Days of Darkness (15 page)

The “member of the gang,” was none other than poor, old Selkirk McCoy, whose only crime was voting according to his conscience.

The
Cincinnati Enquirer
and later the
Wheeling Intelligencer
declared that:

Alfara, the eldest daughter, was the first to open the door … and in the glaring light was shot dead by the fiends outside…. Calvin next appeared
and he was shot dead. [Randolph's] wife … in escaping from the burning building … was shot through the head and … at last accounts will die. Randal McCoy escaped from the burning house … and opened fire upon the attacking party. He is known to have killed one of the gang by the name of Chambers and … shot Cap Hatfield in the shoulder, putting the rest to flight.

Pikeville was on fire with outrage against the slaughter on Blackberry Creek. Randal demanded that Sheriff Harmon Maynard take a posse and go after the Hatfields, with or without warrants or extradition papers. Maynard, a cautious lawman, declined. Frank Phillips did not. He had become a terror to the supposedly dangerous Hatfields; in repeated raids into West Virginia, he had captured and jailed Wall Hatfield, Tom Chambers, Elias Mitchell, Andrew Varney, L.S. McCoy (a son of Selkirk), Moses Christian, Sam Mahon, Dock Mahon, and Plyant Mahon.

Gathering a posse, Phillips now rode openly across the Tug and before long came upon Cap and Jim Vance. They were walking, accompanied by Jim's wife Mary, toward Cap's house, when Mary shouted that there was “a whole passel” of men around the hill. Vance and Cap dived behind rocks and opened fire. Phillips and his posse spread out. One of his men got a bead on Vance and shot him in the stomach. Vance cried to Cap that he was killed, but Phillips, an old mountain fighter himself, crawled carefully around to Vance's rear, where he saw that Vance was only wounded. Casually he walked up to Vance and put a bullet through his brain. During this exchange, Cap managed to roll down the hill and escape into the woods.

With Vance's scalp on Phillips's belt, the Hatfields were reluctant to tackle him head-on. They rode up and down the West Virginia side of the Tug as before, but they no longer came over into Kentucky. But on January 19, 1888, Phillips decided that he would take the fight to them, and with a posse he invaded Hatfield territory. Along Grapevine Creek, a branch of the Tug, they ran into the Hatfields and a constable, J.R. Thompson, armed with a warrant for the arrest of the killers of Jim Vance. A firefight broke out. Bud McCoy was the first to fall, shot in the leg. Then Bill Dempsey, a young Hatfield adherent, was shot in the leg, crawled behind a shuck pen, and, when Phillips approached, begged for mercy, explaining that he had been ordered by the sheriff to join a posse to chase the Kentuckians out of West Virginia. Phillips calmly put a bullet through his head.

No one knew it at the time, but the shooting part of the Hatfield-McCoy feud was about over. Instead, the battle was taken over by
courts and lawyers. Later, Pike County Judge Wagner and County Attorney Lee Ferguson went to Frankfort to ask for troops to defend the county, saying that the violence had little to do with Hatfields or McCoys but was Pike County against Logan County, Kentucky against West Virginia. West Virginia state senator John Floyd, in a plea to the West Virginia governor, made a similar plea, insisting that “the Hatfields are not interested in the difficulty any more than other citizens, while the McCoys … constitute but a small portion of the [Kentucky] gang.” Floyd laid the blame for the continuing hostility on Perry Cline.

The situation was not improved by an increase in press coverage. Typical was the reporting of Charles Howell of the
Pittsburgh Press.
Howell spent some time with the McCoys and with Perry Cline and Frank Phillips but none with the Hatfields, and his stories reflected the fact. “There is a gang in West Virginia,” he wrote, “banded together for the purpose of murder and rapine. There is a gang in Kentucky whose … principle is the protection of families and homes…. An unresisting family has been deprived of five of its members, a father and mother of five of their children, their home burned, their little substance scattered to the wind.”

