Wikipedia says a feud is “a long-running argument or fight, often between social groups of people, especially families or clans. Feuds begin because one party (correctly or incorrectly) perceives itself to have been attacked, insulted or wronged by another. Intense feelings of resentment trigger the initial retribution, which causes the other party to feel equally aggrieved and vengeful. The dispute is subsequently fuelled by a long-running cycle of retaliatory violence.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feud
The key phrase here is “a long-running cycle of retaliatory violence.”
What is missing in the Hatfield and McCoy feud story is this “cycle of retaliatory violence.”
Charles Howell, of the Pittsburgh Times, who said that his information came from “Mr. and Mrs. McCoy,” described the troubles in Tug Valley during the 1880s thus: “There is a gang in West Virginia banded together for the purpose of murder and rapine. There is a gang in Kentucky whose cohesive principle is the protection of families and homes of men and women. An unresisting family has been deprived of five of its members, a father and mother of five of their children, their homes burned, their effects sent up in smoke, their little substance scattered to the wind, themselves forced out at midnight as wanderers on the bleak and inhospitable mountain side, almost naked in the blasts of winter.” http://www.wvculture.org/history/hatfieldmccoyarticles.html
The key word in Mr. Howell’s claim is “unresisting.” What Mr. Howell is describing is a Hatfield crime spree of several years’ duration. There is none of the tit-for-tat that is commonly found in a feud. The McCoys are “unresisting,” in Howell’s writing; they are merely victims who are not carrying on one side of a “feud.”
In another place on that same link, Howell states: “The Hatfield-McCoy war, divested of the coloring with which assiduous correspondents have clothed it, and of all the sentiment with which the representatives of the two States have invested it, is simply a succession of cowardly murders by day and assassinations and house-burnings by night. All of the murders have been cruel, heartless and almost without the shadow of provocation. Given, on the one hand, a family with its contingents of the same blood, allied and cemented by a common desire to avenge an imaginary affront, and on the other another family, small in the matter of alliance and collateral sympathies, doomed to destruction by the larger one, and the case is stated.”
Again it is all one-sided. The evil Hatfields killed five McCoys “almost without the shadow of provocation.” Howell is describing a crime spree, and not a feud. Howell’s description is echoed in the writings of John Spears of the New York Sun. The recent book by Dean King adopts the Howell/Spears description of the troubles, citing the 44 page book by Spears 66 times.
The group that I refer to as “The Ran’l McCoy cult,” adheres to the Howell/Spears position, and well they should, as Howell and Spears both got their stories from the Pikeville elite and the Ran’l McCoy family.
On the surface there are good grounds for the argument that what occurred was a Hatfield crime spree. All one has to do is ignore the murder of Ellison Hatfield, or make it a matter of the three McCoys defending themselves from the murderous Ellison Hatfield and do Spears and King and treat the illegal invasions of West Virginia by the Phillips posse and the murders of Jim Vance and Bill Dempsey as legal operations, and what we had was, indeed, nothing but a Hatfield crime spree.
But the cult goes further: They state the case exactly as it was stated by Spears, Howell and King, and then they demand that it be called a “feud.” It is almost like saying that Ted Bundy was feuding with young women.
The appearance of several Hatfield descendants in King’s advertisement of his book, which portrays their ancestors as murderers without motive, is every bit as remarkable as is the “crime spree as a feud” group. Neither makes sense to me.