Tag: Hatfields

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Hatfield-McCoy Feud Hokum

Why Do We Have the Supersized Feud Story?

My books, this blog, my Facebook “Hatfield-McCoy Truth” page and Ryan Hardesty’s “Real Hatfield, Real McCoy, Real Matewan” Facebook page have proven—by the historical records—that the Hatfield and McCoy feud yarn is a libelous screed against our ancestors. It follows that, by extension, we are also libeled by it. Yet the tale persists, presented to the world as “History.” Why?

The answer is simple: People with power and money were behind it from the beginning, and they still are. The same financiers who owned the newspapers that published the original yarn in 1888 also controlled the land and coal companies who were scooping up the land of the “Feudists.”

The first expansion of the original 1888 tale was by a man named Charles Mutzenberg. If you buy Mutzenberg’s book today, it will show a copyright date of 1917. What few people know is that the book originally appeared in 1897, and it was published by a coal company that owned tens of thousands of acres of Eastern Kentucky.

Scroll forward to the 21st century, and you see the same forces at work. In 2013 Dean King wrote the most voluminous and the most outrageous compendium of libels against our ancestors and us. That book presents our ancestors as bloodthirsty and stupid. But it goes further, claiming that we are still the same.

King claims that he and his teenaged daughter were fired upon TWICE, first in 2009 and again in 2010, as our cousins attempted to “warn him off” as he did his ‘research’ in Tug Valley. Of course these attempts to murder the intrepid writer were not reported to law enforcement.

Most importantly, King tells us that he was accompanied on his sojourn in our valley by the man in charge of the biggest absentee land owner in West Virginia. King says that Mr. Craig Kadevarek, Senior Director of Forest Operations for the Appalachian Region for the Forestland group, accompanied him as he came under fire from the descendants of the feudists.

A man who is overseeing three quarters of a million acres does not take a few days out of his schedule to travel around with a writer unless he knows that the end product will be a book that benefits his company. He was not disappointed. After nearly 400 pages about our barbarous ancestors, King wrote: “I can attest to the continuing ferocity of the neighborhood.” (p. 377)

We are the only demographic group that can be safely denigrated on network TV. The foundation stone of the stereotype with which we are still saddled to this day is the feud story. People who will fight a decades-long war and kill dozens of each other over a pig will do anything.

Ten to twelve thousand children in Flint Michigan were exposed to lead poisoning in their water, and there was a justifiable national uproar over it. Three hundred thousand people in West Virginia were exposed to poisoned water in 2014, and it was a mere footnote.

As long as the hillbilly stereotype exists, nothing will change significantly. That stereotype is founded on the tale of people who went to war over a pig, and the stereotype will not die until the feud yarn dies.
That’s why we fight the feud liars on every front, using the historical record as our weapon.

Victory will not come easy, but it will come.  The power of big money remains sufficient to cause people who are paid by the taxpayers to preserve and present our history to write and say things that they know—from the records—are not true.  That will end. Maybe not in my lifetime, but it WILL end!

 

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Hatfield-McCoy Feud Hokum

Kentucky Lawyers Learn Feud History, Part 2

This is a continuation of the post of January, 2014.  http://hatfield-mccoytruth.com/2014/01/24/kentucky-lawyers-learn-feud-history/

The  section entitled “Facts and Fiction,” features the standard disclaimer we see in all the feud yarns, to wit: As there are no actual records, all we can do is sort through the various feud tales and choose the ones we prefer. It says: “The following presentation of events that occurred throughout the Hatfield and McCoy feud is a collection compiled from authors that devoted their research to discovering the most accurate narrative.” Note that they were not told that the presentation would depend upon the actual public records. Like their cited sources, they were looking at prior “narratives,” which means feud books, all but one of which were compilations of unsubstantianted legend and fable. They were picking and choosing from writers who cited as fact sources almost exclusively prior writers who cited nothing.
The presenter writes: “Almost every incident in this feud has several conflicting versions that blame different participants, depending upon whether its source supported the Hatfields or McCoys. But which conveys what really happened? No one can possibly know except the participants themselves, and they are all long dead, the truth buried with them.” The foregoing is a verbatim quote from the group’s favorite source, the novelist, Lisa Alther. So, of all the events that have transpired since mankind discovered the art of writing, the Hatfield and McCoy feud is the only significant part of anyone’s history where the facts are now lost, because “Only the participants knew, and when they died, the truth died with them.” This is pure hokum, as the first two “feud events” in the presentation show.

