Hatfields and McCoys

On Election Day, August 7, 1882, three sons of Randolph McCoy brutally stabbed twenty-four times and shot Ellison Hatfield, brother of "Devil Anse" Hatfield in Pike County, Kentucky. Ellison was carried across the Tug Fork River to the Anderson Ferrell House where he eventually died from his wounds. Devil Anse and his clan seized the three McCoys responsible and, when Ellison died, they were tied to papaw trees and executed. Thus began America’s most notorious family feud that brought notoriety to the Tug Fork Valley, made national headlines and created a violent image of Appalachian West Virginia and Kentucky.
Kentucky bounty hunters made raids into West Virginia to capture the Hatfields during the 1880s, and the Hatfields retaliated in 1888 by attacking the McCoy homestead in Kentucky, killing a son and daughter and seriously wounding Randolph McCoy’s wife.
Economics, rather than pigs or forbidden love, was the real cause for the feud. The feud was a struggle for power. A 1988 book entitled Feud: Hatfields, McCoys, and Social Change in Appalachia 1860-1900 portrays the Hatfields and McCoys as traditional Appalachians who were wrapped up in the sudden race to control coal and timber—a race that eventually was dominated by powerful outside interests.
The Hatfield-McCoy struggle was a case of ‘local autonomy versus outside control.’ It was between people like the Hatfields and their friends who wanted local control...and people who wanted to bring development from the outside. As a successful small businessman Anse Hatfield, the patriarch of the clan, was the envy of his competitors and his neighbors, including the not-so-successful McCoys across the Kentucky border. The McCoys’ jealousy was manipulated by a local businessman who wanted to force the Hatfields to sell their timber and coal to powerful Eastern corporations.
Jealousy and intrigue may lie at the heart of the feud, but hatred and the hunger for vengeance quickly took over. The feud raged for eight years. By 1890 the killings had ended, but the feud continued to be sensationalised by journalists for years to come. No one is sure exactly how many people died in the long-running feud.

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