Blood Feud: The Hatfields & The McCoys (17 page)

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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?

Ranel and Sarah McCoy bought an attractive two-story frame
house in downtown Pikeville.
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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.”
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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

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.
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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.
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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 friend 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

But in 1898 Johnse Hatfield returned to West Virginia and cut virgin poplars and oaks at a remote lumber camp, where he fell in love with the daughter of a neighboring farmer. They married, and her father gave them three hundred acres as a wedding present, which Johnse started logging. It was reportedly a happy marriage that brought the beleaguered Johnse some peace and contentment. But his wife soon died, leaving Johnse with three small children. He married twice more.
16

Johnse Hatfield had a rival in the lumber business named “Doc” Ellis. One day Johnse was walking along railroad tracks in West Virginia when three armed men appeared before him and three more behind. They escorted him to Kentucky, where Doc Ellis was so thrilled to see him finally in captivity that he shot a rifle over his head and shouted gleefully.
17

Tried for his role in the Pawpaw Murders and the New Year’s Night Massacre, Johnse Hatfield received a life sentence.
18
Six years into it, he witnessed a fellow inmate attack the warden of his prison with a sharpened fork. As the crazed prisoner tried to plunge the fork into the warden’s throat, Johnse intervened. The prisoner threw Johnse to the floor, but Johnse cut his attacker’s jugular vein with a penknife. He was granted parole as a reward for saving the warden’s life.
19

Johnse Hatfield went on to become a land agent for the Island Creek Coal Company, owned by the Rockefeller family.
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20
Johnse continued to drink heavily, and his good looks started to fade. A cocksure young man, he became quiet and diffident as he aged.
21

Johnse’s nephew Coleman A. says, “In their last years both [Johnse and Cap] realized the mistakes of their youth in the score of years which followed the Civil War, but both realized that they had been victims of the tragic times during the last quarter of the 19th century.”
22
It is admittedly a stretch to regard perpetrators of the Pawpaw Murders and the New Year’s Night Massacre as victims.

Johnse Hatfield died at age sixty of a heart attack while riding a horse.

Unfortunately, the feud mentality had not died among some of the younger Hatfields. Charges of murder were filed against Cap Hatfield’s teenaged brothers Troy and Elias (not to be confused with Devil Anse’s brother Good Elias or Preacher Anse’s brother Black Elias) over a death resulting from a fight. They decided to flee the law, and Cap agreed to take them to Oklahoma. Cap continued on to Colorado, where he worked as a farmhand, eventually returning to West Virginia.
23
While Cap was gone, his second son, Shepherd Hatfield, died of malnutrition.
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