by Dean King
“Evidence is of little value when witnesses are ruled by influences stronger than conscience,” feud chronicler Virgil Carrington Jones later opined. “Witness after witness took a seat in the cane-bottomed chair that had been placed directly in front of the judge. They talked as their clan adherence dictated.” 12 Perhaps, but one deposition stood out.
One of Floyd’s witnesses, Bill Staton Sr., who was married to Nancy McCoy, was considered a McCoy by virtue of marriage but had two daughters who were married to Hatfields, including one married to Floyd himself.13 According to George McCoy, a juryman at the trial, Staton testified that he had been present when Floyd earmarked the razorbacks. At this, Randall jumped up and launched into a furious tirade, railing against all of the Hatfield witnesses, whom he accused of lying. Staton, enraged by Randall’s accusations, lunged at him. But Randall’s sons were faster and seized Staton before he could strike their father. With that, the trial moved uneasily to the deliberation phase.
The jury of twelve being evenly split between Hatfields and McCoys, neither side could complain of a stacked deck, but a stalemate was all the more likely. For a while it looked like the jury would indeed be hung. George McCoy, one of the jurymen, later described the judge’s charge to the panel to family historian Truda McCoy: “Gentlemen of the jury, I’ve swore you to be fair and square,” Preacher Anse, who would later serve in the Kentucky state legislature, began. “I want you to forget that Floyd’s Hatfield and Randall is McCoy. The Good Book says do unto others as you’d have em do to you. If them hogs was yourn you’d want em, wouldn’t ye? Well, give em to the man you think they belong to—be he McCoy or Hatfield. That is all, Gentlemen.” 14
The jury adjourned to a back room. After considerable discussion, mostly vehement and along family lines, Leck Hatfield, the foreman of the jury, called for a voice vote to see where they stood.15 Before the vote, he suggested that they agree that if either man won the majority of the votes, he would get the hogs. Several jurymen readily agreed. It had boiled down to that, not so much a determination of Floyd’s guilt as a consideration of who had a better claim to the hogs. Leck led off by declaring for Floyd. They argued back and forth for a while until something remarkable happened.
A McCoy, Selkirk, citing Bill Staton’s testimony that he actually saw Floyd brand the hogs, said that he would not contradict this. Both men had their rights, Selkirk reasoned, but it seemed to him that there was no evidence to prove that Floyd did not own the hogs, and since he possessed them, he should keep them. Thus, Selkirk McCoy sided with Floyd Hatfield, giving him the decisive edge—and arguably igniting America’s most notorious feud.
Scoffed George McCoy at this unexpected turn of events, “If that wouldn’t make a man puke, nothing would.” It was likely lost on no one present that Selkirk, a Confederate veteran, and his two sons—Lorenzo Dom, better known as L.D., and Albert—happened to work in Devil Anse’s logging outfit.16
In any event, Randall lost his case. When the verdict was announced, the Hatfields cheered. To add insult to injury, Randall had to pay the court costs. Glares and curses passed between the two sides after the announcement, but this skirmish was over. All parties picked up their weapons and departed without resorting to them. That should have been the end of it. But the humiliated Randall seethed long after his debacle in court. To anyone who would listen, he damned the procedure and vowed revenge.
Finally, one day in 1879, on the banks of the Tug, his angry words bore bitter fruit. Floyd and Ellison Hatfield, Bill Staton Jr., and several others of the Hatfield clan were fishing, drawing a seine through the river, when Randall and two of his sons rode up. After some passing remarks, Randall started ranting about the hogs. The Hatfields responded in kind. When Randall resurrected his accusation against Bill Staton’s father, it was more than the twenty-eight-year-old Staton could stand. He grabbed a stone and hurled it at the old man’s teeth, hitting him hard enough to knock him down. Randall’s sons sprang to his defense, tackling Staton and beating him until Ellison pulled them apart.17
Another time, Staton and his brother John were poling a scow up the Tug, when a second flat-bottomed boat, drifting rapidly downstream, appeared around a bend. In it were two of Randall’s sons, Floyd and Calvin. The two crews saw one another at the same time. Instinctively, they maneuvered their boats toward opposite banks. From the cover of the shore, they began firing potshots at each other. They kept it up until dark, expressing their anger and disdain for one another but accomplishing little else.
