by Lisa Alther
Outsiders were building a railroad up the valley. If the young men were to have a role in the emerging economy of large-scale lumbering and coal mining, they had to change their entire way of life, morphing into wage laborers who went to work at a certain time every day, all year round, always performing the same tedious and often dangerous tasks. Such a life was unthinkable for young men accustomed to relaxing when they wanted and to working at a variety of jobs, according to the weather, the season, and their own whims.
Feuding gave them a chance to do something heroic. They could ride out in gangs and right what their leaders told them were wrongs. They could showcase their courage and their skills with weapons and horses. They became a generation of hillbullies—and they were proud of it.
Recent psychological studies have suggested that those who are inconsistent and unpredictable in their behavior command other people’s attention more than those who behave in a steady and reliable fashion. This is not news to those who have ever attended kindergarten. This watchfulness has survival value. You must observe those who are unpredictable to see what they are going to do next and to make certain that it doesn’t harm you or your loved ones. This is one reason for the appeal of the bad boy.43 The bad boys of the Tug Fork Valley attracted attention. Much of this attention was fearful, but some of it was admiration from people wanting or needing protection.
Pushed too far, the bad boy ethos verges on psychopathology, and some of the Hatfield behavior does appear sadistic. Whipping women, young or old, with the tail of a butchered cow certainly falls into that category. So does shooting a young woman handicapped from polio as she attempts to draw well water to quench the flames destroying her house, or beating an elderly woman with a rifle butt when she rushes to comfort a dying child.
Coleman C. Hatfield claims that Devil Anse Hatfield “got a charge from scaring people silly. . . . Anse’s own grandchildren were often his prey when he decided to tell scary stories.”44 His younger brothers called him “the boogerman.”45 His favorite source of amusement after he killed a bear was to throw its skin around himself and terrify his children and grandchildren.46 This behavior is on a par with tickling children unmercifully and then claiming that it’s all in fun.
Truda McCoy maintains that Devil Anse Hatfield promised Sarah McCoy to bring her three sons who had killed his brother back to Kentucky alive.47 That he brought them to Kentucky alive, as promised, and then promptly shot them, would strike many as sadistic. So would Cap Hatfield’s promise to Jeff McCoy that he would let him live if he could swim the Tug Fork, followed by his shooting Jeff as he clambered up the Kentucky bank.48 These are the actions of men who might have tortured small animals when they were boys, as Truda McCoy claims Cap Hatfield did.49
Normal everyday life in the Tug Fork Valley—if there was ever such a thing during the feud years—was no doubt tedious. Barring natural or man-made disasters, the routines of a household and a farm are the same, day in and day out, year after year. Thread is spun, cloth is woven, clothes are sewn and washed, floors are swept, fires are fed and banked, food is gathered, preserved, cooked. Seeds are planted, weeds are hoed, crops are harvested and stored for winter. Animals are fed and bred and slaughtered, and their meat preserved. It’s backbreaking, mind-numbing work.
To relieve the stresses of this tedium and the labor it required, women supplied themselves with the calming properties of their own progesterone while pregnant, with pain-soothing endorphins during childbirth, and with bond-inducing oxytocin while nursing. They were either pregnant or nursing constantly, and many died in childbirth, often very young.
Boredom didn’t pose as much of a problem for the women as it did for their sons and husbands. As Blaise Pascal put it in seventeenth-century France, “Man finds nothing so intolerable as to be in a state of complete rest, without passions, without occupation, without diversion, without effort. Then he feels his nullity, loneliness, inadequacy, dependence, helplessness, emptiness.”50 The male equivalents of the female feel-good hormones were adrenaline, cortisol, and testosterone. Devil Anse’s generation acquired regular and generous infusions of all three during the terror, arousal, and aggression of Civil War raids and battles. After the war ended, they needed new ways to trigger those chemical highs. The violence of the feud, stimulated by the inhibition-reducing effects of alcohol, gave them their fix.
The McCoy men who had VHL already produced too much of their own adrenaline. Not knowing this to be the case, though, they needed to manufacture conflicts to explain and justify their extant inner rage.
