Hatfield N Mccoy's Adventures

10/11/2025

07/20/2025

The Hatfields and McCoys were two Appalachian families residing along the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River, which forms the border between West Virginia and Kentucky. The Hatfields, led by William Anderson “Devil Anse” Hatfield, were primarily from West Virginia, while the McCoys, under the leadership of Randolph “Randall” McCoy, lived in Kentucky.

The Hatfields were a little wealthier and had significantly more political connections than the McCoys. Anse Hatfield’s timber business brought considerable wealth to his family. The McCoys were more lower-middle class. Randall McCoy did own a 300-acre farm and some livestock, and both families were involved in producing and selling illegal moonshine, a highly sought-after commodity at the time.

Pre-Feud Tensions

While the exact origins of the feud are complex and multifaceted, several factors contributed to the rising tensions between the Hatfields and McCoys. These included economic competition, political differences, and lingering animosities from the Civil War.

The Catalysts for Conflict

1. The Hog Trial:

A significant event was the dispute over a hog. That may sound silly, but livestock was a serious matter back then and could mean life or death when feeding a large family in the winter.

Floyd Hatfield, a cousin of Devil Anse, was accused by Randolph McCoy of stealing one of his pigs. The case went to court, where it was ultimately decided in favor of Floyd Hatfield, thanks to the testimony of Bill Staton, a relative of both families. This decision exacerbated underlying strains and set the tone for things to come.

2. Love Affair:

Tensions heightened again when Roseanna McCoy began a relationship with Devil Anse’s son, Johnse Harfield. Much to Randall McCoy’s fury, she would leave her family to live with the Hatfields in West Virginia. However, with family pressure, Roseanna eventually and reluctantly returned to her clan. Even though she returned, Randall shunned her, and she and Johnse remained apart. Roseanna was pregnant, but at that point, both families refused to allow them to marry. Johnse attempted to rekindle their relationship, but the McCoys had Johnse arrested on outstanding Kentucky bootlegging warrants. When Roseanna found out about the arrest, she made a desperate midnight ride to alert Devil Anse, who quickly organized a rescue party.

The Hatfield rescue party caught up to and surrounded the McCoys to reclaim Johnse before he could be transported to the county seat in Pikeville, KY.

After all that, and perhaps due to all the strain surrounding the relationship, Johnse ultimately abandoned Roseanna and actually ended up marrying her cousin, Nancy McCoy, in 1881.

3. The Election Day Fight:

During an election day event, the feud escalated further when Ellison Hatfield, Devil Anse’s brother, was killed by Randall McCoy’s sons and Roseanna McCoy’s younger brothers: Tolbert, Pharmer, and Bud. In a moonshine drunken brawl, the three McCoy brothers fought Ellison Hatfield, which eventually led to Ellison getting stabbed and then shot.

The McCoy brothers were initially arrested and taken to Pikeville, KY, for trial. However, Devil Anse secretly organized a large group who intercepted the constables and took the McCoy brothers by force to West Virginia. When Ellison finally succumbed to his injuries, the Hatfields exacted their revenge. The three McCoy brothers were tied to pawpaw bushes and shot multiple times.

4. New Year’s Night Massacre

One of the more horrendous episodes in the feud occurred in January 1888. A group of Hatfields attacked the McCoy homestead, setting it on fire and killing two of Randall McCoy’s children, Calvin and Alifair. Randall’s wife, Sarah, was grabbed, beaten, and almost killed by Jim Vance and Johnse Hatfield. With his house burning, Randolph and his remaining family members fled farther into the wilderness; his children, unprepared for the elements, suffered frostbite.

To evade further attacks from the raiding parties from West Virginia, the remaining McCoys relocated to Pikeville.

4. Legal and Extralegal Responses

After the New Year’s Massacre, a posse led by Pike County Deputy Sheriff Frank Philipps set out to track down the Harfields across the state line into West Virginia. This group included two McCoys, Bud and James McCoy, one of Randolph’s sons. Their first target was Jim Vance, who they ended up killing in the woods after he defied arrest. Philipps then conducted several raids on Hatfield homes and supporters, capturing many and killing three more Hatfield supporters.

