Appalachian Blood Feuds

[Ninurta]

This is the future of Policing in America.

As far as I know, police employment of drones against civilians is still illegal in Virginia. The next county over bought one several years ago, and has never been able to fly it because of state law making that illegal...

Continuing to read-up on back-stories on the Hatfield/McCoy situation (and secretly enjoying it!),
I would propose that such matters of what is lawful tended to depend on the individual holding
the firearm in that region of the USA!


Possible Drone deterrents.

That there is "Devil" Anse Hatfield sitting in the middle, surrounded by his local shootin' club. Looks like they're heading for the range. "Uncle Jim" Vance ain't in that picture, though. I reckon he was probably killed by the time it was took - I think he got killed in 1874 or so.

I may have mentioned it before, but I'm kin to that crew. Anse was my first cousin, several times removed. His ma was a Vance, and her pa (i.e. Anse's gramps) was my great great great grandpa, Abner Vance. As I recall, she was the one Lewis Horton "debauched", which is what led to Abner shooting Lewis right off his horse in the middle of Clinch River just about 3 miles from where my happy ass is sitting at this instant.

It killed the Horton boy, of course, and Abner wound up getting hung over it in Abingdon, Virginia in around 1814 or 1816 or thereabouts. He wrote a song, "The Ballad of Abner Vance" while he was sitting in prison waiting for the hangman to arrive.

He was on the run from the law over the shooting for a while. The whole Vance clan picked up stakes and moved across the county line to avoid the local sheriff, and over time they migrated down Levisa Fork of Big Sandy into Kentucky and West Virginia (which at that time was still Virginia). They ended up on Tug Fork of Big Sandy, which is the border between KY and WV, on the WV side of it. That is where Anse's ma met his pa, and how his ma came to be in that neck of the woods to meet him. I believe his pa was named Ephraim Hatfield.

The last place I lived just before I moved here was on Levisa Fork. I lived on a branch of that called "Poplar Creek".

My Dear Old Dad once told me we were related in some way to the McCoys as well, but I've never found so much as a dram of evidence for that assertion, so I'm gonna have to say that was probably some made-up "family lore" that he'd gotten hold of somewhere down the line.

ETA: if you can find it, there is a good 3-part miniseries on the feud. It's called, unoriginally, "Hatfields and McCoys", and has Kevin Costner playing Devil Anse, Bill Paxton playing McCoy, and Tom Berenger playing "Uncle Jim" Vance. You might be able to find it on a streaming service or at the History Channel website. 3 parts, 2 hours each, total of 6 hours, and does a pretty good job of telling the story.

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