Appalachia: Hatfields and McCoys

The Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River, once navigable, now has a single abstract function: Kentucky lies on one side, West Virginia on the other. Splayed out from both banks are noiseless hollows and stubbly, once-farmed bottoms, all in the shadow of Appalachian mountains, which rise dark and gorgeous in every direction. But to the businessmen who brought the railroad through around 1900, wooded slopes and crags were incidental: the capitalists came to burrow and cart away endless tons of coal, which they're still doing today. The Tug Fork Valley, boosters chime, is THE HEART OF THE BILLION DOLLAR COAL FIELD. But hidden behind that bluff, commercial slogan is a different kind of past—peculiar and unsavory and murderous. This valley is the home turf of the Hatfields and the McCoys, whose family war a century ago became freakish folk legend, even as it was being fought.

Hatfields and McCoys are still here, hundreds of them, Hatfields clustered around West Virginia towns like Belfry and Double Camp, McCoys settled in Pilgrim and Jamboree in Kentucky. Many still hunt (raccoons, squirrels) and gather (chestnuts, huckleberries), but they also watch cable TV and vacation in New Jersey. The feud is unequivocally over. All is forgiven. Forgotten? Not just yet. "Why, we're plain old Hatfields and McCoys," says one of the latter in a shrugging, boiler-plate disclaimer, "good friends and neighbors . . ." Yet after a reminiscence has meandered a while, and the truce reaffirmed again, the rote kindliness can give way to neat bursts of partisanship. In bits and pieces, a little blame is assigned, victory claimed. The legacy is not erased, just quiet and manageable. Modern Hatfields and McCoys do not quite know whether to be proud or embarrassed by their inglorious family histories, and most are a little of both. That modest ambivalence, coming from direct descendants of roughneck killers, is almost sweet.

Exactly what made the clans so extravagantly unfriendly is open to conjecture. Maybe Randolph McCoy was sore at a Hatfield for stealing a razorback hog. Maybe he was angry at his daughter Rose Anne, pregnant by Johnse Hatfield after a frolic in 1880, for moving, unmarried, into the Hatfield compound. Or maybe the cause was the packs of Hatfields who crossed the Tug Fork and went swaggering around the Kentucky election grounds. Whatever the reason, the furies were unambiguously loosed on a whisky-sodden day 100 years ago next August. One of McCoy's sons taunted an unarmed Ellison Hatfield, and Ellison's riposte was intemperate and unprintable. Seventeen knife thrusts and one revolver shot later, Ellison lay mortally wounded. The eye-for-an-eye-for-an-eye retaliation began: three McCoys were captured by Hatfields under the command of Ellison's brother Devil Anse, tied to a pawpaw bush, and shot to death. The skirmishing ended with the century, after at least 20 (and perhaps 100) men and women had died.

The feudists were prolific in all things. Devil Anse, like his McCoy counterpart, fathered 13 children; his brother Valentine is reputed to have had 47.