by Lisa Alther
A favorite tale that the patriarch told his grandchildren concerned the day he brought home four deer with one bullet. As a doe and a half-grown buck rested on the ground in a meadow, he shot one, the bullet passing through it to kill the other as well. When he cut the doe open to gut her, he found that she was carrying nearly full-term twin fawns, which he raised on bottles.9
The most famous image of the feud, this 1897 photograph of part of Devil Anse Hatfield’s extended family, depicts him sitting with a rifle on the left, while his second in command, Cap Hatfield, sits with a rifle on the right. Around them, standing and sitting, are Devil Anse’s younger children and grandchildren, none of whom participated in the feud, and his hunting dog, Yellow Watch. To the right stands W. D. Borden, a local store clerk who commissioned the photo. The photographer whom Borden hired asked the men and boys to brandish their guns, which they did, unknowingly stigmatizing the Hatfield side of the feud for the rest of their lives and beyond. Courtesy of West Virginia State Archives
Another story concerns Devil Anse Hatfield’s testifying at a trial for the murder of an itinerant peddler. He described tracking down the murderers, their bloodstained clothing, and the stolen booty by following clues like leaves pierced with boot nails and blobs of tobacco juice spit onto the path.10
Other admiring anecdotes involve Devil Anse’s adopting an ill and disconsolate young orphan who passed the old man’s house in a wagon train bound for the West. The orphan grew up to be one of Devil Anse’s most loyal feudists,11 perhaps hiding Cap Hatfield and Joe Glenn in his attic from a posse after their murder of the three Rutherfords on the Matewan Election Day. Another story in Devil Anse’s hagiography, which stretches the limits of even the kindest credulity, reports that he organized his henchmen to hoe weeds from the corn patches of widows and the disabled,12 which would be equivalent to Al Capone’s thugs laying down their tommy guns to wash windows in a Chicago old folks’ home.
Buffalo Bill Cody brought his Wild West Show to eastern Kentucky in 1893. One reporter maintains that Devil Anse Hatfield emerged from the audience to match Buffalo Bill’s marksmanship shot for shot.13 But Devil Anse was avoiding Kentucky during those years from fear of the indictments against him there. The myths had already begun to write themselves.
In 1897, seven years after the feud had ended, a clerk at a local store arranged for an itinerant photographer to take pictures of some members of the Hatfield family. The photographer asked the men and boys to brandish their guns. Understandably naive about the extent of media manipulation, they grabbed their rifles and pistols and displayed them “like jewelry” (as one writer has said of Afghan men and their firearms14). Two of these photos soon gained notoriety all over the world, stigmatizing the Hatfield feudists for the rest of their lives and beyond.
The public was especially shocked by a little boy in one of these photos—Cap Hatfield’s son Coleman A., the eventual Hatfield feud chronicler—who clutched a pistol as though it were a teddy bear, and by the apparently dimwitted pride with which all the men flaunted their weapons. The great irony is that only two of them—Devil Anse and Cap—had actually fought in the feud. But psychologists say that children respond to the expectations of those around them, so three of Devil Anse’s younger nonfeudist sons in these photos eventually killed people, and two were killed in turn.
