Blood Feud: The Hatfields & The McCoys (5 page)

But reading between the lines of a deposition that Ranel McCoy’s mother, Peggy, filed when divorcing Daniel McCoy following the Civil War gives the impression that Ranel grew up in an unhappy household. Peggy McCoy spoke of the insults and neglect she had suffered, complaining that Daniel was lazy and pleaded illness to avoid the farm tasks expected of a husband, such as planting and harvesting, clearing land, and splitting fence rails. Peggy had to work late each night spinning, weaving, and sewing, both to clothe her family and also to make extra cloth for sale in order to purchase the necessities they lacked and to hire help for the jobs that Daniel refused to do. Peggy also raised livestock for sale so that they could purchase much-needed land.
36

When Ranel McCoy grew up, he married his first cousin Sarah McCoy, who already had a baby daughter. (Whether it was his remains unknown.) They moved back across the Tug Fork to the Blackberry Fork of Pond Creek in Kentucky. There they raised their sixteen children among their many McCoy cousins and among the many Kentucky Hatfields as well.

Daniel McCoy, like Big Eph Hatfield in his treatment of Devil Anse, also proved the exception to valley tradition by not giving any of his land to any of his children.
37
Only one of his thirteen children named a son after him. Ranel McCoy acquired his Kentucky farm through Sarah’s father, who was of course also Ranel’s uncle. Ranel’s younger brother Harmon McCoy received his farm on Peter Creek from his wife’s father, Rich Jake Cline, who owned several thousand acres on both sides of the Tug Fork.
38
But the brothers of Ranel and Harmon who remained in the Tug Fork Valley were landless, a considerable comedown for descendants of one of the original pioneering families in the region.
39

Truda McCoy states that the McCoy family was, on the whole, “tall and lithe and handsome,” often with an olive complexion and dark or auburn hair.
40
In one photograph of Ranel McCoy, he is a handsome and hopeful-looking young man in a suit jacket and white shirt, with very dark hair, mustache, and eyebrows. In another, he sports a trimmed white mustache and looks like everyone’s favorite grandfather. His graying hair is short, combed, and parted. He wears a suit jacket and a dress shirt buttoned to the throat. Unsmiling, he has sad eyes that gaze directly into the camera. About sixty years old at the time, he would have already experienced the deaths of three of his sons at the hands of the Hatfields, the seduction and impregnation of his daughter, and the death of her illegitimate child, his granddaughter. He didn’t have much to smile about. A reporter at the end of the feud described him as a “broken-down old man,” but one with an impressive physique: “tall, broad-shouldered, with deep-sunken gray eyes and a rugged gray mustache and beard.”
41
In a final photo, he lies in an elaborate casket, finally at peace.

The only known likeness of Sarah McCoy comes from a newspaper sketch at the time of the trials that ended the feud in 1890. Her hair is drawn back tightly into a bun, and her eyes look pale and blasted. By this time, she had lost seven children to the feud, had been beaten senseless and burned out of her home, and was handicapped for life, needing a cane to walk. In the image, her mouth forms a lowercase
n.

She didn’t have much to smile about either, and in fact she died just a few years later.

When the Civil War began, Ranel and Sarah McCoy had nine young children living in their small cabin partway up a ridge above a stream in Kentucky. Ranel was thirty-five years old. Many researchers maintain that he served in the Confederate army.
42
But his name doesn’t appear on the rolls of any regiment, Confederate or Union, even though those of ten of his relatives do.
43
It’s hard to say with any certainty whether Ranel McCoy fought for the Union, the Confederacy, or neither.

After the war ended, Ranel and his father, Daniel, harvested timber in a neighbor’s forest and were sued for it. Daniel had to sell off his own farm to pay his fine. His wife, Peggy, having had enough of his decades of fecklessness, filed for divorce. It was an unheard-of occurrence at the time for a man and woman in their seventies who had been married for fifty years. She was granted the divorce and ended up working as a domestic servant in Pike County, Kentucky, to support herself. Daniel moved in with a daughter in West Virginia.
44

Meanwhile, Ranel McCoy had more problems of his own. He had developed a reputation as a gossip. Pleasant McCoy—Sarah’s nephew and Ranel’s cousin—brought a court case against them both for spreading a rumor that Pleasant had had intercourse with a cow. The records have been lost, so the outcome of this case is unknown.
45
Presumably, with the outraged cow unable to testify, a mistrial must have been declared.

Apart from spreading hearsay, Ranel McCoy’s nature tended toward gloom.
46
People sought reasons to flee when they saw him coming with his litany of complaints. In an even worse record than that of his own father, Daniel, none of Ranel’s eight surviving children named a son of theirs after him. Fourteen years older than Devil Anse Hatfield, Ranel apparently lacked Devil Anse’s charisma. As the feud progressed, though, his gloom seems an appropriate response to unfolding events. Also unlike Devil Anse, Ranel McCoy resorted only to grumbling and lawsuits when he had a grievance, rather than to physical retaliation.