The significance of these skirmishes is that while the elder generation sought strength and power through financial means, resorting to the court system to settle disputes, their anger and resentment were effectively pushed down to the next generation, which was less prone to seek peaceful solutions.
Squirrel Huntin’ Sam would later describe several fights with Staton in detail, like the day Staton met up with Lon McCoy on the road in front of Tom Stafford’s house. Staton, who was strong and quick, according to Sam, “jumps on McCoy for a fight.” In turn, Lon hit Staton so hard with his rifle that he broke off the stock. Staton grabbed the gun barrel and swung at Lon, but “McCoy caught the lick and hit Staton with his fist,” reported Sam, “nearly knocking him down.” Stafford, who happened to be a brother-in-law of Staton, intervened, putting a stop to the fight. A few days later, Staton and his friends managed to spirit off Lon’s brother Lark after church and, in the words of Squirrel Huntin’ Sam, “gave him a good whipping.”18
The next Sunday, the McCoys returned the favor. After an itinerant preacher spoke at a revival meeting at the Caney schoolhouse in Logan County, several of Randall’s sons and Lark and his brothers took up positions about a hundred yards apart on Staton’s route home. “The first bunch jumped out of the bushes and held him till Lark McCoy gave him a good whipping and let him loose,” Squirrel Huntin’ Sam later wrote. “And Staton went running.” As Staton reached the hiding place of the second contingent, they leaped out of the bushes and fired five or six shots at his feet.
“He soon were out of sight,” Squirrel Huntin’ Sam related, but Staton let it be known that the McCoys would never be safe as long as he was alive.
“Sometime after this happened, Johnse Hatfield stole Rosanne McCoy, Randall McCoy’s daughter, away from home, kept her out in the mountains three or four days before the McCoys found out where they were,” Sam further noted, referring to the next significant conflict between the families. “Whereupon this raised a big disturbance.” Sam neglected to mention that in between the two incidents, he murdered Bill Staton.19
IT WAS UNFORTUNATE for the younger Bill Staton that he crossed paths with Paris and Sam McCoy in a lonely stretch of woods. He knew it right off, just as he had known that at some point it was all going to come to a head one way or another. His father had been put in a tough spot, and he had done what he had to do, and nothing good was going to come of it, not for him or his family, not for the accuser who called him a liar or the accuser’s family.
The Statons, of Welsh descent, had been in these parts, like the Hatfields and McCoys, since before it was safe from the terrifying raids of the Indians who used it as a hunting ground. Staton’s Run, a tributary of the Kanawha River, was named for an ancestor of theirs who was ambushed and killed by Indians in 1789.
On this day, June 18, 1880, the three men encountered one another about a mile below what would later become known as Hatfield Tunnel, on the Norfolk and Western railroad, by an oxbow in the Tug Fork in Logan County. Staton certainly was not expecting to meet up with the two brothers. Fortunately for him, he was armed, and he saw them first. It was almost impossible not to see Squirrel Huntin’ Sam, a six-foot-eight, 250 -pound behemoth with big ears and eyes like gun sights. Hiding behind a bush, Staton raised his gun, propped it in the vee of the limbs, shut an eye, squinted down the barrel, and took a bead on one of his two cousins walking up the path.20
Like him, they lived in Logan County. Their father, Sam Sr., a younger brot
her of Randall and Harmon, had been a hard-luck man, inheriting nothing from his own hard-luck father, gaining no advantage from his marriage, and struggling as a hired farmhand living in a shack in the town of Logan Courthouse until his sudden death, more than a decade earlier. Ever since, these two brothers—Paris and Sam—and another brother had hired out as laborers and hunted to support their mother, Benina, born a Phillips, and feed the family.
With his lungs swollen with the breath that stilled his body for shooting, an inhalation of honeysuckle and deep forest scent, Staton, the eighth of Nancy McCoy and William Staton’s nine children (the second was also William but had died before Bill was born, thus ceding the name to him) squeezed the trigger, firing the first accurate shot between the Hatfields and the McCoys since Harmon’s death had set the two families at odds.
