by Lisa Alther
A twenty-four year-old woman with a twenty-three-inch waist, Nancy McCoy, after leaving Johnse Hatfield, caught the eye of Bad Frank Phillips, the McCoy family champion. They moved in together and had a child, even though Johnse Hatfield didn’t divorce her until several months later. Her family knew that Phillips would protect her and her children from any revenge that Johnse Hatfield might take. Courtesy of Jesse Phillips
An attractive twenty-four-year-old woman with a twenty-three-inch waist, unlaced,29 she soon caught the eye of Bad Frank Phillips, the McCoy champion who had organized the Kentucky posses that had captured the Hatfield prisoners. They moved in together that year and had a child the following year, even though Johnse Hatfield didn’t divorce her until several months after that.30 Her family rejoiced in the knowledge that Frank Phillips would protect her and her children from any revenge that Johnse Hatfield might decide to take.31
The lawyers for Kentucky and West Virginia went to Washington for the Supreme Court hearing on April 23, 1888. The decision handed down by the justices, with two dissenters, was that prisoners, even if seized illegally, could be tried once they were detained in the state in which their crimes had been committed.
Given official permission by the US Supreme Court to kidnap people and hijack them across state lines, private detectives and bounty hunters arrived in the Tug Fork Valley in droves, hoping to claim the rewards offered by Kentucky for the Hatfields, and by West Virginia for Bad Frank Phillips’s posses. By now, those rewards totaled some $8,000 (close to $200,000 today).32
In June two detectives from Charleston, West Virginia, set out in search of Dave Stratton, a West Virginian who had joined Bad Frank Phillips’s posse because of a political grudge against Devil Anse Hatfield. Stratton had been with Bad Frank when Phillips shot both Jim Vance on the mountainside and also Bill Dempsey in the fodder crib. The detectives found Stratton, now living in Kentucky, asleep on a sandbar just inside the West Virginia state line, his flatboat beached beside him. One pounced on him and put a gun to his temple. Stratton surrendered, and the detectives delivered him to the Logan County jail and collected the reward.33
A detective who wore fringed buckskins and asked to be called Wild Bill—claimed by one researcher to be the notorious Confederate guerrilla leader Rebel Bill Smith himself34—reported hunting near Peter Creek for some McCoys, who turned the tables and started stalking him instead. To escape, Wild Bill placed his cap and coat in a pathway well beyond a hollow log, as though they had been shed in flight. Then he returned to the log and crawled inside it. The pursuing McCoys arrived and sat down on the log to discuss what they were going to do to him when they caught him. He hid in the log for two days.35
During this summer of 1888, when bounty hunters were haunting the hills of the Tug Fork searching for their human prey, the New York World sent a reporter named T. C. Crawford to West Virginia to find and interview Devil Anse Hatfield. Crawford secured permission to visit Devil Anse with the help of John Floyd, Devil Anse’s friend at the statehouse.36 Crawford wrote a book called An American Vendetta: A Story of Barbarism in the United States, dictating “the first chapter and the essential parts of the story” in three hours upon his return to New York, after ten days of misery in West Virginia.37 This book, and the pen and ink sketches of mountaineers by a Mr. Graves that it included, established and circulated, more than anything else, the emerging stereotype of the venal hillbilly.38 The primary value of the book to researchers is the descriptions it gives of some of the major feudists by someone who met them in person, unlike most other feud reporters. It also includes statements from the mouths of some of the feudists themselves about their actions and motives, however self-serving these may have been.
Devil Anse Hatfield told Crawford that he had a bodyguard of nine men and explained, “I simply will not be taken.”39 He described the hardships involved in being pursued by posses and detectives: “I have been out hiding in the brush. I have been kept away from my wife and babies many and many a time. I do not like to be kept away from my babies.”40 Temper any sympathy arising from that statement with thoughts of Harmon, Tolbert, and Jeff McCoy, who never saw their own babies ever again, and of Pharmer, Bud, Calvin, and Alifair McCoy, who never even had the chance to conceive any.
Claiming that Devil Anse Hatfield resembled Stonewall Jackson, Crawford portrayed him as a “jovial old pirate,”41 rather like an early Keith Richards. But he described West Virginia itself as a “barbarous, uncivilized and wholly savage region.”42 Previously the New York Times had labeled Kentucky “Corsica of America.”43 The mythmakers of America were off and running, using mountain life as grist for their media mills.