Devil Anse and Levicy Hatfield with seven of their children, a hired hand, and a store clerk, posed to look like desperados. Of the eleven, only Devil Anse and Cap Hatfield actually fought in the feud, which had been over for seven years by the 1897 date of this famous photo. 1: Ock Damron, a hired hand. 2: Elias Hatfield, son of Devil Anse. 3: Troy Hatfield. 4: Rose Hatfield. 5: Joe Hatfield. 6: Cap Hatfield. 7: W. D. Borden, a store clerk. 8: Tennis Hatfield. 9: Devil Anse Hatfield. 10: Levicy Chafin Hatfield. 11: Willie Hatfield. Courtesy of West Virginia State Archives
One of Devil Anse’s obituaries states that he was persuaded to go on the vaudeville stage in much the same manner as Sitting Bull had joined Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show. But he was reminded, or he remembered, just in time that if he ventured away from his home and his log fort, the outstanding indictments against him might be served.15
Emmett Dalton, of the infamous Dalton Gang, convinced Devil Anse Hatfield to star in a silent movie in 1915, to be shown at theaters along with a movie called The Last Stand of the Dalton Boys, which concerned the Dalton Gang’s attempt to outdo Jesse James by robbing two banks in broad daylight while wearing false beards. Their ploy failed: Four of the gang were killed, and Emmett Dalton went to prison for fourteen years. Dalton claimed that both the Hatfields and the McCoys starred in the feud movie and that he inspected their guns before the sham battles along the Tug Fork to make sure that no former feudist had slipped real bullets into his gun so as to rekindle the feud. Dalton said that when he showed the film to the participating feudists, they were “tickled as children” to watch this screen version of their activities.16 In reality, no McCoys participated.17
Devil Anse Hatfield playing the part of a rugged mountaineer with rifle and cartridge belts. This photo is believed to be a publicity shot taken to promote Devil Anse’s silent movie about the feud, made with Emmett Dalton of the Dalton Gang. Courtesy of West Virginia State Archives
The movie ran for a time in southern West Virginia. Truda McCoy claimed that Devil Anse and Levicy took along a moonshine still to screenings and demonstrated its operation to movie audiences. She also claimed that the theater owner in Pikeville decided not to show the movie there out of respect for the feelings of the McCoys.18
Some of Devil Anse Hatfield’s friends eventually pointed out to him that neither the Hatfields nor the McCoys had robbed strangers for money. They insisted that it was unseemly for their activities to be equated to the depredations of the Dalton Gang.19 Anse agreed and withdrew from the project. But the damage had been done, leaving behind yet another photo believed to have been taken as a publicity still—of Devil Anse, rifle in hand, wearing double cartridge belts. The aging Devil Anse was quickly becoming a caricature of himself.
Unfortunately, the reporting of the feud tended to tar all inhabitants of the southern Appalachians with the same brush. Some of the adjectives most frequently used in articles about the region were: backward, barbarous, dissolute, idle, primitive, revolting, savage, uncivilized, violent, and wild.20
Between 1905 and 1928 ninety-two silent movies were filmed for national distribution that featured feuding mountaineers exhibiting all those damning qualities and more.21 One writer describes the shift that occurred during this period in how other Americans perceived Appalachian people: “Images of the mountaineer as pathetic and romantic gave way before a new set of images of the mountaineers as feudists and desperadoes, criminals and social deviants.”22 Whereas Southern mountain people had been portrayed prior to the feud era as “our contemporary ancestors,”23 afterward they became crazed outsiders. With their feuding and their moonshining, they had ventured beyond what had become the new American pale. The media at the time stressed the European origins of their violence, among the Highland clans of Scotland—from which most in the Southern backcountry hadn’t, in fact, descended.
An adjective frequently found in reviews and synopses of the scripts of these silent movies about Appalachian feudists is “virile.”24 Once again, while audiences gasped in horror at the outrageous behavior of the fictional feudists, they admired their ruthless aggression. As one writer puts it, “Those forces, which were shaping a new American business and political elite—and hence American mass culture . . . found the idea of man’s ‘wolf-law’ nature a useful indulgence, a justification for annihilating one’s rivals, or minor nations.”25
But in the final reel of each silent film, the feudists were usually arrested, and their women were whisked from the mountains to a richer life in the cities of America.26 So, after a brief flirtation with anarch
y, urban audiences emerged from the darkness of the movie theaters knowing that they were different from, and superior to, these vicious outlaws prowling the Southern mountains.
