Blood Feud

by Lisa Alther

  In 1863, when its commander was charged with embezzling government funds intended for supplies and soldiers’ pay, the VSL disbanded. Devil Anse Hatfield next joined the 45th Battalion Infantry (Confederate), quickly rising to the rank of first lieutenant, then captain. Ten McCoys were under his command, one later joining his side in the feud. His younger brother Ellison served as his second lieutenant, and fourteen other Hatfields served under them. Their assignment was to guard the salt mines at Saltville, Virginia, from Union attacks, the Confederacy needing the salt to produce gunpowder. At least forty-five men in this battalion hailed from Pikeville and knew their Union nemesis, Colonel Dils, as a popular merchant during more peaceful days.15

  Meanwhile, back in the Tug Fork Valley, Colonel Dils’s troops destroyed the crops and burned down the houses of Devil Anse Hatfield and his superior. Devil Anse’s family was also subjected to unspecified “indignities” during this raid. Some of Colonel Dils’s troops had served with Devil Anse in the VSL before turning coats to join the Union army, so their ravages may have involved personal grudges. Devil Anse’s company, in turn, attacked Colonel Dils’s troops in the midst of their assault on his neighborhood, killing six and chasing the rest away.16

  Devil Anse and fifty-four other soldiers abandoned their Confederate regiment in 1864 and headed home, galloping away on stolen horses reportedly provided by Devil Anse’s raider uncle, Jim Vance. Legend has it that Devil Anse was ordered to execute an uncle and one of his uncle’s friends, who had taken leave without permission in order to visit the friend’s dying wife. Devil Anse deserted rather than carry out this order. Others speculate that he and his men, realizing after the defeat at Gettysburg that the Confederacy was doomed, deserted in order to go back home and protect their families and farms from attacks such as the one Devil Anse’s household had recently suffered at the hands of Colonel Dils and his Union soldiers.17

  Once back home, Devil Anse led a partisan unit called the Logan Wildcats, loosely affiliated with a famous Confederate guerrilla leader, Rebel Bill Smith.18 Rebel Bill commanded a force of six hundred men in the Tug Fork Valley. Union officers, probably including Colonel Dils, had placed a $9,000 bounty on his head (almost $125,000 in today’s currency).19

  Rebel Bill Smith and Devil Anse Hatfield mounted some round bee gums (sections of hollow logs in which bees had made hives) on carts and painted them black to look like cannons. Threatening a Yankee steamboat captain on the Big Sandy River with destruction, they forced him to moor his boat. They and their fellow guerrillas boarded the boat and looted its supplies. Rebel Bill Smith also gets credit for donning the uniform of a Yankee officer and boarding another steamboat ferrying laborers to a Union saltworks. The boat mysteriously went up in flames as the fake Yankee officer swam to shore amid the chaos.20 The Logan Wildcats conducted many other less whimsical raids. They seized supplies valued at $700 (close to $10,000 today) from a dry goods store in Peach Orchard, Kentucky, owned by none other than Col. John Dils.21

  Much more than just lofty ideals concerning the preservation of the Union and the demolition of slavery fueled these skirmishes between Union and Confederate forces on the Cumberland Plateau. Personal vendettas were rife, and several flashpoints ignited between those who eventually became Hatfield or McCoy feudists, setting the stage for the murder of Unionist Harmon McCoy in January 1865.

  There wasn’t enough evidence to charge anyone with Harmon McCoy’s murder, but most in the area believed that Bad Jim Vance had committed it. Devil Anse denied involvement, claiming to be sick in bed at the time.22 Throughout the feud Devil Anse was usually sick in bed whenever his followers committed deeds that might get them murdered by McCoys.

  Bad Jim Vance went back home to his farm in Russell County, Virginia, to plow his fields and plant his crops. While he was there, a cousin from whom he had “requisitioned” horses during the war planned a retaliatory ambush. Learning about it, Bad Jim organized a counter-ambush and killed one of his would-be attackers, Harmon Artrip (a distant ancestor of the author). Artrip’s friends came after Bad Jim, so he moved permanently to the Tug Fork Valley.23

  Meanwhile, back in the Tug Fork Valley, residents were frozen with horror over the murder of Harmon McCoy, like a drawing room tableau vivant. No one did anything. Some claim that Harmon McCoy had been unpopular because of his Union affiliation, so that no one was inclined to avenge his death.24 But over a dozen Hatfields and half a dozen other McCoys from his region were also on Union troop rosters, as were many others with different surnames. So it doesn’t seem likely that Harmon’s relatives and neighbors would have found his choice to support the Union uniquely objectionable. Truda McCoy maintains that Ranel McCoy didn’t seek revenge or justice for his brother’s death because he was in a Union prison camp farther south at the time,25 though of course no evidence exists to prove that Ranel was in prison—or even in anyone’s army, Confederate or Union.

