Blood Feud

by Lisa Alther

  As Tolbert and Bud McCoy led Johnse Hatfield off to the Pikeville jail, Roseanna became convinced that they would kill him during the twenty-five-mile journey. Without even grabbing a coat, she ran to a neighbor’s field and tore a strip of cloth from her petticoat with which to fashion a hackamore halter for one of his horses. Although several months pregnant, she scrambled bareback onto the horse and guided it along a rutted sledge road that wound up to a high ridge and then plummeted down to the Tug Fork.17 When she left the path to take a shortcut, briars slashed her arms and legs, and locust thorns ripped her dress. Her horse picked its way along the slippery rock shelves that floored the ford across the Tug Fork. It was autumn, so the water would have been dangerously high and cold, and the current swift.

  Reaching the farther shore, Roseanna rode through cornfields that stretched along the bottomland until she arrived at Elias Hatfield’s house, where a “working” was under way. Many Hatfields, including Devil Anse, had gathered there to help Elias with farm projects. Roseanna warned Devil Anse that her brothers had arrested Johnse and might kill him.

  As the Hatfield women tended Roseanna’s lacerations and tried to feed and warm the distraught young woman, Devil Anse, his brother Ellison, his uncle Jim Vance, and several others saddled up. Devil Anse’s brother Good Elias Hatfield tried to stay home. “Peace between the clans was the desire of this swarthy and more serious-minded member of the family,” says one researcher. But Devil Anse barked at him, “Come with me, or you are no Hatfield.” Good Elias grabbed his rifle and mounted his horse, however unenthusiastically.18

  The Hatfield posse crossed the Tug Fork and accosted Tolbert and Bud McCoy and their prisoner, Johnse Hatfield, on a mountain trail en route to the Pikeville jail. They took the McCoy sons’ guns away, freed Johnse, and cursed and ridiculed his former captors.

  According to one account, this McCoy posse included Ranel and his sons Jim and Pharmer, as well as Tolbert and Bud. Devil Anse Hatfield demanded that they kneel, say their prayers, and beg for mercy. All promptly did so except for Jim McCoy, who remained standing and challenged the Hatfields to kill him.19 Impressed by his courage, Devil Anse decided not to kill any of the McCoys. Coleman C. Hatfield claims that this anecdote is “an entertaining fiction”—though it’s hard to imagine who would find this rather sadistic episode entertaining.20

  Jim McCoy, Ranel’s oldest son, was perhaps the most impressive McCoy feudist. One researcher says that Jim, “a slim man in his early thirties, was the most likeable of the group, even to the opposing clan. He was married, cool-headed, a hard worker, and steady in his actions, and he did more to placate than to antagonize.”21 Devil Anse Hatfield’s grandson refers to Jim McCoy as “the most respected leader of his family.”22 A photo of him in his later years shows a calm, stern, pleasant-looking man with wire-frame glasses, a shirt buttoned to the throat, and a suit jacket.

  Like all of Ranel McCoy’s sons, Jim owned no land and had to farm on other people’s property, humiliating in an agrarian community, particularly since his father and grandfather had owned their own land. Ranel McCoy had nine sons, but only the three hundred acres he had inherited from his wife’s father, on which he, his wife, and his unmarried children were still living. So Ranel, like his father, Daniel, before him, gave no land to any of his married sons to help them get a start in life. They all had to work as sharecroppers or laborers on other people’s farms.23

  Jim McCoy and his brothers were what you might call downwardly mobile, which may partially explain the frustration and fury of his more volatile brothers, Tolbert, Pharmer, Bud, and Bill. They had few prospects for the future and saw no way to improve upon their situation. Jim did his best to restrain his brothers’ fury during tense situations, playing the same placating role among the McCoys that Ellison played among the Hatfields. He seems to have participated in the feud out of loyalty to his family, but he appears to have wished to be almost anywhere else. While Roseanna was riding to West Virginia to warn Devil Anse Hatfield that her brothers might kill Johnse, Jim McCoy, if of course he was actually on this mission, was reported to have assured Johnse that he was under the protection of the law and that no harm would come to him.24 But as one researcher says, “Descriptions of the rescue, like other events of the feud, vary so greatly that there is no way of determining exactly what happened.”25

