by Dean King
In the spring of 1863 came a momentous shift in the dynamics of the war in this region: the western part of Virginia realized its tumultuous effort to secede from the rest of Virginia and became an independent state. In April, President Lincoln signed a proclamation admitting the new state of West Virginia, loyal to the Union, as of June 20. (The only other state created during the Civil War was Nevada.) Although the legality of the move would be argued in court after the war, the confusion that this rift added on the ground was real and immediate. That May, Devil Anse and his brothers Ellison and Elias enlisted in the Forty-Fifth Battalion Virginia Infantry of the Confederate Army. Ellison was made a second lieutenant and Anse probably a first lieutenant. However, by December, when the Forty-Fifth went into winter camp in Virginia, Devil Anse and Elias had skipped out. While Ellison stuck around, his two brothers had served their last stint as regular soldiers. Once more they headed back to their families on the Tug, where Devil Anse, along with his uncle Jim Vance and brother-in-law Johnson McCoy, who was his best friend and the namesake of his son Johnse, helped establish a home guard. They called themselves the Logan Wildcats, perhaps in homage to the former unit of that name under General Floyd, who had recently died of stomach cancer.
Closely associated with the Wildcats were the forces of Rebel Bill Smith, whose son Larkin would marry Devil Anse’s younger sister Emma during the war. Smith led the combined force of four hundred Logan County irregulars on a series of cross-border raids. Major Devil Zeke Counts also sometimes led these irregular Rebel forces on border raids, teaming up at times with Lieutenant Colonel Vincent Witcher. The latter, known as Clawhammer because of the dark swallowtail coat he wore in battle, had a reputation for brutality and for summarily executing men of fighting age who were not enlisted in the Confederate ranks. Riding with these men, Devil Anse earned a reputation for being fearsome and fearless.2
The Logan Wildcats returned from these raids with more than just rations and supplies. When Devil Anse and his fellow partisans came calling, former Union soldiers had a choice: enlist as Confederates at the end of a gun barrel, or die. Jake Cline decided to enlist. In October, as Union troops from the Big Sandy Valley joined an attack on Saltville, depleting the valley of blue uniforms, Rebel Bill and Devil Anse stormed the town of Peach Orchard, a Union outpost upriver of Louisa. Ellison and Elias Hatfield, Johnson McCoy, and Cline, their former enemy, took part in the raid that targeted, among other places, stores and warehouses owned by Colonel Dils. In the end, the raiders’ loot included $3,500 worth of clothing, boots, and hats. They torched the warehouses on their way out of town.3
Asbury Hurley, a relative by marriage to the Mounts and Cline families who had moved across the river to Pike County during the war, skirmished with Devil Anse and his men. After abandoning the Thirty-Ninth, Hurley and his twenty-one-year-old son, Flem, returned home and laid out in a rock house, one of the area’s many shallow caves, which had provided temporary homes to early settlers and were still used by hunters for camping. One day they discovered that one of their cows was missing and set out on its trail. The route led to a group of Rebel irregulars, headed by Devil Anse, who were butchering the animal in the woods. The Hurleys started to shoot. The Rebels scattered, but not before one was fatally shot.
