The Hatfields and the McCoys (6 page)

Wallace had his own reasons for the attack. The Daniels girl had lived with him for a time as his wife but had left after finding out that he had tricked her into a mock wedding ceremony. Wallace had not been able to persuade her to return and may have sought vengeance for her leaving. The Daniels family had no difficulty in identifying their assailants, who made no attempt whatever at any disguise, and complained far and wide of the indignities that they had suffered.
⁴

Not long after the visit of Cap Hatfield and Tom Wallace to the Daniels cabin, Jeff McCoy, the brother of Nancy and Mary, found himself in trouble. In the fall of 1886, while at a dance, he killed Fred Wolford, a Pike County mail carrier. Upon the advice of his older brother, Lark, who lived on Peter Creek, Jeff decided to leave Kentucky rather than face arrest and possible imprisonment. He made West Virginia and the home of his sister Nancy his destination, confident that he could persuade her husband, Johnse, to accord him the welcome which he expected as a brother-in-law.

At the Hatfield residence Jeff heard details of the attack upon his sister and niece by Cap and Tom Wallace. He allowed his desire for revenge to lead him down a tortuous path to his death. Jeff learned that Wallace, for whom he had a special contempt, was working as a hand at the home of Cap. He formulated a plan for capturing Wallace and taking him to the Pikeville jail. Ignoring the risk that he himself might be arrested, he waited for an occasion when Cap was away from home. Then, with Josiah Hurley, a crony willing to do his bidding, he rode over to the Hatfield farm. The two men tied their horses a short distance from the house and stole upon Wallace, who was working in the yard. Suddenly they sprang upon the unsuspecting Wallace, and before he could offer any resistance they had him on the way to Pikeville.

A mountaineer born and bred, Wallace was not without resources in dealing with men of his own kind. As the trio rode toward Pikeville, he watched his chance and suddenly jumped from his horse and ran into the woods. His captors shot at him but inflicted only a flesh wound. Wallace managed to elude them and to reach Cap's house. He barricaded himself inside the sturdy structure, and McCoy and Hurley tried in vain to force their way in. Wallace tried to shoot one or both of his abductors, but he found no opportunity. On the other hand, he himself remained secure against the bullets which McCoy and Hurley rained against the doors and windows in an attempt to force him out. Foiled in their efforts to recapture him, Jeff and Hurley withdrew from the scene.

When Cap returned and heard of the attack, his temper flared. His fury stemmed not only from the damage to his house but also from the danger to which his wife, who was confined to her bed by illness, had been exposed. The next day he and Wallace appeared before a justice of the peace, and Wallace swore out warrants for the arrest of Jeff McCoy and Josiah Hurley. Cap procured for himself an appointment as a special constable for the express purpose of serving the warrants. In his search for retribution, he proposed to arm himself with the authority of the law as well as the usual deadly accoutrements of the Hatfield clan.

Cap arrested McCoy and Hurley with little difficulty and set out with them for Logan. On the way he and Wallace, who accompanied him, stopped at the house of William Ferrell, near Thacker, on Tug Fork. While they were there, Jeff escaped. Cap and Wallace chased him to the Tug Fork. With his captors in close pursuit, Jeff jumped into the stream and swam toward the Kentucky shore. Bullets from the rifles of his pursuers splashed all around him, but he reached the bank on the Kentucky side. Just when success seemed at hand and he reached for a protruding root to pull himself to safety, a bullet struck him, inflicting a fatal wound, and he fell dying back into the water.
⁵

Once again Devil Anse attempted to calm a threatened tempest. On December 26, 1886, in response to a letter from Perry Cline, he wrote the Pikeville attorney that the Hatfields were “very sorry” for the trouble that had occurred. Although it had taken place under “aggravated circumstances,” he told Cline, “I know and solemnly affirm that if such could have been prevented by me I would have stoped [
sic
] the Trouble.” The Hatfield spokesman gave a brief description of the attack upon Cap's cabin, the capture of Jeff McCoy, and McCoy's dramatic but unsuccessful attempt to escape. Devil Anse expressed the hope that “if thier [
sic
] is any ambition Relative to this affare [
sic
] … it will be quieted by a fair statement of the case.” He sought to reassure Cline by declaring, “I will say to all the relatives of Jeff McCoy that neither one of the Hatfields has any animosity against them” and that he himself was “very sorry that such has occured [
sic
] and sincerely Trustfed] that their [
sic
] will be no more Trouble in regard to the matter.”