Ironically, this first salvo of the postwar feud was a McCoy firing at a McCoy. Though Staton was McCoy by blood, two of his sisters had married into the Hatfield family. It was just the sort of familial convolution that paradoxically added to the heat of the anger, the ripening conditions of viral feud, hatred within resentment.
Paris McCoy, the younger of the two brothers, dropped to the ground; Staton’s rifle slug had pierced him through the hip. Then his adrenaline hit, and Paris, twenty, bounded to his feet, raised his own rifle, and fired back. He was a better shot than Staton, who was hit in the chest. Both men discarded their spent rifles and came at each other, spurting blood.21
When they collided, they fought like cornered animals or, worse, kin with a grudge, punching, clawing, and biting. Staton clenched his cousin’s cheek in his teeth and slashed his face with dirt-rimmed fingernails. Blood spewed everywhere. Staton would have had Paris licked if it had not been for Sam. The twenty-five-year-old, who was also known as Big Sam because of his size, was quirky. He went barefoot summer and winter, and he liked inordinately to hunt squirrels. (Thus his more common nickname.) He would rise before dawn, melt lead in the fireplace while his coffee boiled, fill bullet molds for his muzzle-loader, and roll the balls smooth, like beads, in his big fingers. He often went hunting for three days at a time. Once, he killed a hundred squirrels in a single outing and delivered them to a church for a benefit supper. Another time, on the bank of Mate Creek, he shot Staton’s rifle right out of his hand. (Elias had prevented the two from going after each other then.) On this occasion, Sam had his pistol ready but was afraid of hitting his own brother as the two cousins grappled. Perhaps he also did not want to insult him by interfering, not unless and until it seemed absolutely necessary. Only once it was clear that Paris was utterly drained of strength and failing did he squeeze the pistol aimed point-blank at Staton’s head and blow his brains out.22
According to Logan County historian George Swain, Staton “fell back with his arms tightly wound about the body of his adversary and instantly expired. He was wrenched loose from Paris McCoy and left to die in the roadway.” Because the battle had happened in fairly remote parts, where razorbacks and wildcats roamed, Staton’s body was not found until several days later. The McCoy brothers made themselves scarce during that time, but when they showed up again, Paris limped visibly and sported a mean gouge across his face that no amount of hunting grime could hide. When Staton’s gruesome, nearly headless corpse was discovered, those who had seen the two brothers drew the obvious conclusion.23
Squirrel Huntin’ Sam McCoy.
On July 13, 1880, Logan County justice of the peace Wall Hatfield, Devil Anse’s brother, sat for the examining trial, swore out warrants for the arrest of Paris and Sam McCoy, and appointed two special constables—one being his own brother Elias—to hunt down the suspects. Pike County justice of the peace Tolbert Hatfield, a twenty-seven-year-old second cousin of Devil Anse’s, also signed the warrants, making it a cross-jurisdictional manhunt.24
Chapter 5
Moonshine and Love
1880
From Devil Anse’s house beside the Tug there was virtually no evidence of his moonshining operation for a revenuer, a sheriff, or a detective to sniff out. A little below the house, a creek came down to join the Tug. Bushes and grapevines shrouded the creek, which was his “workway,” the path to his still. Even if a snoop broke through this and saw that the creek was walkable, the still was a mile upstream. Overhanging brush would require him to proceed most of the way bent at the waist. All the supplies traveled up and down this stony brook to Devil Anse’s outdoor distillery the same way. It was backbreaking work.
The still sat on a flat bald stretching about fifty feet across the side of the mountain. Devil Anse used a sixty-gallon boiler that he had bought from the owner of a steamer on the Big Sandy. The deal had taken place at dusk one evening near Louisa, Kentucky. They rolled the heavy boiler onto a flatboat, covered it with a tarp, and disguised it with barrels. Then Devil Anse and three men—possibly his sons, and possibly Big Jim, Randall’s son, who worked for Devil Anse making moonshine (though it is hard to know for sure since the business was clandestine)—had poled it up the river. Finally, it, like everything else, had been lugged the mile up the creek to the bald on a corn sled—a wooden crate on runners for hauling corn out of sloped, rocky fields. They cut a door in the bottom of the boiler and placed it on a big square slab of sandstone that was balanced with rocks underneath its corners.