4. Grapevine Creek Battle

On January 19, Philipps and his crew tracked the Hatfields to Grapevine Creek and cornered them. However, the Hatfields were ready, having gathered their own armed group. A faction of the McCoys succeeded in drawing the Hatfields into a specific area of the battlefield, while another McCoy contingent maneuvered to outflank them. This strategy inflicted multiple casualties on the Hatfields, forcing them to retreat. Several Hatfields were unable to escape and were captured by the Posse.

These prisoners, along with those apprehended before the battle, were put on trial with the authorization of the Kentucky government. They faced charges for various crimes committed during the feud, including the murder of Randall McCoy’s sons in retaliation for Ellison Hatfield’s death and the killing of Alifair McCoy, Randall’s daughter, during the New Year’s Eve massacre.

Ultimately, eight Hatfields were found guilty and sentenced to life in prison, except for Ellison Mounts. He was sentenced to death for having killed Randall McCoy’s daughter, Alifair.

Ellison Mounts was executed by hanging. With his last words, Ellison swore that: “The Hatfields made me do it.”

No one had been sent to the gallows in Pike County for forty years, and after Ellison, no one ever was again.

Whatever happened to Johnse Hatfield?
The Hatfields lived under constant fear, always wary that bounty hunters might ambush them or that authorities would drag them across the river to Kentucky to face the gallows. Anse kept close tabs on Sam Vinson, a Logan County acquaintance who had escaped to Washington’s Spokane County after being accused of killing a McCoy. Word had it that Vinson had opened a tavern in Spokane’s county seat. Anse figured that if Johnse could find Vinson, he might establish himself in the region under a new identity.

Having spent decades working in the timber industry, a fresh start in the forested Northwest seemed like a natural choice for Johnse. By that time, his wife, Nancy McCoy—Roseanna McCoy’s cousin—had left him. To make matters worse, she had married Franklin “Bad Frank” Phillips, the Pike County deputy, bounty hunter, and sworn enemy of the Hatfield clan.

Johnse began preparing for the long journey west. He planned to flee to Oregon, leaving his bounty behind and working in the timberlands around Spokane, Washington. His father, Devil Anse Hatfield, had given him a horse and a sturdy pack mule several weeks prior, but the journey had been grueling. Johnse traveled more than half the distance to Washington on horseback, sleeping under the stars with only a wool blanket for warmth and surviving on hardtack, beans, jerky, and coffee. Somewhere in the Oklahoma Territory, he sold his horse and mule and boarded a passenger train to complete the final leg of the journey.

Back in Pike County, Nancy McCoy Phillips, now Johnse’s embittered ex-wife, began hearing rumors that he had settled in the Northwest and was possibly going by the name Jim Jacobs. She passed this information along to her family, who quickly organized a heavily armed posse. On Randall McCoy’s dime, detectives Dan “Cunning” Cunningham, Alpheus “Alf” Burnett, and Treve Gibson, along with several others, set off for Washington.

Their search eventually led them to a logging camp near the headwaters of the Snoqualmie River, east of Seattle. There, Cunningham provided the loggers with a description of Johnse—a tall, blue-eyed, light-haired man from West Virginia, possibly using the alias Jim Jacobs.

As the posse questioned the timber crew, a young woman named Midgie Staunton McCarthy, who happened to be in the camp, overheard the conversation. Although history is unclear about her relationship with Johnse, she knew Jim Jacobs (Johnse Hatfield) and quickly penned a warning note, sending it with a Siwash Indian messenger. The note instructed the foreman of Johnse’s crew to “Tell Jim to look out!”

After receiving the warning, Johnse Hatfield noticed seven determined searchers riding mules along a ridge near his camp. Dropping his ax, he fled into the woods. A fellow crewman, a local Native American, guided him to a riverbank hidden by dense thickets. Johnse crawled into the underbrush, enduring the painful scratches of thorns and branches, and watched as the trackers combed the rugged terrain.

