by Dean King
To construct a raft of logs, the loggers floated or sledded their timber to a cofferdam in a river bend. There they interspersed floaters—logs of lighter wood, like poplar, chestnut, basswood, or sometimes pine—with those of the denser ash, oak, hemlock, hickory, maple, or walnut to keep them buoyant. Once the logs were in line, they fastened oak or hickory binders to the ends with hardwood pegs. Over time, metal chain dogs, wedge-shaped steel points joined together by short chains, replaced the wooden pegs. Then the men attached rigging made from ropes or grapevines.
Loggers prepare to fell a giant tree. (West Virginia and Regional History Collection, West Virginia University Libraries)
Timber crew posing on a downed tree. (West Virginia and Regional History Collection, West Virginia University Libraries)
With a good tide, it took four or five days to reach Catlettsburg. The raft was an unwieldy beast and, even in the best conditions, difficult to steer using long stern and bow oars swiveling within forked stanchions or locks. There was little uniformity in the size of the rafts. Those that were launched on the creeks were often under sixteen feet wide and forty feet long, containing from ten to twenty thousand board feet, while the rafts that floated on the wider and more navigable sections of the Big Sandy were much larger. Once a raft was adrift and caught in a racing flood tide, its fate was more in the river’s control than the crew’s. Some years, the tide faltered, and rafts were stranded in bends and on sandbars. These were left to rot or were retrieved the following year, when they were worth less than those of new wood. In good years, after they reached the lower stretches, rafts were amassed and lashed together in fleets, which could sometimes travel as far as Cincinnati or Louisville before feeling the bite of the saw.
When the waterways became filled with timber, the river runs were treacherous. It was cold, wet, dangerous work. Men could be crushed, drowned, or overcome by hypothermia, and, as if that were not enough, they had to be on guard against robbers and thus kept rifles and pistols strapped to the driest places on their bodies as they maneuvered their payloads downstream. The last spring tide in April, when the briars had greened and budded and the snowball bushes had already lost their blooms, was the best time to set out. But some farmer-loggers, relying on folk weather prognostications or desperate for supplies or money, launched on the freshets of February or the March thaws. These voyages often fell victim to flash storms of sleet and snow. It was not unheard of for a sleeping rafter to wake up plastered to his raft by a coat of ice.5
Sections of the “inexhaustible” first-growth forest near streams or rivers were much prized. Loggers argued over property claims, boundaries, and the logs that often got jumbled on the crowded waterways or that were stolen by timber pirates. Using either branding irons or hammers with brands raised on their faces, the lumberjacks marked their log ends with symbols that, like livestock brands, could be registered in a courthouse. Still, the shores were rife with audacious thieves and “salvagers,” who snared runaway logs. Instead of restoring branded logs to their owners or sending them down to the mill booms, where buyers tallied the logs, they “dehorned” branded logs, sawing off their ends. When raftsmen resorted to side branding, the thieves responded by chiseling off the sometimes deep marks, albeit leaving suspicious dents.
Most rafts carried at least one experienced man who knew the river’s quirks. He would ride at the bow on the lookout for eddies, sucks, rocky shoals, narrows (or “na’rrs,” as the mountain men said), and hazardous debris. “Pull her to the left!” he would shout, or “Hold the stern tight!” as the need arose. “Everybody walk outside!” meant it was time to lighten the load by jumping in the water. Above the mill sites, log booms could back up the tide of timber for miles.6
Perils could be found on land too. Following cold, wet, week-long, nearly sleepless journeys, loggers often indulged in drunken binges and trysts with prostitutes. Men with guns and money and nothing but another year of hard labor to look forward to did not always make wise decisions; gambling sometimes stripped them of an entire winter’s earnings in a night or two. Likewise, armed robberies and murders occurred at an alarming rate. All too often, the much-anticipated return home of the loggers with cooking supplies, store-bought clothes and tools, and news of the outside world was a moment not of joy, but of regret.
