Blood Feud: The Hatfields & The McCoys (8 page)

When Squirrel Hunting Sam spotted Bill Staton in the woods that day, he bristled like a junkyard dog. Taking careful aim, he shot Staton’s gun out of his hand. Then he hurled down his own gun, raced over to Staton, and tackled him. Ellison Hatfield pulled Sam off his friend. As he pushed Sam away from Staton, he insisted that the Hog Trial had been fair and needed to be forgotten.
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A tall, strong, handsome Confederate war hero, Ellison Hatfield was rumored to have fought at Gettysburg.
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A photograph shows him buttoned up in his Confederate uniform, fondling his pistol.
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He displays the calm self-assurance of people who know they are attractive and have enjoyed many advantages because of it. In contrast to his glamorous younger brother, Devil Anse Hatfield resembled a worried troll.

Ellison was “noted throughout the county as being a peacemaker.”
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He was married to Bill Staton’s sister, and they had nine children. He and his family attended a Baptist church on the West Virginia side of the Tug Fork. Had he not been killed soon after this incident, he might have been able to avert some of the senseless violence that followed his death. Then again, had he not been killed, a motive for much of the senseless violence wouldn’t have existed in the first place.

On June 18, 1880,
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after enduring two years of insults and threats over his testimony in the Hog Trial, Bill Staton ambushed Squirrel Hunting Sam McCoy and his brother Paris as they were hunting atop a mountain ridge. Staton shot Paris in the shoulder while aiming for his heart. Squirrel Hunting Sam grabbed Staton’s gun and tossed it aside. Staton and Sam grappled along the ridgetop, trampling small bushes underfoot. Finally Staton got a death grip on Sam’s throat. He struggled to push Sam’s head far enough backward to break his neck. Before blacking out, Squirrel Hunting Sam managed to pull his pistol from his holster and shoot Bill Staton dead.

Or at least this is Truda McCoy’s version of Bill Staton’s murder.
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Coleman A. Hatfield, in contrast, tells a different story. He maintains that Staton was riding down a road in West Virginia, minding his own business—though possibly looking for trouble. Paris and Squirrel Hunting Sam McCoy, working as farm laborers, were hoeing corn in a nearby field. They spotted Bill Staton. Throwing down their hoes, they raced across the field. Sam grabbed the horse’s bridle, and Paris wrenched Staton from his saddle. Then Sam shot Staton point-blank.
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Another version of this story maintains that Bill Staton was fighting Paris McCoy when he sank his teeth into Paris’s jugular vein. Squirrel Hunting Sam then shot Staton to save Paris’s life. This same macabre account claims that rigor mortis set in, and Staton’s jaws had to be pried from Paris’s throat after his death.
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Almost every incident in this feud has several conflicting versions that blame different participants, depending upon whether its source supported the Hatfields or the McCoys. But which conveys what really happened? No one can possibly know except the participants themselves, and they are all long dead, the truth buried with them.

Valentine “Wall” Hatfield, Devil Anse’s older brother, was a justice of the peace for the Magnolia District of West Virginia, in which the murder occurred. He issued warrants for the arrests of Squirrel Hunting Sam and Paris McCoy. Paris was apprehended a month later, Sam two years after that. Several McCoy relatives testified against the McCoy brothers in their trials, as did Ellison Hatfield, whose wife was Bill Staton’s sister. But both Sam and Paris were acquitted on grounds of self-defense.
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Ranel McCoy was furious that they had been brought to trial in the first place and was equally furious with Ellison Hatfield for testifying against them.

Oral tradition assigns Devil Anse Hatfield the role of peacemaker in arranging the acquittals of Sam and Paris. It’s said that he hoped this reprieve would calm the tensions mounting between the two families.
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He was also preoccupied with problems of his own concerning his new timber enterprise on Perry Cline’s former land.

But an episode had taken place by the time of Paris McCoy’s trial in the fall of 1880 that had already escalated those tensions.

The men, dressed in their Sunday best, rode down to the polling places from their mountain farms to race and swap horses, to buy and sell votes, to strut and flirt with the unattached women, to dance to fiddles and banjos, to drink moonshine, and to fight. Officials sat at tables to record the votes, spoken for all to hear.
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The women couldn’t vote, but they came to Election Days anyway in their best calico dresses, sunbonnets with dangling sashes, and soft woolen shawls dyed in the muted colors extracted from plants and nuts gathered in the mountain forests. They brought and served food, and shared in the merriment with neighbors they seldom saw. Some baked and sold ginger cookies to make pocket money or to signal their support for various candidates. They vied with one another over who had the best recipe and could sell the most cookies.
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It was the closest they could get to suffrage at that time.

