Blood Feud

by Lisa Alther

  A few years after the hanging, my grandfather lived with his brother Madison at Johns Creek, home of Bad Frank Phillips and several others who had joined the McCoy posses toward the feud’s end. People surely talked about it in my grandfather’s presence. But both my grandparents died before the topic interested me, so, sadly, I never asked them what they knew or didn’t know about the feud.

  As I was researching this book, I discovered even more links from my family to the feudists. Jim Vance, Devil Anse Hatfield’s uncle, had stolen horses for Gen. Vincent Witcher’s Confederate raiders during the Civil War in Russell County, Virginia. My grandparents’ families lived in what was then Russell County. One of Vance’s victims was one of his cousins, Wilburn Lockhart. After the war, Lockhart planned a retaliatory ambush on Vance while the latter was plowing a field. Vance learned of the plot and summoned a couple of friends. They ambushed Lockhart’s hit men instead, killing one named Harmon Artrip. My father’s moonshining, dynamite-fishing uncle Cas Artrip was a second cousin of Harmon Artrip. After murdering returned Union solider Harmon McCoy, Jim Vance had murdered a distant ancestor of mine. The Hatfield-McCoy feud had suddenly come home to roost.

  As I investigated the other Kentucky feuds, I was also startled to discover that the infamous Craig Tolliver, of the Martin-Tolliver feud of Rowan County, Kentucky, the thug who inexplicably didn’t want to die with his boots on, was a second cousin once-removed to my grandmother’s grandfather John Wesley Swindall, a Union sergeant and himself a woods-colt son of Solomon Tolliver. Both Craig Tolliver and John Wesley Swindall had been born in Ashe County, North Carolina. Craig moved with his parents to Rowan County, where robbers murdered his father and stole the money from the sale of his Ashe County farm. John Wesley Swindall moved with his mother to South of the Mountain in Virginia. I will never know if their families knew one another in Ashe County, but it is possible. It is even likely.

  The understanding came to me slowly—as had Ava McCoy’s under­standing of her fear of thundering horse hooves in the night. My fear of the Cumberlands, a visceral one, had been passed down to me from my grandparents by a process of osmosis. You inherit your ancestors’ genes, but you also inherit, after birth, the psychic fallout from traumas they endured during their lifetimes. Like the forebears of Ava McCoy’s husband Homer, who fled the Tug Fork Valley to escape the Hatfield-McCoy feud violence, like the thousands of others who fled that and other Kentucky feuds, my grandparents had left southwest Virginia in hopes of freeing us, their descendants, from the toxic influence of endemic violence. But it hadn’t entirely worked. The irrational, nameless fear remained, buried deep in my psyche, expressed by only a vague unease whenever I was traveling in those mountains that my grandparents had abandoned nearly a century earlier.

  After college I lived for many years in Vermont, which was settled by a different group of British immigrants than those in the Southern backcountry. They descended from Puritans from eastern England, small-scale farmers and craftsmen who lived in orderly villages centered around a green usually encircled by a school, a church, a town hall, and a general store. Their urban development expressed the high esteem in which they held education, religion, commerce, community, and the rule of law. Herders tend to live in more isolated rural homesteads, surrounded by their animals and their pastures, over which they keep suspicious watch. Because the wealth and sustenance of farmers reside in their land, which isn’t portable, they are generally peaceable people. They have to get along with their neighbors—unlike herders, who must defend their livestock from their neighbors, and who can more readily leave an area when they experience or generate strife.

  As the years ticked by, I started spending more and more time back in Tennessee. I got a teaching job at a university there. The region’s history and my family’s genealogy also began to interest me. I kept a condo in Vermont but commuted regularly to Tennessee for long periods of time.

  Like shifts in the barometric pressure, I noted the differences. Tennessee ranks second in violent crimes among all the states; Vermont is number 48. Kentucky, West Virginia, and Tennessee rank 11, 12, and 13 respectively in gun fatalities. Arriving in Tennessee, my muscles involuntarily clenched. The air itself seemed heavier, as when storm clouds are amassing on the far horizon on a sweltering summer afternoon. I found myself double-checking house and car doors to make sure they were locked, and the home security system to be certain it was set. I glanced all around me in parking lots late at night.

