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Three Blind Mice-A Professor and Two Assistants

West Virginia Historian Laureate, Otis Rice tells his readers in his preface that he had a grant from his employer, West Virginia Institute of Technology, and two student assistants to facilitate his research for his book, “The Hatfields & the McCoys.”

What did the taxpayers of West Virginia get for their money? Well, they got more than one hundred fifty citations of newspaper and magazine writers, and almost nothing from the actual historical records. After more than three decades, academia still has the wagons circled about Professor Rice’s yarn, insisting that it is actually “history.”

I have published dozens of public records which were never seen before; yet not one academic anywhere has uttered a peep about these discoveries. Many of those records greatly expand our knowledge of the history, but academia has never even acknowledged their existence. They cannot even admit the existence of the records, simply because many of them turn Otis Rice’s tale upon its head and they will never admit that Otis Rice’s “history” is a scam.

The three blind mice actually found very little in their purportedly exhaustive search of the records. They certainly found nothing that changed the original feud story which came from the people who organized and led the illegal invasions of West Virginia in December, 1887 and January, 1888, by way of the newspaper reporters John Spears and Charles Howell.

Records which escaped the eyes of the three blind mice include marriages, civil suits, land deeds, criminal indictments, court orders, and, even the Census.

The marriage of the son of Asa Harmon McCoy and the daughter of Jim Vance shows that the relations between those families was NOT that of feuding enemies. The deed where Asa Harmon’s daughter sold Jim Vance a thousand acres and took Vance’s note for a third of the price is additional proof. Perry Cline having Jim Vance sign his sheriff’s bond and appointing Vance a deputy sheriff clinches it.

The many civil suits featuring Perry Cline and/or the children of Asa Harmon McCoy against either Devil Anse Hatfield or Jim Vance cannot be mentioned without relegating the farcical and entirely fictional “pig trial” to the garbage bin. If lawsuits involving the value of hundreds—even thousands—of pigs aroused no feuding enmity, then what is to be done with an argument over a ten dollar pig?

Rice does not mention the indictment of some two dozen of the Frank Phillips gang in their home county of Pike for illegally forming the gang. To do so would destroy the claim that the violence along the border during December, 1887 and January, 1888 involved “Kentucky officers and the Hatfield gang.”

The dozens of documents which I have photographed and included in my books do not exist in the academic universe, simply because they were either not found by the three blind mice, or, if found, were ignored in order to perpetuate the feud yarn.

While not the most significant historically, the documents relating to the second Marriage of Ran’l McCoy are the most shocking discoveries to date.  Not one academic has even said that this document is “a cool document.” None have publicly admitted its existence.

(Click on photos to expand.)

Ran'l-Hattie

Likewise, the three divorce cases which accompanied the bitter break-up of the May-December marriage between the seventy-three-year-old Ran’l and his eighteen-year-old bride were either not found by the blind mice, or they were found and ignored. The daughter of that marriage, Ellen McCoy, has not even been acknowledged to exist.

Hattie v Ran'l

Does anyone think that a professor and two graduate assistants researched the “Hatfield and McCoy feud,” without even looking at the index of cases in the Pike Circuit Court? Does anyone believe that they saw this index and did not have enough curiosity to look at the three cases styled “Hattie McCoy v Randolph McCoy?

Will academia eventually be forced to admit that Otis Rice and his assistants either deliberately falsified their “history,” or they were, indeed, nothing more than “Three Blind Mice?”
Time will tell.