Blood Feud: The Hatfields & The McCoys (10 page)

Ellison “Cottontop” Mounts, a woods-colt son of Ellison Hatfield,
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entered the schoolhouse and made threats against the McCoy brothers for stabbing and shooting his father. Tall and muscular, with pale blond hair and light gray eyes, Cottontop was said to be albino, with the intelligence of an eight-year-old and a strident laugh that irritated the other Hatfields.
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A photo of him from the end of the feud shows a nice-looking young man with close-cropped hair and a surly curl to his full upper lip. He was later manipulated into taking the rap for a murder thought to have been committed by Devil Anse Hatfield’s son Cap—and he hanged for it—but for now Wall Hatfield intervened and sent Cottontop away.

Preacher Anse Hatfield crossed the Tug Fork from Kentucky to plead with his cousin Devil Anse to take the McCoy sons to Pikeville for trial. Devil Anse replied that if Ellison recovered, he would do that. Tellingly, he didn’t indicate what he would do if Ellison died.
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Dyke Garrett, an itinerant preacher who had perhaps served in the war as a chaplain with Devil Anse, also visited him and urged him to release the McCoy brothers into the custody of the law.
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(It’s possible that these two visits from preachers were actually one and the same, Preacher Anse being the more likely of the two to have visited since he had been involved in adjudicating the murder right from the start.)

Rumors swirled that Ranel McCoy was approaching the schoolhouse with a posse. But Ranel instead was in Pikeville, unable to persuade authorities to assist him against the Hatfields on his sons’ behalf.

Unfortunately for all concerned, Ellison died two days after his stabbing.

Coleman A. Hatfield curiously left no account whatsoever of the tragedy that ensued.
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Perhaps he was too horrified by the roles played in it by his father and grandfather, Cap and Devil Anse Hatfield. Instead, he turned his attention to a mysterious character named Charlie Carpenter, a red-haired former schoolteacher with hyperthyroid eyes, which stayed so busy scanning the surroundings for possible danger that they never alighted on the person with whom Carpenter was talking. He carried a pistol under his coat and could shoot a walnut from the highest branches of a tree with his rifle. He claimed he had been shot at once a year for seventeen years, though he didn’t say why.

After Ellison Hatfield’s death, Carpenter composed a document to legitimize vigilante justice against the McCoy sons. Among other things, it said, “Now, therefore, be it resolved that . . . the guilty be punished according to their deeds, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, and that all other things which be just and proper be done for the good of our community.”
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A few men reportedly walked away from this meeting, including, perhaps, Devil Anse’s older brother, Wall. Those remaining signed it with their
X
’s.

Devil Anse Hatfield fulfilled his promise to Sarah McCoy to bring her sons back to Kentucky alive. He and some twenty of his henchmen took them across the Tug Fork—possibly because he believed that if they killed the three in Kentucky and returned to their West Virginia homes, geography would protect them from arrest by Kentucky authorities.

Once they reached the Kentucky shore, using Carpenter’s document as authorization, Devil Anse ordered the three young men bound to pawpaw trees in a sinkhole where the carcasses of some sheep-killing dogs had recently been tossed. The stench of the rotting dogs was said to be suffocating.
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The McCoys were blindfolded and told to make their peace with God. Cottontop Mounts, in the trials that later ended the feud, testified that the sinister Charlie Carpenter tied the young men to the pawpaw trees and hung a lantern on a branch above their heads so that the firing squad could see their targets. He further stated that Carpenter; Devil Anse, Johnse, Cap, and Bill Tom Hatfield; Alex Messer; and Tom Chambers fired the fifty shots that killed the three McCoy brothers.

One researcher claims that Bud McCoy, only eighteen—and innocent of Ellison’s murder, at least according to Truda McCoy, because he had been mistaken for his brother Bill—begged for his life. Devil Anse Hatfield wanted to spare him. But Jim Vance walked over to Bud, put a gun to his head, and pulled the trigger, saying, “A dead man tells no tales.”
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But Devil Anse’s grandson Coleman A. Hatfield insists that Jim Vance had had a falling out with Good Elias Hatfield over some timberland and wasn’t even present that night when the McCoy brothers were executed.
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Cottontop Mounts later testified that Alex Messer shot Bud McCoy in the head.