RANDALL MCCOY’S SONS BIG JIM and Tolbert took advantage of the good times. They were two of the most able timbermen in the area. A timber merchant could harvest land he owned, or he could buy trees for a dollar apiece, or two dollars for an especially good specimen (though the most prized wood, walnut, cost up to ten dollars per tree). The price of the labor to fell the trees, peel them—all logs were floated to the mills without their bark—haul them to a waterway, build the raft, and then float it to the mill was a dollar a day per man.
High-quality poplar brought sixteen cents a cube (twelve inches in length by eighteen in diameter). Oak and sycamore and many other species brought in ten to twelve cents. Top walnut went from twenty cents to a dollar a cube. Walnut was so valuable that men would go back and dig up the stumps to sell for veneer.
Those selling timber had their tricks, sometimes concealing rotten cores with solid pegs. Logs with bad knots or holes were locked into rafts with the blemishes facing down to avoid detection. Buyers had their own stratagems: some were known to squeeze their calipers together when measuring logs to trim an inch here and there, which, when compounded across a raft, added up.7
Shrewd men, like Big Jim, Tolbert, and Devil Anse, knew what to be on the lookout for and were able to make good money. They also knew how to protect what was theirs, or what they presumed to be theirs.
The brothers Perry and Jake Cline worked on Devil Anse’s timber crew. Perhaps they were trying to learn the business to better exploit their landholdings. It was a strange partnership. The Clines were brothers-in-law of the murdered Harmon McCoy. It was their slave Mose—charged with looking after them by their dying father—who had put a price on Devil Anse’s head and who died for it. In the end, things would not work out harmoniously.
According to Perry Cline, in 1870, Devil Anse started logging on land along Grapevine Creek that belonged to Cline. However, Devil Anse claimed a right to the land based on a survey by Big Eph and even started building cabins there. The two settled their differences in a trade, or so they thought. Cline received property in Pike County. But something went amiss. In 1872 Devil Anse filed a lawsuit against both Clines claiming that they had trespassed on his property and cut timber. The suit never went to trial.
In the spring of 1877, Perry Cline officially signed over half of the five thousand acres that he and his brother Jake inherited from their father to Devil Anse. It was prime property situated along Grapevine Creek and the Tug and included the Clines’ Old Home Place. Devil Anse, Vicey, and their children now flourished in the Cline family’s ancestral house.8
Chapter 4
The Importance of Razorbacks
1878–1880
By July 1866, Congress had reduced the army to a peacetime level of just over 54,000 men. By 1876, the number had dropped by half again, to 27,000. That year, America’s centennial celebration took a blow when the news hit the week before the Fourth of July that General George Custer had suffered a devastating defeat at the hands of two thousand Lakota and Cheyenne, under Sitting Bull, in the Montana Territory. Custer had been dispatched to open the Black Hills to gold prospectors, which the Indians, whose land it now was, hotly opposed, and to make a statement that would hit newspaper front pages from coast to coast during the presidential political conventions. Instead, Custer’s Last Stand shocked the nation.
The disputed election of Ohio Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, a former Union general, to the presidency that fall resulted in a compromise with the Democrats that ended Reconstruction and the federal occupation of the South. Army forces were shifted to the West to fight Indians and police the frontier. As America rebuilt, laid rails, and expanded, the Indians would be pushed onto s
maller and more marginal reservations in the West, and the blacks, now free but left to their own devices, would be oppressed and persecuted in the South. In southern Appalachia, the isolated hill people would be conned out of their land by wealthy northeastern industrial interests, which, as the railroads opened up the region to mass extraction, swooped in and snatched up coal and timber rights before the locals had any idea what they were worth. In little more than a decade, the industrialists would wrest almost complete economic and political control of the region from the people who lived there.1
IT IS NOT SURPRISING THAT the Hatfield-McCoy feud found a new spark at this juncture in history, as the strictures and safeguards of the Reconstruction era suddenly vanished. What does come as a surprise is that amid the high-risk and often turbulent work of the timbering industry, with its unbridled inebriation and rowdiness of unleashed mountain men on payday, it was a rather prosaic dispute over livestock that ignited the tinderbox of the feud.
