Blood Feud

by Lisa Alther

  On January 19, 1888, eighteen days after the murders of Alifair and Calvin McCoy outside their family cabin, and eleven days after the murder of Jim Vance on the West Virginia mountainside, Frank Phillips returned to West Virginia with eighteen men.65 It was said the Phillips posse had dynamite in their saddlebags for blowing up any barricades the Hatfields might have erected.66

  On the banks of Grapevine Creek, the Pike County posse met thirteen Hatfield supporters intent on arresting those responsible for the murder of Bad Jim Vance. The battleground on which they stood had once belonged to Rich Jake Cline, then for a time to his son Perry Cline. Now it belonged to Devil Anse Hatfield and fourteen others to whom he had sold parcels.67

  Like every other episode in the feud, it’s almost impossible to figure out from conflicting accounts what actually happened during the battle.******** The Hatfields lined up in battle formation as the Phillips band rode from the Kentucky side of the Tug Fork, down the river toward Grapevine Creek. The Kentuckians tied their horses near the mouth of the creek to advance on foot, but rifle shots from a party of squirrel hunters stampeded their horses.68 While part of the Kentucky group chased the panicked horses, Frank Phillips led another group up the creek toward Cap Hatfield’s house.

  They found a man named Bill Dempsey hiding in a fodder pen. Shot in the leg, through an artery, he begged them to spare him because he had nothing to do with the Hatfields and was only an appointed deputy. Some say Dempsey mistook the McCoy posse for friends and asked for water.

  “I’ll give you water,” Bad Frank Phillips replied, and then he blew Dempsey’s brains out.69

  Truda McCoy says that Jim McCoy chastised Frank Phillips for the unnecessary killing and that Phillips replied contemptuously, letting Jim know who was actually in charge now of the McCoy allies.70

  Truda McCoy’s version of this battle puts the McCoys in the woods, slipping from tree to tree like natives, when they spotted half a dozen of the principal Hatfield feudists crossing a cornfield.71 They agreed to hold their fire until the Hatfields reached the middle of the field, where they would have no shelter to which to retreat. But Harmon McCoy’s son Bud (not Ranel’s Bud, already killed in the pawpaw patch), widely known as one of the most dangerous men in Kentucky, couldn’t restrain himself.72 He leapt up, pointed his rifle at the Hatfields, and demanded their surrender.

  Bud McCoy, fourth son of Harmon, had vowed revenge on the Hatfields for the murder of his father and his older brother Jeff. Present when Frank Phillips killed Jim Vance, he took a bullet in the shoulder during the Battle of Grapevine Creek. Courtesy of West Virginia State Archives

  Said to be “cruel, vindictive, and quarrelsome,”73 Bud McCoy, fourth son of the murdered Harmon, had vowed revenge on the Hatfields for the death of his brother Jeff after his swim across the Tug Fork to Kentucky.74 Having your father murdered when you are three years old, and your older brother when you are twenty-four, might put anyone in a permanently bad mood. A photo shows a young man with very dark hair and eyes, and a full mustache. He looks crazed, but possibly because his ears stick out like handles on an urn.75

  Once Bud McCoy had ruined the trap that the McCoys had prepared for the Hatfields, he kept exposing himself unwisely during the ensuing gun battle, like a jack-in-the-box on too much caffeine. Finally, Bob Hatfield, who had purportedly avoided the New Year’s Night Massacre because of his mother’s pleas, obligingly shot Bud in the shoulder.76 After the Hatfields had withdrawn into the mountains for the night, Bud expressed relief to his comrades that he had been hit in his gun shoulder and not in his dynamite pouch.77

  Bud McCoy was clearly a fellow who knew how to see a glass as half full.

  ******** And my own ancestor Harmon Artrip after that.

  ******** But that hasn’t stopped me from trying so far.

  9

  ALL OVER BUT THE SHOUTING

  The Battle of Grapevine Creek didn’t accomplish anything. Neither side killed or captured any of the indicted feudists. Bill Dempsey, a West Virginia deputy who had nothing to do with the feud, had been killed, and Bud McCoy had sustained a bullet wound in his gun shoulder.

