Author: Thomas Dotson

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A Marker or a Black Mark?

I am all for historical markers for every historically important event, place or person in Pike and Logan Counties, and Frank and Nancy McCoy Hatfield Phillips were certainly significant figures in our history. A marker for them is long overdue.

I have no problem with Nancy, because the worst thing in the record about her is that she was, at times, a bootlegger. To that I simply say that she did what she needed to do to support her children. I respect Nancy for her guts. Her gumption and willingness to fight for her family remind me of my McCoy mother and a couple of her sisters.

The case of Frank Phillips is far different, because there we risk lionizing the very behavior that has been unfairly ascribed to ALL our ancestors.

Frank Phillips was a criminal. He was a criminal from the age of 16 when he shot at a man until the gunfight that took his life.

This story can be read in my book, “Lies, Damned Lies, and Feud Tales.”  https://tinyurl.com/ycqlg3oy

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Hatfield & McCoy Hokum on the Web Hatfield-McCoy Feud Hokum

Abner Vance: The Fight for Truth in History Continues

[It is fascinating how the history of the people of the Tug Valley has been fictionalized, that is falsified, at so many points.  I often wonder why that is.  Why is it that we have so many tales that have survived into the present, but so many of them are built on lies?  The Abner Vance story is just such a lie. The Abner Vance story is in many ways a foundational story for our local history, and like so many of these tales it romanticizes a particular kind of frontier violence.  If you accept the Abner Vance tale, as writer Dean King did hook, line, and sinker, then our history began with a cold blooded murder, itself a response to the mistreatment of a young girl.  Sexual violence leading to homicide leading to a flight to the wilderness.  Racy stuff.  As Thomas points out here, the truth (poorer cousin of the legend) is more drab and more ordinary and, because of that, something we can all more easily relate to. –Ryan Hardesty]

Abner Vance, the great grandfather of Devil Anse Hatfield, shot and killed Lewis Horton in Russell County, Virginia on September 22, 1817. He was hanged for the crime in Washington County, Virginia on July 17, 1819. Both the feud stories and the public records agree on the foregoing, but, on virtually every other point, the divergence between the story and the actual record is glaring.

(Abner Vance was my fourth great grandfather.)

The Abner Vance yarn is set forth succinctly on the Vance Family website:

“Abner Vance born c 1750 in NC. He migrated into the southwestern part of Virginia (Clinch River Valley, Russell Co) sometime around 1790. He was of the Baptist faith and spent much of his time preaching.

One of Abner’s daughters (and it is thought to have been Elizabeth) ran off with Lewis HORTON. After several months Lewis Horton returned with the girl and dropped her off at her parent’s home. It is said that Abner and Susannah pleaded with Lewis to marry the girl. He refused and turned to ride away. Abner went into the house and returned with his gun and shot Horton as he was riding away. Horton died a few hours later.

Abner Vance became a “fugitive”. He left Russell County that night, September 17, 1817 and traveled along the Tug and Guyandotte Rivers where he spent the next two years.

At the urging of family members Abner returned to Russell County to stand trial for the murder of Lewis Horton. Public opinion was that Abner would be “freed” due to his “reputation as a preacher”. On his arrival in Russell County, he was locked in jail and held without bail.

The first trial ended in a “hung jury”. A second trial was held in Washington County. There Abner Vance was found “guilty” of the murder of Lewis Horton and sentenced to hang. A third trial was held. Abner was again found guilty and sentenced to hang. The case was taken to the court of appeals but the lower court’s decision was upheld.

Petitions for the release of Abner Vance were circulated but to no avail. The Governor would not interfere. Abner Vance was hanged 16th of July, 1819 in Abington, Washington County VA. A short time afterwards a courier arrived with a pardon from the Governor. Susannah VANCE and her children left Russell County and migrated into the Tug, Big Sandy and Guyandotte valleys.”

 

Various purveyors of the feud story have reproduced this family legend, almost as seen here. The two best-selling books following the 2012 TV mini-series, by Lisa Alther and Dean King, have the yarn. Both add to it the totally false claim that Abner Vance accumulated vast tracts of land in the Tug Valley during his two-year hiatus in the wilderness, which he parceled out to his surviving progeny at his death.

