The Feud: The Hatfields and McCoys: The True Story

by Dean King

  Having recently returned from a sojourn in England, whose gentility he had found suitable to his tastes, Crawford was little prepared for the three-day ride on a West Virginia buckboard wagon. “After the first fifteen miles leaving Charleston there is not a single rod of good road,” he would write. “The rider, whether in a wagon or on horseback, is in constant pain from jolting, bumping, and sliding over the rocks and down steep inclines.” Crawford’s jaundiced eye did not stop there. In the roadside hamlet of Racine, he found the accommodations “primitive” and the fare “coarse, harsh, and… repulsive,” including pork “floating in a perfect pond of melted fat”—and Racine, he noted, was the best place on the route. The closer he got to Logan Courthouse, the worse the going. “The roads are only a mere name,” he opined. “When the waters are up, the route is absolutely impassable. Days and weeks will pass without any more word coming from Logan Court-House to the outer world than could be gotten out from Central Africa.” After five days, the constant pounding and his inability to eat the food had put him in a “benumbed state,” heedless of the fact that “there is a danger in Murderland, and that investigation of the murderous ways of this barbarous country might lead one to find nothing more interesting than a bullet from the bush.”4

  Crawford and company reached Logan Courthouse just days after Spears departed. They lodged at the Bunce Hotel, where Crawford declined to bed down with a stranger in a communal room and finally persuaded the owner to give him a private room to share with Moore. Being from far away, Crawford fascinated the locals, who strolled into his ground-floor room without knocking or bothering to make excuses for being there. His visitors all drank whiskey together from pint flasks, and some, including a deaf and blind man (Crawford described him as looking like a “ghoul”), even climbed in through the windows. “Locking the door,” Crawford lamented, “simply produced coldness in the community and a suspicion that we were detectives hatching plans to carry off some of their leading citizens.”

  Logan County Courthouse (1875–1905). (Dr. Coleman C. Hatfield Collection, courtesy of Dr. Arabel E. Hatfield)

  It was not every year that two visitors from New York City strolled through the town’s business district, which consisted of, in addition to the courthouse, a post office, five stores, and two hotels. In fact, it was not every decade. Initially laid out in 1824 as Lawnsville, Logan Courthouse, though small, boasted a newspaper—the Logan Democrat—thanks in large part to the fact that its advertising page was a favorite of one particular industry: it featured ads from every major firearms maker in the United States.

  Indeed, every night that Crawford was in town, he heard gunfire and witnessed an “absolute orgy.” With the coming of darkness, the unruly crowd routinely overwhelmed the local sheriffs and stormed the locked courthouse. Once inside its halls, they bought, sold, and quaffed moonshine, gambled, fought, and fornicated, swore, smoked long-stemmed pipes, and spat tobacco juice on the floor. Painted women, whom Crawford dubbed “she-devils,” wearing scandalous dresses not much below their knees, coarse wool socks, and men’s boots, brazenly plied the world’s oldest profession and joined the men in the wrestling and fistfights. One old man sporting a black hat with dozens of colored rags attached to it claimed to be Grover Cleveland. By any measure, the Logan County seat was a colorful backwater, and Crawford was up to the task of describing it. The morning after his arrival, he found out that Spears had beaten him there. Court was in session, and the town was teeming with mountain men who had come to drink and carouse. Crawford learned from the crowd forming around him that Spears had not even stayed in town for twenty-four hours. “He was in such a hurry that he would not wait until noon, when he could have obtained a horse,” wrote Crawford, mocking his competitor. “Such was his haste to get out of Murderland before any committee could call upon him that he left on foot.”

  Crawford relished the fact that Spears, like Creelman, had failed to penetrate the Hatfield defenses and meet Devil Anse. Still, he felt the clock ticking. Spears was now on his way back to New York City with his dispatches. Crawford needed to bag his quarry and get out swiftly.

