Blood Feud

by Lisa Alther

  My grandfather William Henry Reed was born in 1882, the year of the Pawpaw Murders. Both his parents died when he was ten. He went to live with a married sister, but after a few years he ran away to Kentucky, traveling on foot the twenty-five miles to the house of his eldest brother, Madison, a teacher in Johns Creek, Kentucky—where McCoy champion Frank Phillips had grown up—just over the ridge from the Tug Fork Valley. Madison gave my grandfather rides to school on the back of his horse.

  Later my grandfather moved in with another older brother, Robert, the carpenter and Dunkard preacher who was Ava McCoy’s father. He boarded at a private high school in Inez, about twenty miles along crooked mountain paths from Blackberry Fork, where Ranel McCoy had lived until his cabin burned down during the New Year’s Night Massacre in 1888. Robert always sent my grandfather a horse to ride home for the holidays.

  While teaching in Darwin, Virginia, as a young man, my grandfather encountered my grandmother, a second cousin he had never met. She, too, became a teacher. When they married, they decided he should pursue his dream of attending medical school. After a year at the University of Louisville, they moved to Richmond, where she worked at a cosmetics counter in a department store to support them while he completed his studies at the Medical College of Virginia. In the summers, he worked as a logger for the Yellow Poplar Lumber Company, one of the international consortiums denuding Appalachian forests, paying $1.50 per tree, some of them eight feet across and two hundred feet tall.1

  During his final year of medical school, my grandfather served as chief medical officer at the Confederate Veterans Home. My grandparents returned to Clintwood, Virginia, near where both had grown up, and my grandfather conducted a medical practice via house calls on horseback. In 1919, four years after my father’s birth, they moved to Kingsport, Tennessee, where my grandfather opened a hospital.

  My grandparents maintained minimal contact with their fourteen brothers and sisters and many cousins, nieces, and nephews in southwest Virginia. My father took us children there only once. I remember a huge slate dump outside a coal mine in which we unearthed some wonderful fossils of ancient plants. I also remember meeting some of my father’s cousins at the white-framed house of his aunt Cora.

  As a Girl Scout, I used to backpack in the Smoky Mountains, and I felt very much at home in their towering embrace. But the Cumberland Mountains from which my grandparents had emerged seemed dark and forbidding. As an adult, I made several trips there to meet relatives and to do genealogical research. But I was never at ease as I drove the winding roads through that dark and bloody ground—even before I knew that name for it.

  My mother, who grew up in the Finger Lakes region of New York State, always said that the southern Appalachians were so steep compared to the rolling hills around the Finger Lakes that she felt hemmed in by them. It bothered her not to be able to see the far horizon or to spot someone coming along the road up ahead. But this wasn’t the problem for me. I felt comfortable in the Smokies and the Blue Ridge, just not in the Cumberlands. I didn’t understand why until much later.

  My grandparents talked about their reasons for leaving southwest Virginia and moving to Kingsport. They spoke of the pernicious effects of easily available moonshine. A first cousin of my father died in his twenties from lead poisoning acquired from moonshine made in stills with lead seams.

  My father often talked about a visit to southwest Virginia as a boy to stay with an uncle named Cas Artrip. Uncle Cas grabbed a jug of moonshine as they departed for a fishing trip. “Fishing” that day involved sitting on the bank of a stream while Uncle Cas got progressively drunker. My father boyishly informed him that moonshine was against the law. “Son,” he replied, “over here I am the law.” At the end of the afternoon, Uncle Cas tossed a stick of dynamite into the creek, and my father collected the fish that the explosion tossed onto the banks of the stream.

  My grandparents also discussed the too-plentiful supply of weapons in the region they had left behind. Many men routinely carried guns and knives for hunting but also for fighting. My grandfather described an incident at a Sunday school meeting at which a local bully, Tom Stuart, drunk of course, chased my grandfather’s cousin with a knife because of a prior political dispute. My grandfather ended up having to fight Tom to save his cousin’s life. He threw Tom down and choked him before onlookers pulled him off. After that he, too, carried a pistol, and he had several more near encounters with Tom Stuart. He later heard rumors that Tom had sobered up, found Jesus, and become a preacher.

