniel, moved across the Tug Fork to what became West Virginia. Daniel raised his thirteen children there with his wife, Margaret “Peggy” Taylor, who was sixteen when they married. Their third son, Randolph “Ranel,” born on October 30, 1825, became the McCoy feud leader.35
We know much less about Ranel McCoy’s upbringing than about that of Devil Anse because Ranel’s descendants didn’t leave behind appreciative stories concerning him. Possib
ly he wasn’t memorable, or perhaps so many of his children died in the feud that the few left to tell the tale were just trying to forget the multiple tragedies that had blighted their family.
But reading between the lines of a deposition that Ranel McCoy’s mother, Peggy, filed when divorcing Daniel McCoy following the Civil War gives the impression that Ranel grew up in an unhappy household. Peggy McCoy spoke of the insults and neglect she had suffered, complaining that Daniel was lazy and pleaded illness to avoid the farm tasks expected of a husband, such as planting and harvesting, clearing land, and splitting fence rails. Peggy had to work late each night spinning, weaving, and sewing, both to clothe her family and also to make extra cloth for sale in order to purchase the necessities they lacked and to hire help for the jobs that Daniel refused to do. Peggy also raised livestock for sale so that they could purchase much-needed land.36
When Ranel McCoy grew up, he married his first cousin Sarah McCoy, who already had a baby daughter. (Whether it was his remains unknown.) They moved back across the Tug Fork to the Blackberry Fork of Pond Creek in Kentucky. There they raised their sixteen children among their many McCoy cousins and among the many Kentucky Hatfields as well.
Daniel McCoy, like Big Eph Hatfield in his treatment of Devil Anse, also proved the exception to valley tradition by not giving any of his land to any of his children.37 Only one of his thirteen children named a son after him. Ranel McCoy acquired his Kentucky farm through Sarah’s father, who was of course also Ranel’s uncle. Ranel’s younger brother Harmon McCoy received his farm on Peter Creek from his wife’s father, Rich Jake Cline, who owned several thousand acres on both sides of the Tug Fork.38 But the brothers of Ranel and Harmon who remained in the Tug Fork Valley were landless, a considerable comedown for descendants of one of the original pioneering families in the region.39
