Writers of “feud books” despise the historical record. Sometimes ignored and sometimes directly contradicted, the records take a back seat to newspaper reporters in feud writing. The biggest selling feud book cites newspapers over two hundred times. The one hundred thirty page book by the “historian,” Otis Rice, cites them more than one hundred fifty times.
Let us examine two newspaper reports, one from the nation’s “newspaper of record,” the New York Times, and on from a West Virginia report.
The Times had the benefit of four decades of backward vision when it reported the death of Cap Hatfield on page 8 of it’s August 23, 1930 issue, but this is what the Old Gray Lady said:
“Cap Hatfield was called the most dangerous of his clan.” Born in 1862, the year after the famous McCoy-Hatfield vendetta commenced, he was the eldest of the thirteen children of Anderson (Devil Anse) Hatfield, chief of the clan and its leader throughout the forty-eight years of the feud. More than 100 men, women and children of the two families were slain in the battles, which raged in Logan and Mingo Counties, West Virginia, and Pike County, Kentucky. It was said in those days that whenever a McCoy head showed out of a window a Hatfield gun would bark; whenever a Hatfield gazed from his home at the surrounding hill country a McCoy gun would bark.”
That paragraph contains one grain of truth: Devil Anse Hatfield was the father of Cap Hatfield. Everything else in the paragraph is false, by the record.
This story can be read in my book, “Lies, Damned Lies, and Feud Tales.” https://tinyurl.com/ycqlg3oy