The Abner Vance yarn had been thoroughly debunked for a decade when Alther and King wrote their “histories,” yet both included the old yarn just as nothing had been learned since L.D. Hatfield first published ii in his 1944 “True Story” of the feud.

In the September, 2003 issue of the Appalachian Quarterly, beginning on page 40, Grace Dotson told the real story of Abner Vance–from the court records. Anyone repeating the old Abner Vance Yarn after that time was either ignorant or willfully dishonest. Back issues are available on the Wise County Historical Society’s website.

The premier current Vance researcher, Barbara Vance Cherep, published her actual history of the case on the internet in 2007.

Ms. Cherep proves, by the court records, that the Abner Vance yarn is false in detail.

In July, 2012, Randy Marcum, a legitimate West Virginia historian who works at the West Virginia Department of Culture and History, gave a presentation which completely debunked the old Vance yarn, relying mainly on the work of Barbara Cherep.

That presentation was available on YouTube for more than a year before the publication of the book by Dean King. King was undeterred by either Cherep or Marcum, and reproduced the old yarn in a book which he said would “deflate the legends and restore accurate historical detail.” (p. xii-xiii)

Abner Vance was not a preacher. There is no record of him ever preaching, and no testimony in either of his trials that he was a preacher. The court records refer to him as “Abner Vance, laborer.”

Abner Vance’s daughter, Elizabeth already had two out-of-wedlock children in 1817, one being my great, great grandmother, Mary Vance Hatfield, and was possibly pregnant with a third. The claim that Vance was angry with Horton for debauching his innocent daughter is false. The real motive was Horton’s recent testimony against Vance’s interest in a lawsuit.

Abner Vance did not abscond to the Tug Valley immediately after the crime and remain there for two years. He was arrested shortly after the crime, and had his first court hearing on October 16, 1817, at which time he was remanded to jail, without bail, and he remained in jail every day until he was hanged. At each of his many court appearances during the twenty-two months between the crime and the execution, the court record states that he was brought from the jail to the court by the jailer. The record proves conclusively that Abner Vance never set foot in the Tug Valley during those two years.

There were two trials of Abner Vance, not three. There was no trial which resulted in a hung jury. At the first trial, in Russell County, he was convicted and sentenced to hang. He appealed on the basis that the trial judge had not allowed him to plead insanity. The appeals court set the conviction aside and ordered the lower court to try him again, allowing him to plead insanity.

Unable to find a jury that had not prejudged the case in Russell County, the second trial was moved to Washington County. Vance’s claim of insanity was not accepted by the jury, which sentenced him once again to hang for the crime.

The sentence was carried out on July 17, 1819. The newspapers reported that he addressed the crowd for an hour and a half, and accepted death with equanimity. He did not deny the crime, but argued strenuously that his punishment was excessive.

The true story of Abner Vance shows a man who, either in the heat of passion, or in a state of temporary insanity, killed a man. He then faced his crime and fought a valiant fight for his life. Losing, he then faced death in a most manly fashion. He was NOT a coward who killed a man and then absconded to the wilderness.

The struggle between history and legend continues today. In my book, “The Hatfield & McCoy Feud after Kevin Costner: Rescuing History,” I refuted the yarn in detail. On July 12, 2014, an article in the Logan Banner repeated the old Vance yarn, totally ignoring the work of Cherep, Marcum and me.

Fortunately for the side of real history, Ryan Hardesty did a series of three articles on Abner Vance for the magazine, “Blue Ridge Country.”Hatfields & McCoys, Revisited: Part 5.2 – The Legend of Abner Vance – Blue Ridge Country

Back issues are available on the Wise County Historical Society’s website.

Of course the next “True Story” churned out by the feud industry will have the old Abner Vance yarn, just as it was before the turn of the century.

 

 

 

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Hatfield-McCoy Feud Hokum Uncategorized

A Tale of Two Jims

The above sketch is by Tug Valley’s own Vera Kay Fink Hankins.

As I wrote in my book, there were no heroes in the Hatfield and McCoy feud. Some partisans—yes, there are still partisans today—go to great lengths to find heroes.  These same partisans also have villains.