Killing one of Devil Anse’s men was not a good idea. Threats soon arrived, demanding that Asbury and Flem surrender. Instead, they decided to run for it and return to the Thirty-Ninth. But it was too late. Devil Anse’s men closed in, and the father and son negotiated their surrender as prisoners of war. After the two laid down their arms, the Rebels took them to a large flat rock, stripped off their clothes, and bound them. According to one account, Devil Anse backed up thirty paces, fixed a rest out of logs, placed his gun on it, and shot them both, Asbury twice, Flem three times.4
U.S. deputy marshal Dan Cunningham had a low opinion of Devil Anse and would later call him “no soldier at all,” just a “murderer” and a “bush-whacker.” Cunningham accused Devil Anse and his cohorts of preying on the Union men of Peter Creek for personal gain. According to him, Devil Anse was involved in the shooting of Reuben Dotson as he picked pawpaws beside a creek, which left him a cripple. He and his men ambushed John Poss as he walked along a path near the mouth of Grapevine Creek. Charlie Mounts, a farmer and miller who rode with Runyon and was a cousin of the Cline brothers, took his bullet through the heart while making sorghum molasses. He fell into the fire and had to be pulled out by his children before he was incinerated.5
BY NOVEMBER 1864, the confederacy teetered on collapse. In Logan Courthouse, the charred remains of the once proud county courthouse—burned six months earlier by Union troops from Ohio to avenge the death of a company captain—testified to the bleak reality. Confederate deserters swelled the home guard ranks and grew increasingly brazen. The Hatfields took part in another raid on Peach Orchard, this time overrunning an election precinct and attempting, somewhat absurdly, to cast votes in the Abraham Lincoln–George B. McClellan presidential election of November 8. Remarkably, some thirty Rebel irregulars voted to reelect Lincoln, reasoning that “they could whip” him “but did not know about whipping McClellan,” the former commander of the Army of the Potomac and general in chief of the Union Army. The attempt failed. The Rebel votes were disallowed, and after the war, the raiders would be indicted for voter fraud. Devil Anse and his brother Wall were accused of theft as well for having made off with the horse and saddle of a Union militia captain during the raid.6
How Randall McCoy was captured is unknown, but at this juncture he was serving time in a Union prison camp, so he was not around when a fatal clash between the McCoys and the Hatfields took place. A week before Christmas, Devil Anse’s brother Ellison finally abandoned the now miserable Forty-Fifth Virginia Infantry, which was holed up in the Shenandoah Valley. The unit had dwindled to fewer than thirty men, tattered enough to be described as “nearly naked” and said to have only a single blanket among them. Conditions at home were severe but, Ellison reckoned, better than this. The most consistent of the Hatfield fighters, he returned a hero to his family and neighbors.7
On the day before Christmas, Harmon McCoy, who had been captured at his home almost exactly two years earlier, was honorably discharged from the Thirty-Ninth Kentucky Mounted Infantry. All he wanted to do at this point was make his way upriver to his home beside the Tug Fork to see his wife, Patty. Having already been shot in the chest, he now had a broken leg from a buggy accident to show his five children, including Mary, thirteen; Jacob, eleven; and Lark, eight. As much as anyone, Harmon had earned some family time. He barely knew the youngest two: Jeff, who was five, and Bud, two.
But this brutal war gave no respite to the weary, certainly not to those on the Kentucky–West Virginia line. After reaching his home on Peter Creek, Harmon soon found himself under siege. As he fetched water from his well one morning, the crack of a gun sounded from the woods, and a shot whizzed past him. He scurried for cover, but the message had been received. Patty urged him to take refuge in the woods.
Though reluctant to leave his bustling home yet again and hampered by a persistent soldier’s hack in addition to a leg still not right from multiple fractures, Harmon set out. To evade his pursuers, he waded in and across frigid Peter Creek and took a circuitous route for several miles before holing up in a hideout, a rock house about a mile from home, where he would have access to food from his family. Exhausted, he burrowed into his cave just in time to beat a winter storm. A bitter rain poured down, obscuring the half-moon, and after dark it began to snow, bringing an eerie, cold, and—for a man used to camp life and now the joyous sounds of family—lonely hush to the forest.
Several nights later, after Patty and the children had gone to bed, a gang of men pounded on their cabin door and then burst in. Among them were Devil Anse and someone even more frightening: his uncle and compatriot Crazy Jim Vance. The jittery-eyed Confederate roughrider, who also went by Bad Jim, had ridden with Witcher, terrorizing the Shenan
doah Valley on raids. Crazy Jim—the illegitimate son of the disgraced daughter of Abner Vance and a married preacher—was no man to mess with. Worse, he had a score to settle. Fighting in the Virginia State Line, his brother Richard had been shot and mortally wounded near the mouth of Little War Creek. Some said Harmon McCoy did it.8
Asa Harmon McCoy. (Big Sandy Heritage Center)
Patty told them that Harmon was not there. They searched the place and left.