  Tolbert McCoy was so outraged by whatever occurred on that mountain path with the Hatfield posse that he rushed to a justice of the peace and obtained warrants for the arrest of Devil Anse Hatfield and all the others who had rescued Johnse. Three months later, reluctant feudist Good Elias Hatfield and his cousin Floyd Hatfield of Hog Trial fame were arrested and incarcerated. A Kentucky Hatfield bailed them out, and some McCoys testified in their defense. The charges were dropped, further humiliating the enraged Tolbert.26

  Meanwhile, Roseanna McCoy’s warning to Devil Anse Hatfield about Johnse’s arrest—which could easily have resulted in the deaths of whichever male relatives were Johnse’s captors—estranged her even more from her family and neighbors. Especially cold and unforgiving, her father was disgusted by her liaison with Johnse Hatfield, her efforts to save him at the expense of her own brothers, and her pregnancy.27

  In the spring of 1881, aided by her aunt Betty, Roseanna McCoy gave birth to a daughter, Sarah Elizabeth.28 Johnse Hatfield was nowhere to be seen. It was said that Roseanna’s father and brothers had threatened him with death if he came sniffing around again—but he was also otherwise engaged: drinking too much moonshine and courting Roseanna’s cousin Nancy McCoy, who was sixteen.29

  “Tall and lithe with a strange dark beauty all her own,” Nancy McCoy had black hair so long that she could reportedly sit on it.30 Many young women in the mountains married by age sixteen, and some as young as fourteen. But Nancy was still a schoolgirl, and Johnse Hatfield was courting her by giving her rides to the schoolhouse on the back of his horse.31 It was Nancy with whom Patty Cline McCoy had been pregnant when she discovered Harmon’s bullet-riddled body in the forest and dragged him home through the snow. Bad Jim Vance, Harmon’s purported murderer, was Johnse Hatfield’s great-uncle. Patty opposed her daughter’s romance with Johnse for this reason.32 Johnse’s father, Devil Anse, had also recently taken five thousand acres of Patty’s father’s land from her brother Perry Cline.

  But the horseback courtship succeeded, and the couple married on May 14, 1881, despite the objections of Nancy’s mother.

  The winter after Johnse Hatfield’s marriage to Nancy McCoy, his woods-colt daughter with Roseanna McCoy, Sarah Elizabeth, died of measles and pneumonia. Roseanna mourned for hours every day beside the child’s grave on a pine-treed hillside behind Aunt Betty’s house. When Roseanna’s sister Alifair contracted typhoid, Sarah McCoy finally persuaded Roseanna to come home and nurse her ailing sibling. After Alifair’s recovery, Roseanna moved to Pikeville to nurse another child with typhoid, this one belonging to Perry Cline, whose niece Nancy McCoy had just married Johnse Hatfield. Roseanna remained with the Clines to help them care for their six children.33 It must have been difficult for her to accept the role of spinster aunt after the passion she had so recently experienced with Johnse.

  Truda McCoy reports a dramatic, perhaps dramatized, episode recorded by no one else in which Johnse Hatfield comes to the Cline house in Pikeville and begs Roseanna McCoy to marry him, which she refuses to do.34 This scenario seems unlikely since Johnse was presumably married to Roseanna’s cousin Nancy by this time, but who knows? A well-known womanizer, Johnse may have continued to pursue Roseanna while he was married to Nancy, just as he had pursued Nancy when Roseanna was living with him and his family. He could never get enough, of alcohol or of women. Truda McCoy calls him a “chronic lover.”35

  Truda McCoy also reports that, before his marriage to Nancy McCoy, Johnse Hatfield had assuaged his grief over the loss of Roseanna in the arms of Belle Beaver of Happy Hollow, West Virginia. Belle had previ
ously been tarred and feathered and ridden out of a North Carolina town on a rail by obedient husbands of jealous wives. The upright wives of the Tug Fork Valley also insisted that their menfolk get rid of her. So some men bound her hands, tied the skirt of her dress over her head in a knot, and suspended her—naked from the chest down—from the rafters of her shack by a rope under her armpits. When someone finally freed her twenty-four hours later, she announced that she had decided to leave Happy Hollow.36

  Some researchers downplay the significance of the romance between Roseanna McCoy and Johnse Hatfield as a cause for the brutal, bloody feud violence that followed.37 Coleman C. Hatfield maintains that their blighted romance played little part in the course of the feud—until the tabloids got hold of it at the end and turned it into a hillbilly Romeo and Juliet to titillate their prim Victorian readers in Northern cities.

  Roseanna may have behaved like Juliet, but Johnse was no Romeo, with or without his yellow boots and celluloid collar.