Razorback hogs were an important part of the farm economy in Appalachia, providing most of the meat during the harsh winters, which dumped an average of two to three feet of snow on the land and required year-round preparations. With the gradual retreat of the big game, the domesticated swine got the locals through. Elm-peelers, as they were often called, because they liked to peel and eat the bark off the area’s abundant elm trees, required relatively little labor since they were allowed to freely roam the densely forested slopes between farms in the summer to fatten on acorns and the mast of nut-bearing trees.
The razorback was nothing like its feedlot cousin, the four-hundred-pound porker bred to have an intestinal tract ten times its length. With half the intestines, the local hogs were, as one observer put it, “long-legged, long-snouted, long-tailed, long-bristled, razor-back, slab-sided” throwbacks, built hard and wiry for speed and foraging and having a telltale raised streak of bristles down the spine. In short blasts, a razorback could run faster than a horse. A sow with a brood was considered fiercer than a wolf. And the razorbacks tended to be immune to hog cholera, which had been wreaking havoc with farm swine since before the war.2
There were few disputes over the razorbacks because each family earmarked its hogs with its own particular notch, a cut as distinctive as a cattle brand or a timber mark. Some even registered their cuts, like their land and other markings, with the county court. But most of all, since the pork was a critical part of the annual harvest, a mountaineer always had a feel for where his razorbacks and their broods of long-snout sucklings were hiding out.3
A hog was a mountain family’s “money in the bank,” according to John Vance, a descendant of three of the major feudists. It “was where their next meal was coming from, and it was how they could feed their children in the winter. If they were lucky enough to have one to sell or trade, the proceeds were used to acquire flour, salt, and coffee, or sometimes shoes or boots for their families. It was their mainstay for survival.” 4
The mountaineers gathered in their razorbacks and selected those for slaughter in the fall, after Thanksgiving, when it was cold enough outside to prevent the meat from spoiling. They smoke-cured the hams over hardwood fires. They rendered the belly fat into lard, which could be combined with nuts to make pies or baked with cornmeal, salt, and water to make corn pone. Sometimes they added fried skin, or pork rind, to make cracklin’ corn bread. A hog’s lights (or lungs), spleen, and brain found their way into dishes, as did the heart, liver, kidneys, and head, all considered delicacies. Even the feet, ears, and tail were eaten. The hooves were boiled to make glue. The bristles filled beds and pillows. The only thing wasted when they butchered a hog, the saying went, was its squeal.5
Here and elsewhere, hog stealing was a serious offense. In Ireland in 1843, Red Kelly, the father of the famous anticolonial Australian outlaw Ned Kelly, was commuted to Tasmania for seven years of hard labor for stealing a pair. In Kentucky, a circuit judge, noting that in his district men were acquitted of murder more often than of hog stealing, remarked that a hog seemed of more value than a human. Livestock theft was looked on as a particularly lowly crime, tantamount to stealing food out of a family’s pot. Rustling a horse or cow out west might get you the rope; stealing a hog in the Appalachians was worse. It earned you and your family shame and scorn.6
In September 1878, according to Randall’s nephew Squirrel Huntin’ Sam, Randall, with the help of two brothers, Hense and John “Bushy” Scott, put his hogs up in a lot so he could castrate several of the shoats. The sow broke through the fence and escaped with six shoats and her mate. This was a nuisance, not a disaster, since the hogs ran wild all summer anyway, so the men let the animals go without a chase. Snow was a foot deep on the mountain by the time Randall—who at fifty-four was an established if still impoverished farmer, a father of sixteen children, and a grandfather of many more—got around to hunting them down one morning the following February. The hogs had wandered far searching for food in the depths of winter, and he saw no sign of them until evening, when he was crossing over a mountain at the head of a creek. There, Randall discovered a roughed-up spot where the hogs had recently been grubbing for the increasingly spare nourishment. Nearby were the tracks of a man. Randall followed them to his nephew Tom Stafford’s place on the Tug. Randall checked Stafford’s pen and then went to the door of the cabin. A son of Sally’s older sister Ellender, Stafford, who was thirty-five and a justice of the peace, came outside. “Tom, where’d you find my hogs?” Randall asked.
“Is those your hogs, Uncle Randall?”
“Sure are my hogs.”
“Well, Uncle Randall, I didn’t know whose hogs they were. I brung them out with mine.”