Devil Anse and his sons built a dry stone wall around the still with a roof of split boards over it. They left a hole in the wall to allow them to reach in and build a fire beneath the sandstone slab. Fresh ice-cold water was funneled to the operation via wooden troughs from an uphill spring. The wood they needed for making buckets and barrels and for fires was plentiful around the bald. All they had to haul up was the main ingredient. When they were making apple brandy, or applejack, Devil Anse’s specialty, they needed three hundred bushels for a large batch, and lugging those apples up to the still on the corn sled was a major task. Up top, the men took turns mashing the apples a bushel at a time in a solid tub, using the butt of a small buckeye tree. They shoveled the apple pulp into 125 -gallon vats and stirred in water to create what looked like a thin applesauce. They made about 1,300 gallons of apple mash at a time and then let it sit for ten days while it soured.
On the eleventh day, they began filling the still with the fermented apple mash. The cap was screwed onto the still, and the worm—a copper coil—onto the cap. They built an intense but low-smoke hickory-wood fire beneath the stone. By heating the stone instead of directly heating the boiler, they never burned the mash. Once the stone and still were hot, it took just a small fire to keep the batch at a low boil, just right for making moonshine. Alcohol vaporizes at 173 degrees F, and they kept it as close to that temperature as possible to avoid scalding it.
As steam rose from the simmering mash, it passed through the copper coil, which ran through a wooden barrel filled with cold spring water, and condensed. The resulting liquid trickled out into a wooden bucket. Each full bucket was emptied into a barrel. As long as the stream of liquid coming from the barrel tasted like brandy, they kept it coming, usually for about four hours. Once it got watery, they snuffed the fire, emptied the still through the door in the bottom, and started over again.
This way they made six singlings—the amount of whiskey from a full still—in a twenty-four-hour period. Each singling amounted to about ten gallons. It was intense work, and when it was finished, they were only halfway there; a man could get very drunk and very sick off singlings, but this was not the product they were after.
Once enough singlings were collected to fill the still twice, the men gave the still a thorough cleaning, then filled it with the singlings and lit the fire; the steam ran through the worm and was condensed again, this time producing an even purer whiskey, the doublings. It was about 98 percent pure alcohol. Around ten gallons were produced before it began to weaken. Then the men put the fire out, topped off the remaining liquid with more singlings, and lit the fire again.
In this way, six gallons of mash produced a
gallon of singlings, and a hundred and twenty gallons of singlings yielded forty gallons of top-quality Hatfield applejack.
At other times, Devil Anse distilled corn whiskey. Made from milled corn, the corn mash fermented faster—in six to eight days—than the apple mash but also took extra preparation. To start the process, they put the shelled corn in a tow sack, soaked it in water, and left it in sawdust for about three days. They then laid it out in a loft to dry for another three days. Next, it had to be ground into a coarse meal, either at home or by a miller. The water-driven mills on the creeks in the area were frequently visited by revenue collectors trying to sniff out moonshiners.
Both kinds of liquor were kept in barrels for as brief a time as possible before being put into stoneware jugs to be transported to customers. The jugs cost between fifteen and twenty-five cents per pint, depending on the distance they had traveled and the difficulty involved in delivering them.
Distillers and customers checked the strength of white lightning—clear corn liquor—by the bead, pouring some into a glass vial and shaking it. The stronger the whiskey, the more bubbles. Hatfield whiskey beaded long and fine.1
Despite the fact that Devil Anse had been accused of assassinations and other crimes during the war, at this point, Randall McCoy (though not necessarily other members of the McCoy family) bore him no ill will. Big Jim was making a living working for Devil Anse in his moonshining enterprise—an endeavor that required absolute faith among participants. Indeed, Devil Anse’s sons were not keen on the hard work required, and Randall—whose family was not as wealthy as Devil Anse’s—was more than happy to have Big Jim fill in for them. He learned the trade inside and out.2