Blood Feud: The Hatfields & The McCoys (26 page)

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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Fights sometimes involved biting off ears or noses and gouging out eyes.
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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,
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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. Their 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.