Huge beech trees across a creek from Preacher Anse’s cabin, where the Hog Trial had taken place, shadowed Election Day for the Blackberry District of Kentucky in early August 1880. Ranel McCoy’s family traveled over the ridge from their farm in the next valley, the women riding behind the men and boys on their horses. Devil Anse, his sons Johnse and Cap, and various other Hatfields rode across the Tug Fork from their West Virginia homes, as they often did on Blackberry District Election Days, outraging the Kentucky women by eating everyone’s ginger cookies, rather than just those from the baskets of candidates they favored.
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Sometimes the Hatfields tried to buy votes with their moonshine, even though they themselves couldn’t vote in Kentucky.
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Some Blackberry District citizens looked on such behavior with annoyance, and there were numerous outstanding warrants against Hatfield supporters regarding concealed weapons, illegal liquor, and civic disturbances. Pike County officials abstained from serving them, however, so the heavily armed Hatfield bands traveled the county with impunity.
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This particular Election Day of 1880, Johnse Hatfield, Devil Anse’s oldest son, took one look at Roseanna McCoy, Ranel’s fourth daughter, and lost his mind. Roseanna, then twenty-one years old, has been described by those who knew her as “tall and slender with a beautiful, proportioned body. She had a fair complexion that . . . tanned to a pale golden hue during the summer months. . . . The most noticeable of all was her hair, red-brown, abundant and wavy. . . . The sun turned her hair to a burnished gold.”
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In one photo, she is quite beautiful, with a sensual mouth, though her dark eyes look haunted.
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By the time of that photo, however, she had already endured the multiple tragedies that resulted from loving the unreliable Johnse Hatfield too much.

Johnse, for his part, was a fair-haired, ruddy-cheeked, blue-eyed eighteen-year-old rake, known for his natty wardrobe and his ways with young women—many young women. He was “tall, broad-shouldered, with a dark complexion set off by a black mustache and a slight beard,” with a “dare-devil look” about him.
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In one photo, he displays the glazed gaze of a hard-core alcoholic. In another, his face resembles the death’s head often found on the tombstones of New England Puritans. The day he first met Roseanna McCoy, he was wearing yellow boots, a store-bought suit, and a celluloid collar.
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Who could resist?

Ranel McCoy, noticing the two talking, called Roseanna to him and explained that Johnse was a Hatfield and needed to be avoided. Roseanna waited until her father was no longer watching and vanished into the woods with Johnse. What happened between them in the cool of the forest no one knows—but most can well imagine.

When Roseanna and Johnse returned to the election grounds near nightfall, the McCoys had already gone home. Terrified of her father’s wrath, Roseanna agreed to cross the Tug Fork to Devil Anse’s house with Johnse, who claimed he wanted to marry her. She stayed for a few months. When she left, she was still single, but pregnant.

Accounts of Roseanna’s reasons for leaving Johnse Hatfield vary. Some say Devil Anse refused to let Johnse marry her in hopes of humiliating Ranel McCoy or because he didn’t want his blood mixed with that of his enemy, despite the many other Hatfield and McCoy lines that had already cross-pollinated.
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Others say that Ranel sent some of Roseanna’s sisters,
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or a Kentucky Hatfield whose mother was a McCoy,
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to persuade Roseanna to quit Devil Anse’s household and that she finally agreed. Some say Ranel threatened violence against her Hatfield hosts if she didn’t leave.
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Yet others say that she finally grew sick of Johnse’s womanizing, the targets of which included her cousins Mary Stafford and Nancy McCoy.
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Whatever the case, in Appalachia at that time, preachers were scarce and contraception even scarcer. Many couples lived together without benefit of clergy, and young women frequently gave birth to babies out of wedlock. Hence the need for the term
woods-colt.
Often women were pregnant when they married, as was regularly the case in Europe for centuries. Some had a child or children from their future husbands or from other fathers, as Sarah McCoy did. Current DNA testing is uncovering many examples of this folkway. Stringent Victorian morality had not yet invaded the Southern mountains. However socially permissible extramarital births may have been at that time, abandoning a woman once she was pregnant without some type of compensation was not highly regarded. In this case, though, Roseanna had left Johnse.

When Roseanna McCoy returned home, she received such a frigid welcome from her father that she soon moved to her Aunt Betty’s house in Stringtown, on the Kentucky bank of the Tug Fork. Her Aunt Betty’s house was also a much better location for secret trysts with Johnse, should he decide to cross the river from his father’s house in West Virginia. The widow of Sarah McCoy’s brother, Betty McCoy was extremely religious, but kindhearted and nonjudgmental. She welcomed the pregnant young woman into her home.
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In Truda McCoy’s version, the romance assumes Shakespearean proportions. She recounts many intense private conversations between the two lovers, in pitch-perfect dialect. They may have been based on hearsay or speculation, but Truda’s primary source was Martha McCoy, wife of one of Ranel’s sons, who had been close to Roseanna and had no doubt heard verbatim accounts of her intimate conversations with Johnse.

