Blood Feud: The Hatfields & The McCoys (31 page)

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.

A few years after the hanging, my grandfather lived with his brother Madison at Johns Creek, home of Bad Frank Phillips and several others who had joined the McCoy posses toward the feud’s end. People surely talked about it in my grandfather’s presence. But both my grandparents died before the topic interested me, so, sadly, I never asked them what they knew or didn’t know about the feud.

As I was researching this book, I discovered even more links from my family to the feudists. Jim Vance, Devil Anse Hatfield’s uncle, had stolen horses for Gen. Vincent Witcher’s Confederate raiders during the Civil War in Russell County, Virginia. My grandparents’ families lived in what was then Russell County. One of Vance’s victims was one of his cousins, Wilburn Lockhart. After the war, Lockhart planned a retaliatory ambush on Vance while the latter was plowing a field. Vance learned of the plot and summoned a couple of friends. They ambushed Lockhart’s hit men instead, killing one named Harmon Artrip. My father’s moonshining, dynamite-fishing uncle Cas Artrip was a second cousin of Harmon Artrip. After murdering returned Union solider Harmon McCoy, Jim Vance had murdered a distant ancestor of mine. The Hatfield-McCoy feud had suddenly come home to roost.

As I investigated the other Kentucky feuds, I was also startled to discover that the infamous Craig Tolliver, of the Martin-Tolliver feud of Rowan County, Kentucky, the thug who inexplicably didn’t want to die with his boots on, was a second cousin once-removed to my grandmother’s grandfather John Wesley Swindall, a Union sergeant and himself a woods-colt son of Solomon Tolliver. Both Craig Tolliver and John Wesley Swindall had been born in Ashe County, North Carolina. Craig moved with his parents to Rowan County, where robbers murdered his father and stole the money from the sale of his Ashe County farm. John Wesley Swindall moved with his mother to South of the Mountain in Virginia. I will never know if their families knew one another in Ashe County, but it is possible. It is even likely.

The understanding came to me slowly—as had Ava McCoy’s under­standing of her fear of thundering horse hooves in the night. My fear of the Cumberlands, a visceral one, had been passed down to me from my grandparents by a process of osmosis. You inherit your ancestors’ genes, but you also inherit, after birth, the psychic fallout from traumas they endured during their lifetimes. Like the forebears of Ava McCoy’s husband Homer, who fled the Tug Fork Valley to escape the Hatfield-McCoy feud violence, like the thousands of others who fled that and other Kentucky feuds, my grandparents had left southwest Virginia in hopes of freeing us, their descendants, from the toxic influence of endemic violence. But it hadn’t entirely worked. The irrational, nameless fear remained, buried deep in my psyche, expressed by only a vague unease whenever I was traveling in those mountains that my grandparents had abandoned nearly a century earlier.

After college I lived for many years in Vermont, which was settled by a different group of British immigrants than those in the Southern backcountry. They descended from Puritans from eastern England, small-scale farmers and craftsmen who lived in orderly villages centered around a green usually encircled by a school, a church, a town hall, and a general store. Their urban development expressed the high esteem in which they held education, religion, commerce, community, and the rule of law. Herders tend to live in more isolated rural homesteads, surrounded by their animals and their pastures, over which they keep suspicious watch. Because the wealth and sustenance of farmers reside in their land, which isn’t portable, they are generally peaceable people. They have to get along with their neighbors—unlike herders, who must defend their livestock from their neighbors, and who can more readily leave an area when they experience or generate strife.

As the years ticked by, I started spending more and more time back in Tennessee. I got a teaching job at a university there. The region’s history and my family’s genealogy also began to interest me. I kept a condo in Vermont but commuted regularly to Tennessee for long periods of time.

Like shifts in the barometric pressure, I noted the differences. Tennessee ranks second in violent crimes among all the states; Vermont is number 48. Kentucky, West Virginia, and Tennessee rank 11, 12, and 13 respectively in gun fatalities. Arriving in Tennessee, my muscles involuntarily clenched. The air itself seemed heavier, as when storm clouds are amassing on the far horizon on a sweltering summer afternoon. I found myself double-checking house and car doors to make sure they were locked, and the home security system to be certain it was set. I glanced all around me in parking lots late at night.

I learned that a very intelligent man whom I love and respect sometimes packs a pistol. I also learned that one of my cousins carries a Glock 26. I started studying friends and neighbors for telltale bulges in their clothing that might indicate a holster. When staying alone at my family’s isolated cabin, I sometimes placed on my bedside table a pearl-handled Lady Smith and Wesson pistol borrowed from a friend. The part of me that had become a Vermonter thought this the first step toward madness—but the part of me that was still my grandparents’ granddaughter considered it necessary for a restful night’s sleep.

Gradually, it dawned on me that within my psyche lurks a subterranean dread that irrational violence will break out at any moment, when I least expect it and for reasons I won’t understand. Seemingly friendly people will transform into ogres who want to harm me. By the same token, I, as a distant descendant of the crazed Craig Tolliver, may just as well be the one to unleash the mayhem. Some reasons for this dread are known only to my therapist and me. But one of the most important is the atmosphere in which I grew up, with the results of such violence all around me in the stories brought home from the emergency room by my father and grandfather, to say nothing of the fistfights I witnessed at the school bus stop and the victims of violence I assisted as a candy striper at the hospital.