Jim McCoy heard the deadly fusillade while sitting on a friend’s porch on the West Virginia side of the river. He had already learned of Ellison Hatfield’s death, so he had a pretty good idea of what the shots meant. He organized a search party to cross the river in the direction of the rifle fire.

Jim McCoy found his brothers that same night
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—Tolbert with a hand against his head, as though to fend off the bullets that had passed through his palm and entered his skull; Pharmer pitched forward from a pawpaw trunk, swaying from the ropes that bound him; and Bud kneeling, with part of his head blown off.

It was a soft summer evening, fireflies flaring lazily, mirroring the shimmering stars in the blue-black sky overhead. On a night like this, these damaged young men, murderers and the murdered alike, should have been lying in the arms of willing young lovers instead of killing one another with knives and guns. What had gone wrong with them? No one could say, and the river just kept on flowing.

Ellison Hatfield was buried in West Virginia the day after his death. On an ox-drawn sled, the bodies of the McCoy sons were hauled the six miles to their parents’ home above Blackberry Fork. They were buried that day in separate coffins in a single grave on a shelf of land next to the cabin.
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Soon after, Charlie Carpenter, the evil schoolmaster, was spotted heading south through the West Virginia hills toward Tennessee. Half a century later one of his former students had a friendly encounter with him in Washington State, but nothing more was ever heard from or about him.
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A friend of the Hatfields later blamed the entire feud that ensued on “that bull-eyed Charlie Carpenter” and his vigilante resolution.
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Devil Anse’s great-grandson Coleman C. Hatfield relates the story of the Pawpaw Murders in one succinct sentence: “Someone took the McCoy brothers across the Tug where they bound them to pawpaw bushes and shot them dead.”
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Someone, indeed.

As though attempting to explain why Ranel McCoy didn’t organize a posse to rescue his sons, Truda McCoy repeatedly stresses that Ranel raced to Pikeville to arrange bail and to hire a lawyer to represent them. He appears to have believed that he was still dealing with the modern justice system—which had served the valley well with regard to stolen livestock—rather than with a reversion to blood feud vengeance. Truda also emphasizes that Sarah McCoy didn’t summon Ranel home from Pikeville when Devil Anse Hatfield seized their sons because Devil Anse had assured her of their sons’ safe return to Kentucky but also of their immediate death if armed McCoys tried to rescue them.
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After his unsuccessful visit to Pikeville, Ranel McCoy returned to his cabin on Blackberry Fork, accompanied by Roseanna, who was still working for the Clines. The morning after the execution, Ranel and Sarah learned of their sons’ murders in the pawpaw patch.
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Beside himself, Ranel started assembling a posse of relatives and neighbors, but Sarah begged him not to participate in any more killing, to let the courts mete out justice to the Hatfields. She had heart problems and punctuated her plea by passing out. Ranel obliged his wife, canceled his posse, and stayed home to grieve, which many of his kinsmen felt was a mistake, believing the Hatfields could be stopped only by an equivalent show of force. One neighbor was quoted as saying, “If they think they’ve got ye on the run, they’ll keep after ye.”
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And they did.

Once again, the Tug Fork Valley froze with horror. Three sons of Ranel McCoy had killed Devil Anse Hatfield’s younger brother Ellison, and a group of twenty-three Hatfield supporters had executed the McCoy boys in return. Good Elias Hatfield, the reluctant feudist, called these Hatfield supporters who always did his older brother’s bidding “Anse’s Hellhounds.”
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The pack was poised for further pursuits.

But for the moment the only man in motion was Ranel McCoy, who made several trips to Pikeville to initiate legal proceedings against Devil Anse and the Hellhounds.
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In September 1882, a grand jury finally issued indictments against Devil Anse and twenty Hatfield supporters. Four days later bench warrants were issued for some seventeen witnesses for the state.
3

At the next session of the court several months later, however, the Pike County sheriff reported himself unable to arrest any of the indicted. He wrote “not found in this county February 19, 1883” beside each name in the records.
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Perhaps the sheriff felt that justice had already been served by the murders of Ellison Hatfield’s killers and that it was best to let sleeping hellhounds lie. Or perhaps he and his deputies feared confronting the armed bands of Hatfields who continued to visit Kentucky whenever they pleased. One reporter wrote that “there are none of the local authorities brave enough to try” to capture the Hatfields.
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Whatever the case, every last indicted Hatfield or Hatfield supporter evaded arrest for the next five years.