Feud writers concentrate on Ran’l McCoy and Anse Hatfield, but the actual history is presented much better with the stories of two men named Jim–Jim McCoy and Jim Vance.

This story can be read in my book, “Lies, Damned Lies, and Feud Tales.”  https://tinyurl.com/ycqlg3oy

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More Wikipedia Wisdumb on the Hatfields and the McCoys

Wikipedia begins its section entitled “Feud” with a largely apocryphal story of the death of Asa Harmon McCoy. The first sentence is: “Asa Harmon McCoy, who was despised by Jim Vance (uncle of Devil Anse Hatfield) for joining the Union Army during the Civil War, was discharged from the army early because of a broken leg.” How Wiki knows that Jim Vance despised Asa Harmon because if his Union service is not stated, but if he “despised” every man on Peter Creek who served the Union, he was a man literally overflowing with enmity. There were two Union Home Guards on Peter Creek, each with over 50 members. Several dozen Peter Creek men were members of Colonel John Dils’s 39th Mounted Infantry, while fewer than a dozen Peter Creek men served the Confederacy.

This essay, in its entirety, can be read in my book, “Lies, Damned Lies, and Feud Tales.”  https://www.amazon.com/dp/1977716814/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1511238586&sr=1-1&keywords=Lies%2C+Damned+Lies%2C+and+Feud+Tales

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The Hatfields and the McCoys in Wikipedia

The drawing is by the talented Tug Valley artist, Vera Kay Fink Hankins.

The Wikipedia article on the Hatfields and the McCoys is in error on a majority of the points made in the article.

This essay, in its entirety, can be read in my book, “Lies, Damned Lies, and Feud Tales.”  https://www.amazon.com/dp/1977716814/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1511238586&sr=1-1&keywords=Lies%2C+Damned+Lies%2C+and+Feud+Tales

 

 

[i] Preston, John David, “The Civil War in the Big Sandy Valley of Kentucky, 304 and 448-9.

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Dean King Hokum Hatfield & McCoy Hokum in Books

Order in the Court! Heah Come Da Judge!

Because they know the definition of the word “feud,” the feud yarn-spinners put in enough apocryphal incidents to give the reader a story of continuing violence, from at least the hog trial in 1878 until the hanging of Ellison Mounts in 1890.  They give footnotes to create the appearance of a foundation for the events, but the footnotes are almost always to some previous yarn-spinner.  Some, like Lisa Alther, obviously never saw the records, while others, such as Otis Rice and Dean King must have seen the records, because they cite them occasionally, among the much more common citations of prior yarn-spinners.

Writing about the early 1880s, Otis Rice wrote: “The Hatfields occasionally rode to Pikeville, but they traveled in companies adequate for their protection and were heavily armed.” (p. 30)

Writing about the months following the arrest of Johnse Hatfield and his liberation by Devil Anse’s posse, Dean King wrote: “Like so many other Hatfield-McCoy clashes, this one and its ensuing accustions would go unresolved. Kentucky law officers ultimately refused to deal with the interstate legalities or to attempt to detain the Hatfields.”

So, there you have it: According to both the historian, Rice, and the novelist posing as a historian, King, the Hatfields and McCoys were lawless people, who paid no attention to the law. They crossed the state line and committed crime with impunity, and then returned to their sanctuary on the other side of the Tug. Furthermore, the Kentucky law was so scared of the terrible Hatfields that they wouldn’t even attempt to “detain the Hatfields.”

In October, 1880 Tolbert and Bud McCoy arrested Johnse Hatfield on a Pike County charge of carrying a concealed weapon.  King has Bud not there, and Jim and Ran’l in the posse, but he knows he is lying, because he has obviously seen the records.

Lets look at just a couple of records that show just how far from the truth Mr. King strays in his attempt to portray an uncivilized and depraved people:  I don’t know whether Johnse went to Pikeville alone after he was sprung from the McCoy brothers, or if his father accompanied him to insure his safety, but I do know that on October 14, 1880, he stood trial for the offense. He was convicted and fined twenty-five dollars and given ten days in the county jail. Here is the record:

JH-trial1

The case starts at the bottom of one page, seen above,  and carries over to the following page:

 

Now, for the claim that the Pike authorities didn’t even try to detain the dangerous Hatfields: Elias and Floyd were arrested and tried for allegedly participating in Johnse’s liberation from the custody of Tolbert and Bud McCoy.