  I learned that a very intelligent man whom I love and respect sometimes packs a pistol. I also learned that one of my cousins carries a Glock 26. I started studying friends and neighbors for telltale bulges in their clothing that might indicate a holster. When staying alone at my family’s isolated cabin, I sometimes placed on my bedside table a pearl-handled Lady Smith and Wesson pistol borrowed from a friend. The part of me that had become a Vermonter thought this the first step toward madness—but the part of me that was still my grandparents’ granddaughter considered it necessary for a restful night’s sleep.

  Gradually, it dawned on me that within my psyche lurks a subterranean dread that irrational violence will break out at any moment, when I least expect it and for reasons I won’t understand. Seemingly friendly people will transform into ogres who want to harm me. By the same token, I, as a distant descendant of the crazed Craig Tolliver, may just as well be the one to unleash the mayhem. Some reasons for this dread are known only to my therapist and me. But one of the most important is the atmosphere in which I grew up, with the results of such violence all around me in the stories brought home from the emergency room by my father and grandfather, to say nothing of the fistfights I witnessed at the school bus stop and the victims of violence I assisted as a candy striper at the hospital.

  The threat of violence my grandparents experienced in southwest Virginia, which drove them to Tennessee, existed still—in Tennessee. The alarm it had engendered in them existed still—in me. Whatever may have caused the feuds, the feudists have left their descendants in the southern Appalachians a legacy of anxiety that still haunts those hills and valleys a century later.

  When I was in the second grade, in 1952, a man in a town outside of Kingsport went into a general store. His wife’s cousin was sitting on a barrel. The cousin’s daughter sat in a chair beside her, holding her eighteen-month-old son. The man’s wife had recently left him, moving back home to her parents, the Blairs, because he had forced her hand onto a hot stovetop to reprimand her for some domestic failing.

  After entering the store and spotting the two Blair women and the baby, the man calmly pulled out a pistol and shot the women. The baby fell to the floor, screaming. The older woman died right away, the younger woman soon thereafter. The man explained to the horrified bystanders that he had shot them in order “to worry the Blairs.”

  The man was taken to jail. Sheriff Blair, a relative of the two murdered women, agreed to open the killer’s cell to a mob of four dozen local men. They planned to drag the killer behind a car until dead. When this posse arrived, though, a phalanx of highway patrolmen had taken charge. They fired shotguns into the crowd to disperse them. The killer was declared insane and sent to the hospital wing of the state penitentiary for the rest of his life, where he entertained himself by creating superb architect­ural drawings.

  As recently as 2011, I was driving through the Cumberland Plateau, minding my own business and enjoying the colorful autumn leaves. Suddenly, looming over me, framed by orange and scarlet foliage, appeared a giant billboard advertising an indoor firing range. At the top stood a huge cutout of a pistol, pointed upward at an angle. The barrel resembled an erect phallus, the trigger guard outlining a testicle. Printed in giant black letters were the words Man Toys!

  Pulling over and studying the sign, I felt the same Pavlovian stab of nausea that I feel whenever I see a swastika or a Confederate battle flag. There seemed no way to avoid the recognition that, as
the Bible says, the sins of the fathers are visited “on the children and on the grandchildren to the third and fourth generations.”9

  The automatic mental process of stereotyping developed because it had survival value. Early humans had to decide very quickly whether a stranger posed a threat, and those decisions usually derived from past experiences. Someone whose appearance resembled that of a previous attacker was also regarded as dangerous. A few defining physical characteristics served as a kind of psychic shorthand. The problem is that physical appearances don’t offer a reliable gauge to inner intentions. A tramp can be a millionaire in disguise. Stereotypes present only one facet of the complex gem that is each individual.

