Blood Feud

by Lisa Alther

  Floyd instructed the Hatfields to assemble character references, petitions, and affidavits from their friends and neighbors proclaiming their good character and their innocence of the charges of which they had been accused, for delivery to Governor Wilson. He also informed the governor of the McCoys’ culpability for the murders of Bill Staton and Ellison Hatfield, and he emphasized the miscarriage of justice that would result if Hatfields were tried in the Pikeville court with Kentucky jurors. He further explained to the governor the origin of Perry Cline’s animosity toward Devil Anse in the settlement that had forced Cline off his inherited land.68

  Overcome by impatience at West Virginia’s failure to hand over the Hatfields, Perry Cline wrote Governor Wilson a letter itemizing their depredations, including the one against himself in taking his land, in language often misspelled and ungrammatical. Cline maintained that the Hatfields were “the worst band of meroders [marauders] ever existed in the mountains,” asserting that they had no doubt forced their neighbors to sign petitions and affidavits on their behalf. He explained that the Hatfields were constantly crossing into Kentucky to interfere in local elections and to buy votes with their moonshine. But Cline promised that his only goal was to subject them to impartial, official justice.69

  When Governor Wilson failed to reply, Perry Cline and Frank Phillips secured warrants for the arrest of twenty Hatfields involved in the Pawpaw Murders and headed to West Virginia with a posse on December 12, 1887. They returned with Selkirk McCoy, the turncoat who had voted against Ranel at the Hog Trial almost a decade earlier.70

  Phillips planned more raids, but the sheriff of Pike County, Basil Hatfield, requested Phillips’s removal as special deputy because the raids were widely regarded as illegal, involving citizens from one state shanghaiing those from another—despite the fact that Devil Anse Hatfield had done the exact same thing to the McCoy brothers after they killed his brother Ellison. A distant cousin of Devil Anse, Basil Hatfield was said not to be a supporter of his,71 even while seeking the ouster of Frank Phillips. Phillips was relieved of his position, but he and Cline resumed their raids anyway.72

  In response, Devil Anse Hatfield sent a relative and an attorney to Perry Cline in Pikeville, offering him $225 to cancel these raids. Cline accepted the money, supposedly earmarked to reimburse Cline for the expenses he had incurred in securing the extradition documents.73 But Kentucky posses continued to prowl the West Virginia side of the Tug Fork. Cline no doubt felt that $225 was small change compared to what the five thousand acres that Devil Anse had wrested from him were worth, especially now that politicians and businessmen were considering a rail line up the Tug Fork through that same property.

  Thwarted in his peaceful attempts to avert the seizure of himself and his henchmen under the Pawpaw Murders indictments, Devil Anse Hatfield or one of his supporters came up with another plan worthy of the Keystone Kops.

  The results proved anything but amusing.

  ******* All these endless comings and goings to and from jails, arrests, incarcerations, and escapes make me wonder if the feudists might have provided the inspiration for the Keystone Kops of silent film fame early in the twentieth century.

  8

  NEW YEAR'S NIGHT MASSACRE

  On the sun-dappled Christmas afternoon of 1887, anxious that Frank Phillips’s posse would abduct all the indicted Hatfields to Kentucky for trial, the Hatfield feudists gathered at Bad Jim Vance’s house on Thacker Creek in West Virginia. Devil Anse, obsessed with the memory of the hanging of his great-grandfather Abner Vance, “thought that he and his loved ones would not receive justice, but would be met with mere vengeance.”1 Sitting in the yard with their feet propped up on logs, the Hatfields devised a plan taken from the playbook of the Logan Wildcats.2

  Their harebrained scheme would eliminate the threat posed by the raiders from Kentucky by eliminating sixty-two-year-old Ranel McCoy. In their eyes, he had started the trouble, had kept the cauldron of bile bubbling, and would testify for the prosecution if the Hatfields ever came to trial. They didn’t appear to realize that Sarah McCoy and Tolbert’s wife posed more of a threat to them than Ranel, since those two women had witnessed the McCoy boys trussed like roasting hens on the schoolhouse floor just before the Pawpaw Murders. But the Hatfields longed to find a way to come in from the cold. They were sick of sleeping in the woods and in caves, always alert for sounds of pursuit, always poised for flight, not unlike the wild animals that they themselves loved to stalk.3