One researcher describes Ranel McCoy as “a kindly old man, unable to throw off his troubles with jest and jovial raconteuring and, because of advanced age, burdened at times by his sorrows. . . . The fight that came from his side of the Tug was carried on by persons other than himself. His own preference, often spoken, was that the law be allowed to take its course.”
47

Deeply religious, Sarah McCoy appears to have restrained Ranel’s impulses toward retaliation in the face of Hatfield aggression—and this restraint may have led to the deaths of some of their children.
48
Watching the feud develop raises the eternal question of the efficacy of nonviolence in the face of fists and boots, knives and guns.

A common misconception about the feud has it that the Hatfields lived strictly in West Virginia and the McCoys in Kentucky, with the Tug Fork keeping them apart, except when they invaded each other’s territories to murder or arrest one another. However, the Tug Fork, when not in flood, is little more than a large stream strewn with rock shelves and sandbars, and branches of both families lived on both sides of it. The West Virginia Hatfields often rode across the river to attend court sessions and Election Day activities in Kentucky, to visit their numerous relatives, and to sell their moonshine.
49

The Kentuckians and West Virginians living in the Tug Fork Valley had much more in common with one another than they did with those in the inland portions of their own counties. Similarly, residents of the mountainous sections of Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Carolinas—not unlike the Kurds of Iran, Iraq, and Turkey—shared, and still share, more culturally with one another than with those in the lowland sections of their own states.

Just as the Tug Fork boundary between the Hatfields and the McCoys was permeable, so too was family membership. Many Hatfields and McCoys intermarried.
50
For instance, Nancy McCoy Staton, Ranel and Sarah McCoy’s first cousin, had two daughters. One married Devil Anse Hatfield’s younger brother Ellison, who was later murdered by three of Ranel McCoy’s sons. The other daughter married Devil Anse’s cousin Floyd Hatfield, accused of stealing one of Ranel McCoy’s hogs in a clash that occurred early in the feud.

As another example among many, Sarah McCoy’s brother Hiram McCoy (also Ranel McCoy’s first cousin) had a son named Johnson McCoy—not to be confused with the Johnson McCoy who fathered Ava Reed McCoy’s husband, Homer. Johnson McCoy was a close friend of Devil Anse Hatfield and served with him during the Civil War. Johnson McCoy married a sister of Devil Anse’s wife, Levicy Chafin, and Devil Anse and Levicy named their first son Johnson in his honor.
51
This son, Johnson “Johnse” Hatfield, later seduced and impregnated Ranel McCoy’s daughter Roseanna, escalating the fury of the feud.

Struggling to follow these tangled family connections, you can easily imagine how confused the Hatfields and the McCoys themselves must have become when trying to figure out in the heat of a gun battle whom to shoot.

Another misconception about the feud holds that it involved only Hatfields and McCoys, and many men from each family. In reality, most members of both families tried to stay out of the conflict. Only three of Devil Anse’s thirteen children participated, along with three of his ten siblings. His younger twin brothers explicitly distanced themselves from feud events. A newspaper article cited one as saying that he was ashamed of some of the Hatfields and that he hadn’t been raised to behave as they were behaving.
52

There were about thirty-five Hatfield feudists in all. Three were a nephew and two great-nephews of Ranel McCoy’s wife, Sarah. In addition to Devil Anse’s three sons and three brothers, fifteen more participants were relatives. Jim Vance, his uncle, was widely rumored to be the killer of Harmon McCoy in the episode that ignited the feud. Four of Devil Anse’s nephews took part. Devil Anse’s first cousin Floyd Hatfield joined the feud willy-nilly when Ranel McCoy accused him of having stolen one of his hogs, but Floyd retired to the background after the Hog Trial. The husbands of four of Devil Anse’s nieces signed on, as did three of Devil Anse’s Chafin brothers-in-law and two remote cousins. Most of the rest of Team Hatfield worked on Devil Anse’s timber crew or were otherwise economically beholden to him or his family.
53

Ranel McCoy had twelve siblings, six of them brothers, but none joined the feud at first, despite the murder of their brother Harmon by Jim Vance. In the early years, the McCoy roster listed only seven adherents apart from Ranel and Harmon: five of Ranel’s sons and two of his nephews. Ranel’s daughter Roseanna participated inadvertently via her love affair with Johnse Hatfield. By the closing years of the feud, though, Ranel’s ranks had swelled to some forty men, two-thirds of them unrelated to him.
54

Some maintain that the fact that so few of Ranel McCoy’s relatives joined him in his vendetta against Devil Anse Hatfield proves that they disapproved of his behavior.
55
But it seems at least as likely that most residents of the Tug Fork Valley wanted to keep their heads down, hoping the violence would pass them by. As a reporter put it toward the end, “The majority of the people here are peaceably inclined, but are overawed and domineered by the bullying element.”
56

It takes a rare and noble person to challenge aggressors on someone else’s behalf, especially if you have a family of your own to protect. But as the outrages escalated, some outsiders appear to have become so appalled that the more courageous among them stepped forward to assist Ranel McCoy, who clearly lacked the leadership skills, financial resources, and supporters that Devil Anse Hatfield enjoyed. But other motives, mostly economic ones, also came into play for these newcomers who eventually rallied to the McCoys’ defense, helping to bring the Hatfields to trial and the feud to an end.