“It was known throughout Kentucky and West Virginia,” one researcher explained, “that any judge who lifted his gavel in the mountain regions did so at the risk of his life, that civil authorities were not powerful enough to combat family or clan rule, that the instructions of the court could be carried out only if people to whom they applied were in a mood to comply.” Because the Tug Fork split the valley in which both the Hatfields and the McCoys lived, geography introduced thorny issues about jurisdictions and—the reunited nation still mired in Reconstruction—states’ rights.
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Law officers from one state weren’t supposed to apprehend suspects in the other state, so those who committed crimes had only to cross the river in order to avoid arrest, as Devil Anse Hatfield’s crew had done after murdering the McCoy sons in the pawpaw patch.

Ranel McCoy didn’t agree with the sheriff’s assessment of the situation and kept agitating for the Pike County court to require West Virginia to deliver the indicted murderers to Kentucky. He also worked to assemble a posse to enter West Virginia and hunt them down. But his wife, Sarah, kept urging him to turn the other cheek, as advised in the New Testament, in stark contrast to the Old Testament eye-for-an-eye resolution adopted by the Hatfields that fatal night in the pawpaw patch.

A Hatfield historian maintains that “nearly everyone who has written about the Hatfield and McCoy feud has had to deal with the fact that very little happened between February 1883 and January 1887.”
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Such a statement would surely have come as news to several who were terrorized, beaten, shot, and killed during this period, as well as to those who fled the strife-torn area. An editorial in the Louisville
Courier-Journal
on June 30, 1885, stated, concerning the feud regions of Kentucky, “A reign of terror prevails. The quieter citizens are cowed, and those peaceably disposed are leaving that section and coming down within the confines of civilization.”
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Truda McCoy notes that it was almost impossible to figure out what actually did happen during the years immediately following the Pawpaw Murders because no one kept track of the events at the time. She reports, without details, that a young son of Larkin “Lark” McCoy, Harmon’s second son, was ambushed and murdered by someone associated with the West Virginia Hatfields. She describes his funeral, with armed Hatfields watching from the far bank of the Tug Fork and armed McCoys expecting them to attack at any moment.
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Another episode during this supposedly quiescent period was the ambush of John and Hense Scott, two cousins of Ranel McCoy, whose family was trying to remain neutral. While riding their horses along a road, Hense was shot in the shoulder and John in the knee, such that he limped for the rest of his life. Both their horses were killed.
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Some Hatfields later explained to the Scott brothers that they had mistaken them for Ranel McCoy and Ranel’s older brother Big Jim
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(or for Ranel’s son Calvin
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). Learning that Ranel was planning to travel to Pikeville to consult with Perry Cline about the stalled indictments against the Hatfields for the Pawpaw Murders, the Hatfields had intended to kill Ranel to avoid the resuscitation of the warrants. Apparently they didn’t consider the possibility that new indictments for the murders of Ranel and his companion might take their place.

Following the Pawpaw Murders, Devil Anse Hatfield seemed to stay out of the spotlight, behaving like a mountain padrone, sending forth his Hellhounds to execute his instructions. His primary deputy was his second son, Cap, a grim-faced, heavyset young man who had received his first serious wound at age fifteen at a drunken Christmas Eve dance when he was mistaken for his brawling brother Johnse and shot in the abdomen. A portion of his colon was destroyed, and for a long time anything he ate would spill out of his wound rather than continuing to pass through his intestines.
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Such an injury would make anyone grim. It would certainly have made it hard for him to get dinner dates.

