Category: Dean King Hokum

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Dean King Hokum Hatfield-McCoy Feud Hokum Real Hatfield-McCoy History

Fake News is Older than Feuding

Fake news is as old as the news business. Mark Twain is widely quoted as saying: “If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re misinformed.”

So, how does a world-class historian end up writing a book full of fake news? The answer is simply that he had bad sources. John Spears traveled from New York to Pikeville, Kentucky, obviously determined to get the facts straight from the horse’s mouth. Spears names his sources as Randolph McCoy, his wife, Sarah and his son Jim. He also refers to “A lawyer familiar with the case,” which was certainly Perry Cline. At the time Spears was talking to them in Pikeville, Randolph and Jim McCoy were under indictment in Logan County, West Virginia for the murders of James Vance and William Dempsey. The eldest son of Perry Cline was also charged in those murders. Is it any wonder that persons who were charged with murder in the ‘feud’, or had children facing those charges would give a slanted version of events? Is anyone surprised that Jim Vance, recently murdered by the men who were talking to Spears, is the chief villain of the story?

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

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Dean King Hokum Hatfield & McCoy Hokum in Books

We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us!

We Southern Appalachians are the only demographic group that can be publicly insulted with impunity in this politically correct twenty-first century. This will continue to be the case so long as Southern Appalachians continue to aid in the promulgation of lies about themselves and their ancestors.

The most damaging lie about our people is the Hatfield and McCoy feud story. I am not referring to the actual history of the two families, which is not really remarkable for violence in the context of late nineteenth century frontier America.  The problem is the story, which is largely false.

The Hatfield and McCoy feud story, whether in the slimmed down forty-page versions of John Spears and Shirley Donnelly, or in the super-sized four hundred page version of Dean King, is not true. In fact it is false in so many of its material claims—as my own books clearly prove–that it must be considered a lie on the whole.

I despise the feud tales, and I have a very good reason to do so: Every lie in every feud tale makes my ancestors look evil and barbaric. There is not a single lie in any feud book that makes them look more sane and civilized.

I use the term “lie” deliberately, to refer to material misrepresentations of fact which the writer either knew or should have known was false when he wrote it. I am not talking about simple errors like a wrong date or the confusion of similar names—the kind of mistakes every writer makes.

The feud lie, which presents ALL of our ancestors—and, by extension, all of us– as stupid and bloodthirsty cowards, is spread by three types of Appalachians:

First, there are those who believe that the super-sized feud yarn will attract tourists to an area that is virtually in its economic death throes. I try to be as kind as possible to these misguided kinsmen who honestly believe that it is profitable to be dishonest.

They can and must be approached with the power of the truth. Our real history, properly presented, would attract just as many tourists as does the feud lie.

The second group is comprised of folks who just don’t know any better. They need a history lesson or two.

The third group of home-grown aiders and abettors of the feud liars is not approachable on the same basis. Comprised of people who are enamored with the idea of being descended from pathological killers, this group is beyond reason. Rational arguments based on historical facts have no effect on these people. They will help sell a feud book that they frankly admit is false in many material particulars, so long as it presents their ancestors as bloody savages.

pogoClick on graphic to enlarge.

I am sure that most people reading this have seen Dean King’s Facebook page, which features many members of the third group.

The most egregious of the many lies in King’s book says that Ellison Hatfield started the Election Day fight by drawing a knife on Tolbert McCoy. That means that Ellison, called “a splendid man and soldier” in the definitive McCoy story by Truda McCoy, was a would-be murderer, who got only what was coming to him when the McCoys butchered him. By extension, Devil Anse was nothing but a cold-blooded murderer when he executed the three innocent McCoys.

Yet, we see direct descendants of Ellison and Devil Anse pictured with King, helping him sell his lies about their ancestors.

Of course the same lie makes Preacher Anse Hatfield a willing accessory to the triple murder of the three McCoys, but that does not keep descendants of Preacher Anse from giving the book rave reviews.

The best thing about Jim McCoy in the book is the ridiculous claim that he worked for Devil Anse at Anse’s moonshine still, at a time when a vicious blood feud between the two families was underway.  Yet, some descendants of Jim McCoy laud the book.

Asa Harmon McCoy, a warrior to the bone—by the record—is a coward who deserts his home and hides out in a cave. Yet direct descendants of Asa Harmon are shown on King’s Facebook page, grinning from ear to ear as they help him pitch his lies.