The story says: “The first incident between the families was the murder of Harmon McCoy, Ranel’s brother. Harmon had been a Union sympathizer and was treated with hostility by Confederate supporters. One particular supporter, Jim Vance, threatened Harmon’s life. Vance was Devil Anse’s uncle and was well known for his ruthless and violent nature. After Vance’s threat Harmon went into hiding for fear of his life. Not long after, he was shot and most attributed his death to Vance.”

Harmon McCoy was more than a “Union sympathizer.” He enlisted first in a company of Union Home Guards, in February, 1862, and was shot through the chest in a skirmish the day after he enlisted.  With his chest wound still open and oozing, he was captured in October while operating with the Home Guards.

In April, 1863, he was discharged from the Union Army hospital in Annapolis Maryland, with his wound still oozing pus. HIs wound healed, he traveled a hundred miles and enlisted in the 45th Battalion, Kentucky Infantry in October, 1863. In May, 1864 he suffered a fracture of both his tibia and fibula, which caused him to miss muster until August. He was then back with his regiment until he was discharged on Christmas Eve, 1864. All of this is actually in the military records, which I have in my possession.

According to the sworn testimony of his widow, Harmon re-enlisted immediately, and was sent home on a holiday furlough. Martha McCoy swore that he was “Killed by Rebels while on his way back to the regiment.” Martha McCoy’s sworn affidavit was witnessed by Basil Hatfield, who served as both Sheriff and County Judge of Pike County. There are more written records about the military career of Harmon McCoy than about any other feud character. I have the records to prove everything I have written, right down to the oozing wound.

Except for the fact that he was Devil Anse’s uncle, the statements about Jim Vance are demonstrably totally false.  Jim Vance was elected Constable and appointed justice of the peace in Logan County. He was appointed a deputy sheriff in Pike County, and signed the sheriff’s bond for Harmons brother-in-law, Perry Cline. Vance was never even accused of a single crime in his long lifetime.

In addition to his close association with Harmon’s brother-in-law, Perry Cline, Vance also had dealings with Harmons daughter, Mary McCoy Daniels.  I have one record showing that Mary took a note from Jim Vance for a third of the purchase price on a large tract of land in 1875. In that same year, Jacob, the eldest son of Harmon McCoy married Jim Vance’s daughter, Elizabeth. The two families celebrated the nuptials in the home of the bride’s father, Jim Vance.
No one accused Jim Vance of murdering Harmon McCoy until after Vance was murdered. All of this is proved—by the record– in my “Crazy Jim” book.

Knowing that the audience was a roomful of lawyers, the next paragraph truly shocked me. It says: “Ranel eventually retaliated against the Hatfields for the death of his brother when he sued Devil Anse in April 1866 for stealing a horse from his farm in 1864. Randall and Devil Anse filed several similar suits.”
All of the lawsuits in Pike Circuit Court are in the record, and could have been found by the lawyers in attendance. There never was a lawsuit filed by either Ran’l McCoy or Devil Anse Hatfield against the other. In fact, Ran’l never sued a single Hatfield, and Anse never sued a single McCoy.

It takes a mountain of audacity to spin such a yarn to a roomful of lawyers, who can easily do the research to prove it false in detail.
But the lawyers have already been told that there is nothing but the various tales to depend upon for facts, so they just accept the assurance given in the beginning that they are hearing “current and accurate information about the subject matter.”  The source given for all the imaginary lawsuits was, again, the novelist, Lisa Alther.
To be continued……..

 

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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.