Three of the most ruthless participants in the feud were chronic outsiders. Cottontop Mounts, the illegitimate son of Ellison Hatfield, was a mentally handicapped albino always seeking acceptance from his biological father. Jim Vance, most vicious of the feudists, had a condition called lateral nystagmus, which caused his eyes to oscillate uncontrollably.51 Like Cottontop, he too was illegitimate. Tom Wallace, who worked for Cap Hatfield, was known as “half Hatfield and half Indian.” In their eagerness to belong to the Hatfield clan, these men performed whatever terrible deeds Devil Anse and his band asked of them.********
Some have blamed the feud on the way in which boys were raised in the Southern mountains. Their games were boisterous, rough, and competitive, and they were rarely scolded for anger or rudeness. A favorite pastime was a game—if you could call it that—known as rocking: waiting in ambush along a path and assaulting an enemy with volleys of rocks.52 Fights sometimes involved biting off ears or noses and gouging out eyes.53 Boys were encouraged to react fiercely to any possible slight, and they often grew up to become arrogant, quarrelsome young men. The girls, as in many warrior cultures, were reared to serve the men and boys and to submit to them.
I have a photo from this era that shows mountain men and boys sitting at a table laden with food, eating heartily while the women and girls stand behind their chairs, poised to refill their plates. The women and girls ate the men’s leftovers. If you consider the football culture that now prevails in the Southern mountains, with squads of devoted young women cheering on the combatants, you will see the warrior ethos alive and well. It has assumed a new exterior, but the internal dynamics remain the same.
Reared in Appalachia, I can attest to the fact that children there are raised to be respectful to their elders and kind to those younger than themselves. This is the theory, anyway, if not always the practice. So two episodes of the feud that particularly surprised me were Devil Anse Hatfield’s seizure of Perry Cline’s land and his killing of Ranel McCoy’s children, all of whom were much younger than he. The most shocking event of all was Devil Anse’s attempts to kill Ranel McCoy, fourteen years his elder. And despite the fact that the Hatfields had called Sarah McCoy “Aunt Sally” before the feud,54 a couple of them beat her nearly to death during the New Year’s Night Massacre.
A psychotherapist might say that Devil Anse Hatfield was acting out his Oedipal fury at receiving no land from his father, while all his brothers did. Instead, he confiscated the land of young Perry Cline, his longtime next-door neighbor and a surrogate younger sibling. He then tried to kill Ranel McCoy, a surrogate father. He succeeded in killing some of Ranel’s children, more surrogate siblings. The events of the feud that Devil Anse masterminded also resulted in the deaths of two of his own brothers, whom he may have subconsciously wanted to destroy because his father loved them, but not him.
To push this psychotherapeutic explanation to its outer limits, many men on both sides of the feud appear to have had father issues. Jim Vance and Cottontop Mounts were illegitimate. Big Eph Hatfield disapproved of Devil Anse—rightfully so, it turns out—and left him no land. Both Johnse and Cap Hatfield squirmed under the thumb of their father. Johnse was unable to defy him in order to marry Roseanna McCoy and unable to limit his participation in the feud in order to keep his marriage to Nancy McCoy intact. Cap performed atrocious acts in his eagerness to please his father. The
ir brother Bob appears torn between the demands of his father to participate in feud events and the pleas of his mother not to.
On the McCoy side, Perry Cline lost his father at age nine, leaving him vulnerable to the machinations of Devil Anse Hatfield. Frank Phillips never met his father, who was killed in the Civil War, and he spent much of his time trying to live up to his father’s reputation for bravery. Harmon McCoy’s sons lost him to murder when they were very young. Ranel and Harmon McCoy’s father, Daniel, failed in his traditional responsibilities by giving them no land when they started families of their own. Ranel McCoy failed his own sons similarly. Daniel left a legacy of shiftlessness, and Ranel of litigiousness.
Observers have wondered why feud participants felt such rage over matters that often seem so trivial to outsiders.55 I sometimes picture all these sad young men, and some not so young, fighting their shadowbox battles for or against phantom fathers, acting out their longing for fathers who had died or never claimed them, their hatred of fathers who had failed or rejected them—and slaughtering one another in the process.