By fall, three more Hatfields—Charlie Gillespie, Cottontop Mounts, and Alex Messer—had been caught and delivered to the Pikeville jail. Gillespie, tracked for months, was finally captured by a detective and put in jail in Ohio, until officials arrived from Pikeville with requisition papers from the governor of Kentucky. A handsome, polite teenager with dark hair and eyes, he told his story to Charles Howell from the Pittsburgh Times, insisting that he went along on the New Year’s Night Massacre because Cap Hatfield had promised him “some fun.” He quoted Jim Vance as saying that the goal was to kill Ranel and Calvin McCoy in order to eliminate all possible witnesses for the prosecution of those indicted for the Pawpaw Murders. Gillespie maintained that the plan was to lure the McCoys out of their house, but if they wouldn’t come out, to shoot through the doors and windows until everyone inside was dead. He claimed that he had only stood guard and had had no part in the killings.44
Two detectives tracked Cottontop Mounts for days, until they ambushed him on a road near Mate Creek in West Virginia. A tall, muscular young man, Cottontop fought back, shooting one detective through the leg, but he was eventually subdued and escorted to the Pikeville jail.45
Widely regarded as one of the most dangerous men in the Tug Fork Valley, Alex Messer had served as sheriff of a nearby county and reputedly had twenty-seven notches on his gun. Cottontop Mounts later claimed it was Messer who had shot Bud McCoy in the head in the pawpaw patch. Two detectives traced him to a country store. Posing as friendly strangers, they got themselves invited back to Messer’s lodgings, where they revealed their true identities and accepted his rueful surrender.46
An enterprising detective disguised himself as a tramp and went in pursuit of Devil Anse Hatfield. Warned by a neighbor, Devil Anse’s henchmen apprehended the fake hobo at a corn shucking. They forcibly removed his rags to discover underneath a new suit that smelled of mothballs as well as a pistol and cartridges. They escorted him out of the mountains and put him on the road back home to Ohio.47
Some newspapers reported that besieged Hatfields had been spotted trekking north along the railroad tracks, fleeing West Virginia to escape the bounty hunters.48 Other reporters stirred up more hysteria by claiming that West Virginian mountaineers would shoot on sight any Northern sportsman, from a suspicion of strangers due to the presence of so many detectives, and also from a wish to steal his superior firearms.49
In January 1889 two detectives announced their intention to shoot Devil Anse, Cap Hatfield, and French Ellis, and to accost the other indicted Hatfields. The Hatfields took out warrants against the detectives for these threats and managed to capture them in the woods. Then Devil Anse and his followers marched their prisoners to Logan, West Virginia. The Hatfields made the detectives carry them on their backs across streams so that they wouldn’t get their boots wet. In Logan, the Hatfields had the detectives locked up in jail so they could see how much they liked it.50
After this prank, the “jovial old pirate” went back up to his fort in the sky and concentrated on making sure that he and his family weren’t caught. Later, an arsonist believed to be one of the jailed detectives set fire to Devil Anse’s barn, destroying a valuable horse and 150 bushels of corn.51
Sometime in the spring of 1889, Roseanna McCoy,
who had been wasting away for a long time, took to her bed and never got up again. Her young life had been one of loss—of her uncle Harmon; Johnse Hatfield; her woods-colt baby, Sarah Elizabeth; her cousin Jeff McCoy; and five of her siblings. She felt partially responsible for some of the disaster that had befallen her family because of the role her romance with Johnse had played in inflaming the feud. Her mother had been permanently disabled and their cabin and smokehouse incinerated. Her father remained remote and unforgiving. She had many regrets about her past and could see nothing to look forward to in the future.
Some in the feud had already died of broken bodies, but Roseanna died of a broken heart, “jilted to death by Johnse,”52 collateral damage in a war in which she had made the mistake of loving one of her family’s enemies.
10
“THE HATFIELDS MADE ME DO IT!”
In April 1889, the incarcerated Cottontop Mounts confessed.
