by Dean King
ON A HOT SUMMER NIGHT, at a dance in Pike County, a mail carrier named Fred Wolford called Jeff McCoy a liar. No one now knows what prompted the insult. But Wolford had made the last mistake of his short life. Jeff pulled out a pistol and shot him dead.
The next day, Jeff fled across the Tug into West Virginia. The modest river had continued to serve as a legal iron curtain, stopping law enforcement officers cold on its banks. Decades later, police officers on the Kentucky–Virginia–West Virginia borders would avoid the formalities of legal extradition by surreptitiously shoving fugitives across state lines to waiting counterparts late at night, but at the time, with war bitterness still lingering, cooperation between the states’ law officers was virtually nonexistent. Jeff made his way to the house that Nancy, his youngest sister, shared with Johnse Hatfield and asked if he could hide out there. After his marriage, Johnse had sworn off involvement in the feud; now he reluctantly consented to take in his wife’s fugitive brother.7
Nancy McCoy. (Courtesy of Boyd Phillips)
Others were even less eager than Johnse to have the hot-tempered Jeff McCoy in their midst. The worst trouble would come, not surprisingly, from Cap. Now twenty-two, cocksure, and brash, Cap lived near Johnse and Nancy. He frequently visited their place, and his cynicism and bestial look—long black hair framing his watery eye; a bulldog nose; and dark stubble covering his beefy neck, befitting the pugnacious brute that he was—made Nancy, whose first cousins had been killed at the pawpaw trees, uncomfortable, especially with Jeff in the house. Cap’s constant prodding turned her prickly and then angry. Eventually, Johnse had to tell his brother to stay away. He was no longer welcome in their home.8
Cap had hired a man named Tom Wallace, who timbered for Devil Anse, to work on his farm and live there too. The two got on well, and Wallace became a lieutenant to Cap in his duties as a Hatfield deputy. Wallace, a dark-haired twenty-five-year-old child of the war with a distinctive shock of white hair, had had a brief and rocky marriage with seventeen-year-old Victoria Daniels, who went by the nickname Victory. It did not take long for the union to go awry. It was said that Wallace was so mean to his wife that she picked up and went home to her parents.9
While this splintered marriage was a personal matter, when the Hatfields planned a raid on the McCoys and word of their scheming inexplicably leaked out, all the interfamily ties came under scrutiny. Victory was the daughter of Bill and Mary McCoy Daniels, the latter Harmon’s oldest child, the former one of the witnesses to the Hatfields’ crossing of the Tug with the three McCoys in tow. For his part, Wallace had been among those present at their execution. At first, some of the family suspected Johnse’s wife, Nancy, but circumstances ruled her out. Then suspicion fell on Victory and her mother. According to some, Mary Daniels gossiped too much for her own good, and Victory took after her mother.10
Cap and Tom were told to deal with the situation. One night, they led a group of about a dozen men across the Tug. With masks over their faces, they pushed on the door to the Danielses’ cabin, knowing that it was not likely to be locked. Not even latched, it silently opened. The whole family lived in a single room, and they were all in bed. The fireplace’s evening embers barely lit the room. The surprise was absolute. Bill Daniels opened his eyes and found the muzzle of Wallace’s Winchester in his face. Wallace told him to lie still and keep quiet. Cap ordered Mary—at thirty-five already the mother of ten, the youngest of whom was just an infant—and Victory out of bed. The women, wearing only their nightshirts, obeyed, crying and begging for mercy. According to a later report, “Cap laughed in glee.”11
Cap now brandished a cow tail that he had cut for the raid. Wrapping the tuft around his hand and flourishing it whip-like about his head, he grabbed Mary by the hair, forced her to her knees in front of the fireplace, and began to strike her across the back. She screamed in pain. With the first two blows, the heavy bone end of the tail cracked two of her ribs. Victory and several children added to the din, wailing in fear. Bill Daniels, a gun still on him, groaned and turned his head away from his suffering wife, but Wallace ordered him to turn his head back and watch. Presumably the beating was also meant to be a warning to Daniels to keep his mouth shut about what he had seen at the Tug.12
Finished with Mary, Cap turned to Victory. But then he took the gun from Wallace and handed him the whip. Wallace proceeded to ferociously beat his former wife. On the mantel, an old clock ticked away the excruciating minutes. The beatings lasted more than forty of them. When they finally ended, both women lay on the floor unconscious—dead, the helpless Daniels believed.
