Category: Uncategorized

Johnse and Roseanna first appeared as Romeo and Juliet in Jean Thomas’s book, “Big Sandy” in 1940.

Eight years later, the magazine writer, Virgil Jones, titled a chapter in his book: “Mountain Romeo and Juliet.” Jones never gave any prior writer credit for stories he purloined, so he does not credit Thomas for this. Both writers said the couple met at an election in 1880. Both Thomas and Jones, and every other writer after them except for this writer, wrote that the couple met at the 1880 election.

The story appears first in the original telling of the story by New York Sun reporter John Spears in 1888. Spears is closer to the truth, as he does not mention an election, referring only to Johnse’s moonshine whiskey business.

Pricy Farley Scott was born in either 1869 or 1870. Pricy grew up two houses above the McCoys on Blackberry Fork of Pond creek. She lived until the late 1960’s. When I was growing up, she lived on the old Randolph McCoy farm, which she and her husband, Crit Scott, had bought in 1902. My sister, Wanda Hatfield, rented a little house from Pricy from 1952-55. The house sat behind Pricy’s house and overlapped the old seat of the McCoy homeplace which was burnt on New Year’s Day of 1888.

Pricy’s father, Ali, and brother, John B. were the first to visit the smoldering remains of the McCoy home on January 2. Pricy saw the corpses of both Calvin and Alifair in the home of the next-door neighbor, John Scott, before they were prepared for burial. Pricy said Alifair was shot just below the left breast, with the bullet lodged against her shoulder blade. Calvin was shot just behind the left ear, the bullet exiting from his right temple, near the eye.

Most writers of feud yarns say that the surviving McCoys spent the remainder of the night outdoors. Pricy said they spent the night at John Scott’s house. To  believe the tales, one has to believe that the neighbors of Randolph McCoy heard dozens of rifle shots and saw the flames of the burning home and simply laid back down to sleep, without even checking on their neighbors. This is a libel against people who always came to the aid of neighbors in trouble. Under oath in the 1899 trial of Johnse Hatfield, the prosecutor asked Randolph McCoy where he spent that night. Randolph answered: “At John Scott’s house.” So much for Dean King’s claim that Ran’l snuggled up to couple of hogs in his hog pen.

Pricy was twelve years old, selling gingerbread she had baked at the 1882 election where the three McCoy boys killed Ellison Hatfield. She said that Johnse was there, and that he winked at her every time he passed her table. She said that Johnse loved all the girls and most of them loved him back. She did not doubt that one of the girls who reciprocated was Roseanna McCoy.

Pricy Scott, whose best friends were the daughters of Randolph McCoy, had no memory of any romance that included a stay at the Hatfield home by Roseanna, or of a baby. In his notes at the end of the chapter in Truda McCoy’s book, historian Leonard Roberts wrote of the baby: “Its birth, age and death are not proved.”(p.224) According to Roberts, who talked to everyone who could have had pertinent information,  Roseanna’s baby most likely never existed.

Pricy said that the couple undoubtedly knew each other, because Johnse brought wholesale quantities of his father’s moonshine to Roseanna’s brothers for them to resale. Here is a court record of Floyd being charged with “retailing,” which was the charge used when someone was reselling whiskey that they did not actually distill. We know this was Roaeanna’s brother, Floyd, because the named witness is John Scott, next-door neighbor to the McCoys.

(Click to expand)

Dean King, who wrote the biggest yarn of all, runs into some serious timeline trouble with this tale.  King knows, because he refers to it, that Johnse married Roseanna’s cousin, Nancy McCoy, in May of 1881. King invents an election that never happened in the spring of 1880 in order to fit all his fictional events into his timeline. His problem is that there were NO elections in the spring in Kentucky until after the 1892 Constitution.

So, from an eyewitness, Pricy Farley Scott, and from the actual court records. I contend that all the yarns about a Romeo and Juliet romance and the tragic death of the baby that resulted are nothing but fiction, just like most of the events in the feud yarns.

PS: The entry above Floyd McCoy in that court record is historically important. Henry Hall was the last man hanged in Pike County, Kentucky. Hall was hanged in 1892, two years after the hanging of Ellison Mounts. Hall killed his brother in an argument over a poker game and, for some unfathomable reason, the jury sentenced him to death. Here Hall is accused of “Keeping a Tippling House,” which was what they charged one with when he was running an unlicensed saloon.

So, of the last two men hanged in my home county, one was innocent (Mounts) and the other was guilty of manslaughter.

But that was the way it was.

Otis Rice’s “Hatfields & McCoys”—A Yarn or History?

 

Preface

The West Virginia Encyclopedia says of Otis Rice:

One of West Virginia’s most published historians, Rice was the author of The Allegheny Frontier, which received an Award of Merit from the American Association for State and Local History; Hatfields and McCoys; Frontier Kentucky;Charleston and the Kanawha Valley; History of Greenbrier County; Sheltering Arms Hospital; and West Virginia: The State and Its People. He co-authored with Stephen W. Brown, West Virginia: A History, a college text; The Mountain State, a middle school text; as well as A Centennial of Strength: A History of Banking in West Virginia.

Rice served as president of the West Virginia Historical Society (1955–56) and the West Virginia Historical Association (1967–68); book review editor of West Virginia History (1976–79); member of the editorial board of Filson Club Quarterly (1985–87) and the board of advisers of the WVU Library (1988–95); vice chairman of the Kanawha County Bicentennial Commission (1986–90); and first vice president, West Virginia Historical Education Foundation (1992–2003). Among other awards, he received the first Virgil A. Lewis Award of the West Virginia Historical Society (1991) and the first Governor’s Award for Outstanding Contributions to West Virginia History or Literature (1999). He received an honorary doctorate from West Virginia University in 2000. On July 22, 2003, Rice was named West Virginia’s first Historian Laureate.  http://www.wvencyclopedia.org/articles/77

So far as I know, that is all true.