Far from being beyond the reach of the law, Elias and Floyd indeed showed up to face the music. Two of Tolbert’s close McCoy relatives testified FOR the accused Hatfields. Lo, and behold! The jury of twelve Pike County men found the West Virginia Hatfields NOT guilty! So, we see Elias and Floyd Hatfield coming to Pikeville and standing trial during  precisely the time King claims that the Hatfields were beyond the reach of the courts.

Here’s the  the court record on Floyd’s trial:

DA-AB81

Dean King undoubtedly saw these records during his “four years of intensive research.” Therefore, the prevarication is deliberate, and it is done to deceive his readers. And people wonder why I call Dean King a liar!

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Dean King Hokum

Let’s Get Those Tourist Dollars Rolling In!

 

I have asked several people why they support Dean King’s book, when they know that it is mostly lies, concocted by prior writers all the way back to John Spears in 1888, with a few whoppers of his own thrown in for good measure. They all give the same answer: “King is good for tourism.”

Of course I don’t believe that, simply because, as I say in a previous post, there is no tour guide who takes tourists to the fictitious places King has in his book.  No tourist is shown the spot where seven Hatfields emptied their rifles at three men riding abreast from an ambush thirty feet off the road with no fatalities, the location of the house where Cap Hatfield beat two women to the point of death with a cow’s tail, or where Belle Beaver, the hillbilly whore of Happy Hollow plied her trade.

The main criticism of my book from that crowd is that it is “bad for tourism.” Well, the truth might be harmful to the tourist trade, but I doubt it. On the slight chance that it may be true that my book will harm the tourist trade, I have a proposal which I believe will more than compensate.

It is just downright awful that there are no markers in West Virginia along Route 49 between Matewan and Delorme, marking the important “feud sites.” A few markers would contribute greatly to the tourist trade, but I know that money is scarce in Mingo County, so maybe it will take outside funding to get markers erected at important sites along the river. When it comes to charitable activities, I like to do more than my share, so here is my proposal for marking the West Virginia side of Tug River between Matewan and Delorme:

If Dean King will pay for a sign at the Mouth of Thacker Creek, telling how he and his daughter were shot at TWICE in 2009 and 2010, then I will pay for two signs, one for the Battle of Grapevine and one for the home of Devil Anse. Each of us would agree to attend a “Dedication” of our signs, and answer questions for one hour. Surely Mr. King will consider “Two-for-one” a good deal.

If Mr. King will bring along the executive from the Heartland Timber Group, who was with him on both of his near-fatal visits to Thacker Creek, and let him answer some questions,  then I will pay for a third sign, marking the place where Frank Phillips murdered Jim Vance.

Properly advertised, I believe these sign dedications would be the biggest tourist events of the season. If we get right on it, we could probably do it during the week between the Marathon and the Reunion this coming June.

Let Mr. King prove that he is really interested in promoting tourism in Tug Valley, by accepting my very generous offer.

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Was It a Feud, or Was it a Crime Spree?

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.

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Dean King Hokum Hatfield & McCoy Hokum in Books

Dean King: A Review of a Review

In early 2012, I read on the “Real Hatfield, Real McCoy…” Facebook page that a writer named Dean King was soon to publish a book on the Hatfield and McCoy feud.  I was interested, of course, as I had been hoping for someone to write a book undoing the damage to the reputations of my ancestors that originated with the yellow journalists of the 1880s and continued through the ersatz “history” written by Otis Rice in 1982, wherein he cited journalists over one hundred fifty times in one hundred twenty-six pages.

In preparation for the advent of the King opus, I went to the library and checked out his “Patrick O’ Brien: A Life Revealed.” I hadn’t read more than a dozen pages before I realized that what I was reading was fiction: No one could possibly know the details that King claimed to know about O’Brian.

I pre-ordered the King feud book, grandiosely titled “The True Story,” on Amazon, and received one of the first copies.  I was not at all surprised to see many direct quotations of words King claimed to know were spoken more than a century ago in the woods of the Tug Valley. I was only mildly surprised to read what people thought and smelled in the Tug Valley woods long ago.