  Stereotypes also serve another function. Those in a position of power often stereotype those who lack power as inferior and therefore deserving of exploitation. As already mentioned, this is what has happened at varying times to blacks, Native Americans, Appalachians, and all women everywhere.

  But people don’t only stereotype others; they also stereotype themselves. We humans don’t automatically know who we are. It takes time and experience to figure that out. Young people typically try on the roles their culture offers them to see if one will fit, like an off-the-rack Halloween costume. A few people have the courage to try on multiple costumes and cast aside those that don’t appeal to them. Stripped, they are then free to find their true identities from within. But most take the easier route of sticking with a prepackaged identity. This is what many young men who became feudists did, copying the examples of their fathers who had been guerrilla fighters during the Civil War, of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers who had fought natives during the settlement era, and of their more remote ancestors who had been Border Reivers.

  This is what some young men in the Southern mountains are doing still, donning the hillbully stereotype bequeathed them by their male ancestors, mistaking cruelty for justice and stupidity for heroism. This stereotype has somehow managed to replicate itself down the generations, even though most of us no longer have herds to protect and no longer face attacks from vengeful natives or from ravaging guerrillas.

  But just as a few young men in Appalachia have adopted this swaggering legacy of misplaced machismo from their forefathers, I myself have also inherited the stereotype handed down by the women of the feuds. Those passive bystanders loyally kept the home fires burning, watching their sons and husbands butcher one another and then cleaning up after them. Like them, I have accepted, excused, and even laughed at the obnoxious behavior of modern-day hillbullies, as though jokes were talismans that could ward off their attacks.

  Even before they can read books, children read the facial expressions, body language, and tones of voice of their elders. They absorb the loves and hatreds, hopes and fears of the adults around them without knowing it. Obsolete stereotypes that have kept us prisoners of the atrocities in which our ancestors participated—as perpetrators, victims, anxious bystanders, refugees—infest both the hillbullies and me.

  The Cumberland Mountains used to be incredibly beautiful. They probably will be again, once the coal corporations have buried the streams, poisoned the drinking water, shipped all the mountaintops to India, and gone back home to count their profits. Those who now live in the Cumberlands are mostly wonderful people with a proud tradition of brave pioneering forebears. A few who aren’t so wonderful have a chance of becoming so if they can shed the shackles forged by the violence of their ancestors. Around eighty Hatfield-McCoy feudists, far less than 1 percent of the population of Pike and Logan counties at that time, managed to terrorize thousands of peaceful, law-abiding people.10 Hopefully, this will never be allowed to happen again.

  I have finally realized that to fear the hellhounds of today is to feed this outmoded stereotype. At some point the mouse being batted about by a marauding cat must rise up on its hind legs and defy its tormentor—even if the cat then just bites off its head for a tasty snack. Although I still set my security system, I returned the pearl-handled Lady Smith and Wesson to my friend. Like a horse whisperer, I now calm my own inherited terror of hellhounds who attack in the night with self-assurances that such episodes are ancient history that need alarm me no longer.

  I have also recently bought a bridge in Brooklyn. . . .

  ******** Northern Virginia and the Tidewater are the arrogant stepsisters to the Cinderella southwest.

  The Hatfield-McCoy Industry

  In keeping with the American way—of turning pristine first-growth forests into furniture and majestic coal-filled mountains into rubble—the mind-numbing horror of the Hatfield-McCoy feud has itself become an industry.

  In 1949, Metro Goldwyn Mayer released a film called Roseanna McCoy, starring Joan Evans as Roseanna and Farley Granger as Johnse Hatfield. Picture West Side Story set in the Southern mountains with an ending in which the two lovebirds canter off into the sunset astraddle one horse—rather than with Johnse’s marriage to Roseanna’s cousin Nancy, the death of their illegitimate baby daughter, and the death of Roseanna from depression, as actually happened.

