Blood Feud

by Lisa Alther

  They crowded into Preacher Anse Hatfield’s cabin, sitting on his furniture and his bedsteads and on the steps up to his loft. Men squatted on their haunches along the inside walls and in the yard. From the long front porch, people looked in through open windows. The hog lay in the middle of the room, feet bound, eyes puzzled. Some say there were no marks on the hog’s ears,6 others that Ranel’s marks were obvious,7 still others that the marks were so damaged by the hog’s rooting and rutting that they couldn’t be identified.8

  Preacher Anse Hatfield was anxious. He wanted, above all, to avert trouble. Trouble was what he would get if he himself rendered a decision about the rightful owner of this hog. But he hadn’t been able to persuade anyone else to join a jury. If Ranel McCoy won the hog, the Hatfields might punish the jurors. If Floyd Hatfield won the hog, the McCoys might do the same. Tug Forkers respected the law enough to submit to hearings and trials, but if a legal decision went against them, they sometimes administered their own personal justice. Preacher Anse had decided to copy Solomon’s example: He would appoint a jury of six Hatfields and six McCoys. Each man would vote with his own family, resulting in a hung jury. Then he could dismiss the case with everyone’s pride intact.

  Preacher Anse first insisted that every man stack his guns, pistols, and knives in the front corner of the room, where no one could easily get at them. Then he announced his plan and picked his jury members, who sat down on benches along one wall.

  One by one, Preacher Anse invited his witnesses to sit in a cane-bottomed chair and to tell him and the jury what they knew about the hog in question. To no one’s surprise, every McCoy witness claimed the hog belonged to Ranel, and every Hatfield witness claimed it belonged to Floyd.

  But then came Bill Staton. A large, powerful man with a swashbuckling manner, Bill Staton was the son of Nancy McCoy Staton, Ranel McCoy’s first cousin. But Staton’s sister Esther was married to Floyd Hatfield, and Staton’s sister Sarah was married to Ellison Hatfield, Devil Anse Hatfield’s younger brother. Not only were Floyd and Ellison Bill Staton’s brothers-in-law, they were also his best friends. Staton himself lived in West Virginia not far from the various Hatfield households.9 Like many in the audience, Staton had conflicting loyalties. But he testified that he had watched Floyd Hatfield brand the hog with his own mark and that she belonged to him.

  Rumor credited Staton with a grudge against Ranel McCoy’s family because several of McCoy’s rambunctious sons had shot and broken some fishing poles that Staton had planted on the riverbank.10 Following Staton’s testimony, Paris McCoy, Ranel’s nephew, called Staton a “damned liar.”11

  Some say the jurors moved to another room to render their verdict.12 Others maintain that the jurors had to declare themselves on the spot in front of the assembled crowd.13 But all report that one McCoy juror, Selkirk McCoy, voted with the Hatfields against Ranel McCoy, stating that Ranel had presented no evidence to disprove Bill Staton’s testimony.

  Another person with divided loyalties, Selkirk McCoy was a son of Ranel’s first cousin and a nephew of Ranel’s wife, Sarah. But he had fought under Devil Anse in the Civil War, and he and his two sons were working on Devil Anse’s timber crew in West Virginia. Some privately questioned Preacher Anse’s claim to have selected a jury equally divided in its loyalties between the Hatfields and the McCoys.14 With such a Gordian Knot of entangled relationships and alliances, though, how could he have? That said, in the years before the trial, Selkirk McCoy owned no land and lived in Kentucky. In the years after the trial, he lived on 120 acres in West Virginia next door to Devil Anse’s brother Ellison.15 Quite a coincidence of fortune.