Johnse Hatfield, already a master moonshiner at age eighteen, had taken heavily to drink in his grief over losing Roseanna. He sneaked across the Tug Fork to visit her at her aunt’s house, only then learning of her pregnancy. Insisting he would take her away and finally marry her, they agreed to meet later in the woods to finalize their plan.
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Ranel McCoy, learning that Johnse Hatfield had been spotted in the neighborhood, sent some of his sons to spy on Roseanna and to inform him when Johnse turned up. Tolbert, Ranel’s third son, got himself deputized and, with the help of his younger brother Bud, arrested Johnse for carrying a concealed weapon during a visit to Roseanna—clearly a fabricated charge since most men, young and old, in the Tug Fork Valley carried guns and knives for hunting and for protection.
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As Tolbert and Bud McCoy led Johnse Hatfield off to the Pikeville jail, Roseanna became convinced that they would kill him during the twenty-five-mile journey. Without even grabbing a coat, she ran to a neighbor’s field and tore a strip of cloth from her petticoat with which to fashion a hackamore halter for one of his horses. Although several months pregnant, she scrambled bareback onto the horse and guided it along a rutted sledge road that wound up to a high ridge and then plummeted down to the Tug Fork.
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When she left the path to take a shortcut, briars slashed her arms and legs, and locust thorns ripped her dress. Her horse picked its way along the slippery rock shelves that floored the ford across the Tug Fork. It was autumn, so the water would have been dangerously high and cold, and the current swift.

Reaching the farther shore, Roseanna rode through cornfields that stretched along the bottomland until she arrived at Elias Hatfield’s house, where a “working” was under way. Many Hatfields, including Devil Anse, had gathered there to help Elias with farm projects. Roseanna warned Devil Anse that her brothers had arrested Johnse and might kill him.

As the Hatfield women tended Roseanna’s lacerations and tried to feed and warm the distraught young woman, Devil Anse, his brother Ellison, his uncle Jim Vance, and several others saddled up. Devil Anse’s brother Good Elias Hatfield tried to stay home. “Peace between the clans was the desire of this swarthy and more serious-minded member of the family,” says one researcher. But Devil Anse barked at him, “Come with me, or you are no Hatfield.” Good Elias grabbed his rifle and mounted his horse, however unenthusiastically.
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The Hatfield posse crossed the Tug Fork and accosted Tolbert and Bud McCoy and their prisoner, Johnse Hatfield, on a mountain trail en route to the Pikeville jail. They took the McCoy sons’ guns away, freed Johnse, and cursed and ridiculed his former captors.

According to one account, this McCoy posse included Ranel and his sons Jim and Pharmer, as well as Tolbert and Bud. Devil Anse Hatfield demanded that they kneel, say their prayers, and beg for mercy. All promptly did so except for Jim McCoy, who remained standing and challenged the Hatfields to kill him.
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Impressed by his courage, Devil Anse decided not to kill any of the McCoys. Coleman C. Hatfield claims that this anecdote is “an entertaining fiction”—though it’s hard to imagine who would find this rather sadistic episode entertaining.
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Jim McCoy, Ranel’s oldest son, was perhaps the most impressive McCoy feudist. One researcher says that Jim, “a slim man in his early thirties, was the most likeable of the group, even to the opposing clan. He was married, cool-headed, a hard worker, and steady in his actions, and he did more to placate than to antagonize.”
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Devil Anse Hatfield’s grandson refers to Jim McCoy as “the most respected leader of his family.”
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A photo of him in his later years shows a calm, stern, pleasant-looking man with wire-frame glasses, a shirt buttoned to the throat, and a suit jacket.

Like all of Ranel McCoy’s sons, Jim owned no land and had to farm on other people’s property, humiliating in an agrarian community, particularly since his father and grandfather had owned their own land. Ranel McCoy had nine sons, but only the three hundred acres he had inherited from his wife’s father, on which he, his wife, and his unmarried children were still living. So Ranel, like his father, Daniel, before him, gave no land to any of his married sons to help them get a start in life. They all had to work as sharecroppers or laborers on other people’s farms.
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Jim McCoy and his brothers were what you might call downwardly mobile, which may partially explain the frustration and fury of his more volatile brothers, Tolbert, Pharmer, Bud, and Bill. They had few prospects for the future and saw no way to improve upon their situation. Jim did his best to restrain his brothers’ fury during tense situations, playing the same placating role among the McCoys that Ellison played among the Hatfields. He seems to have participated in the feud out of loyalty to his family, but he appears to have wished to be almost anywhere else. While Roseanna was riding to West Virginia to warn Devil Anse Hatfield that her brothers might kill Johnse, Jim McCoy, if of course he was actually on this mission, was reported to have assured Johnse that he was under the protection of the law and that no harm would come to him.
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But as one researcher says, “Descriptions of the rescue, like other events of the feud, vary so greatly that there is no way of determining exactly what happened.”
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