Appalachia: Hatfields and McCoys

The Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River, once navigable, now has a single abstract function: Kentucky lies on one side, West Virginia on the other. Splayed out from both banks are noiseless hollows and stubbly, once-farmed bottoms, all in the shadow of Appalachian mountains, which rise dark and gorgeous in every direction. But to the businessmen who brought the railroad through around 1900, wooded slopes and crags were incidental: the capitalists came to burrow and cart away endless tons of coal, which they’re still doing today. The Tug Fork Valley, boosters chime, is THE HEART OF THE BILLION DOLLAR COAL FIELD.But hidden behind that bluff, commercial slogan is a different kind of past—peculiar and unsavory and murderous. This valley is the home turf of the Hatfields and the McCoys, whose family war a century ago became freakish folk legend, even as it was being fought.

Hatfields and McCoys are still here, hundreds of them, Hatfields clustered around West Virginia towns like Belfry and Double Camp, McCoys settled in Pilgrim and Jamboree in Kentucky. Many still hunt (raccoons, squirrels) and gather (chestnuts, huckleberries), but they also watch cable TV and vacation in New Jersey. The feud is unequivocally over. All is forgiven. Forgotten? Not just yet. “Why, we’re plain old Hatfields and McCoys,” says one of the latter in a shrugging, boiler-plate disclaimer, “good friends and neighbors . . .” Yet after a reminiscence has meandered a while, and the truce reaffirmed again, the rote kindliness can give way to neat bursts of partisanship. In bits and pieces, a little blame is assigned, victory claimed. The legacy is not erased, just quiet and manageable. Modern Hatfields and McCoys do not quite know whether to be proud or embarrassed by their inglorious family histories, and most are a little of both. That modest ambivalence, coming from direct descendants of roughneck killers, is almost sweet.

Exactly what made the clans so extravagantly unfriendly is open to conjecture. Maybe Randolph McCoy was sore at a Hatfield for stealing a razorback hog. Maybe he was angry at his daughter Rose Anne, pregnant by Johnse Hatfield after a frolic in 1880, for moving, unmarried, into the Hatfield compound. Or maybe the cause was the packs of Hatfields who crossed the Tug Fork and went swaggering around the Kentucky election grounds. Whatever the reason, the furies were unambiguously loosed on a whisky-sodden day 100 years ago next August. One of McCoy’s sons taunted an unarmed Ellison Hatfield, and Ellison’s riposte was intemperate and unprintable. Seventeen knife thrusts and one revolver shot later, Ellison lay mortally wounded. The eye-for-an-eye-for-an-eye retaliation began: three McCoys were captured by Hatfields under the command of Ellison’s brother Devil Anse, tied to a pawpaw bush, and shot to death. The skirmishing ended with the century, after at least 20 (and perhaps 100) men and women had died.

The feudists were prolific in all things. Devil Anse, like his McCoy counterpart, fathered 13 children; his brother Valentine is reputed to have had 47.

Around Matewan, W. Va. (pop. 803), probably one-tenth of the inhabitants are Hatfield kin. Clarence (“Dutch”) Hatfield, 69, Ellison’s grandson, lives up the hollow from Matewan. A short walk away his great-grandfather Ephraim, the family progenitor, is buried in what used to be a potato patch, and a little way beyond is Dutch’s birthplace. Says he:

“They undoubtedly was mean men back in that time.”

But the survivors did not encourage myth-making once the perfervid killing had finished. Says Dutch: “My grandmother, Ellison’s wife, wouldn’t talk too much about it. She lost her husband. It was sad for her.” Dutch’s cousin Belle Hatfield Pendergrast is 80, and full of a delighted sassiness about everything except the feud. Her father was indicted in Kentucky for a feud crime, and as long as he lived would never cross the Tug Fork.

“You know, they kept it secret from us children,” she whispers, as if the taboo were still enforced. “My daddy was in the war for 16 years. He was just a young boy but he was still goin’ at it in the mountains.” Henry D. Hatfield, 53, says of his great uncle Henry D., a physician and politician: “He would actually, physically, throw you out of that hospital if you’d ask him about that feud.” Peacemaking was an active mission among both families. “My parents,” Belle says, “made us be friendly with the McCoys. If you met one of those McCoy men that was in the fighting, you’d be nice and kind.”

Still, the children wheedled old battle stories out of the principals. They know the creek bend where a grisly ambush occurred, and the ridge where Jim Vance (a Hatfield inlaw) made a hellbent stand against far too many McCoys. And they think they know who was to blame, though their opinions tend to run along family lines. Robert McCoy, 36, the well-fed and worldly mayor of Matewan, points a finger at the meddlesome Hatfields who invaded the election grounds: “Politics—that was what the whole thing was about. One family meddling in the other’s interests.” Another McCoy, twice the mayor’s age, takes his own backhanded swipe: “Those poor Hatfields, as I understand it, were too easy with their drinking back then. It took away their sense, made ’em too brave.” Given the chance, Hatfields abandon impartiality as well. Says Henry D. cheerfully: “Really, the Hatfields won the feud. Devil Anse would have ended it any time. But Randolph McCoy was so irate. . .” Even Dutch, appalled by his ancestors’ attack on a McCoy family home in 1888, reminds a visitor that the victims had “done something bad to my grandmother.”

There has been no revenge exacted for generations, but the collective arsenals seem undiminished. Dutch owns ten guns; his brother Elliott, who Dutch says was once “meaner than a striped snake,” has 18. Belle has a .38, and another Hatfield, nearly 80, keeps a revolver in his office. When the mood strikes him, he swivels and fires into a stack of books in the corner. The people of the valley know from experience that some folks have a native wildness that is not to be trifled with. Even smiling, gracious Belle has a measure of congenital menace. Says her cousin Dutch: “I believe if you got her down to business, she would kill you.” Her brother Arch, Dutch adds, “did kill two or three fellas.”

Outsiders have always had a special appetite for the Tug Fork’s bloody contretemps. Back in 1888, the New York World sent a reporter to have a look at the combatants. The World man’s Barnum instincts were keen: he almost persuaded Devil Anse to decamp to New York City and charge gawkers $500 a week just to have a look at an authentic feudist, Winchester in hand.

Showmanship lives on. Family Feud is a TV game show, which pits one family against another. Two years ago, in a brain storm of a California kind, the producers brought Hatfields and McCoys, ten of each, out to Hollywood. The contestants were dressed in period costumes, and a rented scrub hog was led into the studio so the quasi-historical argument could be staged. “Buddy, we all had them old-timey guns,” says Dutch. “Hey, I’d have given them $200 for the one I had.” The McCoys won three out of five. For a finale, the Hatfields, on cue, fired blanks at the McCoys.

Henry D., who won $1,100, was glad for the chance to show the world that all feud animus has long since washed away. “I love those McCoys better than anything. But you know,” he confides, “it was funny on the show when they asked this one McCoy girl, ‘Name a New England state.’ And she said ‘London.’ ” His snigger is at least mischievous. “I really couldn’t believe that: ‘London.'” —By Kurt Andersen