  The first Hatfield he encountered—Elias—made a surprising impression on him: he liked him. Wearing a butternut-brown suit with his pants tucked into his boots, a blue-jean shirt, and a straw hat, Elias sported under his waistband a leather girdle with a pistol in a holster.5 He described the murder of his brother Ellison and admitted to the reporter that he had tried to kill one of the McCoys on that day but said that that was the only time he took part in the hostilities. He had moved to Logan Courthouse to get away from the fighting and was focused on raising his family on a two-hundred-acre farm. Nervous and ill at ease, reticent, Elias told Crawford that several attempts had been made on the lives of his three sons. “All that I want is to be let alone,” he said, “but if people will persist in bothering and wronging those who are dear to me—why, let them look out.”

  John B. Floyd offered Crawford some sage advice on his quest to meet Devil Anse: “the best way to see Hatfield was to go right to him and not to ask any permission.” Elias, trusting Crawford, sent one of his sons on Tuesday night to tell Devil Anse that Crawford, Floyd, and Moore were coming to see him the next day.

  Crawford and his two companions hired horses and a guide the following morning and set out on the fifteen-mile journey to Devil Anse’s Main Island Creek farm. This route, to Crawford’s dismay, lay across even harsher terrain. They traveled over boulders and through deep gorges and, worn out from the previous days of travel and suffering from what he called a “malarial fever,” Crawford soon had them turn around. But back in Logan Courthouse, instead of giving up, he ditched their recalcitrant guide, whom they neither liked nor trusted, turned in their three poor mounts, retrieved the wagon they had ridden in from Charleston, and hired a better team of horses. They then set out again.

  As their route snaked through the wilderness from clearing to clearing, Crawford saw how easy it would be for a lone messenger to streak through the woods to warn others of an approaching party. Furthermore, he became acutely aware that each farmer was also a guard. Whistles, hoots, and other “strange cries, signals passing from one neighborhood to another,” preceded them, echoing off the hills.

  The first sentry they came to was Elias himself, who was walking with a bag of cornmeal on his left shoulder and a long-barreled Winchester rifle in his right hand. A young girl walked behind him, also carrying a bag. The rifle barrel ascended to hip level as they approached him, and it eased down again after they identified themselves as the friends of the day before. They next encountered the thuggish French Ellis tending to a water mill on a thrashing stream. A Winchester sat across his lap.

  Likewise, Devil Anse, who was out in a field near his house, was carrying a Winchester in addition to a Colt pistol in a holster under his brown coat. He wore a blue shirt and blue jeans tucked into his boots, and a faded black hat on his head. His thick brown hair, mustache, and beard showed no signs of gray. His smile endeared him to Crawford. He greeted them, the reporter recalled, with “ardor and enthusiasm.”

  Devil Anse had spent the fall in bucolic pursuits. Despite the continuing paucity of deer in the county, he managed to track down and shoot three of them among the forks of Island Creek. He also shot a bear. As a bonus, he sniffed out ten bee trees, the honey and honeycomb from which netted him just shy of fifty dollars in store goods.6

  The house at Main Island Creek had two rooms connected by a hallway, the back room being a smaller cooking and dining area and the front used for almost everything else. Washing up was done outside in the creek, conveniently just twenty feet away. Men, women, and children, as well as guests, all slept in the same room. The women and children retired early, climbing onto their pallets in nightclothes while the men sat together in the room and talked as if nothing else were going on. But when it came to sexual relations later at night, there was, as Crawford put it, “as much modesty and decency observed as if each person had a s
eparate room,” though how exactly he knew this is questionable, since he refused an offer to stay the night.

  As Crawford sat in front of the fireplace and interviewed the fifty-year-old legend before and after dinner, he came to understand just how authentic a creature of the mountains and how original and entertaining he was. Devil Anse’s gray eyes gazed out from undernealth bushy eyebrows, and Crawford could sense the magnetism that attracted both grown men and grandchildren to his side. When Crawford cheekily asked him why it was that so many shots were fired in the feud but so few people were actually hit, Devil Anse responded without pause: “I’ll tell you. The human varmint is the most coorious an’ cunningist varmint thar is. When he goes into a fight, he turns his body sidewise, so that there is presented for the bullet only four inches of life space, and even that he doesn’t hold up fa’r and squar’. He jest keeps a-dodgin’ and friskin’ about, and so when the bullets come along they don’t find him.”

