Blood Feud

by Lisa Alther

  Devil Anse Hatfield came down from his mountain fastness in November 1889, ten days after his convicted cohorts learned of the failure of their appeals, to face federal charges in Charleston, West Virginia, of selling whiskey without paying the federal tax on it.19

  The previous spring, Dave Stratton—evidently not jailed, or sub­sequently freed, following his apprehension by detectives for part­icipating in Bad Frank Phillips’s posse—had traded Devil Anse some bridles and saddles in return for calves and cowhide. After the trans­action, Devil Anse generously offered him as much as he cared to drink from a barrel of whiskey.20

  Stratton presented this story to a grand jury in Charleston and parlayed it into an indictment of Devil Anse for selling liquor without a license. Stratton and some detectives hoped to lure Devil Anse down from the mountains so they could whisk him off to Kentucky for trial, thereby claiming the reward for his arrest.21

  Greeted at Devil Anse’s mountain fortress by a pack of growling bear dogs, the marshal who delivered the warrant to Devil Anse Hatfield promised him that if he came to court voluntarily, he would be shielded from all outstanding indictments against him. The seventeen supporters22 who accompanied him to Charleston were allowed to carry their guns—a motley collection of squirrel rifles, muzzle-loader shotguns, and new Winchesters—and to keep the firearms with them in the courtroom.

  Spectators in Charleston observed an affable old man in a navy blue suit with an open-necked shirt, and trousers stuffed into the tops of high boots, instead of the cloven-hoofed Lucifer they had been expecting.23 The judge treated Devil Anse with respect and bonhomie, and dismissed the charges against him, believing them to be, as they in fact were, a trumped-up excuse to lure Devil Anse to Charleston so that Dave Stratton and the detectives could capture him and deliver him to Kentucky for the reward.

  After a chat in his chambers and an invitation from Devil Anse to come bear hunting in the hills, the judge ordered that Devil Anse be given safe conduct for the hundred miles back to his home. Devil Anse replied that he didn’t need any help, that all he wanted was to “get across the river and back to the timber.”24

  Charleston treated Devil Anse like a celebrity. He gave an interview to the local newspaper in which he denied involvement in the shooting of the three McCoy sons and the burning of Ranel and Sarah McCoy’s cabin. He maintained that the feud had begun with the Hog Trial. Paris and Squirrel Hunting Sam McCoy had killed Bill Staton for his testimony against Ranel McCoy. Then Ellison Hatfield had sworn out a warrant for the arrest of Paris and Sam, for which the three McCoy brothers had killed Ellison at the Election Day Brawl. Much of the interview concerning Johnse and Roseanna’s romance and the Pawpaw Murders was inaccurate and garbled, probably by the reporter, who described the Hatfields as “hospitable, honest . . . peacefully disposed.”25

  Several of Devil Anse’s comrades, including his older brother, had gone to prison for life, and one was about to be hanged. Yet the “jovial old pirate” was striding freely around the state capital, flaunting his firearms, heralded as “peacefully disposed.” Devil Anse had not only survived but thrived when many of his followers and opponents had not—and the public admired him for it.

  On the day of his hanging, February 18, 1890,26 Cottontop Mounts was waiting in his cell for the arrival of his mother.27 Harriet Hatfield Mounts never came, dying that morning of a heart attack on the path to Pikeville.28 It was another broken heart and another case of collateral damage, the kind not tallied in statistics about the victims of violence.

  Cottontop had also been waiting for the Hatfields to rescue him at last. Rumors were rife throughout the region that they would do so. Security at the jail had been increased, and pickets had been posted around town.29

  The only person to appear at the jailhouse was a very drunk Bad Frank Phillips, shooting pistols into the air and announcing that he had dealt with the Hatfields and was now ready to run Pikeville.30 Despite his drunken delusions, he was frantic that Cottontop was about to be executed for a crime Bad Frank was convinced that Cap Hatfield had committed.31 Deputies overpowered him and confiscated his pistols. Then a drunken Bud McCoy, fourth son of Harmon McCoy, rushed to his rescue, knocking the sheriff to the ground. The sheriff summoned twenty-five militiamen,32 who restored order and left Bad Frank lying in the jailhouse doorway to sleep it off.33