Once the detectives left, Johnse quickly swam across the river and decided not to return to the timber camp. He traveled on foot to Seattle, where he caught a steamer to British Columbia and found work in the challenging conditions of the timber industry there. The trees were massive, requiring workers to build tall scaffolds to cut them down. Meanwhile, Sam Vinson, the Spokane barkeep, devised a ruse to end the pursuit. He sent a lock of Johnse’s blond hair along with a fake condolence letter to Johnse’s parents, claiming their son had died in a logging accident. The news devastated Devil Anse and Levicy, and word of Johnse’s supposed death spread throughout the Tug Fork Valley.

In 1898, Cap Hatfield, skeptical of his brother’s death, searched for answers while on his way back to West Virginia from Colorado. In British Columbia, he eventually found Johnse alive and well, working in a logging camp. Cap convinced Johnse to return home, reasoning that they would be safer under the protection of their family. Johnse and Cap took separate routes back to avoid detection. When Johnse finally arrived at the family home, his parents were overwhelmed with emotion, having believed him dead for nearly two years.

Back in West Virginia, Johnse’s troubles were far from over. In June 1898, he was ambushed by a group led by Humphrey E. “Doc” Ellis, a business rival of the Hatfields. They captured him and took him to Kentucky, where he was tried for murder and sentenced to life in prison. However, after four years, Johnse was pardoned for saving the lieutenant governor from an attack by a fellow inmate. The ordeal left him a changed man. Johnse later married Rebecca Browning, whose steady influence brought the stability he had lacked in his tumultuous younger years.

Whatever happened to Anse Hatfield?
Devil Anse Hatfield mellowed with the years. On Sept. 23, 1911, Uncle D**e Garrett, a former Confederate chaplain, Appalachian circuit-riding preacher and longtime friend, baptized “the ol’ Devil” in the icy waters of Main Island Creek.

Anse would live another 10 years, eventually dying of pneumonia at age 81 in his Island Creek home on Jan. 6, 1921. He was laid to rest in the Hatfield Family Cemetery. His grave is marked by a life-sized statue of himself carved from Italian marble.

07/20/2025

During the most heated years of the feud, each family was ruled by a well-known patriarch. William Anderson Hatfield, known as “Devil Anse,” had the appearance of a backwoods, rough-hewn mountain dweller. By the 1870s Devil Anse was an increasingly successful timber merchant who employed dozens of men, including some McCoys. On the other side of the feud stood Randolph “Old Ranel” McCoy. Though not as prosperous as Devil Anse, Randolph owned some land and livestock. Both families lived along the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River, which snaked along the boundary between Kentucky and West Virginia, and both families had complex kinship and social networks. Family loyalty was often determined not only by blood but by employment and proximity. The families even intermarried and sometimes switched family loyalties, even once the feud had started.

The first event in the decades-long feud was the 1865 murder of Randolph’s brother, Asa Harmon McCoy, by the Logan Wildcats, a local militia group that counted Devil Anse and other Hatfields among its members. Many people—even members of his own family—regarded Asa Harmon, who had served in the Union Army during the American Civil War, as a traitor. While some have surmised that his murder set the stage for the feud, most historians now see this incident as a standalone event.

Relations between the two families continued to sour over the next decade before flaring again over a seemingly small matter: a dispute over a single hog. In 1878 Randolph McCoy accused Floyd Hatfield, a cousin of Devil Anse, of stealing one of his pigs, a valuable commodity in the poor region. Floyd Hatfields’s trial took place in McCoy territory but was presided over by a cousin of Devil Anse. It hinged on the testimony of star witness Bill Staton, a McCoy relative married to a Hatfield. Staton testified in Floyd Hatfield’s favor, and the McCoys were infuriated when Floyd was cleared of the charges against him. Two years later, Staton was violently killed in a fracas with Sam and Paris McCoy, nephews of Randolph. Sam stood trial for the murder but was acquitted for self-defense reasons.

Within months of Staton’s murder, a heated affair of a different sort was set ablaze. At a local election day gathering in 1880, Johnse Hatfield, the 18-year-old son of Devil Anse, encountered Roseanna McCoy, Randolph’s daughter. According to accounts, Johnse and Roseanna hit it off, disappearing together for hours. Supposedly fearing retaliation from her family for mingling with the Hatfields, Roseanna stayed at the Hatfield residence for a period of time, drawing the ire of the McCoys.