The duo and their henchmen recrossed the river, satisfied that they had sent the intended message: mind your own business. Afterward, Bill Daniels was so humiliated and nervous that he fled and sent word back that he would not return. But Mary’s younger brother Jeff, eight years her junior, was steelier. When he heard of the beatings—despite the masks, the identity of the perpetrators was no secret—while hiding out at Johnse and Nancy’s, he was outraged by this cowardly act against his sister and niece. In a precarious situation himself and needing the immediate goodwill of Johnse and Devil Anse, Jeff plotted, but waited, to avenge the assault.13
MEANWHILE DEVIL ANSE was busy solidifying his political alliances. As an ally, he was worth his weight in shooting irons and then some. There was the .32 -caliber pistol lodged in his front pocket, the always handy .38 Colt—the gun that settled the West was quite unsettling in the East—as well as the Winchester on his saddle and the dozens more in the hands of his kin and associates that he could command on short notice.14
In 1886, a tense election for the state senate divided the Seventh District—which included Logan Courthouse, the nexus of the Logan County Hatfields—into two relatively equal camps. This gave a persuasive leader like Devil Anse considerable clout, since he could decisively affect the outcome of the vote. The contest pitted twenty-seven-year-old Democrat John B. Floyd against Republican Simon B. Altizer.
With deep ties to the Floyd family, especially the candidate’s uncle and namesake, General John B. Floyd, under whom he, his brothers, and his father had served in the war, Devil Anse was a staunch supporter of the young John B. Floyd. Floyd, who had studied literature and law at the University of Virginia and represented the county in the house of delegates from 1881 to 1882, would rise to even higher stations. The association would serve Devil Anse well as the feud progressed and took political turns far beyond the hollows of the Tug River: Floyd would defend the Hatfields tooth and nail. Devil Anse, for his part, gave the highborn Floyd grass roots and muscle.15
Logan Courthouse, a dusty town of frame houses and small stores around a boxy redbrick courthouse attached to the jail, sat on the banks of the Guyandotte River, which with the spring freshets was effectively a log flume, carrying timber to the mills on the Ohio River. On Election Day, the courthouse square teemed with the partisan citizens of the Seventh District, drinking, socializing, and doing their last-minute lobbying.16 On this particular Election Day, each side felt confident that it had an ace in the hole. Voting practices were primitive, public, and perfectly transparent. There were no secret ballots: men supporting one candidate would line up on one side of the courthouse steps, and men voting for the other candidate on the other.
Dave Stratton, the oldest son of Major William Stratton, a Confederate cavalry veteran from a prominent Irish family in Logan Courthouse, supported John Floyd’s opponent, Simon Altizer. Stratton was known to have a supply of gunmen whenever he needed them. Having heard that Stratton planned to influence the vote by preventing Floyd’s side from being called over, Floyd paid a visit to Devil Anse to see if he could rely on him to counteract Stratton’s tactics.
On the morning of the election, Stratton showed up at the courthouse with twenty well-armed men and strolled about the streets genially addressing those gathered. Just after noon, he ordered his men to herd the electorate in front of the courthouse steps. While it was early to poll the voters, he was eage
r to take care of the dirty business at hand. Mounting the steps, he held up his hands, quieting the crowd. He announced that he had a few words to say on behalf of Simon Altizer. He had just gotten started when the drum of hooves shook the ground. From around a bend, a hundred mounted men rode into town behind Devil Anse, all carrying Winchesters and Colts prominently displayed. At the courthouse, they fanned out, circling the crowd of voters.
Floyd could not suppress a smile but quickly smothered it. Stratton scanned the scene of this debacle impassively, then resumed his speech. Concluding, he glared defiantly at Devil Anse and commanded all those voting for Simon Altizer to step forward. Before they could, Devil Anse spurred his horse through the assemblage of men, dismounted onto the steps, and strode up to the Irishman. Words passed between the two. Stratton, cursing, reluctantly stepped aside. In a commanding voice, Devil Anse asked all those in favor of John Floyd to step toward him.