  The Hatfields did realize, though, that their muzzle-loaders and one-shot rifles from Civil War days paled in the face of the Winchester repeating rifles that the McCoys had recently bought from riverboats that came up the Levisa Fork of the Big Sandy River to Pikeville. So Devil Anse Hatfield instructed his deputy, Cap, to order twenty-five new Winchesters and ten thousand rounds of ammunition. They arrived at the nearest railway station, one week’s journey by wagon from Devil Anse’s house. Unfortunately, Cap’s wife, Nancy, who had written the order, accidentally omitted a zero. Then again, perhaps she omitted it on purpose, doing her best to strangle her family’s retribution with her pen. Either way, only one thousand cartridges arrived. But even these turned out to be superfluous, because it was all over but the shouting.1

  Prior to the New Year’s Night Massacre, newspapers from outside Kentucky and West Virginia simply reprinted material from local Kentucky newspapers, most of it hostile to the Hatfields. After the massacre, though, the feud became front-page fodder in such cities as Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and New York. Papers there portrayed the Hatfields as ruthless desperados and the McCoys as the good guys in white hats trying to uphold the rule of the law.2

  The Pittsburgh Times was the first prominent newspaper outside the region to send a reporter to feud country for a firsthand account. Charles Howell stayed in Pikeville for three days, making no effort to venture into the wilds of West Virginia. Instead, he visited Ranel and Sarah McCoy in a house devoid of furniture, since theirs had burned in the fire that had destroyed their Blackberry Fork cabin. He described Ranel as “a man who has been bent and almost broken by the weight of his afflictions and grief.”3

  Howell also visited the jail and interviewed Wall Hatfield. He described Wall’s shaggy eyebrows as almost concealing “eyes of a greenish gray that are forever evading the person with whom the owner may be talking.”4

  Howell’s overall assessment of the feud was that the Hatfields were destroying the smaller and weaker McCoy clan: “Given, on the one hand, a family with its contingents of the same blood, allied and cemented by a common desire to avenge an imaginary affront, and on the other another family, small in the matter of alliance and collateral sympathies, doomed to destruction by the larger one, and the case is stated.”5 Many newspapers outside the region syndicated Howell’s account, further coloring public opinion against the Hatfields.6

  Sensing that Devil Anse Hatfield was now vulnerable because of the successes of the Kentucky posses, the creditors from his timbering operations in West Virginia swooped down on him only days after the Battle of Grapevine Creek. They had been hounding him to settle his debts for a long time. He and his men had charged supplies at some stores, and the store owners had marked up the goods higher than Devil Anse felt he had agreed to.7

  Devil Anse had been wanting to move to a spot more easily defensible from Kentucky raiding parties and bounty hunters, in any case,8 so he sold for $7,000 the remaining land he had acquired from Perry Cline. The purchaser, a coal agent for a consortium of capitalists from Philadelphia, paid off Devil Anse’s timbering debts, and the Norfolk and Western Railroad began surveys for railroad tracks up the Tug Fork Valley.9

  In two years’ time, Perry Cline’s land on Grapevine Creek would be worth ten times the amount that Devil Anse received for it, since it turned out to be located in the heart of a rich coalfield. Soon the valley filled up with outsiders: land speculators and surveyors, engineers and construction workers for the railroad line. Their off-hours drinking and recreational gunplay introduced even more chaos to the already strife-torn region.10 Country living isn’t always the bromide for stress that many city dwellers believe it to be.

  Devil Anse bought several thousand acres inland from the Tug Fork from
an eccentric wanderer named Old Hawk Steele, who had flowing hair and a long beard. Steele sold his land in return for a portion of the profits Devil Anse would earn from timbering it, which turned out to be considerable.11 Just as Ranel McCoy and his family had moved away from the Tug Fork Valley to escape the feud, so was Devil Anse moving inland and upland from the valley to distance himself from the ongoing ramifications of his prior feud activities.