Although they certainly shared a romance, it rapidly became clear that Johnse was not about to settle down with Roseanna. Several months later he abandoned the pregnant Roseanna and quickly moved on. In May 1881 he married Nancy McCoy, Roseanna’s cousin. According to the romanticized legend, Roseanna was heartbroken by these events and never recovered emotionally.

The real turning point in the feud, according to most historical accounts, occurred on another local election day in August 1882. Three of Randolph McCoy’s sons ended up in a violent dispute with two brothers of Devil Anse. The fight soon snowballed into chaos as one of the McCoy brothers stabbed Ellison Hatfield multiple times and then shot him in the back. Authorities soon apprehended the McCoys, but the Hatfields interceded, spiriting the men to Hatfield territory. After receiving word that Ellison had died, they bound the McCoys to some pawpaw bushes. Within minutes, they fired more than 50 shots, killing all three brothers.

Though the Hatfields might have felt their revenge was warranted, the law felt otherwise, quickly returning indictments against 20 men, including Devil Anse and his sons. Despite the charges, the Hatfields eluded arrest, leaving the McCoys boiling with anger about the murders and outraged that the Hatfields walked free. Their cause was taken up by Perry Cline, an attorney who was married to Martha McCoy, the widow of Randolph’s brother Asa Harmon. Years earlier Cline had lost a lawsuit against Devil Anse over the deed for thousands of acres of land, and many historians believe this left him looking for his own form of revenge. Using his political connections, Cline had the charges against the Hatfields reinstated. He announced rewards for the arrest of the Hatfields, including Devil Anse.

With the pressure cooker gathering steam, the media started to report on the feud in 1887. In their accounts, the Hatfields were often portrayed as violent backwoods hillbillies who roamed the mountains stirring up violence. The sensationalist coverage planted the seed for the rivalry to become cemented in the American imagination. What had been a local story was becoming a national legend.

The Hatfields may or may not have been paying attention to these stories, but they were certainly paying attention to the bounty on their heads. In an effort to end the commotion once and for all, a group of the Hatfields and their supporters hatched a plan to attack Randolph McCoy and his family. Led by Devil Anse’s son Cap and ally Jim Vance, a group of Hatfield men ambushed the McCoys’ home on New Year’s Day in 1888. Randolph fled, escaping into the woods. His son Calvin and daughter Alifair were killed in the crossfire; his wife Sarah was left badly beaten by the Hatfields, suffering a crushed skull.

A few days after what became known as the New Year’s massacre, bounty hunter Frank Phillips chased down Jim Vance and Cap Hatfield, killing Vance. Phillips rounded up nine Hatfield family members and supporters and hauled them off to jail. Years of legal permutations unfolded as a series of courts judged the legal merits of the Hatfield case. Eventually, the case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which decided that the Hatfields being held in custody could be tried.

The trial began in 1889, and in the end, eight of the Hatfields and their supporters were sentenced to life in prison. Ellison Mounts, who was believed to be the son of Ellison Hatfield, was sentenced to death. Nicknamed “Cottontop” he was known to be mentally challenged, and many viewed him as a scapegoat even though he had confessed his guilt. Although public executions were against the law in Kentucky, thousands of spectators gathered to witness the hanging of Ellison Mounts on February 18, 1890. Reports claim that his last words were: “They made me do it! The Hatfields made me do it!”

As the feud faded, both family leaders attempted to recede into relative obscurity. Randolph McCoy became a ferry operator. In 1914 he died at the age of 88 from burns suffered in an accidental fire. By all accounts, he continued to be haunted by the deaths of his children. Devil Anse Hatfield, who had long proclaimed his skepticism about religion, was born again later in life when he was baptized for the first time at age 73. Although the conflict subsided generations ago, the names Hatfield and McCoy continue to loom large in the American imagination.

07/20/2025

https://youtu.be/LUyCEz_Fjms?t=12

Today is the 98 year anniversary of the Matewan Massacre, one of the deadliest events in the West Virginia Mine Wars.