  Ranel McCoy did eventually retaliate, though, however blandly. Fifteen months after Harmon’s death, in April 1866, he charged Devil Anse Hatfield with stealing a horse from his farm in 1864. Legend maintains that Devil Anse refuted this charge by claiming that he was stationed in Saltville on the date in question with the 45th Battalion Virginia Infantry. Therefore he couldn’t have stolen a horse from Ranel’s farm in Kentucky. Devil Anse also claimed that Ranel McCoy was with him. But Ranel’s name, as we have already seen, doesn’t appear on the roster for that battalion among his ten McCoy relatives. So who was actually where, when, and why remains a mystery.

  Ranel McCoy and Devil Anse Hatfield filed several similar civil suits against each other in the years following.26 Clearly there was no love lost between the two men. Each sought to annoy the other and express his contempt—but peacefully and via existing legal channels.

  Many in the Tug Fork Valley—said to be a lawless land of personal vendettas—spent much of their leisure time traveling back and forth to their county courthouses at Pikeville, Kentucky, and Logan, West Virginia, to file suits against one another. Both towns lay twenty-five miles away from the Tug Fork Valley along narrow mountain paths, so these were not simple day trips. After the war, many of these cases concerned livestock and supplies seized without compensation by Union and Confederate troops, Home Guards, and guerrillas. Those charged with such thefts invariably justified their actions as essential for the war effort.

  Devil Anse Hatfield’s younger brother Ellison and three others were sued in 1863 for hijacking four hogs that belonged to two first cousins of Ranel McCoy. One of Ranel McCoy’s brothers and several others “requisitioned” six hogs by force in 1863, and their Hatfield owner demanded compensation after the war. Ranel McCoy’s father and several others were accused of stealing leather from Thomas Hatfield at gunpoint in 1864, destroying a bee gum in the process. Ranel McCoy’s cousin Pleasant, of bovine love fame, was charged with kidnapping three horses in 1863—for what purpose, one shudders to imagine.27 Col. John Dils brought a suit against members of the Virginia State Line and Gen. Vincent Witcher’s rangers for looting his store and tannery in Pikeville.28

  So it goes on, an endless litany of litigation—but not the vigilante retaliation that the stereotypes about the region have led us to expect. Many had used the excuse of Civil War hostilities to take whatever they wanted or needed from their neighbors. But the victims sought compensation through the court system, rather than revenge through midnight attacks. The attacks came later.

  It seems likely that Ranel McCoy and his family were simply afraid to avenge his brother Harmon’s murder more forcefully than with annoyance lawsuits. The Logan Wildcats and Rebel Bill Smith, the guerrilla king, were still policing the district after Harmon’s death, administering their own bloody version of justice wherever and however they saw fit. “The law is not enforced, and the courts are powerless to protect the inhabitants,” said a reporter of the area.29

  Thirteen years elapsed before the next majo
r installment of the feud—the infamous Hog Trial in 1878—and some cite this period of apparent peace as evidence that these Civil War clashes had no relation to what came later. Yet most McCoys who eventually joined the feud weren’t even teenagers when Harmon McCoy was murdered. Harmon’s own sons were twelve, nine, six, and three at the time. Ranel’s sons were fourteen, eleven, ten, three, two, and one. Sam McCoy, Harmon’s and Ranel’s brother, had sons who were ten and four. All these young men later fought in the feud on behalf of the McCoys, and five of them died. Even Harmon’s two daughters played a part, albeit in supporting roles. Like cicada nymphs, the bitterness inspired by Harmon McCoy’s murder appears to have gone underground for thirteen years, until Harmon’s children and nephews had acquired the strength to emerge and avenge it.

  In the meantime, another annoyance lawsuit was to influence the entire course of the feud.