Before dawn, young Mary slipped out of the house to go warn her father that the gang had come looking for him. Her intentions were good, but fatal: Later that morning, the Hatfields followed Mary’s trail in the snow to the rock house. There they found evidence of Harmon’s stay and tracks leading away from the cave. Clearly, Harmon had realized the danger he was in from Mary’s footprints. The snow that had calmed the night hours had now set a dreadful snare.
With his ailments, Harmon could make little headway, and the men, easily deciphering his attempted deceptions, caught up with him in Caney Branch Hollow. They took him without a fight, stripped off his clothes, laid him out naked on a frozen log, and lashed him to it. Though no one has ever proven it, it is believed that Crazy Jim Vance, with his demonic stare—caused by a lateral nystagmus, which in times of stress made his irises dance back and forth—was the one who shot Harmon McCoy in the head.9
It took the family three days to find Harmon’s body. Getting him out of Caney Branch Hollow and across the risen Peter Creek was a treacherous affair, which Patty attended to herself with the help of Pete, one of the family’s slaves. Patty, who was pregnant again, was determined to see Harmon to his final resting place, and eventually, at no small risk to herself and Pete, they managed to get him home. Even then, the difficulties continued: the ground was frozen, and they had a hard time burying him.
Later generations would claim that the McCoys would have avenged Harmon’s death at the time but for the fact that with Randall incarcerated, there was a leadership void in the family.
Some historians have misinterpreted the circumstances surrounding Harmon McCoy’s death and misjudged its impact on the feud. The notion that he was considered a traitor is widespread but false, based on the mistaken belief that he was an anomaly fighting for the Union. He was in good company among his Peter Creek neighbors. The fact that there was no immediate retaliation has also been interpreted to mean that the McCoys did not take deep offense, but this too is a misreading. It is not unusual in a feud to see a decade or more pass between events as sons come of age and avenge the killings of fathers.10
After the war’s end, in the spring of 1865, it would take time for matters to sort themselves out while the combatants struggled to reestablish their lives, their broken families, and their means of survival. Certain retaliations had taken place during the war, and certain repercussions would follow it, both inside the courthouses and outside their purlieu. The postwar years allowed little time to grieve. Lives had to move on. There was work to be done and business to conduct. McCoys and Hatfields spoke to one another when they met and then passed on. However, for Patty and the children, who were now destitute, the pain endured. As they sat around the fire on a bitter winter’s night, the talk would turn to Harmon, and they cursed the West Virginia Hatfield clan.11
Lark was particularly haunted by the murder. His father had appeared like a Christmas gift, only to be snatched away again forever. Some came to regard Harmon’s death as a war incident, best forgotten for the good of all. “Everyone was so scared, they wouldn’t do anything,” Lark later recalled. But Lark McCoy would not forget. Though only eight years old, he pledged to kill the man who had killed his father.
His family would have its revenge. Wrong would be returned for wrong.
Chapter 3
Timbering the Sublime Forest
1865–1877
At the end of the war, Devil Anse Hatfield still lived amid his brothers in the dense woods on the bank of the Tug River, about five miles and ten bends above Mate Creek, named after Mate, a hunting dog that died there along with the bear it was chasing when both fell through the winter ice. The mouth of Mate Creek, where the Tug could be easily crossed, was a focal point of the area. And Randall McCoy still lived just across the Tug on Blackberry Fork, a tributary of Pond Creek in Kentucky.
In the aftermath of the prolonged struggle, it was to the rugged, primordial forest that the men and their families retreated to start again, perhaps to be cleansed of their sins by the grand and remorseless natural world around them, but definitely to turn a profit. The alluvial soils, cool climate, and remoteness of the Cumberland Plateau provided an ideal environment for trees. The intricately intertwined hills were covered in magnificent hardwoods, behemoths descended from the Great Forest that once covered the region before the continental plates separated.