  Several years after that, when my grandfather was coming home on his horse from a house call in the mountains, he passed a gathering similar to the Election Days that had proved so disastrous for the Hatfields and the McCoys. In his memoirs he wrote, “Fifty or a hundred people would gather, drink moonshine whiskey, trade horses, and engage in fights—and too often there would be gunplay and someone killed.”2

  As he sat on his horse watching, my grandfather spotted a man racing toward him on his horse. The reins hung loose around the horse’s neck. In one hand the rider held a pistol, which he was firing into the air. The other hand was holding a bottle of whiskey. It was Tom Stuart, who, having found Jesus, had evidently lost Him again. Stuart hadn’t yet recognized my grandfather, but my grandfather took no chances, wheeling his horse around and galloping off in the opposite direction.

  Soon after this encounter, my grandparents and my four-year-old father moved to Kingsport. I don’t know whether there was any connection between Tom Stuart and this move. No one ever said.

  I witnessed this ethos of overwrought machismo firsthand when I was a teenager. As a candy striper volunteering at the hospital where my doctor father worked, I saw the results of many “accidents” involving knives and guns. I heard more such stories at the dinner table when my father discussed the patients he treated at the emergency room each day. Once or twice a week, I watched boys fighting at the bus stop at school. No one ever knew why they were fighting. Almost everyone but me seemed to enjoy it, both those fighting and those watching. The world, or at least my part of it, was starting to feel like a pretty crazy place.

  My grandparents also decided to leave their birthplace because of the quality of the medical care there—ironic since my grandfather was himself a doctor. But he talked about his anxiety over not having colleagues with whom to discuss difficult cases, and over not having modern equipment and supplies when he had to treat patients in their remote cabins.

  Both my grandfather’s parents had died young of treatable conditions—his mother of gallstones and his father of pneumonia. His mother’s physician, an herb doctor named Marshall “The Red Fox” Taylor, carried two pistols, one on each hip.3 He wore a cartridge belt draped over his shoulder and a rifle slung across his back, much as Devil Anse did in surviving photographs. Taylor also wore shoes that he had made himself, with heels nailed to the toes so that anyone trying to track him would think he was walking in the opposite direction.

  Dr. Taylor was hanged in Virginia in 1893, just down the road from where my grandparents’ families lived, for his role in the Killing Rocks Massacre. He and two accomplices shot three members of the Mullins family as they drove a cart loaded with barrels of moonshine through Pound Gap toward Pikeville. Then they robbed the Mullins family of $1,000.

  The Red Fox, wearing a white suit, preached an hour and a half sermon from the upstairs window of the courthouse prior to his hanging. He asked his family to keep him unburied for three days so that he could rise from the dead. (He didn’t.)

  My grandmother’s mother also died of pneumonia, when my grandmother was thirteen. But her attending physician, though equally ineffectual, wasn’t nearly so colorful. My grandparents lost a son prior to my father’s birth during a difficult delivery that more up-to-date medical facilities could have remedied.

  There were other reasons for their departure from the Cumberlands that I learned about
much later—rumors of ancestors who were Native Americans and Union guerrillas, which didn’t fit well with my grandmother’s notions of herself as a descendant of Confederate Cavaliers.

  But all I knew as a child was that southwest Virginia was a place my grandparents had left, and didn’t talk about very much, and didn’t like to visit, and didn’t want me to visit. It sounded like a land of drunkenness, violence, and whacked-out physicians.

  A tale my father often told didn’t alleviate that impression. It involved a feud among some of his Reed ancestors and some ancestors of Shannon Allen, my father’s surgical associate. Dr. Allen and my father maintained that several Allen brothers had killed five Reeds during a courthouse shoot-out in Hillsville, Virginia, early in the twentieth century. The idea seemed to amuse them. It appalled me.

  Years later I researched this feud, trying to find out if the version I had heard from my father and Dr. Allen were true.4 I discovered that there were indeed many Reeds in the Hillsville area. I also learned that the patriarch of the Allen clan, Floyd Allen, Shannon Allen’s ancestor, was easily insulted and quick-tempered. His family owned large tracts of land and a general store. They were also moonshiners and bootleggers. Nevertheless, members of the Allen family held many local offices, such as sheriff and deputy. (Sound familiar?)