  While his death warrant was read to him, Cottontop Mounts smoked a cigar and blew smoke rings. Then he rode in a wagon, seated on his own coffin, to the gallows. Both he and his guards kept glancing toward the mountains, waiting for his Hatfield rescuers to arrive.34

  It was the first public hanging in Kentucky in forty years, and it would also be the last. Technically, public hangings had been banned, so a fence had been built around the gallows. But the gallows had been erected at the base of a hill, so that the seven thousand spectators who had flooded the town from surrounding counties could stand on the hilltop and watch the hanging from above. Just as though it were an Election Day, the women in the crowd sold their ginger cookies, and the men drank too much moonshine.35

  The February 18, 1890, hanging of Ellison “Cottontop” Mounts was the first public hanging in Kentucky in forty years, and also the last. Some seven thousand people came from surrounding counties to watch. In this photograph, Cottontop kneels on the scaffold, his head bowed. Four other men kneel with him, while three officials stand aside, two shielding their faces from the photographer with their hats. When the black cap was pulled over his head, Mounts cried out, “The Hatfields made me do it!” Courtesy of Paul B. Mays, Pikeville, Kentucky

  The sun was shining, and an unseasonably warm breeze stirred Cottontop Mounts’s pale hair as he mounted the scaffold. He was clean-shaven and wore an open-necked shirt with a line of embroidery down the front placket. A photograph taken just prior to the hanging shows Cottontop kneeling on the scaffold, his head bowed. Four other men are kneeling with him, while three officials stand aside, two shielding their faces from the photographer with their hats. Perhaps they feared reprisals from the absent West Virginian Hatfields should their identities become known.

  When asked if he had any final words, Cottontop said that he was ready to die and hoped his friends would be good so that they could meet him in heaven.36 As a black cap was pulled over his head, he cried out, “The Hatfields made me do it!”

  The trap door dropped moments later. Cottontop’s body dangled from the noose, “turning slowly, back and forth, around and around, like the pendulum of a giant clock running down.” A young man who probably had very little understanding of what he was doing, and who had agreed to confess to crimes that most believe he didn’t actually commit, had been killed.******** Some in the watching crowd had the decency to faint.37

  The Mounts family had been too poor to hire an attorney for Cottontop, and they were too poor to hire someone to bring his body back home to West Virginia. The McCoy boys had killed his biological father in the Election Day Brawl, and his mother had died of a heart attack the morning of his hanging. There was no one left to care about the disposition of his remains, and none of the more affluent Hatfields for whom he had purportedly taken the rap offered to help. His body was buried in the Pikeville graveyard in sight of the scaffold.38

  The scaffold was left standing as a warning in the present, and in case its services might be needed in the future. It became the site of drunken card games and occasional fights among roughnecks apparently unimpressed by death’s arm towering over them.39

  Soon after Cottontop’s hanging, Wall Hatfield, Devil Anse’s oldest brother, died in prison, unable any longer to endure the confinement or betrayal. He had turned himself in. He maintained his innocence of the charges against him. Yet he was sentenced to prison for the rest of his life while his younger brother Devil Anse, the feud leader who had embroiled all the rest of them in his deadly plots, still roamed the hills of their childhood.

&nb
sp; In February 1890, Aretas Brooks Fleming took office as governor of West Virginia, replacing Devil Anse Hatfield’s ally E. Willis Wilson. The Hatfields’ protection from the statehouse came to an end. By early fall, Governor Fleming had canceled Windy Wilson’s rewards and extradition requests for the Bad Frank Phillips Kentucky posse, at which point those men were able to emerge from their hideouts around Peter Creek.40

  A wealthy corporate lawyer with burgeoning ties to John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, Governor Fleming wanted to make conditions in his state more appealing to investors. Kentucky and West Virginia reached a tacit understanding that the indictments for the feudists in both states would hold but would remain unenforced so long as their targets kept their noses clean.41 Some of the Hatfields and their later pursuers, however, appear not to have received this memo.