  Devil Anse Hatfield built his new cabin in a valley between two ridges running atop a tall mountain. Nearby he constructed a fort of logs two feet in diameter, the walls six logs high.12 The structure featured only one entrance and portholes in all the walls. He stocked it with food, water, fuel, arms, and ammunition, rather like a Cold War bomb shelter.13 He organized an army of supporters and a system for summoning them with a code of rifle shots, whistles, birdcalls, and animal cries.14 He also installed a drawbridge over the creek in front of his new house.

  Resuming his life of hunting, farming, moonshining, and timbering, Devil Anse hid out from pursuers when necessary, waiting to see what would happen to his comrades in the Pikeville jail, as well as to those not yet apprehended.

  A month after the bootless Battle of Grapevine Creek, Devil Anse Hatfield’s wife, Levicy, gave birth to their twelfth child, a son. In a masterpiece of public relations, they named him E. Willis Wilson Hatfield after the governor of West Virginia, who was emerging as Devil Anse’s champion in the legal battles over extradition.

  Much maneuvering and posturing ensued between the governors of Kentucky and West Virginia, each naturally supporting his own citizens.15 A populist, Governor Wilson, whom one observer described as a “fiery but humorless orator,” often chewed his red mustache when agitated. A reporter described him as “a small, rather slender man who has the thin and wrinkled face of one who habitually suffers from ill health.”16 His nickname was Windy, and one can’t help but wonder if it stemmed from the nature of his oratory or the operation of his bowels.17

  Governor Wilson wrote to Governor Buckner of Kentucky, informing him of the bribe that Perry Cline had accepted (and then ignored) not to pursue the Hatfields. Wilson refused to extradite the Hatfields from West Virginia, claiming that they couldn’t receive an impartial trial in Kentucky. He also protested the killing in the fodder pen of Bill Dempsey, who wasn’t a feudist and had been deputized merely to arrest Bad Frank Phillips and several McCoys for the murder of Bad Jim Vance.

  All the bloodshed and stray bullets panicked ordinary citizens on both sides of the Tug Fork, who petitioned their respective governors for protection. Both states ordered their militias to prepare to defend their borders, and they sent representatives to the feud areas to assess the situation.

  West Virginia’s representative reported that the situation had calmed down and that the Hatfields were models of probity being persecuted by Phillips and Cline. Kentucky’s representative agreed that tensions had abated but insisted that the Hatfields were the aggressors, and the McCoys fine upstanding citizens. Both governors countermanded their orders for deployment of their militias.

  Local newspapers, meanwhile, had jumped into the fray. The Kentucky papers portrayed the Hatfields as sadistic banditos. The West Virginia papers insisted that the Kentuckians had started the feud and that most of the outrages had occurred there, so it was the McCoys who had a problem with anger management and not the Hatfields.18 The West Virginia papers don’t seem to have put much stock in the fact that the outrages in Kentucky had mostly been perpetrated by West Virginians.

  Governor Wilson sent a document to Governor Buckner requisitioning Bad Frank Phillips and twenty-seven members of his Kentucky posse for the deaths of Bad Jim Vance and Bill Dempsey. Wilson also posted rewards of $500 for Phillips and $100 each for the others, many of whom went into hiding around Peter Creek in the Tug Fork Valley, near where Harmon McCoy had been murdered so many years before.19 The uncaptured Hatfields were also hiding out in the West Virginia mountains.20 All these men on both sides were no doubt delighted to leave the boring chores of farm life to their long-suffering wives and children.

  Governor Buckner replied to Governor Wilson, defending the Phillips raids and demanding extradition of the remaining indicted Hatfields. Governor Wilson, in turn, requested that the US district court in Louisville issue orders releasing the Hatfields held in the Pikeville jail because the Kentucky invaders had unlawfully transported them across state lines. Wilson also maintained that the Hatfield prisoners in the Pikeville jail were in danger of attack from enraged McCoys.

  The district court judge ordered the nine prisoners in question brought to Louisville for a hearing regarding Governor Wilson’s request that they be freed. Perry Cline, Ranel McCoy, and several others escorted them to Louisville by steamboat and then by train. They had been in the Pikeville jail for a month, but the terms of their imprisonment had been lenient. Wall had been allowed to roam Pikeville at will and to visit Perry Cline’s family. He appears to have impressed Col. John Dils because Dils offered to pay his bail.21 Colonel Dils evidently had issues with Devil Anse Hatfield, but not with his entire family.