  Floyd Allen had shot several people: a man in North Carolina, a cousin, a brother in a dispute over their father’s estate. Once he shot a man who was trying to buy his brother’s farm because he himself wanted to buy it at a lower price. For this shooting he was sentenced to a hundred-dollar fine and an hour in jail. The governor suspended his jail time.

  After being appointed police officer for his county, Floyd attacked a buggy carrying two of his nephews to jail. They had been arrested for fighting during a church service with a young man whose girlfriend one had kissed the previous evening at a corn-shucking bee. One was manacled to the buggy’s side rail, the other tied in back with rope. With the butt of his pistol, Floyd beat unconscious the deputy escorting his nephews. Then he rolled the deputy into a ditch and freed his kinsmen. “I just can’t bear to see anyone drug around,” he later explained to the judge.

  At his trial for beating the deputy, almost everyone was armed: the many Allens among the spectators; the court officials, who were expecting trouble; and Floyd himself. When Floyd was sentenced to a year in the penitentiary, he stood up and announced, “I just tell you, I ain’t a’going.”

  Then all hell broke loose. No one knows who started shooting first. The Allens later claimed it was the court officials. The court officials insisted it was the Allens. The spectators had a number of conflicting opinions, but they all saw Floyd shooting a pistol. The Allens fled the courthouse, brandishing their own pistols and twelve-gauge shotguns.

  When it was all over, fifty bullets had lodged in the wood of the courtroom and five people lay dead: judge, sheriff, attorney, juror, and witness—none named Reed. It’s one of the few episodes in American history in which a convicted criminal has attempted to avoid his sentence by killing the judge. Seven people had also been wounded: court clerk, juror, deputy, two spectators, and two Allens. One of these Allens was Floyd, who was so badly injured that he couldn’t escape, so he checked himself into a hotel across the street. When deputies arrived to arrest him, he tried to cut his own throat with a pocketknife rather than face prison.

  Posses of Baldwin-Felts detectives and local deputies eventually rounded up all the Allen suspects, discovering several illegal stills in the process. Floyd and his son were tried for the murder of the Commonwealth’s attorney and sentenced to death by electrocution. When he heard the verdict, Floyd wept.

  Floyd Allen was electrocuted on March 28, 1913, at 1:20 p.m., and his son Claud eleven minutes later. When Floyd’s body was examined following his death, the medical staff found scars from thirteen bullet wounds, including five administered by his own family.

  The story of the courtroom shooting, which had haunted my youth, had really occurred. Shannon Allen’s ancestors had, indeed, instigated it. Five people died, but none was my ancestor. This was my first experience of witnessing how real events in the not-so-distant past transform into legend—a lesson that served me well while researching the feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys.

  The civil rights movement was under way when I left the South to attend college near Boston. Many there hated white Southerners for the mayhem in the Deep South, and it was hard to blame them. From afar my homeland looked like a pretty dismal place. But gradually I began to realize that the issues in what had been the plantation South differed somewhat from those in the mountains where I had grown up. I also began to realize that, however much Kingsport wanted to regard itself as a bastion of the Old South, it was actually located smack dab in the middle of Appalachia. We weren’t Southerners; we were hillbillies.

  Struggling to digest my true identity, I began to research my ancestors. I wanted to know who they really were, finally investigating my grandmother’s Tidewater propaganda about Confederate Cavaliers. I learned that most had left the Tidewater behind in the eighteenth century and that many had supported the Union during the Civil War. It’s impossible to describe the psychic shock experienced by someone who has always identified with the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, upon learning that her ancestors were actually Union guerrillas.

  Grandfather Reed’s family were Dunkards, a nickname for the Church of the Brethren, a German Anabaptist sect with similarities to Mennonites. Dunkards opposed slavery, but they were pacifists—not a comfortable stance during the Civil War. When Virginia seceded from the Union, the Reeds moved to Martin County, Kentucky, home to many Dunkards, in hopes of escaping the ravaging bands of both Union and Confederate bushwhackers infesting their South of the Mountain neighborhood.

