I have reached a tentative agreement with a much younger relative to join me in forming a new “Hatfield and McCoy Tour” enterprise. I am too old to do the actual driving, but I will furnish all the financing, in return for half the profits. The profits should be substantial, as we will be avoiding all the old and much-seen sites and showing our guests sites that are not included in any of the current low-priced tours, which will allow us to charge at least twice the going rate for the cheap tours.
Our tour will feature locations and events which were unnoticed or even unknown before the 2013 publication of Dean King’s “True Story.”
Our tour will begin at the Belfry courthouse. We will first go a short distance up Church House Hollow to show our guests where 1,200 people gathered on every fair Sunday at a church with 25 members, and where about 800 horses and wagons ridden to church by the 1,200 attendees were parked. We will certainly point out the significance of that great crowd assembling every Sunday at a church where services were held only one weekend each month.
Then we will turn right at Toler and point out the spot where seven Hatfield sharp-shooters set up an ambush thirty feet off the road, and not being able to recognize Ran’l McCoy from that distance, loosed a fusillade of bullets from their Winchesters at three innocent men without a single torso hit.
We will, of course, not waste any time at the site of the McCoy cabin where the two McCoys were killed on New Year’s, 1888, and the place where the election was held in 1882; after all, just any old cheap tour will show them those places. We won’t tarry there, lest we run out of daylight before our guest see the really important places which were unknown until the “True Story” was written by Dean King in 2013.
After we turn left at the mouth of Blackberry Creek, we will point out the ancient burial ground for sheep-killing dogs, where, incidentally, three McCoys were shot on August 9, 1882. We will credit Professor Otis Rice for this, as he is the source for the mutton-chopping mutts.
We will cross the bridge at Matewan and take a left turn down the river to where Bill Staton scratched the face of Paris McCoy with dirty fingernails, and where Staton, wounded through the chest by a high-powered rifle slug, was winning a fist-fight against Paris McCoy, who had been shot through the hip, only to be shot in the head by Sam McCoy.
Back-tracking up the river we will note the mouth of Thacker Creek, where Cap Hatfield and Tom Wallace fired many shots with their Winchesters at Jeff McCoy while he was swimming across forty feet of water, missing him every time. We will, of course, note that this is also the very place where the intrepid writer, Dean King was twice fired upon by local descendants of the feudists. We will note also that, just like their ancestors who couldn’t kill the McCoys from thirty feet in the ambush, or hit Jeff McCoy from less than forty feet, the modern would-be murderers also missed the visiting feud chronicler every time they shot at him in 2009 and 2010.
We will then take a short detour up Happy Hollow, to point out the location of the famed bawdy house run by the hillbilly hooker, Belle Beaver. This location is important because it was second only to Aunt Betty McCoys whorehouse at Stringtown as a favorite Saturday night destination for the ever-over-amorous Johnse Hatfield. We located the spot where Belle’s establishment once flourished in a recent dig, which yielded three buried primitive lambskin condoms and a porcelainized bowl, from which originated the name, “Peter Pan.”
We will then cross the mountain to show the place where Cap Hatfield mistook his uncle for Ran’l McCoy, from a distance of sixty-five yards, and shot at him with his Winchester, missing the “kill zone” by about three feet and knee-capping the poor man. As one of the victims in the foregoing “ambush of the innocents” was also shot in the knee, we will note that the Cosa Nostra probably copied its knee-capping technique from Cap Hatfield.
We will then visit the nearby location of the famous encounter between Devil Anse and the bounty hunter, whom Anse shot and killed while the bounty hunter was reading Anse his Miranda rights, sixty years before the Miranda decision.
We will not waste any time pointing out the location of the Battle of Grapevine, or where Devil Anse lived in the former home place of the Perry Cline family, as they, too, are included on all the cheap tours.
Our tour will end after we cross the river at Delorme and re-enter Kentucky, where we will point out the ancestral Daniels home, where Cap Hatfield beat two women for forty minutes with a cow’s tail.
While our tour will end there this year, it may have one additional stop in years to come. We have heard by the grapevine that the soon-to-be-published paperback version of King’s opus will feature Jim Vance beating Nancy McCoy Hatfield all night with an elephant’s trunk. As soon as we determine the exact location of that terrible event, it will be part of the tour.
NOTE: To any reader who is easily taken in by tall tales about “The Feud:” Although all the foregoing places and events appear in the “supersized feud story,” this article is satire!