Any one explanation for the feud, taken on its own, doesn’t do justice to the extent or the gravity of the events. But taken as a whole, their collective weight seems valid: too many guns, too much moonshine, too little regard for human life, an inflated sense of personal pride, an exaggerated need to experience hormonal highs through violence, inchoate rage spawned by largely subconscious inner conflicts. British borderland folkways and the remnants of a frontier culture still exerted their influence. Civil War antagonisms and the habit of guerrilla justice lingered on. Without regular schooling, feudists hadn’t learned how to subdue destructive emotions with rationality. Without churches, many had no sense of moral values that transcended personal or family whims. The warrior ethos conditioned into young boys taught them to disparage or disregard advocates for peaceful solutions to clashes. Young men with no land of their own were raging against the approaching exploitation of their labor and extinction of their way of life occasioned by the arrival of the large-scale timber and coal consortiums.
The Hatfield-McCoy feud was a perfect storm. It resulted in many deaths. But this was a man-made disaster, not a freak of nature. Given some measure of sobriety, humility, rationality, and compassion, most of these deaths could have been avoided.
The greatest horror to me is the plight of the women whose menfolk enacted the feud. Harmon McCoy’s wife, Patty, was seven months pregnant when she dragged his bloody corpse home through the snow. Roseanna McCoy was pregnant when she rode bareback to West Virginia to warn Devil Anse Hatfield of his son’s capture by her father and brothers. Ellison Hatfield’s wife, Sarah, was pregnant when the three McCoy sons killed him. Devil Anse’s wife, Levicy, gave birth a month after the Battle of Grapevine Creek. Enduring childbirth is stressful enough in a peaceful environment, but these women were giving birth on a battlefield.
Then there were all the wives left alone with so many children to rear and no husbands to help them. Cap Hatfield’s wife, Nancy, tried and failed to take care of their five children when Cap was on the lam out West. Their oldest son, Coleman, describes his heartbreaking struggle to run their farm by himself when he was just nine years old. He managed to acquire only a year and a few months of schooling in between planting, plowing, and harvesting. Despite his mother’s and his own best efforts, his brother Shepherd died of malnutrition.
Harmon McCoy’s wife, Patty Cline, found herself widowed with six small children to raise; Ellison Hatfield’s wife, Sarah Staton, with ten.56 Ranel and Sarah McCoy, themselves approaching sixty, took in their murdered son Tolbert McCoy’s two children. The burdens borne by these women and children whose husbands and fathers died such violent deaths must also rank among the collateral damage caused by the feud.
Though none of the women perpetrated feud violence, some fell victim to it.******** Sarah McCoy was brutally beaten and Alifair McCoy killed during the New Year’s Night Massacre. Adelaide McCoy went insane after that night if a newspaper report is to be believed (which some doubt). Roseanna McCoy died of depression. Nancy and Mary McCoy (or Mary and her aged mother-in-law) were beaten unconscious with a cow’s tail.
The role of women in the feud was to mop up after their menfolk’s messes. Sarah McCoy tried repeatedly to calm Ranel’s wrath, and she often succeeded—to the probable detriment of her later-murdered children. Sarah McCoy and her daughter-in-law pleaded unsuccessfully with Devil Anse for Tolbert’s and his brothers’ lives after their murder of Ellison Hatfield. Roseanna McCoy rode across the river to warn Devil Anse that her brothers might kill his son.
Levicy Hatfield tried to keep at least one son out of feud events. Judging from the disapproval of Devil Anse Hatfield’s twin brothers, their mother, Nancy Vance, must have exerted a restraining influence on some of her other sons. Ellison Hatfield’s wife nursed him after the Election Day Brawl, though she wasn’t able to save his life. Cap Hatfield’s wife, Nancy, taught him to read and write, and wrote letters for Devil Anse in his ham-handed attempts to broker a peace with Perry Cline after Jeff McCoy’s murder.