In photos of him as a young man, Cap Hatfield wears a trimmed beard and mustache, and bangs slicked down across his forehead, in addition to a pistol in a shoulder holster. He looks a bit like Hitler, only gloomier.
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Cap was blind in one eye from an accident with a percussion cap in his youth; his good eye was blue. The feud reporter who described Devil Anse Hatfield as resembling Stonewall Jackson disliked Cap immensely, for reasons unknown, saying, “I do not think that I ever saw a more hideously repulsive face in all my life.” He also labeled Cap “quarrelsome and vindictive,” claiming that he was “simply a bad young man, without a single redeeming point.”
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Though some of the worst excesses of the feud have been laid at Cap Hatfield’s feet, he appears uneasy and unhappy in his role as his father’s deputy. The same reporter who despised Cap also observed that Devil Anse seemed to regard him as “a very useful tool for carrying out his purposes.”
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Like all narcissists, Devil Anse had the time of day only for those who advanced his own agenda, incapable of caring that Cap might have had goals of his own that service to his father was preventing him from pursuing. Cap Hatfield’s grandson Coleman C. claimed that Devil Anse “sent Cap out to raid the McCoys and commit other frighteningly violent acts while remaining in the background. Such decisions embittered Cap, who carried the bitterness to his grave.”
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Cap’s son Coleman A. concurred that his father “seemed haunted by the experiences of his youth.”
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One night while the McCoy men were busy plotting elsewhere, Martha Jackson McCoy, the wife of Ranel’s fourth son, Sam, and the eventual source for much of Truda McCoy’s feud information, came to stay with Ranel’s wife, Sarah, and daughter Roseanna, who was visiting, at the McCoys’ cabin on Blackberry Fork. In the middle of the night, they heard noises. Roseanna and Martha climbed into the loft to look down through some loopholes into the yard, where they counted fifteen armed men on horseback in the moonlight. One dismounted and stepped onto the porch. Terrified, the two young women fell over a pile of new lumber and sent it crashing to the floor. Then Martha tripped over a water bucket that also clattered across the floor. Convinced the house was full of armed McCoys, the men raced off into the darkness.
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Meanwhile, Johnse Hatfield’s marriage to Nancy McCoy was not faring well, even though they had produced two children, naming their firstborn son William Anderson after Devil Anse. A schoolgirl no longer, Nancy “wore her raven black hair parted in the middle, drawn tightly back and twisted into a knot at the nape of her neck. Her luminous black eyes were shadowed by long black lashes and arched brows, but she possessed the fair complexion that rarely ever combines with this color of hair and eyes.”
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Johnse, ever the Hatfield family Lothario, had, however, grown impervious to Nancy’s beauty and was continually being summoned to feud-related shenanigans. Like his younger brother Cap, he seemed unable to say no to his father, just as he had proved himself unable to defy his father in order to marry Roseanna McCoy—if marriage was, in fact, what both Johnse and Roseanna had wanted, which is impossible to say. Johnse was also drunk much of the time, which of course didn’t help matters. Belle Beaver may have fled Happy Hollow, but he had found other women to take her place. Nancy, for her part, didn’t hesitate to lash him with her sharp tongue. For all his womanizing, Johnse had a reputation for being henpecked. As one researcher put it, Nancy McCoy “had taken the powder out of his gun.”
21

Twice when drunk, Johnse Hatfield tried to kill Nancy, first by sneaking into her bedroom with a rifle in the middle of the night.
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The second time, he led her into a field where his brother Cap was hiding behind a stump with a gun, poised to pick her off. Once she spotted him, Nancy informed Cap that if she ever saw him on her property again, she would kill him.
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No one who knew her doubted that she would. Cap did his best to avoid her after that. Truda McCoy refers to her as a “Hellcat,” a worthy match indeed for any Hellhound.
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Nor were Nancy McCoy’s other in-laws happy with her. In the autumn of 1886, Devil Anse Hatfield became convinced that a spy was betraying the Hatfield camp. Someone was supplying the McCoys with information about Hatfield activities, thereby making them more vulnerable to arrest under the outstanding indictments for the Pawpaw Murders. The McCoys had discovered a Hatfield hideout, and they had also burned down a remote cabin that the Hatfields used as a refuge.
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The Hatfields concluded that Nancy was the source, conveying information acquired from her drunken husband, Johnse, to her sister, Mary McCoy Daniels (like Nancy, a daughter of the murdered Harmon McCoy), who lived across the river in Kentucky. Mary, in turn, was conveying it to their uncle Ranel. As one writer later put it, in the hills the best ways to spread news are to “telegraph, telephone, or tell-a-woman.”
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