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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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Hatfield-McCoy Feud Hokum

LISA ALTHER: A VERMONT NOVELIST WRITES TUG VALLEY HISTORY

Lisa Alther is a Vermont novelist who has made a lot of money writing books that rely heavily upon lesbian sex. In 2012, she “caught the wave” in the wake of the Kevin Costner TV show by writing a book on the Hatfields and McCoys. In its review, the Wall Street Journal called Alther “An expert on the feud.”

There is not a single sentence in that book that is both new and true. She tells us that she parsed the prior books and chose the tales she liked for her book. It is obvious that she never laid eyes on a single original document in a courthouse or archive.  Ms. Alther entitles the introduction to her book, “Murderland.”  That title is a good indication of the validity of the tale that follows.

Lisa Alther said of Truda McCoy: “she wrote an account that reads like a novel — and is probably about as reliable as one.”  After stating early on that Truda McCoy’s book is “probably about as reliable as a novel,” what does the novelist, Alther do? Why, she cites that “unreliable” source one hundred and two times in her footnotes!

With one hundred and two citations of Truda McCoy in one hundred forty-seven pages of feud-related text, it is clear that this author can’t write two pages without falling back upon a book she says is no more trustworthy on historical fact than a novel.  And she touts her book as non-fiction!

The part of Truda McCoy’s book that reads most like a novel is the first chapter, which describes the death of Asa Harmon McCoy. A comparison of Truda’s original manuscript, which is in the Leonard Roberts papers at Berea College,  it is obvious thatthis chapter in Truda’s book is largely the work of Leonard Roberts.
Alther’s first chapter is also on Asa Harmon.

Truda McCoy, who did not claim to be writing a history, used her imagination to tell the story of Harmon McCoy’s death the way she envisioned it.  Since no one knows the details, McCoy does no great violence to historical fact by telling the story the way she imagines it might have happened.  Knowing what it represents, this chapter is actually the best part of McCoy’s book.  Although one can get a real feel for the situation in January, 1965 by reading McCoy’s chapter, no serious scholar would mistake it for real history.

It is a far different thing for a later writer to use it as if it was real history, but that is what Lisa Alther did, in a near-verbatim regurgitation of McCoy’s first chapter.  Alther said Truda McCoy’s book read like a novel, and that is true of most books by descendants.  Alther’s 2012 book, Blood Feud, reads even more like a novel than does the one by Truda McCoy.  In fact, in her fictional chapter on Asa Harmon, she follows Truda McCoy so closely that one has to look at the title to know which book one is reading.

Here are two examples among many sentences that are so similar that it is hard to distinguish Alther from McCoy:

TM: “Pete and Patty started toward the cave. They had not gone far after they reached the woods, until other tracks joined the tracks that Pete had made on his previous journey to the cave.

LA: “they reached a junction at which new boot prints emerged from the woods to join Pete’s tracks up the hill toward the cave.

TM: Then, “Halfway to the cave, they found Harmon lying across a snow covered log. The snow around him was red with his blood.”

LA: “Alongside the trail, just below the cave, they spotted a fallen oak treeAcross its trunk sprawled Harmon McCoy.  The snow on the ground around him was stained scarlet.”

Alther takes McCoy’s harmless fiction and transforms it into “history,” without even giving McCoy credit for her words.  This narrative exists nowhere else in feud literature, except with Truda McCoy and Lisa Alther. Knowing what it represents, this chapter is actually the worst part of Alther’s book.

Alther had a few new ‘facts’ in her book, but they are all egregiously false.

One of her “New” discoveries is where she wrote, (p. 35) of Ran’l McCoy: “he charged Devil Anse Hatfield with stealing a horse from his farm in 1864.” On the next page, she writes: “Ranel McCoy and Devil Anse Hatfield filed several similar suits against each other in the years following.

This is not a minor human error that any writer might make. It is a whole cloth fabrication of something that is of central importance to her tale. And it is absolutely false in its entirety.

As you can see in this Index, Randolph McCoy filed several lawsuits, NONE of which had any Hatifeld–much less Devil Anse–as a defendant.

McCoy 1

Randolph Mccoy cases continue on the next page. He was actually quite litigious. Ran’l was involved in many suits contesting the value of hundreds of pigs, but no one knows about them.

There are NO lawsuits in the record where Randolph McCoy sued ANY Hatfield, much less Devil Anse Hatfield. The index also shows that Devil Anse never sued ANY McCoy, much less Ran’l McCoy.

McCoy 3

Lisa Alther, whose previous novels dealt a lot with sex, has much more sex in her fictional “history” than any other feud writer.  Everyone knows sex sells in 21st century America– and the kinkier the better.  Alther mentions at least three times that Ran’l McCoy’s cousin, Pleasant, was accused of copulating with a cow.

When describing the widely publicized photo of Ellison Hatfield in his Civil War uniform with his revolver in front of him, she says he is “fondling his pistol.”

In her chapter entitled The Corsica of America, Alther says: “If only the feudists had spent as much money and effort on acquiring contraception (which was, in fact, available in other regions of the United States at this time) as they did on acquiring guns, ammunition and moonshine, a different scenario might have evolved.”

