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Hatfield & McCoy Hokum in Books

The Reporters Who Made Devil Anse Famous

The light bulb shown here was invented by a man whose name was Theron Clark Crawford.  Crawford was also  the co-inventor of something much more lasting than was his light bulb—The Hatfield and McCoy Feud!

crawford

Crawford visited Logan, West Virginia in 1888.  He also penetrated the wilds of Island Creek for a visit with Devil Anse Hatfield.

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] Crawford, T. C., An American Vendetta, 7,8.

[ii] Crawford, 16.

[iii] Crawford, 3.

[iv] Crawford, 65.

[v] Crawford, 81.

[vi] Crawford, 9.

[vii] Spears, John R., A Mountain Feud, 19-20.

[viii] Spears, 28

[ix] Spears, 14.

Categories
Real Hatfield-McCoy History

The Men Who Made Devil Anse Famous

Most Americans are convinced that Devil Anse Hatfield is world famous simply because he was a prolific killer of men. In fact, Devil Anse became famous because there were other men who killed large numbers of men—far more than Anse Hatfield was ever accused of killing—in Kentucky at the same time Devil Anse was active in Tug Valley.

Devil John Wright (photo at left) was said by the biographers of John C. C. Mayo to have killed twenty-eight men and fathered twenty-seven children.[i]  Wright’s son, in a biography he wrote of his father, said that Wright only killed sixteen men, but that he fathered thirty-five children.[ii]

Devil John Wright was a nephew of Martin Van Buren “Baby” Bates. Baby, from Letcher County, Ky., was 7’2″ tall and weighed over 400 pounds. He was a Captain in the Confederate Army, and was said to have been “fierce in battle.” He was captured once, but escaped. I’ve always wondered how he got out of a POW camp without being seen. Baby was eventually discharged early because he Confederate Army tired of replacing the horses he “broke down” with his great weight. After the war, Baby joined the circus, where he met a demure Swedish lass three inches taller than he was. They married and lived heavily ever after. They are still listed in Guinness as the tallest married couple ever.

BabyBatesThis 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] Turner, Carolyn and Traum, Carolyn, John C. C. Mayo, Cumberland Capitalist, 44.

[ii] Wright, William T., Devil John Wright of the Cumberlands, 275.

[iii] Wright’s nephew, Lieurenant Martin van Buren “Baby” Bates, was in the same circus at the same time, as a seven-foot-two inch giant.  “Baby” married a Canadian lass who joined the circus as a giantess, and the couple is still in Guinness as the tallest married couple in history. Anna was seven feet five inches tall.  http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/records-10000/tallest-married-couple/

[iv] King, Dean, The Feud, 120.

Categories
Real Hatfield-McCoy History

A Community Divided–By a River

If that 1849 petition, which was signed by many of the Kentucky feud characters, had been honored by Kentucky, there would have been no “Hatfield and McCoy feud.”

If the three McCoys who killed Ellison Hatfield on Election Day, 1882 had faced a trial in the Valley, with Valley citizens on the jury, Devil Anse and all the rest of the Hatfields would have almost surely accepted the outcome.  After all, Devil Anse was party to over two dozen court cases, some of them criminal indictments, and he accepted the rulings of the courts in every instance.

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

Categories
Hatfield & McCoy Hokum in Books

Blood-thirsty and Stupid—and They Couldn’t Shoot Straight

Blood-thirsty and Stupid—and They Couldn’t Shoot Straight

 

[One of the things that has always amazed me about Thomas is his ability to zero in on the absurdities of the many feud tales.  I had read many of these stories, in book after book, for years, and never thought to question them.  They are presented as fact, with enough convincing detail to make them seem real.  Thomas, however, approaches these tales with impeccable logic coupled with an encyclopedic knowledge of feud-related history.  A major element in Thomas’s work involves whittling away at the accepted body of feud-tales, using actual court records and other documents to set the record straight.  Thomas writes frequently about how the standard story of the feud has grown over the years as outside writers, from John Spears to Virgil Carrington Jones to Dean King, freely add fictional material into the middle of historical events until the two are indistinguishable to the average reader.  One of the main contributions to feud history that Thomas has made, in my opinion, is the way he has systematically dismantled 120 years of feud fiction, downsizing the tall tales passing themselves off as historical events, so that the real history of these real people can at long last be seen. – RH]

Three things which appear repeatedly in Dean King’s supersized feud story are bloodlust, stupidity and poor marksmanship.  If, as King says, Devil Anse was seeking to kill Ran’l McCoy during 1883-1887, he was blood-thirsty. His execution of the three McCoys who killed his brother would have satiated the desire for revenge for anyone who was not a psychopathic killer.  If Devil Anse did not realize that he could send just about any member of his family over the age of ten to lurk in the edge of the woods surrounding the home of Ran’l McCoy, and pick off the old man as he went about his daily chores, then Devil Anse was stupid.