Devil Anse concluded his letter by saying, “Perryf,] the very Bottom of this crime is nothing more nor less than Mary Daniels and her girls. Now Bill [Daniels] is going and says he wont [
sic
] come back. No person is going to trouble him; let him come back.” The letter, written for Devil Anse by an unidentified person, has the ring of genuine sincerity. Addressing Cline by his given name and signing himself “Your friend,” Devil Anse clearly hoped to restore a measure of peace to relations between the Hatfields and the McCoys.
⁶

Unlike Devil Anse, however, some members of both the Hatfield and McCoy families yearned for revenge. They included Cap Hatfield and Jim Vance on one side and on the other Randolph McCoy and Asa Harmon McCoy, Jr., known as Bud, whose father had been killed by the Hatfields and who himself had a reputation as one of the most dangerous men in Kentucky. With men such as they thirsting for blood, any efforts at calming the turbulent waters had little chance of success.

5

AN ERA OF VIOLENCE

T
HE HOPES OF Devil Anse Hatfield that he might calm the volatile situation following the killing of Jeff McCoy by adopting a conciliatory attitude rested upon the assumption that the clan leaders themselves could control future events. The 1880s, however, brought unusual turbulence to Kentucky, with much of it rooted in Civil War and political discord, with whiskey acting as a catalyst for both. In many respects the Hatfield-McCoy feud was a manifestation of a deep political and social malaise that fostered widespread troubles in eastern Kentucky. Perhaps no clan leader such as Devil Anse could give complete assurances against further eruptions.

Until the late 1880s the vendetta between the Hatfields and the McCoys attracted little attention outside the Tug Valley. Even the murders resulting from the election of August 1882 received no special notice in the newspapers of Kentucky and West Virginia. Election-day violence, with fights, stabbings, and killings, was common in Kentucky and more or less accepted as an unfortunate concomitant of the democratic process. The
Louisville Courier-Journal
of August 8, 1882, in a roundup of election news over the state, reminded its readers that the mixture of politics and whiskey had proved as explosive as ever. Even in Lexington, the hub of the elite Bluegrass society, “King Whiskey held high carnival” and led to considerable fighting in the “ancient streets.”

Nor did the trouble between the Hatfields and the McCoys contrast sharply with conditions prevailing along the Kentucky-West Virginia border. An almost unrestrained lawlessness in parts of the Big Sandy Valley, including Lawrence and Boyd counties, as well as adjacent Carter County, led to the organization of a Regulator movement, which drew the support of some of the leading citizens. The Regulators succeeded in obtaining state troops and then voluntarily disbanded. The
Greenup Independent
declared, with satisfaction, “Inefficient men have been in office, the laws were not enforced and justice went by default, encouraging crime and iniquity, until the people, propelled by natural laws of reaction, put a stop to it.”

The newspaper reacted too swiftly. The Regulators had attracted, along with public-spirited citizens, “a band of cutthroats” who engaged in pillage, marauding, and even murder. When an attempt was made to lynch two prisoners confined to the jail in Catlettsburg, Judge George N. Brown directed their removal to Lexington and a change of venue to Carter County. As the prisoners were led onto a steamboat, an Ashland mob aboard a ferryboat fired upon the militia assigned to escort them to Lexington. The troops returned the fire, and the exchange left several persons on the ferryboat and others on the wharves wounded.
¹

Perhaps most residents of the Tug and Big Sandy valleys had greater concern about bands of criminals, which sometimes operated with impunity, than for the Hatfields and the McCoys, who usually molested only each other. The arrest of Steve and Charles Kelley at Ceredo, West Virginia, in March 1888, for instance, exposed a ring that had committed robberies and murders in Kentucky, West Virginia, and Ohio over a period of several months with no real deterrence by authorities in any of the states.
²

Other bloody vendettas of the eastern Kentucky mountains frequently eclipsed events along the Tug Fork. Breathitt County had a succession of feuds which kept it in a turmoil for a quarter of a century. Probably the first of them began during the Civil War, when John Amis and William Strong raised a company of Unionists in deeply divided territory. After Amis was killed in 1873, the feud “burned itself out,” but Strong soon entered into another with Wilson Callahan, which resulted in several deaths before Callahan's assassination ended the trouble. As that vendetta drew to a close, the Jett-Little feud claimed public attention until it put an end to the lives of its principal participants. When Judge John Burnett was killed in 1878, allegedly by members of the Gamble and Little families, Judge William Randall of the criminal court of the district that included Breathitt County declared that he would see the assassins punished. He failed to intimidate the lawless elements, however, and a fight in his own court in which Bob Little was killed and another man was wounded broke up the session and put the judge himself to flight. Randall never returned to Breathitt County to hold court during his remaining tenure as a judge.