I must admit that the scenario would have been quite different if someone had sold condoms to the feudists.  When Devil Anse went to federal court in 1889 on a moonshining charge, he faced the standard year-and-a-day if convicted.  Had he been peddling condoms, however, he would have faced up to five years in the pokey and a two thousand dollar fine plus court costs.

The Comstock Act became law in 1870.  That law read, in part:  “…whoever shall sell…or shall offer to sell, or to lend, or to give away… any drug or medicine, or any article whatever, for the prevention of conception, or for causing unlawful abortion, or shall advertise the same for sale… shall be imprisoned at hard labor in the penitentiary for not less than six months nor more than five years for each offense, or fined not less than one hundred dollars nor more than two thousand dollars, with costs of court.”

Whether this declared expert is ignorant of history or simply chose to condemn several generations of Appalachians while knowing her statement was untrue, I know not.  The Comstock Law remained in full force against contraceptives until 1936.   The 1936 decision applied only to married couples.  The right to contraception for unmarried persons was not recognized until 1972.

We learn more about the mind of the novelist who penned this screed when she says she was driving through the Cumberlands and saw a billboard advertising an indoor firing range.  Alther says: “At the top stood a large cutout of a pistol, pointed upward at an angle.  The barrel resembled an erect phallus, the trigger guard outlining a testicle.”   Now we know why she thinks Ellison Hatfield was ‘fondling’ his pistol in his Civil War photo.  To some people everything is about sex, and those folks write a lot of books — and buy a lot of books.

The Wall Street Journal calls Alther “An  expert on the feud.” I place her in the top tier of the folks I lovingly refer to as “The feud liars.

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Dean King okum Hatfield & McCoy Hokum in Books

A Church house, a Smokehouse and a Cat house—and a Bounty Hunter, Too!

Once one has read my 2013 book, “The Hatfield & McCoy Feud after Kevin Costner: Rescuing History,” one can get some real laughs from reading the feud books.

Dean King’s “True Story.” has almost all of the most comical yarns from earlier feud tales, and he gives the prior author credit occasionally.

Unfortunately, some of the best guffaws in King’s book are not apparent to someone who was not raised in the hills before about 1970, or who hasn’t read the Foxfire books.

King starts out with one of those Foxfire howlers.

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 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

Dean King: A Review of a Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jan as James

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kentucky Lawyers Learn Feud History

This drawing of Ol’ Ran’l and Devil Anse is by the talented Tug Valley artist, Vera Kay Fink Hankins.

On June 21, 2013, the Kentucky Bar Association held a Continuing Legal Education seminar in Louisville, entitled: “THE HATFIELDS AND MCCOYS: FROM FILING SUITS TO FIRING SHOTS   https://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.kybar.org/resource/resmgr/2013_Convention_Files/ac2013_61.pdf  Attending barristers received two CLE credits for absorbing the wisdom imparted by an all-star panel, made up of lawyers and professors.

A note at the beginning assures the attendees that they are about to receive the “straight scoop” on the feud: “The materials included in this Kentucky Bar Association Continuing Legal Education handbook are intended to provide current and accurate information about the subject matter covered.”

Let’s examine some more of the “current and accurate information” which was imparted to the lawyers of Kentucky:

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] McCoy, 9.

[ii] McCoy, 10.

[iii] Alther, 9.

 


[iv] Alther, 9.

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Dean King Hokum

Are we Masochistic?

Am I missing something? Is my reading comprehension somehow faulty? My mother was a McCoy. Whatever is in the McCoy genes must be present in me and my siblings, and my  fifty-plus first cousins and many more cousins more distant. Yet, not one of the several hundred descendants of  my great-great-grandfather, Uriah McCoy, brother to Sally and first cousin to Randolph, has ever attacked anyone, so far as I know. They have all been peaceful people by anyone’s standard.

Dean King says of the McCoys: “the family suffers from a rare hereditary condition now known as von Hippel-Lindau disease.” King says: “Friends and adversaries alike are subjected to a hair-trigger temper. At times angry at the world, McCoy family members have described their inability to stand any kind of insult, experiencing rage that turns them red in the face and compels them to fight.” P. 140.

KIing’s own Facebook page makes a lie out of that, as the top posting at this time shows two McCoys, each holding a copy of the book containing that profound insult. Each of the McCoys is smiling!  They show no signs of attacking the man who wrote those insults.

King says that Ellison Hatfield, called “a splendid man” in Truda McCoy’s book, was a six foot-six giant who started the fight with the much smaller Tolbert McCoy by threatening Tolbert with a knife. Contradicting every one of the dozens of witnesses who were there that day, both Hatfields and McCoys, King said; “Big Ellison grew more animated. He waved his jackknife in Tolbert’s face.” p. 94.

Just a few posts down from the McCoy post cited above, we see King, surrounded by descendants of Ellison Hatfield,who are helping him peddle the book that contains that egregious lie about their ancestor.

Seriously, am I missing something? Can someone enlighten me? What is it that causes people to assist in spreading lies about themselves and their ancestors?

If you support the effort to refute the yarn-spinners and bring real historical study to the subject of the Tug Valley in the late nineteenth century, then please “Like” us on Facebook.

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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