  Truda McCoy insists that the Christmas Day plan was Devil Anse’s and that he told his Hellhounds, “Ranel has got to die.”4 Devil Anse’s grandson Coleman A. Hatfield, however, states that “Anse Hatfield did not think it was a good idea to attack the McCoys and felt that they should forget the whole matter.”5 But Coleman’s son maintains that “Anse turned to his well-remembered Civil War tactic of a preemptive strike at the heart of his perceived enemy and sent a small band of raiders to attack Randal McCoy’s home.”6 Devil Anse’s own descendants can’t seem to agree on who hatched this cowardly plot. Some researchers even lay the blame on Cap Hatfield’s doorsill, like a decapitated mouse.7

  Coleman A. Hatfield, who tends to shift any culpability away from his grandfather and father, Devil Anse and Cap, holds Good Elias Hatfield responsible for the ill-advised midnight jaunt. He claims that Good Elias was convinced that the McCoys had his farm under surveillance and planned to assassinate him. On a hill above his house, he had found a sapling with a branch trimmed down to a fork, on which were marks indicating that a rifle had rested there, trained at his yard. Brush had been mounded up around the tree trunk to conceal the shooter. Good Elias insisted that an attack on Ranel McCoy’s cabin “would have to be did.” Still the reluctant feudist, he deeply regretted that his poor health would prevent him from accompanying the Hellhounds, but he told them that they would have to carry out this attack in order to protect their “old uncle,” who was just forty at the time. Jim Vance, over two decades older than his elderly nephew, rose to the occasion and assumed leadership of the mission. But Cap’s son considered Good Elias “the main agitator who rekindled the smoldering feud fires.”8

  Whoever proposed this idiotic plan, feud legend maintains that Devil Anse didn’t participate in it because he was, once again, sick in bed.9 But one researcher, showing more confidence in Devil Anse’s character than some possess, disputes this notion, insisting that “such behavior would have been out of character. If Anse had instigated the raid, he would have led it. . . . Anse’s brothers Valentine [‘Wall’] and [Good] Elias declined involvement. . . . One must suspect that Devil Anse and most of his group were not willing to take such drastic action or even to sanction it—possibly they didn’t even know when or where it was to occur.”10 But the rumor around Pikeville after the midnight attack held that Devil Anse was angry that his brother Wall had refused to participate.11

  It’s true that only nine Hatfield goons out of thirty-seven took part in the upcoming outing.12 Many of the missing were hiding in the West Virginia hills, perhaps hoping to avoid conscription into this squadron of assassins.13 But Cap Hatfield’s son states that Devil Anse believed a preemptive strike—meaning murder, of course, such as he had conducted against Gen. Bill France during the Civil War—was necessary to deal with Ranel McCoy, which required secrecy and a limited number of men.14

  Cap’s son relates that the Hatfield patrol first sneaked up on the McCoy house on New Year’s Eve of 1887. But someone leaned against a split rail fence and sent it crashing down the hill, alerting the McCoys to their presence, so the Hatfields fled.15 God knows they wouldn’t have wanted to give the McCoys fair warning of their impending deaths.

  The next evening, after dinner at Cap Hatfield’s house, Jim Vance raised his arms and said, somewhat histrionically, to his eight henchmen, “May hell be my heaven, I will kill the man that goes back on me tonight, if powder will burn.”16 Then he led his death
squad—Devil Anse’s three oldest sons, Johnse, Cap, and Robert E. Lee (Bob); Elliott Hatfield and Cottontop Mounts, sons of the murdered Ellison; French Ellis, who was Devil Anse’s nephew-in-law;17 Tom Chambers; and the teenaged Charlie Gillespie18—under a full moon across the Tug Fork and over the ridge to Ranel McCoy’s cabin.19 Bob Hatfield may have turned back because his mother, Levicy, begged him to,20 suggesting on at least this one occasion that she, like Sarah McCoy, might have tried to oppose the conduct of her feudist sons and husband. Every one of these men was under thirty-five years of age except Jim Vance, who was sixty-one and should have known better.

