The Hatfield-McCoy feud, a thirty-year conflict that killed over a dozen family members on both sides, ended not in the hills of Appalachia but in the Supreme Court. Eight men were convicted, seven sentenced to life in prison, and one, Ellison Mounts, was condemned to hang. His final words from the gallows were the most shocking declaration of the entire saga. The feud raged between 1863 and 1891 along the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River, which separated West Virginia from Kentucky.
The two clans were led by powerful patriarchs. William Anderson “Devil Anse” Hatfield led his family from West Virginia, building a wealthy timber empire. Across the river, Randolph McCoy, a struggling farmer with more pride than money, rallied his clan. Both men had large families.
Devil Anse and his wife had thirteen children, while Randolph and his wife, who was also his first cousin, had sixteen. The families had fought on the same side during the Civil War, mostly serving the Confederacy. The one exception was Asa Harmon McCoy, who wore Union blue. The feud began in earnest when Asa, returning home in his Union uniform in January 1865, had a deadly encounter with Jim Vance, Devil Anse’s uncle.
Vance killed McCoy, an act that sparked the decades of bloodshed to come. The Hatfields also had their own grievances, including the death of a friend of Devil Anse at the hands of Union fighters, blood Devil Anse personally claimed to have avenged. After more than a decade of relative quiet, the feud reignited in 1878 over a dispute about a hog. When a local judge ruled in favor of the Hatfields, the decision was based on testimony from a man named Bill Staton.
In 1880, two McCoy brothers killed Staton but walked free after claiming self-defense. Love briefly complicated the conflict when Roseanna McCoy, a McCoy daughter, fell for Johnson Hatfield, Devil Anse’s son. She left her family to live with the enemy. Johnson was later arrested by the McCoys on bootlegging charges, and Roseanna rode through the night to warn the Hatfields, who freed him.
Johnson soon abandoned her, however, marrying her cousin instead, even though Roseanna was pregnant. The feud intensified in 1882. On election day, Ellison Hatfield, Devil Anse’s brother, was brutally stabbed twenty-six times by three McCoy brothers. He died from his wounds.
The Hatfields retaliated by capturing the three brothers, tying them to bushes, and firing fifty rounds into them. The bodies were described as “bullet riddled. ”
The violence escalated further. Perry Cline, a deputy sheriff and McCoy relative with a personal grudge against Devil Anse over a land dispute, announced rewards for the Hatfields’ capture, turning the feud into a bounty hunt.
In retaliation for a suspected warning, Cap Hatfield and Tom Wallace burst into the home of Mary McCoy, sister of Jeff McCoy, and beat her mercilessly. When Jeff McCoy heard of the attack, he sought vengeance but was caught on the banks of the Tug Fork and killed by the two men. The feud reached its darkest point on New Year’s Day 1888. Devil Anse orchestrated a raid on the McCoy cabin while staying home to maintain deniability.
His men surrounded the home, opened fire, and then set the cabin on fire. As two of Randolph McCoy’s children fled the flames, they were cut down in the yard. Randolph managed to escape and hide in a pig pen, but his wife Sarah was caught and badly beaten. The surviving McCoys fled into the cold wilderness, suffering frostbite, and eventually relocated to Pikeville, Kentucky.
The brutality of the New Year’s Day massacre shocked the region. A posse led by Pike County Deputy Sheriff Frank Phillips crossed into West Virginia seeking justice. They found Jim Vance in the woods, and when he resisted arrest, Phillips used it as justification to kill him. On January 19, 1888, the two sides met in an open confrontation at Grapevine Creek, the feud’s only organized armed conflict.
Phillips’s posse killed two Hatfields and summarily executed a surrendering West Virginia deputy. The legal proceedings that followed reached the Supreme Court. Eight men were indicted for their roles in the massacre. In 1888, the highest court in the land ruled in favor of Kentucky on extradition issues, allowing the trials to proceed.
All eight indicted men were found guilty. Seven received life sentences, and Ellison Mounts was sentenced to death. Just before his execution, Mounts attempted to retract his confession, professing his innocence and claiming he had confessed only in the hope of mercy. His final words were a direct condemnation of the family he had served: “The Hatfields made me do it.
” He was buried in an unmarked grave near the gallows. Devil Anse Hatfield escaped punishment. His elder brother, Valentine Hatfield, was not so lucky. As one of the eight convicted men, he died in prison from unknown causes.
Johnson Hatfield was convicted in 1901, the last official trial stemming from the feud. After Mounts’s execution, the open warfare ceased. The feud slowly faded into legend, with tabloid coverage turning the families into national symbols of bitter rivalry. On June 14, 2003, in Pikeville, Kentucky, sixty descendants of both families signed an official truce during the fourth Hatfield-McCoy Festival, and the governors of both states declared the day Hatfield and McCoy Reconciliation Day.
The feud, a thirty-year bloodbath of war, land disputes, revenge, and betrayal, had finally come to an official end.