  That spring, Dave Stratton, who had dogged Devil Anse Hatfield so relentlessly, hoping to take him to Kentucky for trial, was found unconscious near his own house with deep head wounds and a badly contused chest. He died soon afterward, with the Hatfields assumed to be his executioners. More warrants went out for the arrests of Devil Anse, Johnse, and Cap Hatfield, and four others, but further investigation revealed that Stratton had been run over by a train while drunk.42

  Late in 1890, Bud McCoy, who had taken a bullet in his gun shoulder during the Battle of Grapevine Creek and who had struggled heroically the morning of Cottontop’s hanging to rescue the drunken Bad Frank Phillips from the grasp of the Pikeville sheriff, was found dead near a lumber camp on Peter Creek. Like a brood of Chicken Littles, many feared that the Hatfields had returned to the warpath and were reviving the feud. But it turned out that a young Pleasant McCoy, probably the son or nephew of the older animal lover who was Sarah McCoy’s nephew and Ranel’s cousin, was responsible. Pleasant and a friend had shot Bud eighteen times over “a grudge.”43 Perhaps Bud had cracked a bad joke about a cow.

  In September 1890, the Huntington, West Virginia, Times stated: “The famous Hatfield-McCoy feud is at an end. After partaking in the bloody butchery of all the men they could kill, after living as outlaws, with prices on their heads, defying arrest and courting meetings with their enemies, after seeing their young men shot down, their old ones murdered, with no good accomplished, they have at last agreed on either side to let the matter rest.”44 Early the next year Cap Hatfield sent to the local Logan newspaper a letter believed to represent Devil Anse’s sentiments as well as his own. It read, “The war spirit in me has abated and I sincerely rejoice at the prospect of peace.”45

  A jaded editor at the New York Tribune responded: “Our private and entirely disinterested advice to the white-winged dove of peace is for it to fly high in that neighborhood for a while yet, lest it be served up as the principal dish at a game dinner.”46

  Rumors of the feud’s resumption continued to surface off and on over the next several years, but thankfully they remained merely rumors. In 1894, the Logan County Banner cleverly reported, “The Hatfield-McCoy War has broken out fresh in the newspapers. The Hatfields and McCoys, however, know nothing about it.”47

  To all appearances, the feud had ended at last. If you include the victims of heartbreak, the final score was ten McCoys dead to seven Hatfields. But in fact the pointless violence hadn’t ended yet. More collateral damage was waiting in the wings from young men who had learned a disrespect for life, or a lust for blood, or both, during the feud years.

  ******** Cottontop’s final words—“The Hatfields made me do it!”—make me wonder if this is his confession to Alifair’s murder, contradicting Truda McCoy’s allegation that Cap Hatfield had bribed Cottontop to confess to the murder that Cap had actually committed. It all depends on what Cottontop meant by the word it. Does it refer to the murder itself or to the false confession that resulted in his hanging?

  PART 3:

  AFTERMATH

  11

  SURVIVORS

  Ranel and Sarah McCoy bought an attractive two-story frame house in downtown Pikeville.******** For the rest of his life, Ranel ran a ferryboat on the Levisa Fork, complaining bitterly about the Hatfields to any passengers who would listen. “So monotonous did his ravings become at times,” says one researcher, “that his neighbors agreed among themselves it was a shame no bullet had taken him away that unforgettable night.”1

  Following injuries sustained in the New Year’s Night Massacre, Sarah McCoy had to walk with a cane. Throughout the feud she had had a heart condition, and no doubt the loss of seven of her children and the burning of her home hadn’t helped it any. Often short of breath, she experienced fainting spells. She died just a few years after the feud trials ended, around 1894, at age sixty-five, and was buried in Colonel Dils’s family cemetery in Pikeville near her daughter Roseanna.2

  Ranel McCoy, about sixty years old,

  during the height of feud events that cost

  the lives of seven of his children. Courtesy of Leonard McCoy

  In 1914, Ranel McCoy was visiting Melvin McCoy, his son Tolbert’s son, with whom Ranel had fled his Blackberry Fork cabin when Jim Vance set it on fire. In a sad twist of irony, Ranel’s clothes caught fire in front of Melvin’s grate, and he was badly burned. He died two months later of his injuries and joined his wife and daughter in the Dils cemetery.3