  After tying their horses up in the woods under the first full moon of 1888, Cap and Johnse Hatfield and Jim Vance donned masks.21 One wonders who else the McCoys might imagine were attacking them in the middle of the night—although masks could, of course, allow the Hatfields later to shift blame wherever they wanted it to fall. They advanced on foot to the McCoy cabin, inside which everyone was fast asleep. The dogtrot log cabin had a story-and-a-half main structure connected to a smaller one-story kitchen by a roofed porch. Hoarfrost on the roof sparkled in the moonlight.22

  The Hellhounds stationed themselves across from all the entrances. Jim Vance called for the McCoys to come out and surrender. He had ordered his comrades not to fire until he directed, but a nervous or perhaps drunk Johnse Hatfield fired into the house anyway. Coleman A. Hatfield, son of Cap, who was present at the cabin, insists that Calvin McCoy, Ranel’s twenty-five-year-old son, who loved learning and wanted to become a politician,23 fired first from inside the house.24 Whichever the case, the attackers riddled the house with bullets, and Ranel and Calvin McCoy returned fire, hitting Johnse Hatfield in the shoulder.25

  Then Bad Jim Vance set the cabin on fire—on purpose, say most;26 by accident, says Cap’s son.27 Tom Chambers tried to stuff a flaming pine knot under a shingle. Ranel shot at him from inside and blew off three of his fingers. Ranel’s daughters Alifair, Fanny, and Adelaide tried fruitlessly to quench the flames with water and buttermilk stored inside the house, and the stench of scorched milk filled the thickening air.28

  When twenty-nine-year-old Alifair, lame from polio, limped out to draw water from the well, she was shot dead—by Cap Hatfield, said her sister Fannie and later, at trial, her mother.29 Some researchers insist Cottontop Mounts shot her.30 Her mother, Sarah McCoy, nearly sixty and ill with influenza, rushed out to Alifair’s fallen body. Jim Vance clubbed her to the ground with his rifle butt, breaking her arm and hip.31 Then, with his pistol butt, someone—either Jim Vance, Johnse Hatfield, or Cottontop Mounts32—bashed in the skull of Sarah McCoy, the woman they had called “Aunt Sally” in happier days.

  With the house burning, Calvin McCoy raced out, trying to distract the attackers’ attention so that his father, Ranel, could escape from another door with a young grandson named Melvin, son of the Tolbert murdered in the pawpaw patch. Forgetting that a corncrib where he meant to seek shelter had recently been moved,33 Calvin was trapped in the open and shot in the head.34 Ranel and Melvin fled the conflagration and hid either in a haystack35 or in the pigpen.36

  Upon their departure, the Hatfields also set fire to Ranel McCoy’s smokehouse, full of food stored for winter.37 They ran back to their horses, one of which bolted,38 no doubt appalled by the behavior of its owner. As the raiders rode over the ridge toward the Tug Fork, the McCoy house and smokehouse at their backs were engulfed in flames. They could hear the McCoy daughters calling for help. The odor of burnt meat floated on the smoke that wafted from the smokehouse.

  Cottontop Mounts, though he may have been mentally challenged, recognized the horror of what had just happened. He had been shot in the arm, and the bone had been broken.39 But before passing out from the pain, he said to the young man who rode double with him on his horse, “Well, we killed the boy and the girl, and I am sorry of it. We have made a bad job of it. . . . There will be trouble over this.”40

  He was right.

  A neighbor of the McCoys later claimed to have watched the Hatfields retreat toward the Tug Fork on their horses, “their guns glistening in the moonlight,” and to have wondered what they were up to.41

  Her house destroyed, Sarah McCoy lay unconscious in the yard until dawn, alongside the body of her dead daughter. Alifair’s hair froze to the ground in her own blood.42 Ranel’s and Sarah’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Adelaide—said, in a probably inaccurate (though certainly understandable, if true) newspaper report, to have gone insane shortly after this attack43—built a fire nearby to keep her mother warm.44 Fanny, her sister, and Cora, a young daughter of Tolbert’s, who had also escaped the burning house, emerged from hiding after the Hatfields departed.45

  Summoned by the glow from the conflagrations, the wails of the McCoy daughters, and the stench of burning meat, wary neighbors gathered. They carried Sarah on a makeshift stretcher to her son Jim McCoy’s house a mile away.

  A couple of days later, Calvin and Alifair McCoy were buried with their brothers who had been shot in the pawpaw patch—Tolbert, Pharmer, and Bud—in the family plot on the shelf of land below the charred skeletons of the McCoy cabin and smokehouse.46 Ranel McCoy loaded his severely injured wife into a cart and headed to Pikeville, placing her in the care of their daughter Roseanna at Perry Cline’s house.

  Ranel’s sons Sam and Jim McCoy also packed up their households in the Tug Fork Valley and moved their families to Pikeville, trying to put as much distance as possible between themselves and Devil Anse’s Hellhounds.47 The governors of Kentucky and West Virginia previously had advised both the Hatfields and the McCoys to move away from the valley as a way of ending the feud.48 It’s regrettable that it took the deaths of five of their children to persuade Ranel and Sarah McCoy to do just that.