The University Press of Kentucky says of his book, “The Hatfields & the McCoys:”

“The Hatfield-McCoy feud has long been the most famous vendetta of the southern Appalachians. Over the years it has become encrusted with myth and error. Scores of writers have produced accounts of it, but few have made any real effort to separate fact from fiction. Novelists, motion picture producers, television script writers, and others have sensationalized events that needed no embellishment.

Using court records, public documents, official correspondence, and other documentary evident, Otis K. Rice presents an account that frees, as much as possible, fact from fiction, event from legend. He weighs the evidence carefully, avoiding the partisanship and the attitude of condescension and condemnation that have characterized many of the writings concerning the feud.

He sets the feud in the social, political, economic, and cultural context of eastern Kentucky and southwestern West Virginia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By examining the legacy of the Civil War, the weakness of institutions such as the church and education system, the exaggerated importance of family, the impotence of the law, and the isolation of the mountain folk, Rice gives new meaning to the origins and progress of the feud. These conditions help explain why the Hatfield and McCoy families, which have produced so many fine citizens, could engage in such a bitter and prolonged vendetta.”  http://www.kentuckypress.com/live/title_detail.php?titleid=1989#.VNI0eJ0c58E

Almost none of that is true, and I will prove it. The claim: “Using court records, public documents, official correspondence, and other documentary evident, Otis K. Rice presents an account that frees, as much as possible, fact from fiction, event from legend. He weighs the evidence carefully”– is provably false in detail.

Rice ignores the actual record on most of the events and people he describes, and directly conflicts the record in many places.  While rarely referring to the historical record, Rice depends almost entirely upon newspapers and prior feud yarns for his “facts.”

He warns repeatedly against depending upon newspapers, and then cites newspaper reporters as fact sources more than one hundred fifty times!

On the first page of his Preface, Rice writes: “In addition, many newspaper accounts were so biased or so grossly inaccurate that they must be used with considerable discrimination.” He repeats the caveat about accepting newspaper reporters as fact sources many times in the book. Then, throughout the book, he indiscriminately uses newspaper reporters as fact sources, even when they conflict directly with the historical record.

Because he was West Virginia’s “Historian Laureate,” and because his book was published by the University of Kentucky, I consider Otis Rice to be the biggest impediment to getting the real history of the Tug Valley in the feud era out to the public.

I hereby challenge any faculty member from any college or university in either West Virginia or Kentucky to publicly debate me on the question: “Is “The Hatfields & the McCoys,” by Otis K. Rice, real history, or just another feud yarn.”

 

Rice and the Civil War

On page 10 Rice writes: “The Hatfields favored the Confederacy, as did the majority of the McCoys, but a few of the latter supported the Union.” That is undoubtedly a deliberate misstatement of the facts, as anyone doing any research on the military associations of the families would know that more than two thirds of the Kentucky McCoys who served wore Union blue. The error became more important than it should have been, simply because it was relied upon by Altina Waller, resulting in the only material error in her fine book.[1]

Rice has a thoroughly garbled recounting of the Civil War history of the two families, getting almost nothing right except for the fact that Devil Anse deserted.  He even includes the ridiculous claim that Devil Anse was a member of the Logan Wildcats. The Logan Wildcats were Company D of the 34^th Virginia Infantry. That unit never operated within a hundred miles of Tug River, and Devil Anse was never a member of the unit. Rice then compounds his error by saying that Ran’l McCoy was also a Logan Wildcat. (p.11)

Rice lets us know that he was familiar with the record, by citing several post war lawsuits, filed against raiders of various farms. He leaves out the most important ones, which featured Union soldiers raiding the farms of Union supporters, George and James Hatfield.

Rice defies the plain record repeatedly in describing Asa Harmon McCoy. He says that Asa Harmon sat out the first two years of the War and enlisted in the 45^th Infantry in late 1863. He once again says that in joining the Union cause Harmon was going against “most of his own family,” [2]which is patently false.

 

 

Rice says that when Harmon came home near the end of 1864, “his former friends and neighbors did not extend him a cordial welcome.” (p.13) This is outrageous!  I have identified more than seventy-five men from Peter Creek who served the Union, and less than half a dozen who served the Confederacy.

Rice says that Jim Vance, a member of the Logan Wildcats, told Harmon that “the Logan Wildcats would soon pay him a visit.”(13) There is absolutely nothing in the record which associates Jim Vance with the Logan Wildcats or any military organization that included Devil Anse Hatfield.

Rice then says: “Knowing that to remain at home would mean almost certain death, Harmon hid out in a nearby cave. There they found Harmon, lame and suffering from lung troubles, and killed him.” (13) That is false in detail. Harmon was literally surrounded by his fellow Unionists, many of whom had deserted the 39^th Kentucky earlier in that autumn. None of his near neighbors were Confederate. Yet, Rice says that Harmon was so scared of the Rebels that he abandoned his home and family and crawled into a hole in the ground.

Rice gives a footnote referencing the medical record of Asa Harmon McCoy. That medical record proves clearly that everything Rice wrote is false. Far from “sitting out the first two years,” Harmon was in the Home Guard and was seriously wounded in the chest in February, 1862. In November of that same year, he was captured by the Virginia State Line cavalry—including Devil Anse Hatfield—and sent to Libby Prison in Richmond. Paroled and discharged in April, 1863, he returned home, still recuperating from the old chest wound. In October of 1863, is chest wound healed, he traveled to Ashland and enlisted in the 45^th Kentucky Infantry.

Discharged on Christmas Eve, 1864, Harmon immediately re-enlisted and was sent home on furlough. He was, according to the sworn testimony of his widow, “killed by rebels while on his way back to his regiment.”