  But it was the fact that Devil Anse knew nothing of the New York newspapers that so dominated Crawford’s life—that he seemed to have little concept of where or what New York City even was—that struck a chord with the reporter. Devil Anse had heard about the visitor from New York City who departed rather abruptly and asked Crawford if he knew him. “I was obliged to answer in the negative,” Crawford later wrote. “That was enough for Ance Hatfield. The man had said he was from New York, and here was another man from New York who did not know him. No greater proof was necessary to show that the first comer was a detective.”7

  Vicey worked through dinner, pulling hot dishes from the blaze as needed. She served fried pork, beans, sweet potatoes, corn pone, and sliced tomatoes. Afterward, Devil Anse insisted the visitors stay the night, but Crawford, noting that there were twelve family members, including three young women, as well as nine guards to occupy the two rooms, declined the offer. Outside by the stream, Devil Anse and his men showed off for the visitors with an impressive round of target practice.

  It was Crawford who first planted the seed of celebrity with Devil Anse, telling him that after his story came out in the World, Devil Anse and Cap could come to New York, dressed just as they were and carrying their Winchesters (Crawford had counted fourteen sitting around the great room of the cabin) and Colts, and make five hundred dollars a week by being on display.

  “When this here Hatfield-McCoy feud is settled,” offered Devil Anse, not missing a beat, “I want to come down to New York, and if you will get me that thar engagement, why, I’ll give you half I get out of it.”

  Before Crawford and his companions departed, Devil Anse volunteered to show them Rock Fort, which lay on the stream about a quarter mile from the cabin. Crawford was impressed by the stout, windowless, six-log-high structure topped by a steeply pitched heavy-shingled roof. Defenders could shoot from all angles through the gaps between the logs. The nine men then on patrol around the house conducted themselves in military fashion, as if they were engaged in a war. Inside, the fort was furnished with nothing but a pallet with a feather bed, where, it was pointed out, Kentucky Bill had recuperated after he was shot in the heel.

  It was outside the fort that the most dramatic moment of the visit occurred. Floyd, who was a friend of the Hatfields but had also boasted to Crawford that he could bring the whole lot in if he felt so inclined, ambled up to Cap and in an instant whipped a pistol from his holster and pointed it at him.

  Cap was dumbstruck. He rushed forward and grabbed Floyd’s wrist, but Floyd, who was a powerful man, shook him off. Cap forced a smile. It was a joke but not one he liked. “No man ever did that before,” he said, “and bet your life no man will ever ketch me again that way.”

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING Crawford and Moore set out for Brownstown, where Crawford would catch the train back to New York. Their wagon gave him little confidence as it jolted over gullies, boulders, and tree trunks at less than four miles an hour. It finally crashed on an impediment that would not be glossed over. Crawford’s hopes of scooping his rival looked to be dashed, but Moore quickly unharnessed the horse and told Crawford he was going after the drummer (as traveling salesmen were then known) who had recently passed them. Before long, they had the wagon fixed, much to the relief of Crawford, who was at least as worried about his health as he was about his story and later confessed that “not having swallowed a morsel of wholesome food for nearly ten days, and having had nearly six days’ continuous riding over the road to this region, I had reached the limit of my ability to live the life of a mountaineer.”8

  ON SUNDAY, OCTOBER 7, the crosstown rival newspapers the New York Sun and the New York World published major feature stories on the feud. The Sun billed John Spears’s whopping (ten-thousand-word) blow-by-blow account as “a remarkable story of murder and outrage.” Notably, it included a portrait of “Rose Ann’s boy,” who appeared to be about age five or six but who did not in fact exist. Still, Spears was a top reporter, and his colorful account would prove to be one of the feud’s most enduring.

  On three consecutive Sundays in October, T. C. Crawford’s story on the feud ran in the World. On October 7, the editors launched it with ample hyperbole: “Mr. T. C. Crawford has travelled through the blood-stained wilderness along the mountainous boundary of Kentucky and West Virginia, and he gives the World a truthful picture of lawlessness and moral depravity unparalleled in our history.”