  ****** Vote buying with liquor and money was still in force when I was growing up in Appalachia in the 1950s.

  6

  PAWPAW MURDERS

  The tragedy that ensnared Roseanna McCoy when she met Johnse Hatfield at the 1880 Election Day didn’t teach the McCoys to avoid the polls. On Monday, August 7, 1882,1 they traveled across their ridge and down to the polling grounds under the beech trees for an Election Day even more lethal than the last.2

  Meanwhile, Good Elias and Ellison Hatfield rode their horses across the Tug Fork to join the festivities and to support a kinsman running for office.3 By afternoon most of the men in attendance were drunk and napping in the shade of the beech trees when the handsome war hero Ellison Hatfield got into a scuffle with three of Ranel’s more obstreperous sons, Tolbert, Pharmer, and Bud.

  Tolbert McCoy was twenty-eight years old and, like his brothers, owned no land. He and his new wife lived with another family, for whom Tolbert worked as a farm laborer. One writer describes him as “a handsome man with a beard like General Winfield Scott Hancock of Civil War fame.”4 Another researcher observes that “Tolbert would fight at the slightest provocation, especially after downing a few drinks.”5

  Tolbert McCoy must still have felt chagrined by the Hatfields’ rescue of Johnse Hatfield following Roseanna’s bareback ride across the river to warn Devil Anse. If Devil Anse really had ordered Tolbert to kneel, and he had done so while his older brother Jim then refused and remained standing, Tolbert’s sense of humiliation would have doubled. When his own McCoy relatives testified in defense of Good Elias and Floyd Hatfield after Tolbert had arranged to have those two arrested for their role in freeing Johnse, his humiliation would have been complete.6

  Ranel McCoy was said to be gunning for Ellison Hatfield that day because of Ellison’s testimony against Paris and Squirrel Hunting Sam McCoy, nephews of Ranel, in their trials for the murder of Bill Staton two years earlier.7 Perhaps Ranel was also still angry about Devil Anse’s appropriation of Perry Cline’s land; about the loss of what Ranel claimed were his hogs to Floyd Hatfield; about Devil Anse’s supposed refusal to let his son Johnse marry Roseanna; and about Johnse’s subsequent marriage to his niece Nancy McCoy, the daughter of his murdered brother, Harmon. It was a significant collection of aggrievements, and he had no doubt been filling his sons’ ears with recitatives concerning all these Hatfield transgressions and more.

  The three McCoy sons, Tolbert, Pharmer, and Bud, already liquored up, came racing up on their horses, shouting. Ellison Hatfield was wearing a large straw hat, which he jokingly offered as feed for their horses. Tolbert, sporting his luxuriant beard, leapt off his horse.

  “I’m hell on earth!” he announced.

  “You’re a damned shithog,” replied Ellison—shithogs being those that fed on undigested grain from manure in the roads, as opposed to the more noble hogs that fed on chestnuts high up the mountainsides.8

  Enraged, Tolbert McCoy slashed Ellison Hatfield with his knife. Bud McCoy joined in with his pocketknife, and then Pharmer McCoy shot Ellison in the back.9 Some claim that Ranel McCoy was holding a piece of fence post with which he intended to wallop Ellison once he was down, but that the crowd restrained him.10 But this is an account of Ellison’s murder, as told by his great-nephew, Coleman A. Hatfield.11 Truda McCoy insists that Ranel wasn’t even present at this fight.12

  Truda McCoy’s version has Tolbert buck dancing to a banjo on a platform for a long time. He was evidently widely admired for his clogging, if for nothing else. Black Elias Hatfield, Preacher Anse Hatfield’s brother, an ornery fellow with a drinking problem,13 joined Tolbert. Black Elias, said to have a swarthy complexion, outweighed Tolbert by twenty pounds.14 Tolbert was a head taller, with a fair complexion and light brown hair. Tolbert repeatedly accused Black Elias of owing him money for a fiddle.15 Black Elias repeatedly insisted that he had already paid this debt. Eventually Black Elias slugged Tolbert in the chin to shut him up. They began to fight, and Tolbert knocked Black Elias out.

