The Hatfields and the McCoys (17 page)

Sheriff Maynard had deep suspicions of Mounts. When, toward the end of January, Mounts refused to talk or eat, his friends insisted that he had lost his mind and that Maynard should summon a jury to determine his sanity. Maynard considered Mounts's behavior a ruse to postpone the hanging and rejected the suggestion. Mounts apparently took no interest in the visits of Dr. J. W. Glover, a physician and pastor of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, who held services and tried to persuade him to prepare to meet his Maker. On February 17 Mounts expressed a desire to see the scaffold on which he was to be hanged, but the sheriff, fearing another device for a possible escape, refused his request.
²

Meanwhile, the first hanging in Pikeville in more than forty years attracted crowds estimated at from four to eight thousand persons. Spectators began to arrive on Sunday, February 16, and for the next two days arrived in droves. On the morning of an unusually warm February 18 Frank Phillips provided preliminary excitement. Already intoxicated for the occasion, he staggered about the streets of Pikeville, with a revolver in each hand, proclaiming that he had dealt with the Hatfields and that now he would run Pikeville. Sheriff Maynard failed in his efforts to restrain Phillips, and officers were forced to disarm him. Several of his friends, including Bud McCoy, also intoxicated, then tried to rush the officers and knocked Maynard to the ground. Fortunately, twenty-five militia arrived and restored order.

A few minutes after noon Maynard appeared at the jail with the death warrant for Mounts, who stoically puffed a cigar and blew smoke rings into the air while it was read. After a prayer by the minister, a guard of twenty-four men led Mounts to a waiting wagon, seated him on a coffin box beside Dr. Glover, and conducted him through the town to the waiting scaffold. In accordance with Kentucky law, which forbade public hangings, Pike County authorities had erected a fence around the scaffold, but they circumvented the law by placing the structure at the base of a hill, from which crowds of curious people could obtain a clear view of the execution. They evidently intended that Mounts should serve as an example to others.

When Mounts had taken his place on the scaffold, Deputy Sheriff Weddington asked if he desired to make a statement. Mounts said simply that he was ready to die and that he hoped that his friends would be good men and women and meet him in heaven. His last words, uttered as a black cap was pulled over his head were, “They made me do it! The Hatfields made me do it!”
³

The hanging of Ellison Mounts produced the inevitable barrage of rumors, many of them ludicrous in the extreme. According to one story, Mounts had lost his mind and the state had hanged a crazy man. Another alleged that the Hatfields had bribed the jail cook to poison the guards in order that Mounts might escape but that the cook had succeeded only in poisoning the jail cat. Yet another reported that the new governor of West Virginia, A. Brooks Fleming, had promised Lee Ferguson that he would honor all requests made by Governor Buckner and would, if necessary, call out the entire State Guard to capture the Hatfields. Fleming flatly denied the report and stated that he had never seen Ferguson. Nevertheless, the
Louisville Courier-Journal
declared that the governor of West Virginia was ready to surrender Devil Anse, Johnse, and Cap Hatfield to Kentucky authorities in return for the delivery of Frank Phillips and Bud McCoy by Governor Buckner.
⁴

Perhaps the most exciting of the reports that circulated in the wake of the hanging of Mounts concerned the alleged killing of Frank Phillips by Colonel William O. Smith. According to the story, Phillips met Smith, a former Confederate officer known as “Rebel Bill,” who was sawing lumber for the Norfolk and Western Railway, and accused him of killing Phillips's father during the Civil War. When someone subsequently entered Smith's bedroom and tried to kill him, suspicion fell upon Phillips. Although Phillips insisted that he was fifteen miles away at the time of the attack, Smith, so the story went, attempted to serve a warrant on him, and when Phillips resisted, Smith shot him. One version of the story had the killing of Phillips on Peter Creek on April 19 and another placed it on John's Creek on April 20. Some said that the warrant was issued by Governor Buckner, who had honored a request from Governor Fleming for the extradition of Phillips. The excitement subsided when a United States deputy internal revenue collector arrived in Charleston on April 23 with positive evidence that Phillips was alive and Colonel Wallace J. Williamson, who had been attending court in Logan, declared that Smith had been there on both of the days when the alleged killing occurred.
⁵

Two events of May 1890 centered around men identified with the Hatfield-McCoy feud. Charles Gillespie escaped from the Pike County jail and made his way to West Virginia, never again to return a prisoner to Pike County, and Dave Stratton, who had reputedly shaken hands with Frank Phillips over the dead body of Jim Vance, met his death. On the morning of May 15 Mrs. Stratton found her husband not far from their house, unconscious and suffering from deep head wounds and a badly bruised chest, from which he died soon afterward. Most people immediately assumed that he had fallen victim to Hatfield vengeance.