He stated that Charlie Carpenter, the former schoolteacher who had composed the document authorizing vigilante justice against the three McCoy sons, had tied them to the pawpaw bushes and hung a lantern over their heads so that their executioners could see their targets. Mounts said that before Tolbert and Bud had finished praying, Johnse Hatfield shot Pharmer, Devil Anse shot Tolbert repeatedly, and Alex Messer shot Bud, adding a twenty-eighth notch to his gruesomely overwrought gun. Several others then riddled the bodies with bullets.
Cottontop also claimed that Wall Hatfield swore the participants to secrecy afterward. Then he gave equally detailed accounts of Jeff McCoy’s murder, as told to him by Cap Hatfield, and of the New Year’s Night Massacre.1
The trials of the Hatfield prisoners for the Pawpaw Murders began in late August 1889.2 Spectators from all over the area packed the courtroom. The mules and horses that had brought them to town filled the livery stable and lined the banks of the river.3 As when Joseph and Mary arrived in Bethlehem to be counted in the Augustan census, all the inns were full.
Perry Cline was representing Wall Hatfield and his three sons-in-law now. In a truly ironic twist, Wall was paying for Cline’s services with the promise, in the event that he couldn’t raise the necessary cash for the legal fees, of some of the land on Grapevine Creek that Devil Anse had won from Cline in the settlement eleven years earlier and had then sold to Wall.4 No one has ever been able to say whose side Perry Cline was actually on, but he lost the case, so perhaps he really was working in secret for the McCoys.5
The prosecution produced nineteen witnesses, eight of them named Hatfield, including Preacher Anse, further proof that not all Hatfields sided with Devil Anse.6 Ranel McCoy told of accompanying his sons as the Kentucky Hatfield constables escorted them to Pikeville after they killed Ellison Hatfield during the Election Day Brawl, and of their counterseizure by Wall Hatfield and others. His memory of the events was vague and contradictory,7 perhaps a symptom of what today we would call post-traumatic stress disorder.
The only known likeness of Sarah McCoy comes from a newspaper sketch at the time of the trials that ended the feud in 1890. By this time, she had lost six children to the feud, had been beaten senseless and burned out of her home, and was handicapped for life, needing a cane to walk. She died a few years later. Courtesy of the Louisville Courier Journal
Sarah McCoy spoke of her visit to the schoolhouse in which her sons were held captive and quoted Wall Hatfield as saying that if his brother Ellison died, her sons would be shot as full of holes “as a sifter bottom.”8
The stalwart Jim McCoy, now forty years old, recounted sitting on the porch of a house in West Virginia near the Tug Fork and hearing a volley of rifle shots from across the river in Kentucky. He and several others crossed over to the pawpaw patch and found the bullet-riddled bodies of his three brothers.
Wall Hatfield explained that he took the McCoy brothers from the constables escorting them to the Pikeville jail because he wanted them tried in the Tug Fork Valley so as to obtain testimonies from several older witnesses of the Election Day Brawl who lived there and would have had difficulty making the trip to the county seat. He acknowledged attending a meeting after Ellison’s murder at which Devil Anse ordered all the Hatfields and their supporters to fall in line. But Wall denied telling anyone that the McCoy sons would be killed if Ellison died. He further denied crossing the Tug Fork to the pawpaw patch or administering an oath of secrecy to the execution party afterward. He insisted that he had wanted the McCoy brothers tried in a court of law and had done everything in his power to protect them while they were being held captive in the schoolhouse. He also pointed out that he had surrendered voluntarily to the Kentucky authorities in response to the indictment against him.9
Various witnesses confirmed the testimonies of Ranel, Sarah, and Jim McCoy. Two of the indicted turned state’s evidence in return for having their charges dismissed. They had been among four who had refused to participate in the shooting of the McCoy brothers and had turned to leave as the others opened fire.
Several spoke in Wall Hatfield’s defense. But in the end, the jury found him guilty, and the judge sentenced him to life in prison, the same verdict and sentence as those handed down to Alex Messer, two of Wall’s sons-in-law, and five others. Wall’s third son-in-law had fallen ill while in jail, and his trial had been postponed. When Messer heard the judge say that he was “confined to hard labor for the period of your natural life,” he rose and explained that he hadn’t been able to work worth anything for several years now. It provided a moment of comic relief in the grim proceedings.