Coal formed the foundation of the industrial revolution in Europe and America in the nineteenth century because it powered steam engines and fueled the manufacture of steel. Anthracite fields near the East Coast were nearly exhausted, so the bituminous seams in the southern Appalachians looked very attractive to industrialists.27 William MacCorkle, elected governor of West Virginia in 1892, maintained that the abundance of raw materials in West Virginia would assure that the state would become a major manufacturing center, bringing abundance and harmony to its citizens.28
Unfortunately, the arrival of industry in the Tug Fork Valley didn’t provide the panacea that Governor MacCorkle blissfully predicted for the people who lived there. Many local residents sold their farms and timberlands to these large corporations or sold the rights to the minerals beneath them, for prices ranging from twenty-five cents to three dollars per acre. Some sold entire mountains for a mule, a horse, or a rifle, like the Lenape who supposedly exchanged the island of Manhattan for some beads.29
Some mountaineers made such deals not by choice but because overlapping land grants and unreliable eighteenth-century surveys put many existing land titles in West Virginia into jeopardy. Nonresident agents challenged traditional proprietors, who lacked the resources to fight these challenges in court. Some preferred to sell their land for pennies on the dollar rather than to face the confusing and expensive maze of legalities required to uphold their own claims.30
Others exchanged their mineral rights for quitclaim deeds that assured them of ownership of the land on which their families had already been living for generations. Unfortunately, these deeds granted the owners of the mineral rights access to the minerals by any and all means necessary for their extraction. At the time the deeds were signed, this provision meant a tunnel in a hillside and space for a tipple and a railroad spur. Later, in the twentieth century, this same provision allowed for strip-mining, mountaintop removal, and complete destruction of the land that the original owners had sought to preserve by signing away the mineral rights in the first place.31
Unable to rely any longer on farming, herding, hunting, and riding their rafts of logs downriver to the sawmills for their sustenance, many Tug Fork Valley residents became wage laborers. Those who took up mining soon discovered that they were required to work twelve-hour days, six days a week32—an incomprehensible schedule for people accustomed to working their own land at their own pace according to the demands of the weather and the seasons.
Coal seams often lay in remote coves, so mining companies had to build entire towns for their workers, in which the companies owned the houses, schools, churches, and stores.33 Wages usually came in the form of scrip that had to be spent at company stores, where prices were manipulated artificially according to the requirements of the companies’ profit margins.34 The valleys they mined were sometimes so narrow that there was room for only a creek, a road, a railroad track, and a row or two of buildings, with walls of rock rising up on either side and blocking out the sun by midafternoon. The houses “squatted on the mountainside like ‘great drab beetles with their stilt legs braced against the slope.’ ”35
West Virginia in 1900 had the largest percentage of native-born coal miners in the nation, but there weren’t enough of them, so miners came from eastern and southern Europe, as did blacks from farther south.36 Within a decade, West Virginia had the highest percentage of foreign-born workers south of the Mason-Dixon Line.37 Whereas once the Tug Fork Valley had hosted very few people, most related to one another and most of them subsistence farmers and loggers, now people from all over the country and all over the world called the valley home. But they knew only the inhabitants of their own isolated coal towns and depended entirely upon the whims of absentee owners for their shelter and sustenance.38
The last decade of the nineteenth century and the first two of the twentieth were an age of industrial violence. Major strikes occurred all over the United States. In the Lawrence, Massachusetts, textile strike, for example, twenty-three thousand workers left their looms, demanding higher wages and safer working conditions.39
But in West Virginia the coal companies were in bed with state and county governments to prevent any form of regulation.40 Those who used to win elections in the Tug Fork Valley were the best orators and those who enjoyed the support of extended kinship groups. They often bought votes with free liquor, as the West Virginia Hatfields did in Kentucky, where they themselves couldn’t vote. Replacing this system was one dominated by industrialists who bought support with private patronage.41
Hand-loading coal required miners to lie on their backs and undercut coal seams with picks, to augur holes with drills braced against their chests, to pack these holes with explosives, to light the fuses, and then to run like hell.42 West Virginian coal miners were more likely to lose their lives on the job than soldiers fighting in World War I.43 They could die from explosions, roof falls, poisonous gases, or the lingering suffocation of black lung disease.44 Unions, which negotiated for safety regulations and higher wages, were allowed in most states, but not in West Virginia due to the influence of the coal operators. As a result, cheaper, nonunion coal from West Virginia flooded the national market and forced a reduction in price for union coal mined elsewhere.45
The United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) moved in and unionized the mine at Paint Creek, some seventy-five miles from the Tug Fork Valley. But the mine at nearby Cabin Creek remained without a union. So in 1912 the Paint Creek owners outlawed the union there and hired the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency to root out any miners who objected. A hundred Baldwin-Felts guards, some former criminals, moved in with machine guns and evicted the miners’ families from company houses, beating up and killing several miners in the process and kicking one pregnant woman, who later lost the child.46
The ousted miners moved to a tent colony during an unusually harsh winter. Strikebreakers roared past the colony in an armored train called the Bull Moose Special and fired machine guns into the tents.