  A second movie was made for television in 1975, starring Jack Palance (of Shane and City Slickers fame) as Devil Anse. Palance’s Devil Anse comes across as a lovable old coot who adores his wife and children, and who tries to restrain his followers from their deadly antics. The plot tampers with the chronology of feud events to make the incomprehensible comprehensible. For instance, the hanging of Cottontop Mounts and the death in prison of Wall Hatfield, which ended the feud, occur earlier in the movie to account for some of the Hatfield animosity toward the McCoys. The most egregious episode of the entire feud, the New Year’s Night Massacre, becomes a scene in which the McCoys attack the Hatfield homestead in the dead of night instead of the other way around.

  In this version of the feud’s termination, Devil Anse Hatfield and Ranel McCoy sneak through the wilderness, tracking each other like beasts of prey, periodically shooting one another in non–life threatening areas. They finally bond over their mutual decision not to shoot a buck, thus, presumably, renouncing further shooting of human beings as well.

  Several cartoon series have also featured plots based on the Hatfield-McCoy feud, including Looney Tunes, The Huckleberry Hound Show, The Flintstones, and Scooby-Doo. Why anyone considered such historical violence amusing fare for children is a topic for another book.

  Dr. Leonard McCoy, the irascible physician on Star Trek, is depicted as being descended from the feuding McCoy family of Kentucky.

  One of the country’s longest-running TV game shows, Family Feud, took its name from a nod to this epic struggle. In 1979, descendants from both the Hatfield and the McCoy families appeared on the show, carrying antique rifles and dressed in period costume—Little House on the Prairie dresses for the women and frock coats for the men. A bewildered pig munched feed at the front of the stage. Both families smiled good-naturedly about their ancestral history of mutual hatred. Fortunately, the contest proved a draw.

  Theater West Virginia performs a musical about the feud in an outdoor amphitheater several nights a week every summer. Because Devil Anse Hatfield was a West Virginian and one of his nephews, Henry D. Hatfield, became governor of the state, this version of the feud has been sanitized. It ends with a revival in which Devil Anse and two of his sons are baptized and, in Devil Anse’s imagination, unite with the McCoys to sing a gospel song about the glory of God’s forgiveness—rather than with the imprisonment and hanging of Hatfields that actually ended the feud.

  There is also a Hatfield-McCoy dinner theater in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, gateway to the Smoky Mountains (where the feud didn’t take place) with two shows nightly. A building constructed especially for this event resembles two giant cartoon hillbilly shacks. Inside, spectators sit at tables eating fried chicken with all the fixin’s while onstage a cheerful comic plot with almost no connection to actual feud events features some of the most admirable achievements of Appalachian culture: singin
g, the playing of musical instruments, and clog dancing. Many in the audience are, of course, Hatfield or McCoy descendants, who are seated on opposite sides of the theater. They cheer as though at a football game at any mention by the actors of their respective surnames.

  An ATV trail, inexplicably christened the Hatfield-McCoy Trail, winds around five mountains in southern West Virginia. It attracts dirt-bikers and ATV riders from all over America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. The precipitous trails through the dense forests do give a sense of the world the feud participants must have inhabited as they cut timber and hunted game (and one another).

  The tourist office in Pikeville, Kentucky, offers an audio CD guiding motorists from site to site around feud country to the accompaniment of feud-related songs composed and sung by Jimmy Wolford, a country singer descended from Ranel McCoy. Explanatory roadside markers identify various points of interest on the driving tour.

  The Hatfields and McCoys of today seem at peace with their ancestral heritage. My McCoy cousins say that the feud was mentioned only in jokes as they were growing up and that they themselves never felt animosity toward any Hatfields. In 2000, Bo and Ron McCoy and Sonya Hatfield organized a joint Hatfield-McCoy reunion that drew five thousand descendants of the two families from all over the nation.1 This reunion has been repeated every year since. Bus tours take attendees to the various massacre sites. Marathoners—around 450 in 2011—race along roads that wind through feud territory. They cross the finish line in Williamson, West Virginia, where Devil Anse Hatfield and Ranel McCoy impersonators congratulate them. A tug-of-war across the Tug Fork, featuring as combatants ten T-shirted descendants from each family, provides a climax to the reunion.