  Devil Anse Hatfield was said to be alarmed when he learned that his cadre had failed in its assignment to eliminate Ranel McCoy. His great-grandson Coleman C. Hatfield says, “I do not think he knew that the retaliation would come as quick and as hard as it did.”49 Coleman C. rather coldly and callously categorizes the destruction of the McCoy home and the deaths of two of their children as “another public relations disaster”50 for the Hatfields.

  Ranel McCoy urged the Pike County sheriff to form a posse to pursue the Hatfields, regardless of whether he had warrants and extradition papers for them. The sheriff refused. Bad Frank Phillips did not.

  Phillips and Perry Cline resumed their forays into West Virginia on January 8, 1888, a week after the New Year’s Night Massacre, with a posse of twenty that included three sons of the murdered Harmon McCoy.51 On a mountain path that day, they came across Cap Hatfield, Bad Jim Vance, and Jim’s wife, carrying a bucket of dressed squirrels.52 Although hiding from the posses, Vance sometimes rendezvoused with his wife for food. This particular day he was said to have been ill from eating too much raccoon meat.53

  Bad Jim Vance and Cap Hatfield ducked behind some rocks and started shooting, while Jim’s wife ran to summon Hatfield reinforcements. Jim McCoy, de facto head of the McCoy feudists while Ranel was grieving, shot Bad Jim54 in his gun arm.55 Bad Jim ordered Cap Hatfield to flee so he could warn the other Hatfields about the Kentucky posse.56

  After Cap’s departure, Vance lay bleeding on the ground, aiming his wavering pistol at the approaching Frank Phillips. Not taking any chances, Phillips shot Jim Vance in the head. The man who had murdered Harmon McCoy over twenty years earlier********—who had led the New Year’s Night Massacre and had beaten Sarah McCoy almost to death—finally lay dead himself, a victim of the violence he had so often perpetrated.

  Cap Hatfield’s son reports that Bud and Lark McCoy shook hands over the corpse of their father’s murderer. Then they “waded in Jim’s blood and dipped a corner of a handkerchief in blood-feud revenge.”57 Another Hatfield researcher, in an anecdote that sounds equally far-fetched, maintains that Bud McCoy dipped his finger in Jim Vance’s brains, used it to
polish his boots, and then licked his finger clean.58 Yet another claims that Dave Stratton (more about him later) and Bad Frank Phillips shook hands over Vance’s body.59 Whoever rejoiced, the McCoy team clearly gloried in its vengeance.

  Sam McCoy, Ranel’s fourth son and Martha McCoy’s husband, spotted Cap Hatfield’s overcoat, which he had shed so as to run faster. Sam picked it up and took it home with him. Young women in Pikeville later asked him for buttons from it as souvenirs, until his wife, Martha, grew jealous of all the admiring young women and made him get rid of it.60

  The coatless Cap Hatfield, meanwhile, was now also barefoot, having removed his boots so that the McCoys couldn’t track him. Had he continued his search for Hatfields to come rescue the already-dead Jim Vance, he might have ended up stark naked. Instead, he shot a neighbor’s steer, mistaking its white face for the shirt of a McCoy and its long horns for a rifle.61

  Half a dozen raids during the next ten days netted seven more Hatfield feudists—but not Devil Anse.62 All of Pikeville panicked, convinced that the Hatfields would rescue their confederates from jail, burning the town and murdering innocent civilians in the process.63 But they overestimated the Hatfields’ courage and concern for their captured comrades.

  Wall Hatfield, Devil A nse’s older brother, wrote to Frank Phillips, offering to surrender. Not one to wait for what he wanted, Phillips arrested Wall at his home.64 As a justice of the peace in his district, Wall apparently had faith in the legal system—unwarranted, it turned out—and expected to be exonerated since he claimed not to have participated in either the New Year’s Night Massacre or the Pawpaw Murders.

  Rather than riding to Pikeville and freeing his incarcerated followers, Devil Anse rode to Logan, West Virginia, and persuaded county officials there to issue indictments for the twenty men in Frank Phillips’s posse who had murdered his uncle Bad Jim Vance. These same officials also organized a posse of their own to patrol the West Virginia banks of the Tug Fork and to arrest Frank Phillips’s band, should it cross the river from Kentucky again.