The great family feuds—such as the Hatfield-McCoy, Martin-Tolliver, Hargis-Cockrell, Sutton-Taylor, and Horrell-Higgins feuds, which lasted from ten to thirty years and killed many people—were intensely personal, but many had been started by Civil War animosities, particularly in the Southern Appalachians. In Kentucky and West Virginia guerilla bands of Confederate and Union sympathizers had fought in the mountain wilderness. In addition to these inherited hatreds, the poverty and isolation, the backward education and law enforcement of the area, led to sustained feuds, of which the most notorious took place between the Hatfields and the McCoys.
The Hatfields and McCoys lived on opposite sides of a stream dividing West Virginia from Kentucky. The Hatfield chief was William Anderson (Devil Anse) Hatfield, who had been a Confederate captain. Randolph (Ran’l) McCoy, the opposing clan leader, had been a Union guerrilla. They lived in peace for a time after Appomattox, industriously producing moonshine. Trouble started in 1873, as Devil Anse recalled later, “when a difficulty arose between Floyd Hatfield … and Randolph McCoy, over a sow and some pigs.” McCoy accused Hatfield of stealing his pigs; the accusation led to scuffles, brawls, and eventually guns, and the feud was on.
The following document tells of an incident in 1888, when nine of the Hatfields went to Randolph McCoy’s cabin to murder two McCoys who could give material evidence against a Hatfield who had murdered three McCoys in 1882. It is a confession by Charles Gillespie of his part in the incident. The account is taken from a book by a New York World reporter who visited the feud site in 1888 and talked to Devil Anse: Theron C. Crawford: An American Vendetta: A Story of Barbarism in the United States (1889), 179–85. See Virgil Carrington Jones: The Hatfields and the McCoys (1948).
“On the first day of last January I was at home, when ‘Cap’ Hatfield came along and said: ‘Charley, we are going over into Kentucky to-night to have some fun. Get a horse and meet us, and go along.’ Well, I did not know what was up, but I told ‘Cap’ I would be on hand, and after a little trouble I got a horse and was at the rendezvous, where I found ‘Cap,’ ‘Johns,’ Ellis, ‘Bob,’ and Ellett Hatfield, ‘Old Jim’ Vance, Ellison Mounts, and a man who goes by the name of both Mitchell and Chambers, whom I know by the name of the ‘Guerilla.’ ‘Jim’ Vance was in command of the party, and it was agreed at the start, before the real object of the trip was disclosed, that all should yield to everything he said and do all he might order us to do. It has been claimed that the whole Hatfield neighborhood was with us that night. This is not true. There were just nine of us, and the nine I have mentioned.
“Arriving at a convenient distance from the McCoy house, I was first made acquainted with the real object of our trip. Vance told us that, if old Randall McCoy and his son ‘Cal’ were out of the road, every material witness against the men who had taken part in the murder of the three McCoy boys would be removed, and there could be no conviction of any of them, even if they might at some time be arrested for it. All had become tired of dodging the officers of the law, and wished to be able to sleep at home beside better bedfellows than Winchester rifles, and to occasionally take off their boots when they went to bed. This was the reason which ‘Old Jim’ Vance gave us, and ‘Cap’ and ‘Johns’ Hatfield agreed with him.
“Well, we determined, if the family would not come out when we should warn them to, to shoot through the windows and doors of the house from the ends and sides, with our Winchesters, volley after volley, until all inside would be either dead or disabled. The only reply the McCoys made to our demand to come out was to bar and barricade the doors and to prepare to fight us till the last. We shot through the windows and doors and our shooting was responded to by ‘Old Ran’l’ and ‘Cal,’ the former with a double-barreled shot-gun and the other with a Winchester. We had to be very careful, as both were good shots.
“I must tell you right here that I was not one of those who were doing the shooting. Me and one of the other Hatfields was put out along the road to act as guards to see that no one came up or that no one got past us. We never went near the house until the house was burning and all was on their way back to Hatfield’s house. When they came up, Ellison Mounts said to me: ‘Well, we killed the boy and the girl, and I am sorry of it. We have made a bad job of it. We didn’t get the man we wanted at all (meaning “Old Ran’l”). If we had got him, it would have been all right and our work would not have been lost. There will be trouble over this.’ I asked him about the fight as we went along home, and he told me how Chambers had crawled up on the roof to get at those inside and to fire the house, when Ran’l McCoy heard him, and, firing at him through the shingles, shot his hand off behind the knuckles. He said Chambers got down, tied his hurt hand, and, taking his Winchester, began shooting again. It took some time to get the McCoys out, but finally the door opened and ‘Cal’ ran out at the top of his speed toward a corn-crib. Several banged away at him, but none of the shots took effect, and one or two more shots were fired, when he was seen to jump up and fall forward. We went to him and found him dead, with a big hole in the back of his head. The girl came out of one of the two dwelling-houses, and wanted to get into the one where the family was, and some of the men told her to go back; but she knew them and named them, and she was killed. ‘Cap’ was blamed for this, but I think Mounts did it. I could not find out who struck old Mrs. McCoy with the butt of the revolver, but I think Mounts did this too. The hammer of the revolver penetrated her skull, and when she fell several of the men jumped upon her, breaking her ribs, and when they left her thought she was dead.
“I had let my horse go on the way to the house of the McCoys, and had to get up behind Mounts, better known as ‘Cotton-Top’ and ‘Cotton-Eye,’ because he has white hair and white eyes. On the way home he talked a great deal. Once he said: ‘If John Hatfield had not shot before we were ready, there would not have been one of the McCoys in that house alive now. That shot gave them inside a correct idea of the location of some of the men, and they kept us well in sight right along thereafter. They kept us so far away that it was a long time before we got up to the house and were able to do anything.’
“Mounts told me that he himself made the first move toward getting into the house, breaking into the annex to the cabin, where he found Alfaro McCoy and the little children. He demanded that the men in there should come out. She told him there were no men about the annex, but Mounts insisted that she make a light. She told him to give her a match and she would satisfy him of the truth of her words. Then ‘Cap’ Hatfield yelled, ‘Shoot her,—her, and let’s go on.’ Then Mounts shot her, and she fell dead without a word. They then began shooting through the doors and windows of the cabin, thinking that some of those in it would be looking to see what was going on in the annex, and by the promiscuous shooting to kill all within the house. After this volley nothing was done for several minutes.
“ ‘Cal’ McCoy, from the loft of the cabin, in the meantime got sight of the men and began firing at them so rapidly that they all got behind a log pig-pen for safety. There they concluded to burn the house, and Mitchell, by dodging around for a little while, managed to get to the roof with a torch and fire the roof, but not till ‘Old Ran’l’ had shot off one of his hands, as I have described. This was done with a revolver, and the old man was not two feet from Mitchell when he fired. He could see only his hand, and he did the best he could at the distance.
“Well, we all went back to ‘Cap’ Hatfield’s, and most of us stayed in his house all night, leaving early in the morning. I did not see the gang again. There was one of the nine missing, but I could not tell who it was, and none of us spoke of the fact but once.
“I left home within a day or two and have not been back since, and have had no means of knowing what is going on.”