  Perry Cline had switched from representing Ranel McCoy to representing Wall Hatfield because, some say, Wall had offered him a higher fee.22 Truda McCoy reports that Perry Cline privately assured Ranel McCoy that his working for Wall Hatfield was in Ranel’s best interests, though he didn’t explain what he meant by this.23

  A large crowd greeted the Hatfield prisoners at the Louisville train station, eager to catch a glimpse of the infamous desperados. Perry Cline lined them up two by two, each flanked by a guard, and marched them to the jail. Half wore white shirts, a few wore collars, and all wore soft felt hats and trimmed mustaches. They were quiet and polite, and many in the crowd were disappointed to realize that these were the gun thugs supposedly responsible for so much havoc. The New York Times, preferring stereotypes to this less dramatic reality, said on its editorial page, “The latest vendetta in the backwoods of Kentucky shows the purely savage character of the population more strongly than almost any previous instance.”24

  At the same time, the Louisville Courier-Journal helpfully suggested that the Hatfields move to Dakota Territory and the McCoys to Venezuela as a way to end the feud.25

  In the district court the West Virginia lawyers argued that a citizen of one state couldn’t enter another state to extract suspects in crimes committed in that citizen’s home state. The Kentucky side replied that once a suspect was in another state, however he had gotten there, that state had a right to try him for a crime committed within its boundaries. Both sides maintained that a district court couldn’t settle a dispute between two states, that only the US Supreme Court could.

  The judge of the district court agreed that the case didn’t lie within his jurisdiction and ordered the prisoners returned to Pikeville. West Virginia took the case to the US circuit court, which agreed with the findings of the lower court. Then the case was referred to the US Supreme Court.

  The prisoners returned to the Pikeville jail, bored from a month of sitting quietly listening to a lot of legal wrangling that they didn’t understand. They had enjoyed their time in the Louisville jail, though, listening intently as other prisoners read to them from books and lustily singing hymns in perfect pitch during religious services. Keeping to their mountain schedules, they had gone to sleep at dusk and arisen noisily at dawn—much to the annoyance of more urban prisoners who wanted to sleep in.26

  Shifty-eyed Wall Hatfield had impressed the reporters with his quiet intelligence, despite the fact that one of his Pikeville guards had outed him to reporters as having five wives.27 He steadfastly maintained the innocence of himself and of his fellow West Virginian prisoners, pinning blame for the McCoy murders on his brother Devil Anse; his nephews Cap, Johnse, and Bob; and several others, none of whom had yet been apprehended. “They are all bad men,” he said. He also denied the rumor that he had multiple wives.
28

  Valentine “Wall” Hatfield, elder brother of Devil Anse, during the feud trials. Pittsburgh Times reporter Charles Howell described Wall’s shaggy eyebrows as almost concealing “eyes of a greenish gray that are forever evading the person with whom the owner may be talking.” Although he had pleaded not guilty, Wall was found guilty of the deaths of three McCoy brothers and sentenced to life in prison, where he soon died. Courtesy of the Louisville Courier Journal

  A newspaper sketch of Wall Hatfield at this time shows an older man, partially bald, with a walrus mustache, the prominent Hatfield nose, and heavily lidded eyes. He looks almost as though he is wearing an ascot with his suit jacket. He gives the impression of being a thoughtful, distinguished country squire, rather than a hardened killer, which he probably wasn’t.

  As the Hatfield prisoners languished in the Pikeville jail, waiting to hear whether the Supreme Court would order their release, Nancy McCoy Hatfield decided to leave Johnse Hatfield. At the time, he was hiding out from the McCoy posses in a secret location. Fed up with his drinking and womanizing, she was also, no doubt, appalled by his role two months earlier in the murders of her cousins Calvin and Alifair McCoy, the beating of her aunt Sarah, and the burning of her aunt and uncle’s cabin and smokehouse. She packed her belongings and crossed the Tug Fork with Johnse’s and her two children, returning to her mother’s house on Peter Creek in Kentucky.