  Jim McCoy—Ranel and Sarah’s second child, oldest son, and the de facto McCoy leader during the final throes of the feud—continued to live in Pikeville after bringing his wife and nine children there following the burning of his parents’ cabin.4 He refused to talk about the feud with his children.5 His neighbors regarded him as “a hardworking, industrious man, easy to get along with and a friendly neighbor.” He became sheriff of Pike County, later joining the police force.6

  In his old age, Jim McCoy is rumored to have met Tennis Hatfield, Devil Anse and Levicy Hatfield’s youngest son. They were seen strolling the streets of Pikeville together, arm in arm, chatting amiably. They reportedly had their picture taken there along with three friends.******** Jim died of a lingering illness in 1929.

  After also seeking sanctuary in Pikeville following the New Year’s Night Massacre, Sam McCoy, Ranel and Sarah’s fifth child, bought a 250-acre farm outside town and died there of a heart attack in 1916. His dying words to his daughter were, “I don’t hate anyone. I’ve forgiven all my enemies.” His wife, Martha Jackson McCoy, continued to live on this farm until her own death in 1944. Interviews with her provided her daughter-in-law Truda McCoy with much of the information included in her book about the feud. Sam and Martha joined Ranel, Sarah, and Roseanna in the Dils cemetery in Pikeville.7

  No records survive, if there ever were any, about what happened to the four surviving McCoy daughters—as is so often the way of the world.

  Squirrel Hunting Sam McCoy, Ranel’s and Harmon’s nephew, who killed Bill Staton for his testimony against Ranel McCoy in the Hog Trial, moved out West in the 1890s, living in California, Kansas, and Missouri. He married four times. In the 1930s he wrote his memoirs, which tell of many deadly antics with knives and guns. He blamed the feud on the Hog Trial and on the McCoys’ habit of talking too much and antagonizing the Hatfields.******** Said to go barefoot in summer and winter, Squirrel Hunting Sam’s feet eventually froze, and he had to have a leg amputated. He died from complications of the amputation.8

  Perry Cline died in 1891, aged forty-two, having lived only long enough to see the end of the feud,9 which he had perhaps helped to prolong by reviving the stalled indictments against the Hatfields for the Pawpaw Murders.

  Frank and Nancy Phillips supported themselves and their eleven children—two of Nancy’s with Johnse, five of Frank’s with his second wife, and four of their own—in part by bootlegging.10 Bad Frank Phillips continued to live up to his nickname. He quarreled with a younger friend over a woman and threatened to knife him. The friend warned him to back off, but he kept coming. His fr
iend shot him through the hips.

  Carried home, he set about putting his affairs in order. He requested that his first wife come to visit, and he asked her if their last two children were really his. She said yes, but he must not have believed her because he left money to all his children except for those two.11 He also left five hundred acres of land to Nancy. After lingering for a couple of weeks, he died of his wounds in 1898 at the age of thirty-six.12

  Bad Frank’s wife, the “Hellcat” Nancy McCoy Hatfield Phillips, died of tuberculosis three years later, also thirty-six years old. Devil Anse Hatfield’s wife, Levicy, came to Pikeville to retrieve the two children Nancy had had with Johnse Hatfield. The daughter soon died of tuberculosis as well. The son grew up to join the Navy and died of dysentery in Egypt, leaving Johnse and Nancy with no surviving descendants from their tempestuous union.13

  It escaped no one’s notice that three of the principal Hatfield feudists—Devil Anse, Johnse, and Cap—were alive and free, while several of their comrades were dead or in prison. Johnse managed to elude arrest in West Virginia for six years.

  Always fearful of being apprehended and taken to Kentucky on the still-standing indictments for his role in the Pawpaw Murders and the New Year’s Night Massacre, Johnse Hatfield fled to Washington State in 1896, where he worked as a lumberman. Rumor credited Ranel McCoy with financing seven detectives to follow him there, based on a tip from Johnse’s first wife, now Nancy McCoy Hatfield Phillips, as to his whereabouts.14 As the detectives closed in on him, he swam a river and fled to British Columbia, where he also cut timber. A friend in Washington sent a lock of his hair home to his family, telling them that he had been killed while felling a tree—in hopes of ending his pursuit by the detectives.15