  Descended from German immigrants from the Palatinate, Jacob Cline, known as “Rich Jake,” owned six thousand acres in the Tug Fork Valley on both the Kentucky and West Virginia sides of the river, as well as at least three slaves. His nearest West Virginia neighbor was Devil Anse Hatfield. When Rich Jake died in 1858, he willed five thousand acres of West Virginia timberland to his son Perry. Perry was nine years old at the time and continued to live at his father’s house in West Virginia with a brother and a sister.

  When the Civil War broke out, Perry Cline was too young to fight, but two of his brothers joined Col. John Dils’s 39th Kentucky Mounted Infantry.30 Allowed to choose his own guardian after the war, Perry picked Dils. Dils also acted as guardian to nine other young people whose fathers had been killed fighting for the Union. One of these was Frank Phillips, later an important feud leader for the McCoys.

  When Perry Cline was old enough, he worked briefly on Devil Anse Hatfield’s timber crew. Then he began logging the land left him by his father. In 1872 Devil Anse accused him of logging across the boundary between their properties and initiated a lawsuit against him.31

  Rich Jake’s will read: “I give to my son Peary [sic] H. Cline a tract of land on Tug River in Logan County and state of Virginia bounded as follows to wit Beginning at two maples standing about 1 quarter of a mile above the south of Grapevine Creek thence running up the river including all the land I hold on the river up to Jackson Mounts line.”32 These terms defining Perry Cline’s boundaries are so vague that it’s hard to imagine Devil Anse Hatfield not excusing him for straying off his own land while timbering. The Cline family, like both the Hatfields and the McCoys, were among the earliest settlers in the Tug Fork Valley. They had been Devil Anse’s closest neighbors for many years. Nevertheless, six years later this suit was settled out of court, and Devil Anse received all five thousand of Cline’s acres in recompense.33

  Why was Perry Cline willing to give up all his inherited land without a trial? The reason remains a mystery. In a letter to the West Virginia governor in 1887, nine years later, Cline writes of the Hatfields, “These men has made good citizens leave their homes and forsake all they had, and refuse to let any person tend their lands.”34 Reading between the lines here suggests that some kind of intimidation persuaded Cline to forfeit his land.

  There were also rumors that the Logan County courthouse was so in thrall to Devil Anse Hatfield that Perry Cline knew it was pointless to pursue the matter any further. Devil Anse served as deputy sheriff at various times, and his brothers as constables. Some of Devil Anse’s friends were county officials. His oldest brother, Wall Hatfield, often sat on the county court, the center for all community decisions in those days.35 Four respected citizens of the county posted the bond required for Devil Anse’s court case against Perry Cline, and Devil Anse named his fifth child after one of them.36 Young Cline surely felt all of Logan County’s leadership arrayed against him.

  Prior to the acquisition of Perry Cline’s five thousand acres, Devil Anse Hatfield had owned no land, apart from a small plot given to him by his wife’s family. He was living in a cabin on land his father had already willed to his brother Ellison, and he was running a small lumbering operation on leased properties. Once he took possession of Perry Cline’s five thousand acres, however, he increased the scale of his operation, hired more workers, and obtained lines of credit for supplies with store owners. He also sold off pieces of Cline’s land to friends and family.37 He had gone, in that one legal settlement, from being virtually landless to being one of the largest landowners in the valley, amassing profits from both lumbering and real estate.

  Soon after the lawsuit was filed, Perry Cline accepted defeat and moved with his wife and child to Pikeville, where his guardian, Col. John Dils, lived. Making the best of a bad situation, Cline became deputy sheriff and was elected sheriff the following year. He also became deputy jailer. In 1873 he served in the Kentucky House of Delegates and participated in the state’s Democratic convention. By 1884 he had become a lawyer, just in time to champion the McCoys against Devil Anse Hatfield during the closing episodes of the feud.38

  Cline had ties of kinship to Ranel McCoy. Two of Cline’s older brothers had married first cousins of Ranel. One of Cline’s sisters had also married a first cousin of Ranel, and Perry’s sister Martha (Patty) was the widow of Harmon McCoy, Ranel’s younger brother. Which made Harmon McCoy Perry Cline’s brother-in-law. (But to further illustrate the complicated ties between the feuding families, another of Cline’s sisters married a cousin of Devil Anse Hatfield.)

  No doubt for Ranel McCoy, the acquisition of Perry Cline’s land by Devil Anse Hatfield salted the wound of Harmon’s cold-blooded murder. Ranel McCoy was no doubt looking for a way to register his displeasure with Devil Anse Hatfield’s rapacious ways—but in his usual passive-aggressive manner.