Rice cites Asa’s army medical record, which says he was shot in a skirmish “near Sandy River” in February, 1862, then captured by Federals in December of that same year. He was released from the Union hospital in Annapolis, Maryland in April, 1863, with his chest wound still oozing, per the written statement of the military doctor in the official records, and then says that Harmon sat out the first two years of the war. Preposterous!

Here is the sworn statement of Harmon’s widow, Martha (Patty) McCoy, wherein she tells how he died:

That is also in the medical record cited by Rice. Here, as in so many places in the book, Rice deliberately ignores records he admits that he has seen, and repeats the “feud yarn” as history!

 

Asa Harmon and Jim Vance

Rice then says that, while some thought Devil Anse “murdered” Asa Harmon, “More likely the real culprit was Jim Vance, a close associate of Devil Anse…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.” (14)

Rice gives absolutely no foundation for that scathing indictment of Jim Vance; he simply states it all as if it were well-established fact. The record proves it false in detail.

First, there is absolutely nothing in the record that shows Jim Vance to be “a close associate of Devil Anse.” However, there is much in the record showing Vance to be a close associate of the family of Asa Harmon McCoy. The record clearly depicts a man who was highly respected in his community—the mirror opposite of the reputation Rice gives him.

In 1870, Jim Vance was elected Constable of the Magnolia District. His neighbors obviously did not consider him a bad man. In 1883, at the zenith of Rice’s blood feud, the Logan County Court appointed Jim Vance Justice of the Peace when the incumbent resigned. The Logan ruling elite certainly didn’t share Rice’s assessment of Vance, and the court was hardly made up of “rough” associates.

Four substantial land-owners in the District, none of whom were related to Vance, signed twenty-five hundred dollar bonds for Vance, as seen in the document. That is equal to one hundred fifty thousand dollars in gold today.

A list of the four most important figures on each side in the feud story would have, on the Hatfield/West Virginia side: Devil Anse, Johnse and Cap Hatfield, and Jim Vance. On the McCoy/Kentucky side would be: Ran’l and Jim McCoy, Frank Phillips and Perry Cline. Of those eight men, ONLY Jim Vance was never indicted for a crime in his entire life!

There is much more in the record about Jim Vance and his general reputation, as well as his association with the family of Asa Harmon McCoy; so much in fact that we will only look at a single year, 1875.

In 1875, ten years after Otis Rice says that Jim Vance murdered Asa Harmon McCoy, Perry Cline, brother of Martha (Cline) McCoy, the widow of Asa Harmon, became sheriff of Pike County. The large bond required of someone entering that office was signed by three men. These included two of the richest men in Pike County, O.C. Bowles and the foster father of Perry Cline, Colonel John Dils. The other was Jim Vance, who had lived in Pike County only about a year at that time. Is Colonel Dils another of Vance’s “rough associates?”

Later that same year, Perry Cline appointed Jim Vance a deputy sheriff of Pike County, making Vance the only man who was a sworn law officer in both Pike and Logan counties during the entire era.

Does anyone—other than Otis Rice—really believe that Perry Cline thought that Jim Vance had murdered his brother in law? Is Perry Cline just another of the “rough associates” in Rice’s book?

In April, 1875, Jacob McCoy, son of Asa Harmon McCoy, married Elizabeth Vance, daughter of Jim Vance. The marriage Bond was signed by Jacob’s Uncle, Perry Cline, and the ceremony was held at the Pike County home of Jim Vance.

In June of 1875, Jim Vance bought a large tract—a thousand acres—from Bill and Mary (McCoy) Daniels. Mary Daniels was the daughter of Asa Harmon McCoy. The Danielses took a note from Jim Vance for a third of the purchase price of that tract.

Does anyone—other than Otis Rice—really believe that the family of Asa Harmon McCoy thought that Jim Vance had murdered the father of the family?

There is no doubt that Otis Rice, having spent his entire professional career doing historical research, knew everything I have presented here. After all, I found it in only a few days of research. In his “Bibliographical Note” at the back of the book Rice lists all the sources one needs to find everything I have presented here, but which was omitted from Rice’s “history.”

The only logical conclusion to be drawn is that Rice intentionally ignored and distorted the record to make a man who had a stellar record and a fine relationship with the family of Asa Harmon McCoy something that he clearly—by the record—was not:  the low-life murderer of Asa Harmon McCoy. This is libel of the dead, totally unbecoming of someone who made a living as a professional “historian.”

Rice on the Hog trial

Professor Rice recounts the story of the hog trial just as if it were handed down from Mt. Sinai, even though there is absolutely nothing in the record pertaining to such a trial. He gives a few daisy-chain citations, but most of it is just Rice spinning a yarn, with no support claimed for what he writes.

I  believe that there was an argument about a hog involving  Ran’l McCoy. The local lore on Blackberry Creek 70 years ago said it was between Ran’l McCoy and Jesse Gooslin–NOT Ran’l McCoy and Floyd Hatfield. The oldest people I talked to as a boy in the 1950’s spoke of such a dispute. None, however, recalled an actual trial.

If there had really been a dispute between Floyd and Ran’l, there was a witness very near to Floyd Hatfield’s hog pen who knew whether or not Floyd owned the pork in question.  That witness was Floyd Hatfield’s landlord, the brother in law and first cousin of Ran’l McCoy, my Great, Great Grandfather, Uriah McCoy.

I talked regularly with two of Preacher Anse’s sons, Jeff and Ransom, as I delivered papers to them in 1952-55. Both denied such a trial ever happened. Both said that trials were rare in their father’s court, as he was usually able to mediate any arguments which arose. JP’s were paid $2/day for holding court in those days. All the payments are in the Pike County Court records. Preacher Anse was paid a total of $8 during his 4-year term, and all of it was in the first year. Preacher Anse was elected to his only term as JP in 1871. In 1875, he was elected county tax assessor, the office he held at the time Rice says he was a JP, hearing a trial over a $10 pig.