Then the two governors got into it. Wilson of West Virginia insisted that his state had been invaded by Kentuckians who had killed Bill Dempsey and that he would no longer consider extraditing anyone. Buckner wrote to Wilson that he was sending General Sam Hill to Pikeville to confer with Colonel W.L. Mahan, Wilson's agent. Both governors ordered their state troops to prepare for possible duty along the Tug. Newspapers warned that war between the two states was imminent. Hill went at once to Pikeville but arrived after Mahan had returned to West Virginia. Hill reported to Buckner that West Virginians were responsible for the trouble and that Senator Floyd had made matters worse by urging Governor Wilson to refuse Kentucky extradition requests. Buckner wrote Wilson insisting that the Hatfields had caused the trouble and that Frank Phillips had gone into West Virginia only when he failed to get any response from Wilson to his requests for extradition. And so on.

Before the state troops could clash, Governor Wilson concluded that further dealings with Buckner were useless and sent Mahan to Frankfort to demand that Kentucky immediately release the nine West Virginians who had been seized illegally and were moldering in the Pikeville jail. Buckner said the courts, not the executive, had jurisdiction over release of prisoners. Wilson ordered Eustace Gibson, a former congressman, to initiate habeas corpus proceedings in the U.S. District Court in Louisville. Gibson argued that armed men from
Kentucky had invaded West Virginia and without legal authority taken West Virginia citizens to the Pikeville jail, where they were in great danger of assassination.

Kentucky attorney general Parker Watkins (“Polly Wolly”) Hardin argued that since the case involved states, only the Supreme Court had jurisdiction. He also argued that if the court freed the prisoners, they would return to West Virginia and never face trial for their crimes. Judge John Barr held that it was not essentially a case between two states and ordered the jailer of Pike County to produce the nine men to the court in Louisville.

The appearance of the famed “mountain desperadoes” on the streets of Louisville caused great excitement, and reporters swarmed around the jail and the courtroom where the prisoners later were brought. Wall Hatfield, especially, became a favorite of the press and had a great time giving interviews, insisting, among other things, that he had only one wife (some reporter had gotten the idea that he had five) and that Devil Anse and his sons were responsible for the murder of the McCoy boys.

For weeks it appeared that the prisoners would grow old in jail before the court decided who had responsibility and jurisdiction. Eventually the question was taken up by the U.S. Circuit Court and finally by the Supreme Court of the United States, which, in its majesty and with Justices Harlan and Bradley dissenting, upheld the judgment of the lower court that the arrest and abduction of the prisoners were lawless and indefensible but that the authority of the governor of Kentucky was no grounds for charging complicity of the state in the wrong done to West Virginia. The outcome was that the Kentuckians shouldn't have done it, but since they had there wasn't much that could be done about it. Everyone assumed that the cases would go to trial.

Meanwhile, things along the Tug became almost ridiculous. With large rewards offered by West Virginia for the capture and delivery of various McCoys and their allies, and similar rewards offered by Kentucky for the capture of Devil Anse and his cohorts, bounty hunters and private detectives swarmed into the area, intent on getting some of the reward money. They were universally despised, and regional newspapers proposed that rewards be offered for
their
capture, in which case the Hatfields and McCoys would take care of them in short order and after a few good hangings peace would descend on all. This did not deter the detectives, who managed to capture Charles Gillespie, a minor figure in the burning of the McCoy cabin. Gillespie confessed that the assault on the McCoys was designed to “remove
every material witness to the murder of the McCoy boys.” The detectives also captured Ellison Mounts, who managed to shoot one detective in the leg.

Meanwhile, back in Pikeville, things had taken a curious turn. After the assault on the McCoy home and the murder of Alifair and Calvin, Nancy McCoy, who had never lost her loyalty to her clan, left Johnse and went to live in Pikeville. There she met none other than Frank Phillips. They took to each other and, though both were legally married, started living together. As soon as they could obtain divorces, they got married.

No such happy ending awaited Rose Anna. Day and night she tended her mother, but while Sarah, a remarkable woman, slowly but steadily regained her strength, Rose Anna gradually faded. Sarah sent for a doctor, but he could find nothing medically wrong with Rose Anna, and she finally died quietly in her sleep.

On August 23, 1889, the trial of the Hatfield “gang” began in Pikeville. Ellison Mounts had confessed that he had been party to the murder of the three McCoy boys and named Devil Anse, Johnse, Cap, and Bill Hatfield, Alex Messer, Charles Carpenter, and Tom Chambers as those who fired the shots. Among the nineteen witnesses produced by the prosecution were eight named Hatfield, evidence that family lines were more blurred than writers have claimed.