The courtroom audience reeled, though, upon realizing that the defendants hadn’t received death sentences. Ranel McCoy set about trying to organize a lynch mob, but people mostly ignored him.10
Eight Hatfield followers had also been indicted for the murder of Alifair McCoy during the New Year’s Night Massacre, when she ran from the cabin to draw water from the well to douse the fire set by Bad Jim Vance. The Hatfields under indictment were: Johnse, Cap, Bob, and Elliott Hatfield; Cottontop Mounts; French Ellis; Charles Gillespie; and Tom Chambers.
The ringleader, Jim Vance, was already dead. The reputed mastermind, Devil Anse Hatfield, had covered his tracks that night by staying home in bed. Charlie Gillespie requested and was granted a separate trial, but he escaped from the Pikeville jail and was never found again.11 None of the other indicted West Virginians had been apprehended, except for Cottontop Mounts.
Cottontop, though twenty-five years old, was said to have had the comprehension of an eight-year-old. He had already pled guilty to the murder of Alifair McCoy. His family was poor. His mother, Harriet Hatfield Mounts, had borne him out of wedlock. His biological father was her first cousin, the murdered war hero Ellison Hatfield, for whom Cottontop had been named. Since Wall Hatfield hadn’t included Cottontop with his sons-in-law for defense by Perry Cline, and since no other Hatfields had come forward to hire him another attorney, he had a court-appointed one.12
The only witness called was Sarah McCoy, who hobbled to the witness stand, leaning heavily on a cane because of injuries sustained at the hands of Bad Jim Vance during the New Year’s Night Massacre. She stated that Mounts hadn’t killed her daughter and that Alifair had called out Cap Hatfield’s name just as she was shot.
Regardless, the jury found Cottontop Mounts guilty and sentenced him to be hanged. He tried to change his plea to not guilty, explaining that he had confessed expecting mercy. But he wasn’t allowed to retract his confession. He had become the designated Hatfield scapegoat. As Perry Cline told Ranel McCoy, “We’ve got to hang someone.”13
Truda McCoy claims that Cap Hatfield had given Cottontop Mounts $500, a rifle, a saddle, and a promise of rescue from jail if he admitted to the crime.14 As Cottontop waited in his Pikeville cell for the day of his hanging, he expected the Hatfields to arrive and fulfill this promise. They never did.
A newspaper article spoke of his “dull gray
eyes that alternately stared and blinked at vacancy . . . his skin of ashen hue, and his countenance marked by the mental agony of one doomed to die, although madly desirous of living.” He was quoted as saying that the Hatfields came after him with guns and insisted he join them in killing the McCoy brothers who had murdered his father. He claimed his guilt was not so great as those who had received only life imprisonment. “Nobody seems to be doing anything for me,” he told the reporter. “My lawyers come here and talk to me; then go away and forget that I am alive.”15 They wouldn’t have to forget for long.
Wall Hatfield and two of his sons-in-law were conveyed to the Lexington jail to await the results of their appeals, which were eventually denied. Alex Messer—said by Cottontop Mounts to have executed young Bud McCoy in the pawpaw patch—went straight to the penitentiary in Frankfort.
The Pikeville sheriff who delivered these prisoners to their respective jails, accompanied by twenty-five guards, admitted his fear of Hatfield reprisals to reporters: “Every man, officers as well as witnesses, in these late convictions, has taken his life in his hands and may expect to be called on at any moment to pay the forfeit. . . . To do it [maintain the peace] requires unflinching nerve and backbone to stand the fire of midnight assassins.”16 Everyone had seen what the Hatfields could do to those who stood in their way, and no one had reason to doubt that they would do it again.
In October of 1889 Ranel and Sarah McCoy’s youngest son, Bill, followed Roseanna’s example and died of guilt and despair. Mistaking his brother Bud for himself, the Hatfield mob had killed Bud in his place. Bill was actually the one who had helped Tolbert McCoy stab Ellison Hatfield during the Election Day Brawl, at least according to Truda McCoy.17 Despite Bill’s attempts to lead an ordinary life, he still vanished for days at a time and was sometimes found sitting by Bud’s grave. Finally, he, too, went to bed and stayed there.18 He became Ranel and Sarah McCoy’s fifth son and seventh child to die from feud-related causes.