While no one can prove that a hog trial occurred, no one can prove that it didn’t; but I can prove that much of Rice’s yarn about the trial is either nonsensical or simply false.

Rice begins his tale of the hog trial with: “In the autumn of 1878 Floyd Hatfield, a cousin of Devil Anse, went into the hills, rounded up his hogs, and drove them into pens for fattening at his home near Stringtown, on the Kentucky side of the Tug Fork.” That opening statement contains several “facts.” Not one of which could possibly be known as a fact by Professor Rice. How does he know that Floyd went into the hills and rounded up his hogs? Could he not have hired a neighborhood boy to round them up? Or could the hogs not have come home on their own?

How does he know that Floyd lived at Stringtown in the fall of 1878? Floyd Hatfield is at Stringtown, on the land of Uriah McCoy, in the 1870 Census. In the 1880 Census, he is in Logan County on land he bought from Devil Anse in 1877. It is at least as likely that Floyd was in Logan as that he was in Pike in the fall of 1878.

I know that Rice got much of his hog trial tale from Charles Mutzenberger. I know this because Rice refers to my Great, Great Grandfather, as “Deacon Anse Hatfield,” and that originated with Mutzenberger. No one who knew Preacher Anse ever called him “Deacon.” There was a “Deacon” Hatfield, but it was Preacher Anse’s brother, Basil Hatfield, who served as both county judge and sheriff of Pike County.

Like Mutzenberger, Rice has large numbers of each family in attendance, but neither Rice nor any other feud writer mentions the one man whose testimony would have been dispositive of the case–Ran’l’s cousin and brother-in-law, Uriah McCoy, upon whose land Floyd lived. Rice refers to two “sides” as if an argument over the ownership of a pig was a major controversy. Rice has seen the Circuit Court records; he cites them in his Bibliographical note. He knows, therefore, that both Devil Anse Hatfield ans Ran’l McCly were involved in multiple lawsuits during the 1870’s which involved amounts equal to hundreds of hogs, but he goes along with the yarn.

Rice does not tell his readers that Devil Anse was involved in a lawsuit with Bill and Mary Daniels, daughter and son in law to Asa Harmon over eight hundred acres at the time of the hog trial. If Rice told his readers that Devil Anse was personally involved in a large lawsuit against the immediate family of the man Rice says was murdered by Anse or someone under his command, then how could he convince them that Devil Anse was concerned over a cousin possibly losing a pig to a McCoy who had served with Anse in the Confederate army.

Like Mutzenberger, Rice has a jury of twelve members, six Hatfields and six McCoys. Again, Rice must know better, but he wrote it anyway. Kentucky law—as well as that in West Virginia, where he was “Historian Laureate”—restricted a justice of the peace jury to a maximum of six members.[3] The restriction is also in Article 248 of the Kentucky Constitution. Faced with a choice between Mutzenberg’s yarn and the law, the Professor comes down squarely on the side of the yarn-spinner.

Rice cites Truda McCoy, G. Elliott Hatfield and Virgil Jones for his hog trial yarn. Neither of those writers cites anyone or anything.  The Professor does not cite Mutzenberg at all, but anyone can compare pages 14 and 15 of Rice with page 16 of Mutzenberg and see that he should have.

 Rice makes profuse use of what I have dubbed “The daisy-chain” in his citations.  Feud books from John Spears in 1888 until Virgil Jones in 1948, were void of footnotes or endnotes. The writers wrote a story.

The books following Jones all have copious reference notes.^[4] With the exception of Professor Waller, all the writers use the daisy chain. Very few notes—even in the book by the historian, Rice—are to original records.

The daisy chain always ends with a prior writer who cited nothing in support of what he wrote. Virgil Jones is the most frequently cited source for Professor Rice, and Virgil Jones cites nothing for his tale. Mutzenberg is mentioned in Rice’s Bibliographical Note as the best of the  prior writers, but Mutzenberg also cites nothing in support of his yarn.

Of course the average reader is impressed by all the little numbers seen in the books, but not one in a thousand ever traces the daisy chain back to its origin, which is almost always the unsupported scribblings of a previous yarn-spinner.

The Quiet Years

Under oath in the 1899 trial of Johnse Hatfield, Jim McCoy swore that between the 1882 lynching of his brothers and the Frank Phillips raids of December 1887, “We tried to get them arrested, but we never had any trouble.”

Rice struggles mightily to find enough “feuding” during the quiet years to maintain his feud, but ends up with a chapter only six and one-half pages long covering the entire five-plus years. More than half that chapter is devoted to the Jeff McCoy killing. In desperation he writes: “Some of them may have occasionally fired upon a member or cabin of the opposing clan.”All writers of feud books include in the feud story the November, 1886 killing of Jeff McCoy, which is not connected to the 1882 events. Then they proceed to fill the years between the lynching of the three McCoys in August 1882 and the beginning of the Phillips raids in December 1887 with manufactured feud events which have no support whatsoever in the records.

Rice shows even more desperation in his search for a feud during the years when nothing happened by including a page on the escape from the Mount Sterling jail by Montaville Hatfield, which no one—including Rice—says was connected to the feud in any way.

Rice ends up with only the “ambush of the innocents” and the “tale of the cow’s tail” to maintain his blood feud during those quiet years.

The ambush of the innocents is a tale that says that Devil Anse wanted to kill Randolph McCoy in 1884. We don’t know why Anse wanted to kill Ran’l in 1884, as nothing had happened since Anse killed three of Ran’l’s sons, which should have balanced the scales in Anse’s mind, but that is Rice’s story.  Being too obtuse to realize that anyone in his household over the age of ten could get close enough to Ran’l any day as he went about his chores to easily kill him, Anse sets in motion an elaborate espionage effort to learn when Ran’l will be traveling down the road and therefore exposed to ambush.