To the surprise of many McCoys, Perry Cline appeared as defense attorney for Wall Hatfield, possibly in an effort to regain some of the money he had lost to the Hatfields in land deals. Old Randal proved a poor witness, unable to recall many events, but Sarah was articulate and precise. She spoke well of Wall Hatfield, however. Others also spoke well of Wall, but to no avail. The jury found him guilty and recommended life in prison. He appealed, and Judge John Rice granted him a sixty-day suspension of judgment. Alex Messer and Dock and Plyant Mahon were tried together, and they too received life sentences. When asked if he had anything to say about his sentence to life at hard labor, Messer said, “Hit's mighty little work I can do, jedge. Hain't been able to work none on any count for several years.” Spectators guffawed, but the sentence stuck. Dock and Plyant Mahon were granted appeals.

The rest of the accused were give life or lesser sentences, and for a while it seemed that the Kentuckians would be denied the hanging they had anticipated. Old Randal was so outraged that he reportedly attempted to raise a mob and take some of the defendants out and hang them, but, as with most of his plans, he failed. He was somewhat mollified when, on September 4, the jury returned a guilty verdict
against Ellison Mounts and recommended that he be hanged. Mounts protested that he had been assured that his guilty plea and cooperation would get him a light sentence, and he tried to withdraw his guilty plea. The judge overruled the motion and sentenced him to hang on December 3.

On November 9, 1889, the Kentucky Court of Appeals upheld the convictions of Wall and the Mahons. Wall's life sentence proved to be just that. Six months later he died in the state penitentiary. On December 3, Ellison Mounts was hanged on a hillside in Pikeville. Although state law required that such ceremonies be private and a fence had been erected around the gallows, the position of the gallows allowed the crowd of thousands to look down from the hillside on the final act. As the hood was placed over his head, Mounts cried, with considerable honesty, “The Hatfields made me do it!”

On November 19, 1889, Devil Anse Hatfield was fined $100 for moonshining in U.S. District Court in Charleston, West Virginia. Unlike most moonshiners, he was not given the customary year in prison. On the contrary, he was treated in Charleston as something of a celebrity. Reporters asked his opinion on all manner of topics and hung on his words. The judge treated him with courtesy and respect and provided him with a guard to make sure he was not annoyed by bounty hunters or such low types. Old Anse had killed or caused the murders of practically all of the McCoys but paid none of the price.

By that time, most people had forgotten the feud. Frank and Nancy Phillips, who had become parents of a son shortly before their marriage, were said to deal in the manufacture and sale of whiskey, and on at least two occasions Nancy was in court for such enterprise. Neither she nor Frank mellowed much with age or parenthood. In 1894, at the age of thirty-six, Frank died in a gunfight. According to the
Hazel Green Herald,
he and detective William Blevins were chasing the Ricketts boys, West Virginia gun thugs who “had killed old man Ferrel in Logan County,” when the Ricketts ambushed and killed them instead. Three years later Nancy died of tuberculosis.

Perry Cline died in 1891. He was only forty-four. Old Randal and Sarah never went back to Blackberry Creek. Randal got a license to operate a ferry on the Big Sandy at Pikeville. Sarah died in 1894. Randal lived on to the age of eighty-eight, still complaining about the injustices he had suffered, and in 1913 died of burns received when he fell into an open fire. In 1921, at the age of eighty-two, Devil Anse died and was given a big funeral.

The Woman in the Case

One story concerning the French-Eversole War in Perry County is about the woman who caused the trouble, or, more precisely, about the young man whose desire for this woman caused the streets of Hazard to run red with blood, to exercise hyperbole. The young man was a clerk in Fulton French's general store when he met this woman. She drove him crazy. One night he came back to the store to get his hat, and there was this woman with his employer, French. Engorged with jealous rage, the young man decided to get rid of French, went one night to the home of Joseph Eversole, French's chief competitor in the merchandise business, and warned him that French was planning to kill him. Eversole, alarmed, began arming his employees. French, hearing of this, armed his. It wasn't long before the two sides clashed. But it was Eversole, not French, who was killed. The lovesick young man committed suicide.