I was, however, actually surprised at the number of egregious and easily proven lies in King’s book.

Given his connections in the publishing industry—he tells us early on that his brother-in-law runs one of the big New York publishing houses—I was not surprised to see glowing blurbs in his Amazon listing from the shills at organs like the Wall Street Journal and the Boston Globe, so I went looking for reviews of his prior efforts.  After wading through several boiler-plate reviews by American reviewers, I came across one from the Mother Country that intrigued me: Jan Morris–photo above– reviewed the book on O’ Brien for the Guardian-Observer in 2000.  http://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/sep/03/biography

I had read Morris’s two books on Venice, and, in spite of her troubled personal life, I considered her an outstanding writer, so I was interested in her review of King.  Morris was born “James Humphrey” Morris, in 1926. She continued to be James Humphrey for forty-six years, during which time (s)he married Elizabeth Tuckness and fathered five children.  In 1972, James Humphrey went to Morocco to avail himself of the services of an Arab surgeon.  Here’s Jan when she was a good-looking guy named James:

Jan as James

Whether the Bedouin used a scimitar or a scalpel, we do not know, but we do know that as a result of his ministrations, James Humphrey became “Jan,” and remains so to this day.

In her review of King’s “biography” of O’ Brien, Morris apparently saw what I see in his “True Story” of the feud. Morris says: “King’s telling of the puzzling tale is decent, fair and extremely thorough, but often ingenuous. There was no Australian Embassy in 1929; there never has been such a thing as ‘England’s Air Force’; the Basque country is not the same as Catalonia, as page 168 seems to imply. Who cares that, on a journey in France: ‘Patrick revved the engine of the little 2CV to pass slow-moving traffic on the winding two-lane roads’? “

Morris obviously sees the same disregard for fact in the O’Brien book that King exhibits in his “True Story” of the feud.  He claims to know what O’Brien did on a country road in France, just as he purports to know what Anse Hatfield and Sam McCoy did and thought in the West Virginia woods, and this reviewer caught onto it!

The last sentence in the review is: “In O’Brian, on the contrary, I am reading the work of an artificer, a contriver of genius and, well, a liar.” While Morris calls King’s subject in that book a liar, I call King, himself a liar. Dean King is a talented writer, but he is also a liar. There is a huge difference between Morris’s accusation and mine, in that O’Brien is dead and cannot sue Morris for libel, while King is alive and needs only to file a suit and prove that I am lying when I call him a liar.  His suit could definitely be worthwhile, because I made a million dollars in one year while King was still in school.

I know that the first reaction of people reading this is that, as King is a public figure, he would have a hard row to hoe in suing me for libel, but that is not so. A public figure has the same protection as a private individual if he can show that the libel was intended to do him professional or financial harm, and I freely admit that when I warn the public that King’s book is a collection of lies, I am doing just that.  My goal is to stop completely the sale of his compendium of lies about my ancestors, thus depriving him of that source of income.

I wouldn’t care if King made millions from writing about my people, IF he would tell the truth and say that he was writing “historical fiction,” but when he titled it “The TRUE Story,” he crossed a line that I must defend.  Historical fiction is partly true, but a “True Story” is a true story. If a writer says he is telling a “True Story,” and then writes what he knows to be untrue, or writes with reckless disregard for the truth or falsity of what he writes, then he lied when he wrote the title.

All he has to do is prove his case, but I have no worries whatsoever, because, in an American court, truth is an absolute defense to a claim of libel.

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Hatfield-McCoy Feud Hokum

War by other Means

The end of the Civil War was only the beginning of sorrows for many of the veterans—especially those on the losing side. Devil Anse Hatfield was indicted three times in 1865 for war-time murders. When I discussed Dan Cunningham’s accusations of war-time depredations by the old Rebel raider, I said that while I was sure that Cunningham exaggerated to Anse’s detriment, I believed that most of the incidents actually happened. From the evidence in the court records, somebody in Pikeville agreed with me.

This story can be read in my book, “Lies, Damned Lies, and Feud Tales.”  https://tinyurl.com/ycqlg3oy