  As one of Devil Anse Hatfield’s descendants suggested years later, the entire feud could have been avoided if only Floyd Hatfield had barbecued that wretched hog and invited everyone to supper.16 Instead, the cauldron of McCoy bile, simmering since Harmon McCoy’s death and Perry Cline’s land loss, began to boil in earnest. Ranel McCoy nursed his hard feelings, grumbling and complaining, but he avoided retaliation. A good Christian woman, his wife, Sarah, urged him to accept his lot in life and forgive those who had wronged him.17

  Ranel McCoy was also a religious man, so he no doubt struggled to accept his wife’s counsel to turn the other cheek. Truda McCoy says of him that “he had a standard of right and wrong—a code that he lived by. He believed in God and the Devil. No man in his right mind could doubt the Devil—not after he had lived as close to the Hatfields as he had.”18

  Some of Ranel McCoy’s sons and nephews, however, refused to forgive and forget. They insulted and sparred with both Bill Staton and Selkirk McCoy. One day when Staton and his brother were poling a boat upstream along the Tug Fork, another boat passed them, headed downstream, piloted by Calvin and Floyd McCoy. Quiet and reserved, Floyd McCoy, Ranel’s second son, had no gift for fighting. One researcher says that his enemies regarded him as “chicken-hearted.”19 He did his best to remain in the shadows whenever feud violence flared.

  A studious young man, Calvin McCoy, Ranel’s sixth son, was so in love with learning that he supposedly repeated the eighth grade three times, constantly borrowing books from his teachers to read at home. One teacher praised his speaking ability and predicted that he would become a politician one day. But he lived in the wrong place at the wrong time to nurture such ambitions to fruition.20

  Both boats pulled ashore on opposite banks of the river, and the two groups shot at each other until dark. Then they went home for supper.21

  One autumn day soon after this skirmish, Squirrel Hunting Sam McCoy, Ranel’s nephew, came across Bill Staton and Ellison Hatfield as they hunted deer on a creek near their West Virginia homes. Squirrel Hunting Sam, obviously, loved to hunt squirrels. Some days he started on a mountain ridge and followed it twenty-five miles into Pikeville, slaughtering squirrels all along the way. His record was one hundred in one day. He usually donated the dead squirrels for church suppers.22 His relatives reportedly found him “queer”—pronounced “quair” in the mountains, meaning strange.23

  A tall, strong, handsome Confederate war hero, Ellison Hatfield was rumored to have fought at Gettysburg. Here he wears his Confederate uniform while showcasing a pistol. Courtesy of West Virginia State Archives

  When Squirrel Hunting Sam spotted Bill Staton in the woods that day, he bristled like a junkyard dog. Taking careful aim, he shot Staton’s gun out of his hand. Then he hurled down his own gun, raced over to Staton, and tackled him. Ellison Hatfield pulled Sam off his friend. As he pushed Sam away from Staton, he insisted that the Hog Trial had been fair and needed to be forgotten.24

  A tall, strong, handsome Confederate war hero, Ellison Hatfield was rumored to have fought at Gettysburg.25 A photograph shows him buttoned up in his Confederate uniform, fondling his pistol.26 He displays the calm self-assurance of people who know they are attractive and have enjoyed many advantages because of it. In contrast to his glamorous younger brother, Devil Anse Hatfield resembled a worried troll.

  Ellison was “noted throughout the county as being a peacemaker.”27 He was married to Bill Staton’s sister, and they had nine children. He and his family attended a Baptist church on the West Virginia side of the Tug Fork. Had he not been killed soon after this incident, he might have been able to avert some of the senseless violence that followed his death. Then again, had he not been killed, a motive for much of the senseless violence wouldn’t have existed in the first place.

  On June 18, 1880,28 after enduring two years of insults and threats over his testimony in the Hog Trial, Bill Staton ambushed Squirrel Hunting Sam McCoy and his brother Paris as they were hunting atop a mountain ridge. Staton shot Paris in the shoulder while aiming for his heart. Squirrel Hunting Sam grabbed Staton’s gun and tossed it aside. Staton and Sam grappled along the ridgetop, trampling small bushes underfoot. Finally Staton got a death grip on Sam’s throat. He struggled to push Sam’s head far enough backward to
break his neck. Before blacking out, Squirrel Hunting Sam managed to pull his pistol from his holster and shoot Bill Staton dead.