  With Jack the Ripper on an appalling crime spree, murdering and mutilating prostitutes in London—and stealing the front-page headlines—Crawford, a consummate raconteur, wasted no time in striking the most memorable lines written about the feud: “I have been away in Murderland for nearly ten days” came his opening salvo. “No one unless he has had the actual experience of a visit to the region made notorious by the Hatfield-McCoy feud would believe that there is in this country such a barbarous, uncivilized and wholly savage region.”

  He painted a detailed portrait of what he had observed, often in stark and unflattering terms, as when he described Vicey, “one of the strongest and most muscular-looking women” he had ever seen, as having “no more idea of right or wrong than a mastiff dog.” Written in haste, Crawford’s voluminous account is sometimes contradictory. “It would take but little energy on the part of the authorities of either State to bring this disgraceful vendetta to a sudden end,” he wrote with one stroke, and with another: “The road is so wild and rough going from Logan Court-House to Devil Anse’s fort that it would be impossible to march any body of men through there so as to reach the outlaw.” Furthermore, his traveling companion, Clarence Moore, a federal court clerk, had told him that it was almost impossible to serve the Hatfields with any process of the court. He had more than once dispatched an officer to serve writs on them. “This officer would ride straight… to the mountain country, where the person desired was living, only to find in the majority of cases that he had already received notice of the officer’s coming and had disappeared.”

  Crawford achieved his goal. Devil Anse gained equal billing with the day’s “JACK THE RIPPER” headline in the Cincinnati Enquirer, which ran his story on the front page concurrently with the World, under the headline “DEVIL ANCE: The Outlaw King of Kentucky,” essentially taking the piece national (although failing in accuracy, since Devil Anse hailed from West Virginia).

  On October 14, Crawford’s headline read “American Barbarians: The Heroes of the Bloody Hatfield-McCoy Vendetta.” Devil Anse’s two oldest daughters were depicted in an illustration barefoot, in long, plain dresses, one modestly buxom and the other quite so, both with short-cropped hair. In another, the men, in boots, waistcoats, and jackets, some holding rifles, were gathered around the kitchen table, apparently holding a war council. A week later, the paper wrapped up the series with “The Land of the Vendetta,” which included an illustration of Crawford’s horseback expedition. The reporter concluded with a begrudging tip of the hat to the Hatfields, with whom his time had not been entirely unpleasant: “The Phillips crowd who now control the Peter
Creek region are even more desperate than the Hatfields,” he noted. “I do not think the Hatfields would shoot down strangers on general suspicion unless the stranger made some direct move against them. But over in the Peter’s Creek region the fact that a man is a stranger is quite enough to invite shots from the numerous ambuscades which are occupied along the line of this most wretched locality.”9

  On the third Sunday, Spears jumped back in with another full page (one that until now has been lost to history), this time depicting his journey to Logan Courthouse and giving the only written description of Devil Anse’s distilling operation, the details of which had been furnished by Big Jim from his days of working with Devil Anse before the feud heated up. Spears made a point of highlighting the delicious food he ate in the region, including a “sumptuous meal of string beans cooked with bacon, ham, sweet potatoes, fried apples, hot corn bread (a specialty of the region), biscuits, plum preserves, and apple butter, followed by apple pie and coffee.” While this was not news, it was excellent for tweaking the nose of his puffed-up rival at the World, who had whined that the food was inedible and that he had lost fifteen pounds while in West Virginia for fewer than ten days.

  The locals would weigh in later. The following May, the Logan Banner reprinted a few pithy lines from the nearby Journal, which captured the broad consensus: “A Kentucky newspaper correspondent who left home two weeks ago to write up the Hatfields and McCoys is missing and is supposed to have been murdered in the wilds of the Kentucky mountains. If he was one of the sensational, unreliable correspondents that have been operating in that territory, the Hatfields and McCoys did the work of their lives when they fed him to the vultures.”