Detective W. J. “Kentucky Bill” Napier, who heard of Stratton's death, hurried from Charleston to Brownstown, present Marmet, West Virginia, and swore out warrants for Devil Anse, Cap, Johnse, and Elliott Hatfield and three other men, all charged with complicity in the murder of Stratton. Napier, however, had rushed to conclusions, for it soon became known that Stratton had fallen under the wheels of a Chesapeake and Ohio Railway train while returning home in the dark in a state of intoxication.

Napier himself became the subject of wild rumors. For several weeks after he went to Logan County, nothing was heard of him except a report that he had been seen in Racine, in Boone County, and in Kanawha County. In July the press wires out of Charleston reported that his body had been found within half a mile of a Hatfield home, presumably that of Devil Anse, and that he had a bullet through his heart. About two weeks later, however, a newspaper correspondent in Oceana, Wyoming County, West Virginia, stated that Napier had appeared before a grand jury there in connection with a moonshine case and that, after being assaulted by two friends of the defendants, he had been rescued by local police and then left town.
⁶

In contrast to the insatiable demand of the press for news, the Hatfield and McCoy families by 1890 showed signs of becoming weary of the feud. In September the
Huntington Times
reported, “The famous Hatfield-McCoy feud is at an end. After partaking in the bloody butchery of all the men they could kill, after living as outlaws, with prices on their heads, defying arrest and courting meetings with their enemies, after seeing their young men shot down, their old ones murdered, with no good accomplished, they have at last agreed on either side to let the matter rest/'

As an evidence of the changed feelings, the
Times
stated, “Two men were seen on our streets yesterday, conversing together in a friendly manner and together taking in the sights of our city. One was a brother-in-law of old man McCoy, the other a son-in-law of Anse Hatfield. They spoke freely of the famous feud, and said that by common consent it would be allowed to cease. Both the parties have gone back to work and are living honest lives without troubling each other. A number of members of both factions are still under indictment for murder and lesser crimes, but will probably now not be troubled by the authorities. West Virginia and Kentucky may both rejoice at the termination of the feud and hope that their annals may never again be stained with a similar occurrence.”
⁷

Although reports of the end of the feud had circulated periodically for several years, the
Huntington Times
article contained a kernel of truth. In a significant move, Governor Fleming announced that he was withdrawing the rewards offered by West Virginia for the capture of the McCoys. His statement served notice on the Hatfields that the governor's office was abandoning interest in their cause. Without political support, they faced serious disadvantages.

In Pike County, too, support for the feudists eroded. Although the charges against the Hatfields remained on the docket, they excited relatively little interest after 1890. Moreover, two of their strong antagonists had troubles of their own. Lee Ferguson had to defend himself against a charge of stealing government pensions from two Civil War veterans. A.J. Auxier, already accused of being the father of a child born to the wife of another man, was deserted by his own wife, who charged him with “habitual drunkenness” and filed for divorce. The murder of Bud McCoy in late 1890 threatened for a moment to reopen the feud, but when it was discovered that his own relatives, Pleasant McCoy and Bill Dyer, were responsible, the danger of a new outbreak of violence subsided.
⁸

The year 1891 brought further hope that the vendetta might be over. On February 24 the Wayne, West Virginia,
Wayne County News
carried an intriguing letter to its editor. It read: “I ask your valuable paper for these few lines. A general amnesty has been declared in the famous Hatfield and McCoy feud, and I wish to say something of the old and the new. I do not wish to keep the old feud alive and I suppose that everybody, like myself, is tired of the names of Hatfield and McCoy, and the ‘Border Warfare' in time of peace. The war spirit in me has abated and I sincerely rejoice at the prospect of peace. I have devoted my life to arms. We have undergone a fearful loss of noble lives and valuable property in the struggle. We being, like Adam, not the first transgressors. Now I propose to rest in a spirit of peace.” The letter was signed by Cap Hatfield.