The coal operators brought in scabs, whose trains the union miners attacked. Martial law was declared, and Mother Jones, a UMWA organizer, was arrested and sentenced to twenty years in prison for reading the Declaration of Independence from the statehouse steps in Charleston.47
At this point Henry D. Hatfield, Devil Anse Hatfield’s nephew and the son of Good Elias, became governor of West Virginia. A practicing physician, he went to Paint Creek carrying his doctor bag. While helping the miners’ families with their health problems, he earned their trust. He brought union leaders to Charleston, put them in a room with the coal operators, and insisted that they reach a deal to end the strike. They did so—but the deal didn’t include the right for miners to unionize.
In 1912, Woodrow Wilson became the first Democratic president of the country in twenty years. A friend of labor, he established the Federal Trade Commission, instituted a federal income tax, and introduced some pro-union legislation regulating wages and working conditions, and protecting existing unions during mergers.48
Henry D. Hatfield, Devil Anse Hatfield’s nephew and the son of Good Elias, became governor of West Virginia and tried to mediate the conflict between union leaders and coal companies. Courtesy of the Library of Congress
Some four million American soldiers mobilized for World War I, and the country needed those who stayed at home to cooperate in the war effort. Industry made many concessions to keep the war workers happy, and union membership soared from two million to five million. But during the recession following the war, wages fell, layoffs ensued, and regulations protecting both wages and working conditions came under attack.49
Meanwhile, the UMWA was trying once again to unionize the coal mines in and around the Tug Fork Valley, so as to stabilize coal price
s at union rates all around the country. Many miners in Mingo County, a new county formed along the Tug Fork from part of Logan County, West Virginia, favored the union. Its main town was Matewan, where Cap Hatfield had lived following the Battle of Grapevine Creek, until the shoot-out in which he and Joe Glenn had killed the three Rutherfords.
Matewan chief of police Sid Hatfield had worked in a mine and sympathized with the miners’ plight. Although he claimed to be related to Devil Anse Hatfield and was raised by a Hatfield family on Blackberry Creek in Kentucky, he was actually an orphan whom they had adopted.50 However, he gave Devil Anse a run for his money when it came to constructing a legend about himself.
On May 19, 1920, a dozen Baldwin-Felts detectives arrived in Matewan by train.51 They traveled half a mile out of town to the coal camp of Red Jacket on Stone Mountain, where all the miners had joined the UMWA. As a result, several miners had been fired, blacklisted, and ordered to vacate their company houses. Since they had refused to leave, the detectives evicted them, throwing one woman’s furniture into the road in the rain. (The detectives claimed she had asked for their help in moving.)
Sid Hatfield and the town mayor, Cabell C. Testerman, standing in front of Testerman’s jewelry store, confronted the detectives. One of them produced a warrant for Hatfield’s arrest for interfering with their own arrest of a union organizer. Testerman studied it and pronounced it a fraud.