The best depiction of any Hatfield or McCoy in King’s screed is of Ran’l McCoy. He is simply a victim. There is not a single laudatory word about Ran’l or any other McCoy in the four hundred plus pages of the book. Yet King has no shortage of McCoys plugging his book.

This third group of Hatfields and McCoy descendants is beyond the reach of rational argument. Any time spent trying to enlighten them is utterly wasted.

 

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Dean King Hokum Uncategorized

We Got Guns! The Little Newspaper that Wasn’t

A recent post on a popular Facebook page devoted to “The Hatfield and McCoy Feud” caught my eye. The poster wrote:  “The story in its basic form will never really change despite efforts to uncover new evidence in documents.”

That is an absolutely true statement. The basic story will never change for one simple reason–it is a STORY! It has not changed materially since John Spears first wrote it in 1888.

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

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Dean King Hokum Hatfield & McCoy Hokum in Books

The Stockholm Syndrome in Southern Appalachia?

The Stockholm Syndrome in Southern Appalachia?

When a hostage bonds with his/her captor, it is called “The Stockholm Syndrome.” Wikipedia says that it: “can be seen as a form of traumatic bonding, which does not necessarily require a hostage scenario, but which describes “strong emotional ties that develop between two persons where one person intermittently harasses, beats, threatens, abuses, or intimidates the other.” Wiki further states that the FBI has found that roughly 8% of victims succumb to the syndrome.

What are we to make of a situation where a much larger percentage—possibly even a majority—of a population of a million or more exhibits evidence of having succumbed to the syndrome? I submit that this is precisely what we now see in the coal mining areas of Southern Appalachia.

West Virginia native Jeff Young wrote: “The key to understanding West Virginia is to recognize that it is less a fully functioning state government than a resource-extraction colony.”  http://grist.org/climate-energy/is-there-hope-for-west-virginia-as-it-moves-away-from-coal/

I have argued that the colonization was possible in the beginning and is maintained today only because the people of Southern Appalachia are perceived as deserving of colonial oppression.

North Carolina native, Betty Cloer Wallace wrote: “Appalachian mountain natives are the only group in America that many people still have the audacity to publicly ridicule as being ignorant—and worse.”  https://mountainx.com/opinion/050609fighting_back/

Historians trace the stereotype from Will Wallace Harney’s article “A Strange Land and a Peculiar People,” published by Lippincott’s Magazine in October 1873, through John Fox, Jr to Al Capp and television’s “Beverly Hillbillies.  I contend that, at least since 1888, the hillbilly stereotype rests mainly upon the story of the Hatfield and McCoy feud. In its “Hillbilly” entry, Wikipedia says: “Fueled by news stories of mountain feuds such as that in the 1880s between the Hatfields and McCoys, the hillbilly stereotype developed in the late 19th to early 20th century.” I agree.

Within a few days of entering graduate school at Cornell more than half a century ago, I was faced with this question from a fellow student from New York City: “What kind of people kill over a hundred of each other over a pig?”  When I objected to the characterization, he produced a copy of the New York Times article reporting the death of Cap Hatfield in 1930, which gave him all the documentation he needed. After all, it was in the nation’s “Newspaper of record.”

In my more than eighty years, I have never had anyone refer to Harney, Fox or Capp as support for their opinion of my people. It is always “the Feud!” I wrote in my 2013 book, “The Hatfield & McCoy Feud after Kevin Costner: Rescuing History: “The feud story was a creation of the big city newspapers.  The immediate purpose for its creation was to devalue the people and thereby facilitate the transfer of ownership of the wealth of the Valley to the same big city financiers who controlled those newspapers.  The ultimate purpose was to transform the independent mountaineers into docile and willing wage workers. This transformation was abetted by the state governments and the elites on both the state and local levels, who hoped to profit by the transformation.”

I show in my book that the story of the Hatfield & McCoy feud is, indeed, a story and not history, and that it was created and is maintained for the purpose of facilitating the continuing colonial oppression of the region.

Ms. Wallace ended her essay with: “We do have a choice. We can hasten our own cultural demise by doing nothing, by drawing a circle around ourselves and trying to shut out the rest of the world. Or… we can pick up our pine knots and go to war—to save ourselves.”

