Hatfields, McCoys Unite to Put Famous Feud to Rest

Just like their infamous ancestors, the Hatfields gathered on the West Virginia side of the Tug Fork Valley, the McCoys across the state line in Kentucky.

As they always have, the families talked about coal, about mountain songs, about the dead.

Then, unlike their forebears--who for a dozen years in the late 1800s crept through the poison ivy and pawpaw trees to kill each other--the families worked their way peacefully, tentatively at first, to the other side to say hello.

“You’re too ugly to be a McCoy.”

“You’re too dumb to be a Hatfield.”

“Heh heh. Nice to meet’cha.”

For the first time in a century, the Hatfield and McCoy clans gathered formally Saturday to visit the blood sites of the country’s most legendary feud, offer a prayer and put the past in the past.

They ate some hot dogs, played softball and quietly studied the photo of the 1890 hanging that took the last of a dozen lives lost in the feud. In the grainy black-and-white, Ellison Mounts, a member of the Hatfield clan, already has disappeared into the gallows. The men who hanged him are screwing up their faces in anguish or covering them outright.

The families have, in one sense, never been as estranged as popular myth would suggest. Hatfields married McCoys before the killing began, during the feud and after it. Dozens from both sides still live in the hollows and the hills around here. They still work the mines together and fix each others’ cars.

But after more than a century of tales, many of them tall, some descendants on both sides still harbor a twinge of resentment over the killings, and more than a twinge over the stereotypes to which the feud gave rise: Appalachians as hillbillies, lawless, toothless, thoughtless killers.

The time had come, said reunion organizer Bo McCoy, to start again.

bracing it,” said the minister from Waycross, Ga., as he sat in the shade of an elm tree in Pikeville, Ky. “We can’t change the past. But life goes on. It’s gone on.”

For generations of Hatfields and McCoys, the feud was viewed as a great familial shame, the embarrassment of Appalachia and a topic not to be discussed. Many of the 1,000 or so descendants, who came from as far away as South Korea, never heard a word from their parents about feud patriarchs Anderson “Devil Anse” Hatfield and Randolph McCoy.

They learned some version of the tale on the schoolyard or at the movies. And, some conceded, they stewed.

“I was a kid and saw that movie, ‘Roseanna McCoy.’ Oh, I was hot. I was mad,” said Gene Hatfield of Clyde, Ohio. “The way they demonized the Hatfields . . . .”

If ignoring their history or leaving it for others to tell hadn’t seemed particularly helpful, maybe meeting face-to-face would be, a handful of reunion organizers decided in 1998, and at the same time bring tourist dollars to the still-impoverished region.

All along the valley, communities prepared for this weekend, grading the trail to the life-size statue of Devil Anse, pruning the thickets in the cemetery where many of the McCoys are buried.

Nearly every motel room in the valley is occupied. Official reunion T-shirts and coffee mugs sold out within hours Saturday.

But if all the thick veins of rich coal in these mountains could not bring prosperity, a few days of tourists seem unlikely to change much. Unemployment runs to 11%, more than 2 1/2 times the national average, and half of all the mining jobs in the region have vanished.

“We’ll be back next year, though, and it’ll be even bigger,” Bo McCoy said.

As with all tragedies, the true story of the feud is more complicated, more nuanced than the legend.

“We didn’t just kill each other over a pig like everybody says,” said Bucky Hatfield, a garrulous, black-hatted farrier from Bloomington Springs, Tenn. “It was more than that.”

It was indeed. But the pig story is true. And as a tragic beginning, it works well.

A pig was something when this still-remote place had no railroads, no mines, no towns even--something valuable. And in 1878, Randolph McCoy made a monumental accusation. Devil Anse Hatfield, he said, had stolen his pig.

A judge impaneled six Hatfields and six McCoys. But only five McCoys voted against Devil Anse Hatfield. The sixth would be the first to die.

The feud, as it would come to be called by newspaper and magazine writers, was born. But ill will between the families already had been festering for years, infected by such grand passions as clan pride, Civil War allegiance and commerce.

The Hatfields--Devil Anse had fought with the Confederates-- had made a relative bundle logging their lands. The McCoys, one of whom had fought for the Union, had failed miserably trying to do the same. And the railroads, the mining companies, the developers from Boston and New York, all things that would intensify the rivalry, were already on their way.

The dying began in 1880 with a series of skirmishes along the banks of the Tug River. As the shooting commenced, so did the saga’s classically ill-fated romance.

Devil Anse’s son Johnse met Randolph’s daughter Roseanne. He wooed her. He impregnated her. Then he married another woman, another McCoy.

On the following election day, Roseanna McCoy’s three brothers hunted down Devil Anse’s brother, Ellison, stabbed him and shot him. When Ellison died a few days later, Devil Anse and his men hunted down those brothers, tied each to a different pawpaw tree near the town of Matewan, W.Va., and shot them repeatedly.

But everyone had had enough, enough of the bloodshed and of the fancy magazine writers who talked about simple mountain people but wrote about savages. The Tug Fork Valley was quiet again for five years.

“What happened in the quiet five years was development,” said Altina Walker, author of “Feud: Hatfields, McCoys and Social Change in Appalachia, 1860-1900.” “People from the east found this place was rich in coal, rich in timber.”

Against the backdrop of rising property values emerged a Pikeville lawyer and McCoy cousin named Perry Cline, who had, years before, lost a court battle and 5,000 acres to Devil Anse Hatfield. Cline persuaded officials to reissue 5-year-old murder indictments against the Hatfields. And he helped organize a posse that briefly captured nine Hatfields.

In retaliation, the Hatfields set out on New Year’s Day 1888 to do away with Randolph McCoy for good. They didn’t get the old man, but they killed two more of his children.

Two years later, Ellison Mounts was hanged for his role in that raid. By 1900, the fight, finally, was over.

More than a century later, nothing here except maybe a loaded coal train carries as much metaphorical weight as the names “Hatfield” and “McCoy”--names that are more often than not spoken in tandem.

“It’s Hatfield and McCoy, always Hatfield and McCoy,” said Bo McCoy, still beneath the elms. “But maybe we don’t really need to be two separate families anymore.”