Historical Notes: Chapter Thirteen

The Hatfield-McCoy Feud

The Hatfield-McCoy feud stands as the most infamous family conflict in American history, a decades-long cycle of violence that erupted along the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River, which forms the border between Kentucky and West Virginia. While popular legend traces the feud's origins to a stolen pig in 1878, the conflict's roots ran far deeper, embedded in the economic, political, and social upheavals that followed the Civil War. The Hatfields, led by William Anderson "Devil Anse" Hatfield, were a prosperous West Virginia family involved in the lucrative timber industry. The McCoys, headed by Randolph "Randall" McCoy, were Kentucky farmers of more modest means. The war had split loyalties in the region—Devil Anse served the Confederacy while several McCoys fought for the Union—and these lingering antagonisms festered in the impoverished postwar landscape.

The feud escalated dramatically through a series of violent incidents that shocked the nation. In 1882, three of Randolph McCoy's sons killed Ellison Hatfield in a drunken brawl at an election day gathering. Devil Anse and his sons captured the McCoy brothers and, in an act of vigilante justice, executed them by firing squad, tying them to pawpaw bushes across the Tug Fork in Kentucky. The most notorious incident occurred on New Year's Night 1888, when a Hatfield raiding party attacked the McCoy home, setting it ablaze. Alifair McCoy, Randall's daughter, was shot and killed as she tried to flee, and her brother Calvin was also murdered. Alifair's mother, Sally McCoy, was brutally beaten. The violence drew national attention when Kentucky governor Simon Bolivar Buckner sought to extradite the Hatfields from West Virginia, leading to a legal battle that reached the United States Supreme Court. The case of Mahon v. Justice (1888) ultimately upheld the arrest and extradition of several Hatfield men to face trial in Kentucky.

The legal proceedings following the 1888 raid brought the feud to its grim conclusion. Ellison Mounts, Devil Anse's illegitimate nephew who had participated in the New Year's Night raid, was convicted of Alifair McCoy's murder and hanged in Pikeville, Kentucky, on February 18, 1890—the only participant to receive the death penalty. His lawyer, J. Lee Cline, who also represented Hatfield interests, allegedly convinced the mentally limited young man to confess with promises of clemency that never materialized. Mounts's execution, witnessed by thousands who traveled to see the spectacle, marked a turning point. Several other Hatfield men received life sentences, though most were eventually pardoned. By the early 1890s, the era Mack encounters in Chapter Thirteen, the active violence had ceased, but the stories remained fresh and terrifying in local memory.

The Hatfield-McCoy feud reflected broader patterns of violence and social disorder throughout the Appalachian and Ozark regions during the late 19th century. The conflict embodied the clan loyalty systems that governed much of mountain society, where family identity superseded legal authority and personal honor demanded blood vengeance for perceived wrongs. The weakness of formal law enforcement in remote areas meant that disputes were often settled through private violence rather than courts. Economic competition over timber rights, land ownership, and emerging natural resources fueled many conflicts that were framed as family feuds. The feud also illustrated the region's difficult transition from a subsistence economy to industrial capitalism, as outside interests exploited local resources while residents struggled with poverty and displacement. Similar feuds—the Rowan County War in Kentucky, the Brooks-Baxter War in Arkansas, the Martin-Tolliver feud—plagued the region throughout this period, creating an atmosphere of pervasive danger and lawlessness.

By 1898, when Mack hears the story at the Broadmoor House, Devil Anse Hatfield had indeed undergone a religious conversion and been baptized, an event widely covered in newspapers as a symbol of the feud's end. Yet the legend lived on, growing with each retelling. The story Marv Hamby relates captures the essential elements that would define the feud in popular memory: the burning house, the murdered children, the corrupt lawyer, the hanging of Ellison Mounts, and the specter of Devil Anse somewhere in the mountains, perhaps still "conjurin' devils by a campfire." For travelers like Mack passing through this landscape, the feud served as a cautionary tale about the violence that could erupt from the most trivial disputes, and a reminder that the border between civilization and barbarism remained perilously thin in these remote mountain regions. The innkeeper's daughter Sheba, members of immigrant families who had settled in this violent landscape, represented a newer generation hoping to leave such conflicts behind while still living in their shadow.