For a moment the body of voters, mesmerized by the tense scene, stared at the two ringmasters and did not move. Much more was at stake than simply electing an official to send to Charleston. These people had to live with one another the next day.
John B. Floyd, West Virginia state senator and assistant secretary of state.
Devil Anse scanned the crowd. Gently, he repeated: “All those in favor of John B. Floyd come to this side.”17
The saddle leather of a small army crackled under the weight of ominously shifting men. A voter stepped toward Floyd, breaking the ice. A collective shout of Floyd! went up as a clear majority moved to Floyd’s side. Devil Anse’s lined face broke out in a triumphant grin. Floyd was elected.
That day Dave Stratton became an enemy of the Hatfields for life—though that life would soon be cut short by a head-on collision with progress.
ON NOVEMBER 17, hearing that Cap Hatfield was away from home, Jeff McCoy and a friend named Josiah Hurley went to pay a visit on Tom Wallace. They found him at work in the yard. Caught off guard, Wallace looked up from his task into the barrels of two guns. Jeff told Wallace they were taking him to Pikeville to be tried on indictments returned against the assailants of the Daniels women. Wallace, however, suspected that his chances of making it to a jail were slim. For one thing, Jeff himself was wanted for murder in Kentucky. What were the odds that he would go riding up to the jailhouse in Pikeville?18
Expecting no mercy at the hands of the man whose sister and niece he had nearly beaten to death, Wallace looked for an opportunity to make a break for it. When his captors momentarily relaxed their guard, he dashed into the woods. Jeff and Hurley promptly opened fire on his backside, but Wallace was moving fast and was only grazed by a bullet in the hip. He made it to Cap’s house. Cap’s wife, Nan, who was seriously ill, was lying in bed, where she had been for almost a month. Her indisposition was a lucky break for Jeff and Hurley, because Nan was not only more educated than Cap—she was teaching him how to read, something that would later transform his life—but also a better rider and, more to the point in this instance, a better shot, able to knock a bird out of the sky with a rifle. But she was too weak at the present moment to do anything except hide under the covers.
Wallace barricaded the door. From the window, he opened fire on his pursuers, and they shot back at him. Though they were unable to hit Wallace, who was protected by the cabin’s thick walls, they seemed to take pleasure in shooting up the place and heavily peppered the doors and windows with lead.19
When Cap returned and saw the damage to his cabin, he was furious. He immediately went with Wallace to a justice of the peace to swear out warrants against Jeff McCoy and Josiah Hurley. Cap secured himself an appointment as special constable, took the papers, and, despite the fact that Jeff and Hurley were certainly heavily armed and on the alert for a reprisal, went alone in search of the pair. He soon found them together and trained his rifle on them before they could react. He disarmed them both and, directing them with his weapon, set out for Logan Courthouse.
On the way, Wallace fell in with them. After arriving in Thacker, a small village where Thacker Creek spills into a bend in the Tug, they stopped for Cap to get a drink at Shanghai Will Ferrell’s house. While Cap talked to Shang, Jeff slipped free from the rope that bound his hands to the horn of Wallace’s saddle. He leaped over a low fence and dove from the eight-foot bank into the Tug.20
As he pulled himself across the forty feet of current, lead piffed the river surface, sometimes penetrating next to him, other times ricocheting off the water. Just as he approached the safety of the Kentucky shore, he was hit by a bullet in the left arm. He emerged from the reeds beside the river and rolled behind the only available cover, a sorry bush. The steep, naked bank presented a challenge: he would be fully exposed as he climbed it. But he had no time to come up with another plan.
Cap and Wallace kept up their fire, gauging the fall of the lead across the water and homing in on him. Plunging back into the water and scrambling downriver to a nearby stand of beech trees would have been a better decision, but Jeff, a man of the mountains, clung to the earth. Timing the shots, he suddenly sprang, clawing his way up the bank.
Cap nailed him halfway up the slope.21
WORD SPREAD THROUGH THE VALLEY that Cap and Wallace had intentionally allowed Jeff to escape so that they could gun him down. Cap denied it, and no one could prove it either way. In any case, another McCoy had been killed by another Hatfield, the son of a Union soldier murdered by the son of a Confederate. Like father, like son.