Under oath in Johnse Hatfield’s trial, Jim McCoy was asked: When did the trouble between the two families start?”

Jim answered: “It started at the 1882 election.” Nothing about his uncle Asa Harmon being murdered by Hatfields in 1865, nothing about his uncle having a pig stolen in 1878, and nothing about his sister being impregnated and abandoned by Johnse in 1880.

Then the prosecutor asked Jim what happened between the 1882 election events and the New Yeaar’s raid on his father’s home. Jim McCoy, with the strongest possible motive to make the ‘feud’ as big and bloody as possible, said: “We tried to get them arrested, but we NEVER had ANY trouble.” There is a plethora of documentary evidence for the things Jim McCoy swore happened, but there is absolutely NO historical evidence for the dozens of “feud events” that appear in the feud tales before 1882 and during the five years between 1882 and December of 1887. With no real evidence for their yarns, and no dead bodies, the feud writers are forced to present the Hatfields as poor marksmen. Men who shot squirrels out of the tops of tall trees with a .22 rifle are said to be unable to score a torso hit with a high-powered Winchester from the free throw line to the basket.

As the only documented death between August 9, 1882 and January 1, 1888 was the killing of Jeff McCoy in September, 1886, with Perry Cline telling the Governor that Tom Wallace–NOT any Hatfield–killed his nephew Jeff, all the “battles” conjured up by King for his fantastic yarn had to feature poor marksmanship, because there were NO corpses or court records to back up King’s yarns.

Thus King has Cap Hatfield firing several shots from a Winchester rifle at Jeff McCoy while McCoy was swimming across a river King says was only forty feet wide (it’s actually about three times that wide), missing him every time.  Then King has a seven-man hit squad of mountain hunters hurling a fusillade of bullets at three men riding abreast from an ambush located only thirty feet off the road, and succeeding only in hitting one man in the knee and another in the shoulder.  Like Glenn Campbell in “True Grit,” they did manage to kill the horses.

King’s poor marksmanship on the part of the Hatfields includes a tale of Cap Hatfield mistaking one of his Hatfield cousins for Ran’l McCoy, at a distance of less than seventy yards.  At this distance, a mountain hunter should be able to hit either coat button he aimed at, but all Cap could manage was another knee-capping. After reading of these repeated knee shootings, one begins to wonder if the Cosa Nostra got its “kneecapping” thing from Cap Hatfield.

King is just the latest in a long line of feud story-tellers who feature poor marksmanship on the part of the Hatfields.  G. Elliott Hatfield, in his 1976 book, The Hatfields, had Elias Hatfield shooting six times at Pharmer McCoy, with the gun so close to McCoy’s face that every shot powder-burned McCoy’s face, yet he missed every time. To top it off, Elias shot six times with a revolver that had only five live cartridges in the cylinder!

An interesting twist to King’s tale of sorry marksmanship on the part of Devil Anse and his crew is that the poor shooting was strictly a daytime phenomenon. In King’s yarn, the Hatfield gang fired hundreds of shots at dozens of men in daylight, with Jeff McCoy being the only fatality.  The same gang shot at six McCoys during the dark of night, and killed five of them. Go figure.

Categories
Dean King Hokum

The “Top Ten” from Dean King’s “True Story” of the Feud

I read Dean King’s book four times, the last two mostly trying to rank the whoppers according to the amount of exaggeration and outright lying.  I came up with a “Top Ten,” but they are all so outrageous that I could not rank them within that group of ten. I finally just said that King had ten whoppers that tied for first place!

Every time I post one of  King’s Whoppers on my Facebook “Hatfield-McCoy Truth” page, someone charges me with envy and/or jealousy, but that is not it at all.  When I started reading the book, I really enjoyed it. Reading a book by a man who promised in his “Author’s note” to “deflate the legends and add or restore accurate historical detail” who then started off with the old Abner Vance Yarn, following it immediately with the tale of a 15 year old Anse Hatfield kicking a “colossal” bear in the ass and driving it up a tree, was a real hoot.

My sides were splitting by the time I got to page 94, but it stopped dead right there.  That’s when King hit us with the big lie about Ellison Hatfield starting the Election Day fight by drawing a knife on Tolbert McCoy. Suddenly it became serious, as I realized that this was a book that had enough New York money behind it to make it a best-seller, and it totally upended our history. The knife in Ellison’s hand made all my McCoy ancestors, none of whom joined Ran’l McCoy’s “feud” and all of my Kentucky Hatfield ancestors who did likewise, either cowards or men with no morality or sense of justice.  And it is a lie.

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