The Tug Valley was still mostly virgin forest, virtually untouched and a haven for wildlife, helped by the fact that the locals heated their homes with the soft coal they could pick from seams all around them. These woods would save the men economically, speeding their recovery from the war, but in the process, the forest would be wiped out. Later, Devil Anse’s nephew, Governor Henry D. Hatfield, would declare that “the ruthless destruction of one of the greatest forests in the world has taken place within our state.” By then—1913—almost sixteen million acres of woodland had been reduced to fewer than a million and a half.1
The Great White Mingo Oak, believed to be the largest white oak in the world, stood at the head of Trace Fork of Pigeon Creek. It was cut down in 1938, following its death, at which time it was calculated to be 577 years old. (West Virginia and Regional History Collection, West Virginia University Libraries)
Winter was the toughest season here. The craggy heights of the southern Appalachians were cold and windswept, with a climate closer to Canada’s than the Carolinas’. Some said the Tug River got its name during the French and Indian War, when a party of Virginians and Cherokee fighting the Shawnee were snowed in and had to eat buffalo hide, which they roasted in thin strips, or tugs, to survive. Others say English trappers had found the Tug in winter and, snowed in as well, had been forced to eat the tugs from their boots. Either way, a man living in the Tug Valley had to be prepared to be shut in at times and to provide for himself and his family always.2
Each spring, torrential rains in March and April transformed the rocky wooded slopes of the river valley. As streams of water plunged off ledges and rushed down steep and narrow hollows (pronounced “hollers”) to fuel a now raging Tug, foliage leafed out along the riverbanks, trees budded, and violets blanketed the hills. The Tug Valley once again became, to its modest inhabitants at least, a land of plenty. Along the river’s lush banks, the women filled baskets with blueberries, blackberries, and pawpaws. Wild grapevines provided small purple possum grapes, if you could beat the possums to them. The locals knew when and where to find edible young pokeberry plants, as well as nettle weed and dandelions. They harvested wild mint to make fragrant tea. They turned the bark of sassafras roots into a sort of coffee, tapped maples for syrup, and collected honey from beehives, either wild or cultivated in hollowed-out gum trees. They dried gourds to fashion drinking cups, ladles, sugar dishes, and scoops for livestock feed. They made fabric from flax and dyed it with madder root for scarlet, black walnut hulls for brown, and hickory bark for yellow.
Also resourceful, the men made gunpowder from saltpeter and bartered for lead to make their own shot. They fished, hunted for wild game and fowl, kept semiwild hogs, and distilled their own alcohol, an art practiced by their Old World ancestors for centuries and an act signaling neither rebellion nor depravity, simply a way of life. Distilled spirits, when properly employed, were considered both salubrious and medicinal.3
The river itself yielded them bass, trout, several varieties of catfish—channel, blue, and yellow (or mud)—frogs, and snapping and leatherback turtles. Redtail suckerfish ran in the spring, so bony that locals simply pounded them with a mallet, fried t
hem crisp in lard, and ate them whole. Catfish roe was another spring treat.
The mountains receded from the river in hierarchical waves of green and blue. Many peaks were so close together that you could throw a rock from one slope to another. In the narrow hollows between them—or etched into their sides by seasonal streams—the locals felled trees and planted corn, wheat, sorghum, cotton, and flax, though only a third of the unsparing terrain was arable, and filled their cabins with as many children as the seasons allowed.4
With the South eagerly rebuilding after four years of bitter destruction, timber was in great demand, and the Tug River Valley had it in spades. Indeed, there was not only a seemingly inexhaustible expanse of timber, but also an easy way to transport it: logs could be floated down brooks, streams, and rivers—the Levisa and Tug forks of the Big Sandy and the Guyandotte River in West Virginia—to sawmills on the Ohio River, and from there the lumber could be shipped around the nation.
Giant tulip trees—native only to the East Coast and China and, at two hundred feet, North America’s tallest trees—blossomed in spring, catching sunlight in brilliant lanterns. The mountain men, who called them yellow poplars, put them to the ripsaw and ax. They also felled and floated other hardwoods—steely hickories, dense elms, and sprawling walnuts—on westward rafts. Sawmills on the Ohio hummed, turning these trees into the lumber that was building America. At the international Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, the state of West Virginia would proudly display at its much-visited exhibit samples of its wide array of commercial lumber: from cedar, spruce, and white walnut to chestnut, sugar maple, white ash, and black cherry.