Newspaper reaction to Cap Hatfield's letter ranged from cynicism to lavish praise. The
New York Tribune
gave credence to a rumor that on the same day that Cap wrote his letter he purchased two hundred long cartridges. It advised the McCoys to stay on their side of the Tug Fork for a time and “the white-winged dove of peace … to fly high in that neighborhood for a while yet.” The
Wheeling Intelligencer,
on the other hand, welcomed Cap's announcement and declared, “If Anse Hatfield and his friends had been left alone in peace by the Kentuckians, it is safe to say that the public would have heard the last of the hostilities long ago.” Then, violating Cap's appeal to let bygones be bygones, the
Intelligencer
asserted that the blame for the feud rested with the McCoys and that the Hatfields were “honest, thrifty, well-to-do citizens who would not harm a hair upon the head of anyone who had done them no injury.”
⁹

A report concerning Elias Hatfield in July 1891 provided further confirmation of an abatement of the fighting spirit among the Hatfields and the McCoys. Elias, who served as a special deputy to deliver a prisoner to the West Virginia penitentiary at Moundsville, told a newspaper reporter that members of the two families had not seen each other or, to his knowledge, been within twenty-five miles of each other during the previous two years. Elias berated reporters who had misrepresented events connected with the feud and singled out T. C. Crawford of the
New York World
as one who had grossly distorted them.
¹⁰

The Hatfields and the McCoys, nevertheless, continued to fascinate reporters and their readers. In 1894 the
Williamson New Era
emphatically denied a rumor circulated by raftsmen on the Big Sandy River that Cap Hatfield had been killed by his brother in a poker game and stated that, instead, Cap had become an invalid as a result of an old wound and now professed religion. Another newspaper later declared that Cap had joined the Methodist Church, but it warned the McCoys not to “tempt the saintly convert to fall from grace by presuming too much upon his Christian patience.'
¹¹

If the Hatfields and McCoys had become weary of the fighting, so had most of the residents of the Tug Valley. Eastern Kentucky and West Virginia stood on the threshold of a new industrial era, the excitement of which surpassed the periodic agitation provided by the feudists. By 1890 dozens of representatives of coal and lumber companies had purchased lands or contracted for mineral rights in the Tug Valley. In June 1892 Pikeville installed its first telephone, and some twenty miles away the Norfolk and Western Railway reached Williamson, with construction eventually to be completed to Columbus, Ohio. Frederick J. Kimball, the president of the railroad, declared, however, that the Hatfield Bend of the Tug, “a great sweep of the river, several miles around,” was “the worst place on the Ohio extension” of the line and required the construction of a tunnel eight hundred feet long, with a bridge over the river at each end. The company could cope with the engineering problems relating to the tunnel, which was located in the very heart of the feud country, but Kimball encountered “so much lawlessness and shooting that we … found it almost impossible to get good men to work.”
¹²
Clearly, by the 1890s the feud was getting in the way of progress.

Political leaders in Kentucky and West Virginia, keenly aware of the demands for a more favorable industrial climate, called for an end to the lawlessness in the mountains. At a statewide development convention held at Wheeling on February 29, 1888, Governor Wilson, who had demonstrated sympathy for the Hatfields, denounced metropolitan newspapers which had sensationalized the Hatfield-McCoy feud. Wilson characterized the notoriety as “bad for the people there [Logan County] and bad for the State, too.”
¹³
The decision of Governor Fleming, Wilson's successor, to withdraw the rewards offered by West Virginia for Frank Phillips and other McCoy partisans was undoubtedly made, in part, with a view to creating conditions more attractive to industry. A wealthy coal baron, who had begun to form connections with the Standard Oil interests, Fleming had little patience with a feud which he considered detrimental to the economic advancement of his state.
¹⁴