Worse disorders lay ahead for Breathitt County. On November 13, 1888, Circuit Court Judge Henry Clay Lilly wrote Governor Simon Bolivar Buckner that he would not attempt to hold court in Breathitt, Letcher, and Knott counties unless the governor provided a state guard/such as some of the previous judges had obtained. Lilly explained that the people were so divided that a sheriff's posse could not maintain order. He declared that several persons charged with murder, including a brother of the sheriff and a son-in-law of the jailer, awaited indictments because witnesses feared to speak out. Jurors were equally cowed, and at the previous term of court four murderers had escaped justice because of hung juries.

Governor Buckner, in a letter of rebuke to Lilly, revealed a strong aversion to state intervention in the Kentucky mountain feuds. He declared that he failed to find, from Lilly's statements or any other source, “an evidence of any organized opposition to the civil authorities” of Breathitt County. The governor reminded Lilly that “in a republic the employment of the military arm in enforcing the law is of rare necessity.” He pointed out that “the law invests the civil authorities with ample powers to enforce the observance of the law, and expects those officers to exert their authority with reasonable diligence. When this is done,” he wrote, “there is seldom an occasion when the military arm can be employed without bringing the civil authorities into discredit. When a people are taught that they are not themselves the most important factor in the conservation of order in society, and that they must depend upon the exertion of extraneous forces to preserve order among themselves, they have lost their title to self-government, and are fit subjects to a military despotism.”

The worst disorder in Breathitt County, known as the Hargis-Cockrell-Marcum-Callahan feud, had its origins in a political contest in which fusion candidates accused County Judge James Hargis and Sheriff Ed Callahan of stealing the election. Violent disputes resulted in warrants for the arrest of Hargis and John B. Marcum, an attorney for the fusionists. Hargis alleged that in arresting him Tom Cockrell, the town marshal of Jackson, and his brother James had drawn a gun on him and would have killed him had not Callahan intervened. Recriminations filled the air during the ensuing weeks, and violence erupted when Cockrell killed Ben Hargis, a brother of the judge, in a blind tiger saloon in Jackson. Cockrell gained strong support from Marcum, who volunteered to defend him, and Dr. D. B. Cox, Jackson's most prominent citizen. Shortly afterward, Jerry Cardwell, also allied with the Marcum, Cockrell, and Cox faction, killed John (“Tige”) Hargis, whom subsequent evidence revealed at fault in the altercation.

In the wake of these events Judge Hargis surrounded himself with paid killers. Shortly afterward assassins cut down Dr. Cox, James Cockrell, and Marcum, whose death occurred in front of the courthouse, with Hargis and Callahan watching from a store across the street. For fifteen minutes Marcum lay bleeding before anyone summoned up the courage to attend him. After this reign of terror, state troops arrived. Their presence gave Captain J. B. Ewen, who was with Marcum at the time, the nerve to tell all he knew. On the strength of his testimony, Hargis and Callahan were indicted for murder, but both were acquitted. Hargis, whose near-absolute power in Breathitt County and gubernatorial connections seemed to give him immunity from punishment in Kentucky, was killed by his own son in 1908, and Callahan was shot from ambush in 1912.
³

Meanwhile, Hazard, in Perry County, became the center of another feud known as the French-Eversole War. Benjamin Fulton French and Joseph Eversole, the chiefs of their respective clans, were prominent lawyers and successful in the mercantile business. Their trouble began in a business rivalry and a malicious report of a clerk in French's store that French intended to kill Eversole. The two leaders began to gather their forces, made up not only of relatives but also of others to whom they promised employment and good wages. With the killing of Silas Gayhart, a French partisan, in an ambush involving at least a dozen white men and several blacks in the summer of 1887, the town of Hazard became an armed camp. After intermittent fighting, the two sides agreed to lay down their arms, with French surrendering his to the county judge of Leslie County and Eversole placing his in the custody of Josiah Combs, the judge of Perry County, who was his father-in-law.