  Or at least this is Truda McCoy’s version of Bill Staton’s murder.29 Coleman A. Hatfield, in contrast, tells a different story. He maintains that Staton was riding down a road in West Virginia, minding his own business—though possibly looking for trouble. Paris and Squirrel Hunting Sam McCoy, working as farm laborers, were hoeing corn in a nearby field. They spotted Bill Staton. Throwing down their hoes, they raced across the field. Sam grabbed the horse’s bridle, and Paris wrenched Staton from his saddle. Then Sam shot Staton point-blank.30

  Another version of this story maintains that Bill Staton was fighting Paris McCoy when he sank his teeth into Paris’s jugular vein. Squirrel Hunting Sam then shot Staton to save Paris’s life. This same macabre account claims that rigor mortis set in, and Staton’s jaws had to be pried from Paris’s throat after his death.31

  Almost every incident in this feud has several conflicting versions that blame different participants, depending upon whether its source supported the Hatfields or the McCoys. But which conveys what really happened? No one can possibly know except the participants themselves, and they are all long dead, the truth buried with them.

  Valentine “Wall” Hatfield, Devil Anse’s older brother, was a justice of the peace for the Magnolia District of West Virginia, in which the murder occurred. He issued warrants for the arrests of Squirrel Hunting Sam and Paris McCoy. Paris was apprehended a month later, Sam two years after that. Several McCoy relatives testified against the McCoy brothers in their trials, as did Ellison Hatfield, whose wife was Bill Staton’s sister. But both Sam and Paris were acquitted on grounds of self-defense.32 Ranel McCoy was furious that they had been brought to trial in the first place and was equally furious with Ellison Hatfield for testifying against them.

  Oral tradition assigns Devil Anse Hatfield the role of peacemaker in arranging the acquittals of Sam and Paris. It’s said that he hoped this reprieve would calm the tensions mounting between the two families.33 He was also preoccupied with problems of his own concerning his new timber enterprise on Perry Cline’s former land.

  But an episode had taken place by the time of Paris McCoy’s trial in the fall of 1880 that had already escalated those tensions.

  5

  MONTAGUES AND CAPULETS OF THE CUMBERLANDS

  The men, dressed in their Sunday best, rode down to the polling places from their mountain farms to race and swap horses, to buy and sell votes, to strut and flirt with the unattached women, to dance to fiddles and banjos, to drink moonshine, and to fight. Officials sat at tables to record the votes, spoken for all to hear.1

  The women couldn’t vote, but they came to Election Days anyway in their best calico dresses, sunbonnets with dangling sashes, and soft woolen shawls dyed in the muted colors extracted from plants and nuts gathered in the mountain forests. They brought and served food, and shared in the merriment with neighbors they seldom saw. Some baked and sold ginger cookies to make pocket money or to signal their support for various candidates. They vied with one another over who had the best recipe and could sell the most cookies.2 It was the closest they could get to suffrage at that time.

  Huge beech trees across a creek from Preacher Anse’s cabin, where the Hog Trial had taken place, shadowed Election Day for the Blackberry District of Kentucky in early August 1880. Ranel McCoy’s family traveled over the ridge from their farm in the next valley, the women riding behind the men and boys on their horses. Devil Anse, his sons Johnse and Cap, and various other Hatfields rode across the Tug Fork from their West Virginia homes, as they often did on Blackberry District Election Days, outraging the Kentucky women by eating everyone’s ginger cookies, rather than just those from the baskets of candidates they favored.3

  In this photograph believed to have been taken in Pikeville, Kentucky, after her romance with Johnse Hatfield and the death of their daughter, Roseanna McCoy’s dark, mournful eyes betray her suffering. Courtesy of West Virginia State Archives

  Sometimes the Hatfields tried to buy votes with their moonshine, even though they themselves couldn’t vote in Kentucky.****** Some Blackberry District citizens looked on such behavior with annoyance, and there were numerous outstanding warrants against Hatfield supporters regarding concealed weapons, illegal liquor, and civic disturbances. Pike County officials abstained from serving them, however, so the heavily armed Hatfield bands traveled the county with impunity.4

  This particular Election Day of 1880, Johnse Hatfield, Devil Anse’s oldest son, took one look at Roseanna McCoy, Ranel’s fourth daughter, and lost his mind. Roseanna, then twenty-one years old, has been described by those who knew her as “tall and slender with a beautiful, proportioned body. She had a fair complexion that . . . tanned to a pale golden hue during the summer months. . . . The most noticeable of all was her hair, red-brown, abundant and wavy. . . . The sun turned her hair to a burnished gold.”5 In one photo, she is quite beautiful, with a sensual mouth, though her dark eyes look haunted.6 By the time of that photo, however, she had already endured the multiple tragedies that resulted from loving the unreliable Johnse Hatfield too much.