Rice says that the Hatfields learned of an impending trip to Pikeville and set up an ambush. Unfortunately, the Hatfields didn’t even know what their adversaries looked like, and they shot two neighbors of the McCoys instead. As with all the manufactured “feud events” during the five years when nothing happened, the absence of corpses makes poor marksmanship an essential part of the tales. In this case, Rice says that the inept Hafield marksmen managed to wound only one of the two unintended targets. Like Glen Campbell in True Grit, they managed to kill both the horses.

For this fiasco in the wilds of Blackberry Fork, the Professor cites the Louisville Courier Journal and the Pittsburgh Times. The daisy chain ends with newspaper reporters here, but it is now part of “history.”

Does any reader with an IQ above room temperature not know that the Professor is spinning a yarn here, and not writing history? Consider this:

In 1878, while Perry Cline was the incumbent Sheriff of Pike County, both he and his wife, Martha Adkins Cline, were charged with assault and battery.

Sheriff Cline copped a guilty plea, paying a ten dollar fine, in order to get his wife dismissed as a defendant.

The Pike County Circuit Court Records, to which Rice refers in his Bibliographical Note, are replete with charges of assault and battery in the 1870’s and 1880’s. Many of those charges were brought against women—some of them middle-aged.  Another famous “feud name,” Nancy McCoy Hatfield Phillips, wife to Johnse Hatfield and later Frank Phillips, was charged with A & B:

The court added “Johnse’s wife” to identify the defendant. Nancy was fined the exorbitant—for that time—amount of forty-five dollars upon conviction.

The women married to McCoys were not immune either:

Aunt Betty McCoy was charged with several crimes, including A&B and keeping a whorehouse. The jury was more lenient with Aunt Betty than with Nancy. She was convicted and fined ONE CENT!

Professor Rice was familiar with these records; he cites them in his bibliography. He knew that in a county where women with strong family connections were charged and convicted of assault and battery, there was no way that the most hated men in Pike County could come across the border and shoot a man and kill two horses without a charge being field. But the professor used it anyway, citing two big city newspapers.

The professor also has the venerable “tale of the cow’s tail” in his little chapter on the quiet years. He says that Cap Hatfield and Tom Wallace beat Mary Daniels, daughter o f Asa Harmon and wife of Bill Daniels, and her daughter with a cow’s tail. 33) For this yarn the Professor cites the newspaper reporter, Virgil Jones, who cites nothing or no one.

Professor Rice cites Virgil Jones, a total of forty-eight times as a fact source. Jones cites nothing in support of his yarn.

In his Bibliographical Note, Rice says that the best feud book is the one by Charles Mutzenberg, and Mutzneberg also reports that Cap Hatfield and Tom Wallace beat two women in the Daniels home.  One may wonder why Rice does not use the writer he says wrote the best book. the answer is that Mutzenberg did not mention a cow’s tail, so Rice went with the more colorful Jones version. I don’t blame the Professor, because, after all, if you know you are just citing a daisy chain that ends up with a source that is unfounded, you might as well go with the one that will titillate readers the most.

Following his short chapter on the quiet years, Rice inserts a “filler chapter” twice as long on the other feuds going on in Kentucky at the same time.

On page 1, Rice refers to “battle scarred veterans of the feud,” knowing full well that there was only one “battle” involving the families of Devil Anse Hatfield and Ran’l McCoy—the New Year’s, 1888 raid on the McCoy home.

On page 3, Rice says of Ephraim Hatfield, father of Devil Anse: “Over seven feet tall and weighing more than three hundred pounds, he was generally referred to as “Big Eaf.”  Ephraim’s Civil
Ep’s war record lists him as six feet even.[5]

The Historian Laureate of West Virginia should know that the appellation “Big” was almost always applied to an older man who had the same name as a younger relative. There were several younger Ephraim Hatfields in the Valley during “Big Eaf’s” lifetime.

 

 

[1] Feud: Hatfields, McCoys and Social Change in Appalachia, 1860-1900.

[2] Of the thirteen Pike County McCoys who served, nine were in the Union Army. Preston, John David, The Civil War in the big Sandy Valley,

[3] Section 2252 of the Kentucky Statutes.

[4] Truda McCoys book, “The McCoys,” has no reference notes, but it was written before Jones, although not published until 1976.

[5] Weaver and Osborne, The Virginia State Rangers and State Line, 200.

In the biggest and most fictional ‘history’ of the Hatfields and McCoys, written by Dean King, William Anderson Hatfield was first called “Devil Anse” by his mother in 1854, when Anderson was 15 years old. King writes: “Nancy declared her boy not afeared of no kind of varmint nor of the devil hisself. She called him Devil Anse after that. The nickname would prove apt to friend and foe” (p. 20)

In fact, Anderson Hatfield was never called “Devil Anse” by anyone before 1888, when he was so identified the New York reporter T. C. Crawford. Anolther New York reporter, John Spears wrote in the same year. Getting his information first-hand from Ran’l McCoy and Perry Cline, Spears called him “Bad Anse.” Surely Spears would have used the much more sensational “Devil Anse” if any of the Pikeville cabal had known of its usage.

1888 and 1889 featured many articles about the Hatfields and McCoys, with the moniker “Devil Anse appearing only in reports written hundreds of miles from Tug Valley.

Anse Hatfield was sued by several people in the years immediately following the Civil War, and was indicted in Pike County for murder alleged to have been committed during the War. In all cases, he is simply “Anderson Hatfield.”

In 1860, Anse was charged with assault along with his brother and several of his Kentucky Hatfield cousins. As one of the other Hatfields was also named Anderson, the court had to distinguish them in the indictment. If he was known as Devil Anse, surely the court would have used that nickname to distinguish him from Preacher Anse. But they named him in the court papers as “Big Ephraim’s son.” Here is one of the court records.