  He soon found one.

  ***** Confusingly, Col. John Dils and Harmon McCoy, who owned slaves, fought for the Union. Rich Jake Cline, the father of Harmon McCoy’s wife, Patty, also owned slaves, yet some of his sons joined Colonel Dils’s Union regiment. These cases suggest that abolition was not the determining issue for Civil War loyalties in the southern Appalachians.

  PART 2:

  AVENGEMENT

  Devil Anse’s first cousin Floyd Hatfield joined the feud when Ranel McCoy accused him of stealing one of his hogs, but Floyd retired to the background after the Hog Trial. Courtesy of West Virginia State Archives

  4

  HOG TRIAL

  Building and maintaining fences is demanding work, even more so in rocky, mountainous terrain, so frontier farmers in the nineteenth century often allowed their livestock to range freely through the woods. The half-wild razorback hogs flourished in this arrangement because they could feast on the rich mast of steep hillside forests—acorns and beechnuts, chestnuts and hazelnuts. Territorial, the hogs didn’t often wander far from home, and each farmer made specific notches in the hogs’ ears to identify his own.

  In autumn, farmers herded their hogs back home for fattening and slaughter, branded the ears of the piglets, and released the latter to the wilds. They butchered the adults, rendered their lard, and cured their meat for winter use. Identification marks sometimes became difficult to discern as the hogs grew to maturity, their ears growing along with their bodies.1 But, like herders the world over, most farmers could identify their own animals by sight.

  Many have snorted at the idea of a stolen hog’s triggering a bloody feud, but hogs in the Tug Fork Valley in the nineteenth century were no laughing matter. One hog more or less could make the difference between surviving the winter or starving to death before wild greens sprouted in the spring. Livestock also served as a gauge of a subsistence farmer’s wealth. So the accusation of hog theft was deadly serious, and one that Ranel McCoy was about to level at a first cousin of Devil Anse Hatfield.

  In the autumn of 1878, just six months after the settlement that awarded Perry Cline’s five thousand acres to Devil Anse Hatfield, Ranel McCoy and his s
ons went into the forests to gather in their hogs. It was time to fatten them for the winter slaughter. But one of their sows and her piglets were missing.2

  Searching for his errant sow, McCoy passed the farm on which Floyd Hatfield was a sharecropper. A first cousin of Devil Anse Hatfield, Floyd worked on Devil Anse’s timber crew on Perry Cline’s former land across the Tug Fork in West Virginia. He had recently bought some of Cline’s land from Devil Anse at the bargain price of fifty cents per acre and was preparing to move to West Virginia.3 Floyd’s wife was a daughter of Ranel McCoy’s first cousin, so Floyd Hatfield and Ranel McCoy also had ties of kinship, though not so strong as Floyd’s ties to the Hatfields. Ranel thought he recognized his missing hog among Floyd’s drove—but Floyd indignantly denied it.

  Ranel McCoy carried his charges to Devil Anse Hatfield’s cousin Preacher Anse Hatfield,4 who preached at the Old Pond Creek Baptist Church, attended by both Hatfields and McCoys. Preacher Anse also served as a justice of the peace for Blackberry District, in which Ranel McCoy lived. Preacher Anse and Devil Anse both descended from Eph-of-All Hatfield, but via two different wives. So they were half–first cousins once removed. They were removed from each other in other ways, too: Preacher Anse was mild-mannered and peace-loving, whereas Devil Anse was a wily prankster and guerrilla fighter. Preacher Anse ran a church, whereas Devil Anse told a reporter toward the end of the feud that he himself belonged to “the Devil’s church.”5 Preacher Anse assured Ranel McCoy that he would organize a hearing about the contested hog at his log cabin.

  On the morning of the hearing, farmers in the Tug Fork Valley slopped their hogs, milked their cows, and scattered grain for their chickens. In their fields, fenced with split rails, stood rows of sheaved cornstalks, like Indian tepees, surrounded by ripe orange pumpkins. They saddled up their horses and rode double, carrying rifles and lunch baskets. Everyone wanted to see whether Ranel McCoy or Floyd Hatfield would be awarded the wayward hog. But most were happy just to have a break from routine and a chance to visit with neighbors. They had put on their best clothes—calico dresses, shawls, and sunbonnets for the women; suit jackets, overalls, starched shirts, boots, and hats for the men.