Blood Feud: The Hatfields & The McCoys (27 page)

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.

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.”
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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.”
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But Pearce sees both sides as “basically backward, mean-tempered people.”
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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 equally stereotypical portrait of Devil Anse Hatfield as a Stonewall Jackson of the Cumberlands.
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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.”
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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A favorite tale that the patriarch told his grandchildren concerned the day he brought home four deer with one bullet. As a doe and a half-grown buck rested on the ground in a meadow, he shot one, the bullet passing through it to kill the other as well. When he cut the doe open to gut her, he found that she was carrying nearly full-term twin fawns, which he raised on bottles.
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Another story concerns Devil Anse Hatfield’s testifying at a trial for the murder of an itinerant peddler. He described tracking down the murderers, their bloodstained clothing, and the stolen booty by following clues like leaves pierced with boot nails and blobs of tobacco juice spit onto the path.
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Other admiring anecdotes involve Devil Anse’s adopting an ill and disconsolate young orphan who passed the old man’s house in a wagon train bound for the West. The orphan grew up to be one of Devil Anse’s most loyal feudists,
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perhaps hiding Cap Hatfield and Joe Glenn in his attic from a posse after their murder of the three Rutherfords on the Matewan Election Day. Another story in Devil Anse’s hagiography, which stretches the limits of even the kindest credulity, reports that he organized his henchmen to hoe weeds from the corn patches of widows and the disabled,
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which would be equivalent to Al Capone’s thugs laying down their tommy guns to wash windows in a Chicago old folks’ home.

Buffalo Bill Cody brought his
Wild West Show
to eastern Kentucky in 1893. One reporter maintains that Devil Anse Hatfield emerged from the audience to match Buffalo Bill’s marksmanship shot for shot.
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But Devil Anse was avoiding Kentucky during those years from fear of the indictments against him there. The myths had already begun to write themselves.

In 1897, seven years after the feud had ended, a clerk at a local store arranged for an itinerant photographer to take pictures of some members of the Hatfield family. The photographer asked the men and boys to brandish their guns. Understandably naive about the extent of media manipulation, they grabbed their rifles and pistols and displayed them “like jewelry” (as one writer has said of Afghan men and their firearms
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). Two of these photos soon gained notoriety all over the world, stigmatizing the Hatfield feudists for the rest of their lives and beyond.

The public was especially shocked by a little boy in one of these photos—Cap Hatfield’s son Coleman A., the eventual Hatfield feud chronicler—who clutched a pistol as though it were a teddy bear, and by the apparently dimwitted pride with which all the men flaunted their weapons. The great irony is that only two of them—Devil Anse and Cap—had actually fought in the feud. But psychologists say that children respond to the expectations of those around them, so three of Devil Anse’s younger nonfeudist sons in these photos eventually killed people, and two were killed in turn.

One of Devil Anse’s obituaries states that he was persuaded to go on the vaudeville stage in much the same manner as Sitting Bull had joined Buffalo Bill Cody’s
Wild West Show.
But he was reminded, or he remembered, just in time that if he ventured away from his home and his log fort, the outstanding indictments against him might be served.
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Emmett Dalton, of the infamous Dalton Gang, convinced Devil Anse Hatfield to star in a silent movie in 1915, to be shown at theaters along with a movie called
The Last Stand of the Dalton Boys,
which concerned the Dalton Gang’s attempt to outdo Jesse James by robbing two banks in broad daylight while wearing false beards. Their ploy failed: Four of the gang were killed, and Emmett Dalton went to prison for fourteen years. Dalton claimed that both the Hatfields and the McCoys starred in the feud movie and that he inspected their guns before the sham battles along the Tug Fork to make sure that no former feudist had slipped real bullets into his gun so as to rekindle the feud. Dalton said that when he showed the film to the participating feudists, they were “tickled as children” to watch this screen version of their activities.
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In reality, no McCoys participated.
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The movie ran for a time in southern West Virginia. Truda McCoy claimed that Devil Anse and Levicy took along a moonshine still to screenings and demonstrated its operation to movie audiences. She also claimed that the theater owner in Pikeville decided not to show the movie there out of respect for the feelings of the McCoys.
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Some of Devil Anse Hatfield’s friends eventually pointed out to him that neither the Hatfields nor the McCoys had robbed strangers for money. They insisted that it was unseemly for their activities to be equated to the depredations of the Dalton Gang.
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Anse agreed and withdrew from the project. But the damage had been done, leaving behind yet another photo believed to have been taken as a publicity still—of Devil Anse, rifle in hand, wearing double cartridge belts. The aging Devil Anse was quickly becoming a caricature of himself.