(Click on graphics to enlarge)

There is only one actual written transcript of a criminal trial that featured testimony by major feud characters, the 1899 trial of Anse’s son, Elias for the July 3, 1899 killing of Doc Ellis. The sons of Anse had killed at least four men in the three years prior, and the local authorities had it up to here with their antics. The transcript makes it clear that Anse had about run out his string in Mingo County. When the doctor examined the fresh corpse of Doc Ellis, minutes after Elias shot him, he found a petition in Doc’s breast pocket. It contained the names of many of Anse’s neighbors and demanded the immediate arrest and extradition of two of Anse’s sons.

So intent were the local elites upon hanging Elias that they hired the most famous trial lawyer in West Virginia, H.K. Shumate to lead the prosecution. Here is a snapshot of part of the transcript.

Does anyone really believe that the wily barrister, Shumate, would not have used “Devil Anse” if he thought any juror would recognize the moniker?

The first recorded usage of the nickname in the Tug valley came in a 1912 civil case, wherein Anse was suing the Mason Coal company. The company’s lawyer asked him if he was the man sometimes called “Devil Anse,” to which Anse answered in the affirmative.

I grew up among dozens of people whose lives overlapped that of Anse Hatfield, and who were related to him. Three of my eight great, great grandfathers were Hatfields, cousins to Anse. None of the old Hatfields on Blackberry Creek, many of them who were in their forties or fifties when Anse died, ever called him “Devil Anse.” To distingujish him from my great, great grandfather, Preacher Anse, they all called him “Eph’s Anse.”

Anderson Hatrfield (Eph’s son) lived 56 years after the end of the Civil War. He was engaged in violence on only THREE DAYS of that long stretch of time. He led a gang that freed his son, Johnse, from arrest by Tolbert McCoy in October, 1880. He led a group that took custody of the three McCoy brothers from the Kentucky Hatfields on August 8, 1882, and he led the lynch mob that killed them the following day. Real violence by Anse Hatfield occurred on ONLY one day, August 9, 1882.
He lived another 39 year after that lynching and was never accused–not even in the feud yarns–of harming another person.

So, the answer to the title question is that, in 1900, Devil Anse did not exist anywhere except in the scribblings of yarn-spinners, writing hundreds of miles from Tug Valley.

There is no record of Anse’s mother ever referring the man as Devil Anse. This is one of many dozens of places where Dean King failed in his commitment in his Author’s Note to correct the historical record.

Most writers of books on the history of the Tug Valley in the late 19^th century are either ignorant or dishonest. They have a problem spinning a long, convoluted yarn of decades-long inter-family violence when the fact is that all the violent events that either wounded or killed anyone occurred on just THREE days!
On August 7, 1882, three McCoys butchered Ellison Hatfield. On August 9^th, 1882, The Hatfields lynched the three McCoys. On January 1, 1888, the Hatfields burned the McCoy home and killed two McCoys. How do I know that this is all of it? First, I talked to more than a dozen people while I was growing up on Blackberry Creek who remembered the 1880’s, several of whom were present at the 1882 election. Those three days were all the feud story that they had.

Secondly, about 2000 hours of research in the documentary record have convinced me that those old folks were right. The best evidence is the sworn testimony of Jim McCoy, eldest son of Ran’l, in the 1899 trial of Johnse Hatfield for the murder of his sister, Alifair, during the New Year’s raid. So intent was Jim McCoy upon hanging Johnse that he testified first for the prosecution and was then allowed to sit at the prosecutor’s table and feed them question during the trial.

After raising his right hand, Jim was asked when the trouble between the two families started. Jim answered, “It STARTED at the 1882 election.” Then asked what happened between August 1882 and the 1888 New Year’s raid, Jim testified: “We tried to get them arrested, but WE never HAD any TROUBLE.”

With only three days of violence, separated by more than five years, how does a writer come up with dozens of feud events, stretching over decades? The answer is simple; they make it up!

Dean King, who wrote the biggest yarn of all, says that he did four years of intensive research. So, after all that digging, how does he come up with a quarter century feud that claimed a dozen and a half lives? Well, he simply MADE IT UP!

Let’s look at one of the many ‘feud events’ King made up to go back beyond where Jim McCoy said it started. King re-spins the old “Romeo and Juliet” yarn about Johnse Hatfield and Roseanna McCoy, saying, “On this particular election day in the spring of 1880, a number of Hatfields crossed the Tug…”

King says that Roseanna and Johnse first met there and then we have the elopement, Roseanna’s stay at the Hatfield home, Roseann returning to Kentucky, and having a baby that died. Then, a year after that made-up election, Johnse marries Roseanna’s cousin, Nancy.

There was NO election in Pike County in the spring of 1880. There were NO spring elections in Kentucky until after the new Constitution was adopted in 1892. In years that featured only local offices, Kentucky elections before 1892 were held in August, as when Ellison was killed. In Presidential years, Kentucky held its election in November, along with the rest of the country.

But King could not have an election in November 1880, And then have all the excitement he has included in the time between the election and Johnse’s marriage to Nancy McCoy the next May, so he simply backed it up six months and gave us an election that NEVER happened.

Now we will examine one of the many made-up lies King told in order to have a continuous feud during the years when Jim McCoy swore under oath that they “never had ANY trouble.”

King writes: “On a hot summer night, at a dance in Pike County, a mail carrier named Fred Wolford called Jeff McCoy a liar…Jeff pulled out a pistol and shot him dead.”

King has a knack for detail, which causes people like the book reviewers for big city newspapers to laud him for his “detailed research.” After all, how deep do you have to dig to come up with a detail as insignificant as the fact that Fred Wolford was a mail carrier? Mighty deep, I’d say, since there was no such thing as a mail carrier outside of a large city in 1886. The first delivery of mail to a rural address was in 1896.  https://psmag.com/economics/a-short-history-of-mail-delivery-52444

This one of more than a dozen lies in King’s book that can be refuted by simply consulting the US Census. The Census says Fred Wolford was a farmer.