Unfortunately, a large percentage of my people have done the opposite of what Ms. Wallace urges us to do. The worst screed ever penned about my people—for reasons amply stated in my book—is the book by Dean King, which came out in the wake of the hit Kevin Costner TV mini-series.

Mr. King wrote in his book that the man responsible for overseeing 650,000 acres of West Virginia land for the largest absentee “colonizer” of West Virginia took two days out of his schedule to show Mr. King around the feud region.  Of course the land magnate’s time was not wasted, as the end result was a book that showed ALL the people of the feud area to be such low types that Mr. King’s stated “hero” of his story is the murderer of sleeping coal miners, Dan Cunningham.

When one looks at Mr. King’s Facebook page and sees the number of descendants of the people he maligns who are helping him to sell his massive libel of their ancestors, and, by extension, themselves, one sees the Stockholm Syndrome writ large.

The one that galls me most is a photo of King with descendants of Ellison Hatfield on his FB page, helping him sell his lies about their ancestor. King writes that Ellison Hatfield, one of the most respected men in Tug Valley, started the Election Day fight but drawing a knife on Tolbert McCoy.
Growing up on Blackberry in the 1940’s and ‘50’s,I heard the story of that fight from a dozen people who were eyewitnesses. I delivered the Williamson Daily News to the son of Preacher Anse who lived in Preacher Anse’s house from 1952-55. NO eyewitness, none of whom had a dog in the fight, placed a knife in Ellison’s hand. Not a single court record has a word of testimony placing a knife in Ellison’s hand. Yet, people directly descended from Ellison Hatfield help King sell that egregious lie about their ancestor.

If the pine knots are not taken up soon then the future is indeed bleak for such a people.

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Dean King Hokum Uncategorized

The Library of Virginia’s “People’s Choice” Writer Survives Ambush in Feud Country—Twice!

 

Two thirds of Mingo County, West Virginia is owned today by five out-of-state coal and land companies. The Forestland Group controls over three and one half million acres of land in the US. Seven Hundred twenty-three thousand acres are in West Virginia and Kentucky. As the map shows, it is not a great overstatement to say that they “own West Virginia.”  http://www.forestlandgroup.com/about.html

forestland

From the company’s website, we see:

Craig R. Kaderavek
Senior Director of Forest Operations-Appalachian Region

 

According to Dean King, Mr. Kaderavek and one of his associates (p.348) took the intrepid explorer/writer on a tour of the Valley in the summer of 2009. At the mouth of Thacker Creek, the group was fired upon by the barbaric descendants of the feudists. (p.xii)

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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Dean King Hokum Hatfield-McCoy Feud Hokum

Library of Virginia’s “People’s Choice Award” Won by a Fraudster

The Library of Virginia’s 2014 People’s Choice Award for non-fiction has gone to a book that is probably the biggest literary hoax since Clifford Irving’s bogus “Autobiography of Howard Hughes” more than forty years ago.

This is the first in a series of posts I will make which will prove conclusively—by the record—that Dean King’s “The Feud: The Hatfields and McCoys, The True Story” is one of the biggest collections of falsehood ever sold as non-fiction.

If I covered all of King’s distortions of the record and outright lies, this series would be longer than King’s four hundred thirty page book; therefore, I will cover only a dozen or so of the most egregious examples of the perfidy of this “historian.”

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

 

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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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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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Dean King Hokum Hatfield-McCoy Feud Hokum Real Hatfield-McCoy History Uncategorized

Crazy Jim Vance: Did They Really Call Him “Crazy?”

Jim Vance is “a raccoon with rabies, a psychopath, a misogynist, and throw in a pinch of Bruce Dern. That’s the recipe.”—Tom Berenger

Otis Rice, a full professor and the West Virginia Historian Laureate, wrote of Jim Vance: “The tall, heavy-set, dark-bearded Vance, himself a later casualty in the feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys, had a reputation, even among his rough associates, for ruthlessness and vindictiveness.” The “historian Laureate” gives NO supporting documentation for his wildly inaccurate description of Jim Vance, and he had good reasons not to.  How could Rice present Vance as a ruthless and vindictive criminal when the court records show him holding the offices of constable and justice of the peace in West Virginia and deputy sheriff in Kentucky, with not a single criminal charge–not even a misdemeanor–against him in his entire long life?

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