  My grandfather Reed’s maternal grandfather stayed behind in South of the Mountain—only to be taken prisoner by Confederates, who slaughtered one of his cows. My grandmother’s grandmother also stayed behind. When she heard that Confederate troops were approaching, she piled rocks in all her handmade quilts and sank them in a stream. The soldiers found them anyway and rode away with the sodden quilts draped across their horses to dry.5

  My grandmother’s family—Vanovers, Howells, Swindalls, and Phippses—mostly supported the Union. Alf Killen, a notorious Union guerrilla leader, was a Vanover in-law (my grandmother’s great-aunt’s husband’s brother, to be exact), rumored to be the son of a half-Cherokee mother. Loosely affiliated with Col. John Dils’s 39th Kentucky Mounted Infantry, his band operated out of Pike County, Kentucky. He was said to be somewhat deranged because of having been forced to fight for a Confederate Virginia State Line unit when his sympathies lay with the Union. I have often wondered if Alf Killen might have known Devil Anse Hatfield, who also served with the Virginia State Line.6

  Joel “Dusty Pants” Long, Alf Killen’s head henchman (and my grandmother’s great-aunt’s husband), carried a cane dagger and was said to have been called Dusty Pants because he fled from dangerous situations so quickly that he left behind a cloud of dust. One night while on a mission, he was so cold that he chased some wild hogs out of their rut so that he could sleep among the leaves warmed by their bodies. When he woke up the next morning, the razorbacks had returned and were sleeping snuggled up all around him.7

  When the war began, John Wesley Swindall—my grandmother’s grandfather and also my grandfather’s great-uncle—moved his family from South of the Mountain to the Big Sandy River just north of the Tug Fork Valley in Kentucky. Then he joined Company K of Colonel Dils’s mounted infantry as a sergeant.

  One day, Alf Killen learned that some two hundred Confederate soldiers were camped on the Crane’s Nest River near my grandmother’s hometown of Darwin, Virginia, and they were looting the homes of Union soldiers and supporters. Alf summoned his cohorts: his brother Bob Killen (married to another of my grandmother’s great-aunts), Dusty
Pants Long, John Wesley Swindall, several Vanovers in Dils’s mounted infantry, my grandmother’s great-uncle Eli Vanover, a couple of Phipps cousins, one of my grandmother’s great-grandfathers, and perhaps three dozen other Union sympathizers. They intended to ambush the Rebel bushwhackers, but some snitch disclosed their plans to the Confederates, who ambushed them instead. Eight Union partisans died, including Bob Killen, and Eli Vanover’s arm bone was shattered.8

  Toward the end of the war, Col. John Dils, dishonorably discharged from the Union army for fraud, was rumored to have joined Alf Killen’s guerrilla band. Killen was eventually killed in the Battle of Big Mud Creek in Floyd County, Kentucky. Improvising on his nickname, Dusty Pants Long was said to have escaped from this battle by donning a woman’s dress and sunbonnet and running like hell.

  During my research on the Hatfields and the McCoys, I realized that the situation for my ancestors in southwestern Virginia during the Civil War was identical to that in the Tug Fork Valley, with bushwhackers, deserters, draft dodgers, and escaped prisoners of all allegiances, or none, assaulting and robbing civilians at will.

  The missing link, Col. John Dils connected my ancestors from South of the Mountain to the Hatfields and the McCoys in the Tug Fork Valley. My Unionist forebears might have known their commander, Colonel Dils, as well as Harmon McCoy, Billy Phillips, and the other Pike County Unionists, and they might have fought against Devil Anse Hatfield, Jim Vance, and the Logan Wildcats.

  My grandparents never mentioned the Civil War. Their families’ roles in it certainly didn’t support my grandmother’s notion of herself as a daughter of the Confederacy. My grandparents never mentioned the Hatfield-McCoy feud either, even though my grandfather was eight when Cottontop Mounts was hanged, and my grandmother four. Pikeville, where the hanging occurred, lay just across Pound Gap from South of the Mountain. People from all over the region attended the hanging. It was a major occasion—the first public hanging in Kentucky in forty years, and the last. It’s possible that my grandparents were taken there for the event, or that their relatives or neighbors attended.