American Folk Feud

THE HATFIELDS AND THE McCoys (293 pp.)--Virgil Carrington Jones--Chapel Hill ($3.75),

This little book is almost a masterpiece. Particularly in its early chapters (the later ones grow somewhat confused with the ramifications of the feud), it summons up the life of the mountains in the days before the fighting began: little streams, dropping 25 feet to the mile, with names like Grapevine, Blackberry, Sulphur, Sycamore, Turkey and Buffalo; old families of English stock bearing names like Vance, Chafin, Smith, Weddington, Varney, Cline and Trent; forests of oak, cherry, walnut, hickory, linden, beech, sycamore; cabins with quiet hospitality, plenty of food, and courteous, high-strung, honest and proud people.

Devil Anse Hatfield was a tall bearded man with round shoulders and a slight stoop, grey eyes, bushy eyebrows, a hooked nose. He was the father of 12 children. Randolph McCoy was 20 years older, tall, kindly, broad-shouldered, with sullen grey eyes and a full beard and mustache. He had 13 children. Devil Anse built his cabin on the edge of West Virginia, at a point where Peter Creek flows into Tug Fork. Across the Tug in Kentucky, up Blackberry Creek to Hatfield Branch, then up the steep mountain slopes to the ridge at Turkeyfoot--seven or eight miles--was Randolph McCoy's cabin. The land between was battleground.

Who Owned the Sow? The feud of the Hatfields and the McCoys is surely one of the great U.S. folk stories. It has sunk into the popular mind with Li'l Abner connotations, a confused impression of moonshiners, hillbillies, revenue officers, and verbs with "a" in front of them ("I don't feel like runnin', I'm a-goin' t'fight"). Actually, the Hatfield-McCoy feud was a tragedy, violent and unrelenting, with its characters, doomed and possessed, living their parts with fixed intensity.

Bad feeling between the Hatfield and McCoy families reached back before the Civil War. But the real trouble began in 1873, when Floyd Hatfield (Anse's cousin) appropriated a roaming sow and her litter. Old Randolph McCoy said the pigs were his, and had Floyd Hatfield brought into court. The jury was evenly balanced --six McCoys, six Hatfields. But the judge was a Hatfield, and one of the McCoy jurors (married to a Hatfield) wavered. That did it: the Hatfields won the verdict; the hills got a feud that lasted two generations.

How Many Died? Author Jones tells the long story in chronicled detail: the disappearances (till bodies turned up later); the killings in "justified self-defense"; the kidnaping and executions. One day in 1882 the Hatfields intercepted seven peace officers who were taking some of Old Randolph McCoy's sons to jail for the knifing of a Hatfield. The youngest McCoy began to cry. Said Wall Hatfield gruffly, "I'm not going to hurt you." But next day the wounded Hatfield died. His kinsmen turned on the hostages. The bodies of Tolbert, Phamer and young Randolph McCoy were found tied to pawpaw bushes. Another time, Hatfields surrounded Old Randolph and his family in a cabin. The leader shouted: "Come out, you McCoys, an' surrender as prisoners o' war." The besieged refused; the besiegers set the cabin on fire, killed two McCoys, gave up shooting only when they found that Old Randolph himself had ducked away through the smoke.

How many lives were taken in the feud until stronger administration in Kentucky--and plain blood weariness--caused it to flicker out? Fifty or sixty? Or hundreds? Chroniclers disagree; Author Jones says the answer can never be determined: "No count ever was made of the men who went into the hills after their enemies and never came back."

Not until 1928 did a Hatfield shake hands with a McCoy.

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