(Click the thumbnails to expand photos.)

Fred died on March 26, 1886, at which time Peter Creek was far more likely to have had a foot of snow than a “hot night.”

From King’s yarn, the reader would believe that the two men met at a dance, and, both likkered up, got into an argument wherein Fred called Jeff a liar and Jeff responded by plugging Fred with his Colt. In fact, Fred Wolford’s death was the result of a Wolford family argument. Jeff McCoy was married to Sarah Wolford, niece of Fred Wolford. Sarah had a brother named Andrew. The court records show that both Jeff McCoy and Andrew Wolford were charged with the murder of Fred Wolford.

According to Fred Wolford’s descendants that I heard the family story from some 50 years ago, Fred was STABBED, not shot. A stabbing makes more sense in a case where TWO men were indicted for the killing. It doesn’t take two to shoot a man.

After killing Uncle Fred, Jeff stole a horse and went on the lam.

Where did he go? To the West Virginia home of Johnse HATFIELD, of course! With a vicious feud between the Hatfields and McCoys going on, according to King, Jeff McCoy took refuge in the home of Johnse Hatfield, with Cap Hatfield as his next-door neighbor! Note that the March 1887 filing says that the defendant is dead.

Jeff was indeed dead, having been shot on the banks of the Tug in November of 1886. King writes that after swimming the forty feet of the Tug (it’s actually about three times that wide there) “Jeff, a man of the mountains, clung to the earth. Timing the shots, he suddenly sprang, clawing his way up the bank. Cap nailed him halfway up the slope.” That is false. Cap did NOT kill Jeff McCoy—Tom Wallace did– but King needed it to be a Hatfield killing a McCoy, because, after all, he was writing a tale about a feud between the two families. Let’s look at the very best evidence, which comes from Jeff McCoy’s uncle, Perry Cline.

In a letter to the Governor some two years later, seeking a requisition from the governor for the arrest and extradition of Tom Wallace, Cline told the governor that he wanted very much to get Wallace (spelled Walls),because “He shot my nephew.”

Despite his promise in his Author’s Note to “deflate the legends, to check the biases, and to add or restore accurate historical detail,” King has dozens of flat-out lies in the book which can be proven false BY THE RECORDS.” That’s why King ignores my challenge to a debate, even though I have offered to pay for the hall.

In the years after I graduated from Belfry High School in 1958 and left Blackberry Creek, I read every book that had been published on the Hatfields and McCoys, and searched the records. All the books had many bloody and exciting events of which Ransom Hatfield and his brother, Jeff, sons of Preacher Anse, had no knowledge.  I found NOTHING in the records which supported all the extraneous events in the feud tales.

For many years I wrestled with the question of whether it was possible that ALL those writers had made up stuff, or if the men who lived it were either not recalling correctly, or if they were dissembling. Then I got the microfilm of the trial of Johnse Hatfield for the murder of Alifair McCoy from the Kentucky Archives, and found the answer:

Jim McCoy, the eldest son of Ran’l McCoy, was the star witness for the prosecution against Johnse Hatfield. So important was Jim that the judge allowed him to testify first and then take a seat at the prosecutor’s table, helping frame the questions asked of the defense. Of course Jim McCoy had the strongest possible motive to make the “Feud” as big and bloody as possible.

On direct examination by his friend, the prosecutor, Jim McCoy’s testimony was as follows:

Q: “When did the trouble between your two families start?”

A: “It started at the August, 1882 Election.”

Jim McCoy, with the strongest possible motive to enlarge the tale, had nothing to say about the Hatfields killing his uncle, Asa Harmon McCoy, and nothing at all about a pig trial, the killing of Bill Staton, or a Romeo and Juliet affair involving his sister and the defendant. He stated very clearly: “It STARTED at the August, 1882 Election.”

Anyone can get this microfilm from the Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives in Frankfort, for thirty dollars. Just ask them for “Kentucky Court of Appeals, Roll J00009 and J00010.”

The prosecutor then asked Jim McCoy: “From the events of August, 1882 until the crime of New Year’s, 1888, did anything happen between the two families?”
Jim McCoy, under oath, said: “We tried to get them arrested, but we NEVER had ANY trouble.”
There was no attempt to assassinate Ran’l McCoy, no “Ambush of the innocents,” and no whipping of Jim’s cousins with a cow’s tail. Jim McCoy swore exactly what Ransom Hatfield, Jeff Hatfield, my Granny, Mary Hatfield Dotson, Jeff Davis, Pricey Scott and a host of others who lived through the 1880’s told me.
The Hatfield and McCoy feud tale is a crock. It is exactly what Ransom Hatfield told me—bullshit!

Feud story writers always cite as references prior writers of feud stories. Although many claim to have done years of research, they rarely write anything that is directly from the actual record. No writer of a feud book—other than me– has EVER cited the transcript of the trial of Johnse Hatfield. As the ONLY verbatim transcript of the testimony of major characters in the real story, it is the most important feud evidence in the world, but feud writers have ignored it.  Now you know why. It blows their yarns to smithereens, by the sworn testimony of the best possible witness, Jim McCoy, who swore that the trouble started at the 1882 Election, and that during the ensuing five years, “We never had ANY trouble.”

During my first week in graduate school at Cornell back in the 1960’s, a fellow grad student from Brooklyn asked me: “What kind of people kill a hundred of each other over a pig?” As the son of a Pike County, Kentucky coal miner who was killed in the mine when I was seven years old, I had enough weight to carry without the extra load of lies such as  the commercialized Hatfield and McCoy feud tale. Hillbilly Elegy is just another brick in the load. “Elegy” tells the public nothing at all about what it was really like to grow up in Appalachia. Nothing!