The Morning After: Williamson, Kentucky

The next morning, Mack rose early and apparalled himself in his purple costume. He tugged on his breeches and slipped on his snow white blouse, buttoned his doublet and pulled on his boots, plucked the frills from his cuffs and collar, buckled on the sword and shoved the poinard in his belt, tied his mask, donned his chapeaux, straightened his plume, and finally, winked at himself in the mirror. He had been traveling for over four months now, but he still felt a thrill when he emerged as the Purple Knight.

Mack entered the common room where a newly laid fire was crackling into life, and the table had been set for breakfast. From the kitchen came voices like those of the night before, and he heard the girl say again, "But, mama!"

Mack dragged a chair from the table and sat down with a long scooch forward. The kitchen door swung open, and the dark-eyed girl from the night before backed into the room. She was carrying a tin coffee pot in one hand and a little pitcher of cream in the other, and when she turned around, she froze in momentary astonishment. "The Purple Knight!" she whispered in a soft Carpathian accent. "The papers said you were passing this way, but I never thought you would stay here!"

Mack smiled. "Well, here I am! What's your name?"

"Sheba."

"Hello, Sheba, I'm Mack."

"Yes." She stood in front of the door, holding the pot and pitcher and gawping.

"May I have some coffee, please?"

"Oh, yes! Yes, sir. I'm sorry!" With her dress rustling and her slippers sibilant on the sanded floor, she–a mere slip of a girl!–slipped to his side to pour the coffee. In her anxiety and admiration, she sloshed some coffee into the saucer so that she cried out, "I am so sorry! Did I spill it on your pretty clothes? I'm so sorry!" She set the coffee pot on the table and took a dish towel from her pocket. She leaned over Mack to clean up the spill and pressed her bodice against his arm. With every circular motion, she caressed him.

Mack closed his eyes as he felt her breasts moving against him. Finally, he managed, "No, you didn't get it on me." Her hair tumbled forward as she cleaned up the coffee and parted to reveal the nape of her neck, ivory with dainty hairs, smooth, and oh, so kissable. Mack swallowed and asked, "How old are you, Sheba?"

"Sixteen, but I turn seventeen in March."

"In March? Such a beautiful month, March. The sap rises and makes everything green"–then with a gentle laugh–"and purple, too, by which I mean the flowers. I love spring flowers." Mack placed his hand on the girl's upper thigh and stroked downward to her knee and then up again. Sheba's dress bunched in folds as his hand moved upward, and he felt her firm, young leg beneath the fabric. Gently, he kissed her naked nape.

A hot whisper in his ear: "I know all the purple flowers by name: henbit and johnny-jump-ups and violets and wild sweet William. I know many things for a girl of sixteen."

Mack flushed and felt his sap rise. "Oh, really? What things do you know?"

"Maybe I show you after breakfast. Would you like that?"

"Yes. I would like that very much."

Sheba went into the kitchen and returned with a plate of eggs and bacon and slices of buttered toast and a pot of jam and more coffee, and then she asked if he needed anything else and smiled.

"I'm fine . . . for now. Thank you."

"Good" she said. "I'll be in your room . . . cleaning. Don't be long."

Mack ate breakfast with a young man's appetite, finished his coffee, and returned to his room. When he cracked open the door, he saw Sheba lying in the bed with the sheet pulled to her chin. "Come in," she said. Mack stood over her and gently pulled the sheet down to her feet. He swallowed and said, "Raise your head."

Sheba lifted her head from the pillow, and Mack pulled off his mask and tied it over her eyes. "Now we'll put these on you." He sat on the bed and tugged off his boots, and Sheba put her slender bare feet on Mack's thigh. He opened the tops of the boots and slid them over the girl's feet and up to her knees. Then he stood and looked down at the girl wearing his mask and purple boots and nothing else. He inhaled sharply and thought for a moment he might faint. Then he said, "Now you're perfect. My perfect little Sheba."

Later that morning, Mack, Roz, and the lone greyhound resumed their southward trek on the rutted road beside the Levisa Fork. The morning was growing colder, and an ambiguous November sun shone faintly behind a canopy of gray. The river, too, was a dull gray, and when the cold wind blew, the water fanned out in rippling shale-colored peaks. Mack wrapped his coat around him and dug a pair of purple gloves out of the pockets. His first stop in Pikeville would be the Western Union station where he would send another telegram to Glenn. In the meantime, he was still revising the story about the Hatfields and McCoys that he had begun the night before. Mack was ever revising as he went.