Since it was late, Randall told Stafford he would come get them the next day. But Stafford’s brother-in-law Floyd Hatfield, twenty-nine, who lived about half a mile away, across the river in Logan County, showed up shortly after Randall left. He too claimed the hogs, saying that they had crossed the Tug on the ice, and he insisted on taking them, even after Stafford explained that Randall McCoy had said they were his and warned that Randall, with his hot temper, would surely resort to legal action if Floyd took them. “Why, I can prove the hogs are mine” was Floyd’s response as he drove them off.7
When he discovered what had happened, Randall went to see Floyd, who was not only a double first cousin of Devil Anse but also married to Esther Staton, a sister of Sarah Ann, Ellison Hatfield’s wife. Randall confronted Floyd, claiming that the hogs and their brood were his. An examination of the hogs in question did not help: the earmarks were either nonexistent or too similar to each other to be distinguished. The two men argued, neither backing down at all. Randall threatened to go to the law, and Floyd told him to go ahead. With veins popping in his forehead, Randall departed, heading straight to the nearest justice of the peace, Preacher Anse Hatfield, another cousin of Devil Anse. Preacher Anse, a former Union soldier and now, at age fifty-seven, a Hardshell Baptist minister, as well as a relative of Floyd Hatfield, lived in a log house in Raccoon Hollow on Blackberry Creek. As a justice of the peace, he was a local legal officer, a man who commanded respect as a community leader and who was an arbiter of disputes.8
Hog Floyd Hatfield in later years. (Dr. Coleman C. Hatfield Collection, courtesy of Dr. Arabel E. Hatfield)
Randall wasted little time in getting to the point. He demanded a warrant of delivery for the hogs. Preacher Anse issued it. But when Randall presented it to Floyd—who would forever after be known as Hog Floyd—he was just as determined to keep the disputed swine. Instead of turning them over, he posted a bond for the delivery of the hogs on the day of trial, scheduled by Preacher Anse for the following Saturday.
Randall had taken a legitimate but aggressive tack in trying to regain what he believed to be his property. As a result, what might, in cooler and more careful hands, have been decided in a friendly manner had now become a matter of honor.
THE TRIAL WAS TO BE held at Preacher Anse Hatfield’s house. The presiding judge well
understood the sensitivity of a trial that pitted the two clans against each other, particularly when the charge reflected directly on a man’s character. He decided to call a jury. As there were few people in the area who were neutral and none foolish enough to get involved if they were, he determined that the jury of twelve would consist of six Hatfields and six McCoys; that way he could not be accused of bias.9
Preacher Anse Hatfield and his wife, Polly Runyon Hatfield, after the feud. (Dr. Coleman C. Hatfield Collection, courtesy of Dr. Arabel E. Hatfield)
Randall’s suit against Floyd for theft was the scandal of the day, and both sides showed up in force for the trial. Hatfield kith and kin—Chafins, Ferrells, Mahons, Vances, and Statons—gathered at the makeshift courthouse, as did McCoy partisans, including Colemans, Gateses, Normans, Sowards, and Stuarts.
To start things off, Preacher Anse, a man known for his oratory skills—he had been ordained in 1869 and was licensed to preach, a thing he did every Sunday at the Pond Creek Baptist Church—asked the claimant and the defendant as well as the jury to disarm. Reluctantly, they did, setting their pistols on the judge’s bench as directed and stacking their rifles against the wall in a corner of the room. An impressive array of weapons filled the chamber. Those who had come to watch the trial placed their guns along the wall outside the cabin. As being away from their farms and timbering operations came at a high cost, these mountaineers were not wordy and did not cotton to lengthy explications. The trial would not drag on for days. It would be terse, intense, and settled in a sitting.10
What was actually testified to is now a matter of hearsay, not fact. Newspaper reporter John Spears would later write that several witnesses for Floyd swore that they recognized his hogs and that they were the same ones that he had brought to court and tied up outside under a beech tree. According to Spears, Randall “could bring no witnesses.” But Squirrel Huntin’ Sam claimed that Randall “proved the hogs to be his by 2 or 3 of his neighbors and also by Hense Scott and John Scott, his brother, to be the same hogs McCoy had in his pen to work on.” 11