While it is difficult to sell enough REAL Appalachian history books to recoup the cost of publishing them, a man can still make millions slandering my people. I knew before I started reading the book that it would be another big put down of my people, because it was being pushed so hard by all who enjoy having hillbillies to look down upon.

In the first 50 pages, I saw the four-letter “F-word,” more times than I heard or saw it in 18 years of growing up on Blackberry Creek, in Pike County, Kentucky, the very heart of Appalachia. Almost all of the dozens of usages of that word are ascribed to his grandmother, who was born several years before I was born. A hillbilly woman of my generation or older frequently emitting that expletive is about as credible as a Brooklyn Jewish grandmother sitting on the front porch smoking a corn cob pipe. We will deal with that in the next post, but first we will examine Vance’s knowledge of hillbilly history, particularly the history of the Vance family.

There ought to be a law stating that anyone who writes a book about his family, and connects them to the Hatfields and McCoys, must be historically correct or go to jail! The attached screenshot is a paragraph on Jim Vance, who is claimed to be a distant relative of the author. It is FALSE in detail!

(Click thumbnails to view)

 

James M. Vance, called a murderer by his ‘kinsman’, J.D., Vance, was a leading member of his community, on both sides of Tug River. In a lifetime of almost sixty years, he was never charged with a crime–not even a misdemeanor. He was elected constable and later appointed justice of the peace in Logan County, West Virginia. He signed the sheriff’s bond for Perry Cline, brother-in-law of Asa Harmon McCoy in Pike County, Kentucky, and was the first man appointed as a deputy by the sheriff. Does anyone really believe that Perry Cline thought Jim Vance murdered his sister’s husband? Had that been so, Cline would have tossed Jim into the Pike hoosegow, but he appointed him a deputy.

Jim Vance did not “marry into the Hatfield family.” Jim’s wife was Mary Collins, no relation to the Hatfield. Jim’s sister, Nancy, married Ephraim Hatfield in Logan County, WV,  and they produced Anderson, now called “Devil Anse.” Another sister, Mary, married Valentine Hatfield in Pike County, Kentucky. They are my gg-grandparents.

Jim Vance never “Joined a group of former Confederate soldiers and sympathizers called the Wildcats.” The Wildcats referred to here were the Logan Wildcats, a Logan militia unit, which became Company D of the 36th Virginia Infantry. The Wildcats were taken into the regular Confederate army soon after Fort Sumter, and remained part of the regular army until Appomattox. The Wildcats never operated within a day’s ride of where Harmon McCoy was killed, and neither James Vance nor Anse Hatfield were ever members of that company.

Martha McCoy, widow of Asa Harmon McCoy, gave us the facts in this affidavit, wherein she says that he was killed by Rebels, while on his way back to his regiment. Note that her first witness was Basil HATFIELD.

Jim Vance, a leading member of his community, owning several thousand acres of valuable land, smack-dab in the heart of the “Billion Dollar Coal Field,” was murdered by a gang from Kentucky on January 8, 1888. That gang was sent by some of the leading financial men in Kentucky, for the purpose of kidnapping the men who were indicted for the lynching of the three McCoys five years earlier. There were 23 men under indictment, and the Kentucky gang nabbed 9 of them. Of course those nine just happened to all be owners of land along the route of the coming railroad. Within 90 days of the killing of Jim Vance, Kentucky financiers would own all the land of the indicted West Virginians, with the exception of Devil Anse Hatfield. Old Devil Anse pulled a fast one, selling his land to  a Logan land dealer, who flipped it to the Torpin Group of Philadelphia., thus depriving the Kentucky cabal of 5,000 acres of prime coal land.

The Kentucky cabal had no such legal hook with which to catch Jim Vance, so they simply murdered him. Three weeks later the New York newspaperman, John Spears, visited Pikeville, and the men who murdered Jim Vance told him a tale. That tale was published in papers all over the country, and is now accepted as history. But it is all a lie, and the records prove it.

On day short of four months after Jim Vance was murdered, the Kentuckians got what they wanted, as Jim Jr. and his brother-in-law sold George Headley and Samuel Clay 5,000 acres for a pittance. And they didn’t even have to pay cash! George Headley was a leading Bluegrass horse breeder, and founder of Keeneland Race Course. Samuel Clay, cousin to the great Senator, Henry Clay, was president of Kentucky’s largest distillery and a director of a railroad. Here is my transcription of that deed:

Here is a snip from a letter to the governor from Sam Clay, written in April, 1888, wherein he says that he knows all the Hatfields and has bought all the land from most of them.

J.D. Vance could have written a much more engrossing story if he had only taken the time to research his own ancestors. Vance conjured up a paragraph, not a bit of which is true, and tried to connect it with real history. If he had taken the time to do real research,  he would have found the documentation that gives us REAL history. Some of those documents are shown below.

This is from the June, 1883 report of the Logan County Court. The justice of the Magnolia District resigned and the court voted to name James Vance as justice of the peace. Note that four landowners signed bonds of $2,500, the equivalent of about $150,000 today, guaranteeing the faithful performance in office of a man J.D. Vance says was wanted for murder.

This one shows that the daughter of Jim Vance married the son of Asa Harmon McCoy in 1875, ten years after J.D Vance says that Jim murdered Jacob McCoy’s father. As the certificate shows, the nuptials were solemnized at the home of Jim Vance.

In Kentucky, every county officer has to have a bond to protect the public from malfeasance. That is especially important for the office of sheriff, as that official is responsible for collecting all the county’s taxes. If a sheriff absconded with the public’s funds, the signatories of that bond were liable for the entire amount. When Perry Cline, whose sister was the widow of Asa H. McCoy, was elected sheriff, his bondsmen were Colonel John Dils and O.C. Bowles two of the three richest men in Pike County, along with his friend, James Vance.

Surely by now you don’t believe that Perry Cline thought Jim Vance murdered his brother-in-law, no matter what an Ohioan masquerading as a hillbilly says.