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