Later, Randall prevailed upon Perry Cline, who was both Jeff’s uncle and a relative by marriage of the Danielses—his sister was married to Bill’s brother—to try to contact Devil Anse. Cline sent more than one letter to his old nemesis. Responding was not easy for Devil Anse, as he could neither read nor write. What Cline said in his letters is now lost to history, but Anse’s response is not. On December 26, perhaps caught up in the holiday spirit or taking advantage of a family gathering, Devil Anse dictated his reply to Nan: “We are all very sorry that the Troubles occored but under Somewhat aggravated circumstances it happened,” he said. “But I Know And solemly affirm that if such could have been prevented by me I would have stoped the Troubles.” He went on to explain the circumstances and claimed that it was Wallace, not Cap, who shot Jeff. He included a statement from Shang Ferrell, who said that when Jeff bolted, “Cap was off conversing with me some 40 or 50 yds and I never seen Cap Hatfield fire a single shot.”
Concluding the letter, Devil Anse said that none of the Hatfields bore any “animosity” toward any of Jeff McCoy’s relatives, and he trusted they would let the matter drop. Yet he could not help but shift the blame back on the McCoys: “Perry, the very Bottom of this crime is nothing more nor less than Mary Daniels and Her girls: now Bill is gone. And says he wont come back. No person is going to Trouble him. Let him come back.” He signed off twice: “Your friend” the first time—though certainly that was something of a stretch—and “Very Respectfully” the second.22
Though the embittered Randall had proved to be ineffectual in countering the more powerful Hatfields, he had made at least one right play. Cline, who moved in higher circles of power and politics than he and did not mind getting his hands dirty, now became the McCoy spokesman and began to direct their efforts in the feud. He was about to demonstrate to Devil Anse just how little he valued both his respect and his friendship.
Chapter 12
The Enforcers
Spring, Summer, and Fall 1887
Tall and stoop-shouldered, a country lawyer with pale skin and a thick, dark beard who sported a high hat and a frock coat, a Union man for law and order, Perry Cline bore an obvious resemblance to the greatest man of his day—Honest Abe. Having served briefly as a Union soldier, he was now a well-respected deputy sheriff, deputy jailer, member of the Pikeville courthouse committee and board of supervisors, and a former county school commissioner and building commissioner. The Louisville Courier-Journal would describe him as having a “very intelligent, gentlemanly bearin
g… and an appearance of firmness.” The reporter concluded, “He probably knows what he is about.” A later Hatfield would accuse Cline of trying to cultivate a Lincolnian image “in dress, speech, and mannerisms” for his own benefit and of trying to capitalize on the feud. “Cline understood that if he took up the cudgels for Randall McCoy, his name would be on everybody’s lips,” historian G. Elliott Hatfield reasoned. “So, with a couple of razorback pigs as a retainer fee, he bent to the task.”1
The thirty-eight-year-old Cline was indeed a clever man. Unlike Lincoln, he was a Democrat—a proactive Democrat in a Democratic state—and he would use his affiliation to his advantage. At times, his broad involvement in the prosecution of the feudists would call into question his methods and motives. However, he did not work for either razorbacks or sawbucks alone. He had a number of deep-seated and valid reasons for involving himself in the Hatfield-McCoy feud.
Pikeville attorney Perry Cline. (Big Sandy Heritage Center).
Cline had been born into a wealthy family in Logan County in 1849. However, the silver spoon had been yanked from his mouth at an early age. Cline’s father, Jacob, sometimes called Rich Jake, had died when Perry was a boy. With his brother Jake Jr., he had inherited five thousand acres of prime West Virginia timberland, property that had been passed down through the generations from Cecil Cline, an early settler in the area.
It was Cline’s misfortune that at the beginning of the war, Devil Anse had become his immediate neighbor and possibly, though records are unclear, a renter on Cline’s land. Cline lost three brothers-in-law, including Harmon McCoy, and many other relatives and friends fighting for the Union; Devil Anse’s war depredations were a wedge between them that would grow as the years passed and the violence between their families increased. After the war, Cline, who had grown up along Grapevine Creek in what was then Virginia, faced an uphill battle to keep the land that was his birthright. In 1868, he had become a ward of Colonel John Dils, the staunch Unionist and regiment organizer who was a bitter enemy of Devil Anse and other West Virginia border fighters.