When the women of the feud weren’t enduring or cleaning up after the violence, they enabled it. They seem to have felt that boys will be boys, and girls must put up with it. They loved men who didn’t deserve it. They gave birth to sons who grew up to become murderers. They kept farms and households functioning, washed the bloodstains out of shirts, and mended the bullet holes, while their men plotted and schemed, threatened and blustered, cantered and killed.
If only the feudists had spent as much money and effort on acquiring contraception (which was, in fact, available in other regions of the United States at this time) as they did on acquiring guns, ammunition, and moonshine, a different scenario might have evolved. With fewer children, their farms could have remained intact instead of being constantly subdivided into ever-smaller plots. Those angry young hillbullies would have had secure livelihoods and perhaps wouldn’t have felt such a compulsion to charge around the countryside on horseback, expressing their fury by creating such terror and misery for others.
******** Other possible explanations for the existence of African haplogroups in the British borderlands are early migrations out of Africa and the Middle East, as well as African slaves brought to Britain before slavery was abolished there at the end of the eighteenth century, in addition to their free descendants after abolition.
******** Anyone who has attended middle school will recognize this syndrome.
******** None of the Hatfield women, however, experienced any harm from McCoy men.
14
THE INNDER HILLBILLY
Charles Howell of the Pittsburgh Times was one of the first to start shaping Devil Anse Hatfield’s image as a wild and crazy savage for a national audience. His report from Pikeville following the New Year’s Night Massacre in 1888 portrayed Devil Anse as a ruthless tyrant intent on demolishing the McCoys for no reason at all, even though Howell never met the man. He called the feud “a succession of cowardly murders by day and assassinations and houseburnings by night. All of the murders have been cruel, heartless and almost without the shadow of a provocation.”1
John Ed Pearce, in his book about several of the Kentucky feuds, would probably agree with this portrayal of the Hatfield-McCoy feud. “Devil Anse, Jim Vance, Johnse, and most of the other Hatfields,” he says, “were little more than thugs. I cannot find grounds for admiring Devil Anse, who not only engineered the two instances of brutal murder but lacked the backbone to commit them himself and sent his underlings out to do the slaughtering.”2 But Pearce sees both sides as “basically backward, mean-tempered people.”3 But others maintain that the feud and the feudists were more complicated and more likeable than this.
When T. C. Crawford’s book An American Vendetta: A Story of Barbarism in the United States appeared in 1888, he presented a more favorable but equ
ally stereotypical portrait of Devil Anse Hatfield as a Stonewall Jackson of the Cumberlands.4 A Confederate veterans’ magazine in 1900 stated admiringly that “Devil Anse always goes with a Winchester, a sack around his neck full of cartridges, a pair of Smith and Wesson’s, and, I am told, that a pair of good Damascus blades luxuriate constantly from his boot legs. . . . When you hear that Devil Anse has been shot, it will not be in the back; he will have several piled around him.”5 Maintaining this bloodthirsty public image must have placed a great strain on Devil Anse since he shed it after he emerged from Island Creek as a dripping wet Christian, living a quiet and peaceful life******** until his death in his bed at home from old age.
Crawford also commented on the respect that Devil Anse received from his family and the high regard in which his neighbors held him, concluding that the Civil War had destroyed the community mechanisms for maintaining order, so that group retaliation became the only recourse available in the face of criminal activity.6 These two versions of Devil Anse coexisted, depending upon whether an informant sympathized with the Kentuckians or the West Virginians. Devil Anse was simultaneously a vicious lunatic and a revered elder statesman thrust into a position of leadership by the needs of his community.
There was a third Devil Anse as well, a rival to Paul Bunyan, with his woodsman skills and his feats of hunting, shooting, and riding. He was said to still be able to shoot a squirrel from the top of the tallest tree in his seventies.7 He raised as pets bear cubs whose mothers he had killed. Sometimes young lawyers or politicians trekked up to his house to see the living legend for themselves, like visiting Mount Rushmore. Devil Anse got a kick out of sending them on a chore into his yard, where they encountered a friendly bear and fled in terror.8