  Johnse, for his part, was a fair-haired, ruddy-cheeked, blue-eyed eighteen-year-old rake, known for his natty wardrobe and his ways with young women—many young women. He was “tall, broad-shouldered, with a dark complexion set off by a black mustache and a slight beard,” with a “dare-devil look” about him.7 In one photo, he displays the glazed gaze of a hard-core alcoholic. In another, his face resembles the death’s head often found on the tombstones of New England Puritans. The day he first met Roseanna McCoy, he was wearing yellow boots, a store-bought suit, and a celluloid collar.8 Who could resist?

  Ranel McCoy, noticing the two talking, called Roseanna to him and explained that Johnse was a Hatfield and needed to be avoided. Roseanna waited until her father was no longer watching and vanished into the woods with Johnse. What happened between them in the cool of the forest no one knows—but most can well imagine.

  When Roseanna and Johnse returned to the election grounds near nightfall, the McCoys had already gone home. Terrified of her father’s wrath, Roseanna agreed to cross the Tug Fork to Devil Anse’s house with Johnse, who claimed he wanted to marry her. She stayed for a few months. When she left, she was still single, but pregnant.

  Accounts of Roseanna’s reasons for leaving Johnse Hatfield vary. Some say Devil Anse refused to let Johnse marry her in hopes of humiliating Ranel McCoy or because he didn’t want his blood mixed with that of his enemy, despite the many other Hatfield and McCoy lines that had already cross-pollinated.9 Others say that Ranel sent some of Roseanna’s sisters,10 or a Kentucky Hatfield whose mother was a McCoy,11 to persuade Roseanna to quit Devil Anse’s household and that she finally agreed. Some say Ranel threatened violence against her Hatfield hosts if she didn’t leave.12 Yet others say that she finally grew sick of Johnse’s womanizing, the targets of which included her cousins Mary Stafford and Nancy McCoy.13

  Whatever the case, in Appalachia at that time, preachers were scarce and contraception even scarcer. Many couples lived together without benefit of clergy, and young women frequently gave birth to babies out of wedlock. Hence the need for the term woods-colt. Often women were pregnant when they married, as was regularly the case in Europe for centuries. Some had a child or children from their future husbands or from other fathers, as Sarah McCoy did. Current DNA testing is uncovering many examples of this folkway. Stringent Victorian morality had not yet invaded the Southern mountains. However socially permissible extramarital births may have been at that time, abandoning a woman once she was pregnant without some type of compensation was not highly regarded. In this case, though, Roseanna had left Johnse.

  When Roseanna McCoy returned home, she received such a frigid welcome from her father that she soon moved to her Aunt Betty’s ho
use in Stringtown, on the Kentucky bank of the Tug Fork. Her Aunt Betty’s house was also a much better location for secret trysts with Johnse, should he decide to cross the river from his father’s house in West Virginia. The widow of Sarah McCoy’s brother, Betty McCoy was extremely religious, but kindhearted and nonjudgmental. She welcomed the pregnant young woman into her home.14

  In Truda McCoy’s version, the romance assumes Shakespearean proportions. She recounts many intense private conversations between the two lovers, in pitch-perfect dialect. They may have been based on hearsay or speculation, but Truda’s primary source was Martha McCoy, wife of one of Ranel’s sons, who had been close to Roseanna and had no doubt heard verbatim accounts of her intimate conversations with Johnse.

  Johnse Hatfield, already a master moonshiner at age eighteen, had taken heavily to drink in his grief over losing Roseanna. He sneaked across the Tug Fork to visit her at her aunt’s house, only then learning of her pregnancy. Insisting he would take her away and finally marry her, they agreed to meet later in the woods to finalize their plan.15

  Ranel McCoy, learning that Johnse Hatfield had been spotted in the neighborhood, sent some of his sons to spy on Roseanna and to inform him when Johnse turned up. Tolbert, Ranel’s third son, got himself deputized and, with the help of his younger brother Bud, arrested Johnse for carrying a concealed weapon during a visit to Roseanna—clearly a fabricated charge since most men, young and old, in the Tug Fork Valley carried guns and knives for hunting and for protection.16