I wrote four books for one simple reason: I got tired of seeing pure fiction and lies published about my McCoy and Hatfield ancestors. It was so bad that I can state, without equivocation, that anyone who has read only the feud tales knows very little about most of our history.
You can prove it to yourself by this little exercise: Find someone who had not read my books or my FB posts. List for them the four main characters on each side of the feud story which would be:
Hatfield side: Devil Anse Hatfield, his sons, Johnse and Cap, and Jim Vance. McCoy side; Ran’l and Jim McCoy and Perry Cline and Frank Phillips.
Then ask them two questions: 1) Name the characters on both sides who were NEVER charged with a crime. 2) Name the ones who killed someone between the end of the Civil War in 1965 and the Election of 1882.
The odds of you getting the correct answer are somewhat less than your odds of taking an iPhone photo of a Unicorn on Main Street. NONE of the hundreds of people that I addressed in groups after my first book ever answered either question correctly. In fact, the correct answers were so shocking that I believe some left the room thinking I told them wrong. But the proof is in the records, and I use the records to prove it.
Jim Vance, whom Dean King wrote was “More fearsome than Devil Anse,” lived almost sixty years and was never charged with a single crime. Jim Vance was elected constable and appointed justice of the peace in Logan County, WV, and made Chief Deputy Sheriff in Pike County, KY, by none other than Sheriff Perry Cline.
Jim Vance, presented as impoverished and living in a one room shack by Dean King, was a leading businessman in Tug Valley. He paid almost as much for a farm in Wayne County in 1886 as Devil Anse got for five thousand acres in 1888. Three months after Jim Vance died, his son and son-in-law sold five thousand acres of land that they had received from the Old Man. Never charged with even a misdemeanor in his long life, he is now known as “Crazy Jim Vance,” burner of homes and killer of children.
The only one of the eight ‘feudists’ who killed a man between 1865 and 1882 was Perry Cline. He is presented in the feud yarns as a sly, slinking lawyer who was afraid of Devil Anse. In fact, the opposite is more likely true. The same year of his trial and acquittal for manslaughter, 1878, saw him plead guilty to assault and battery.
Perry Cline was a man’s man, elected High Sheriff of Pike County at the age of twenty-five, less than four years after he moved into the county. The two-fisted, gun-slinging Sheriff, the King of Peter Creek when he was barely old enough to vote, does not faintly resemble the sneaky shyster in the feud books and in Kevin Costner’s movie.
Some of the feud books have the fact that that Perry Cline guarded the nine men charged for the 1882 lynching of the three McCoys when they were taken to their habeas corpus trial in Louisville. But none of them say why. When I read my first feud book—by V. Jones—in 1952, I asked Uncle Ransom Hatfield, son of Preacher Anse, why a lawyer was picked to guard the ‘outlaws.’ His simple answer was: “Perry was the only man in Pikeville that had the nerve to do it.”
I knew over a dozen old people while growing up on Blackberry who knew both the men discussed here. What they told me about stood up as true after I had done over two thousand hours of research in the courthouses and libraries.
NOTE: Documents proving every claim I make here are reproduced in my books.