  Annoyed to see his cousin defeated (or possibly trying to break up the fight),16 Ellison Hatfield took to the dance floor. One researcher speculates what might have been going through Tolbert McCoy’s liquor-benumbed brain at this point: “Ellison was everything Tolbert was not: a large, physically strong man; a war hero; a respected officer of the law in Logan County; a landholder; and, most important, Devil Anse Hatfield’s brother. All the stories drummed into Tolbert by Ole Ranel must, at that moment, have congealed into an irrational fury. The Hatfields cheated and lied but they were successful, feared, respected and admired. Tolbert was going to give them what they deserved.”17

  So Tolbert McCoy taunted Ellison Hatfield by calling him “a cross between a gorilla and a polecat.”18 Tolbert and Ellison started fighting as though their lives depended on the outcome—which, as it turned out, they did. Tolbert was exhausted from buck dancing and his struggle with Black Elias, and Ellison, carrying two hundred pounds of well-positioned muscle, was taller and larger than Tolbert. Tolbert and his brothers, however, were carrying knives.

  Ellison Hatfield began to force Tolbert McCoy’s head backward, trying to break his neck, in a ploy not uncommon in frontier fighting, during which noses and ears were sometimes bitten off and eyes gouged out. Tolbert reached for the knife in his belt and stabbed Ellison in the stomach several times. Tolbert’s brother Bill also started slashing at Ellison with his pocketknife.19

  Ellison Hatfield, his shirt soaked in blood, threw Tolbert McCoy to the ground and reached for a rock with which to bash his head. Someone in the crowd tossed a pistol to Pharmer McCoy, who shot Ellison, saving Tolbert’s life—for the time being.

  Reluctant feudist Good Elias Hatfield (not to be confused with his cousin Black Elias Hatfield, the fiddle debtor presumably still lying unconscious on the dance floor), who had tried to stay home when Devil Anse organized the posse to rescue Johnse from his McCoy captors, forced the pistol from Pharmer McCoy’s hand. Then he tried to shoot Pharmer with it but missed, making him an incompetent feudist as well as a reluctant one. The McCoy sons raced for the woods but soon returned to face their fate.20

  Good Elias Hatfield had his severely wounded brother Ellison placed on a stretcher fashioned from two saplings and a blanket and carried to a friend’s house near the river. He also sent messengers to his brothers Devil Anse and Wall in West Virginia to inform them of the situation.

  Preacher Anse Hatfield, a justice of the peace for Blackberry District, ordered local constables Tolbert Hatfield and Joseph Hatfield to escort the three McCoy brothers to the Pikeville jail some twenty-five miles distant.21 Although the constables were themselves Hatfields, they were Kentucky Hatfields, normally sympathetic to the McCoys, several later testifying on their behalf in the trials that ended the feud. Some were also related to the McCoys through their mothers.

  Preacher Anse Hatfield warned the McCoys that they needed to get
to the Pikeville jail quickly, lest the West Virginia Hatfields cross the river and take vigilante revenge on them. Ranel McCoy and his son Bill replied that the McCoys were fighters, too, and had “plenty old axes ’n’ things to fight with.”22 Ranel mounted his horse and rode ahead to Pikeville to hire a lawyer for his sons’ defense.23

  Apparently not feeling Preacher Anse Hatfield’s urgency, the Hatfield constables and their prisoners stopped en route to the jail to eat supper and spend the night. In any case, it would have been dangerous to travel the twisting mountain paths in the dark. Sarah McCoy arrived to comfort her captive sons, but they shrugged off her concerns.24 She and Tolbert’s wife stayed overnight with the insouciant young prisoners.25

  The next morning, Devil Anse Hatfield arrived at the house where his mortally wounded younger brother Ellison was being cared for and arranged to have him taken across the river to the house of another friend in West Virginia. Meanwhile, Good Elias and Wall Hatfield went in pursuit of the McCoy sons and their guards on the trail to Pikeville. They soon caught up with them, as the constables and their prisoners had traveled only about a mile from the house in which they had stayed overnight. Sarah McCoy and Tolbert’s wife had returned home, but Jim, Sam, and Floyd McCoy had arrived to accompany their brothers to Pikeville.26

  Wall Hatfield was Devil Anse’s older brother and a justice of the peace in the Magnolia District of West Virginia. Called “The Old Man” by his relatives, he was known as “the most dependable and conservative member of the clan,”27 this despite rumors that he had more than one wife.28 He was “tall, powerful, well proportioned, with iron-gray hair, a full mustache, and rough, shaggy eyebrows, the last a screen from behind which eyes peeped rebelliously and made it difficult for him to maintain the proper degree of decorum as a justice of the peace.”29