Appalachian Blood Feuds

[BIAD]

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.

[Snarl]

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!

Oddly, my mom married us into one of the last remaining feuds in the US. My stepfather was the last remaining blood kin when he passed away and the feud was quietly alive up to his passing. He adopted a son to carry his name, but he was crippled in a plane crash and produced no heirs. The Yearling (1946), mildly addresses the feud, but doesn't provide the actual family names.

This'll give ya an idea of the amount of land the two families lived on (red box). If memory serves, the actual feuding started up there in the top right in Crescent City. The snakebite incident happened in the bottom left.    

I grew up in the town a little to the south and west of the box ... DeLand.

[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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[BIAD]

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.

(Sorry to 727Sky for going off topic)

I was aware of the miniseries and it's pencilled-in to be watched. My own modern-day fascination lies in how
this became such a deadly situation worthy of manifesting into Virginian lore.

Did the Press at the time hold the same class-built school of thought that today's media has that implied
supposedly 'uneducated folk' would always deal with such matters in the same manner the Penny-Dreadful
portrayed the Wild West or had that region been singled out due to their assumed isolationism beliefs?

I would dare to say such disputes occurred elsewhere in the US, but this one seems to be the mainstay.

[Ninurta]

(Sorry to 727Sky for going off topic)

I was aware of the miniseries and it's pencilled-in to be watched. My own modern-day fascination lies in how
this became such a deadly situation worthy of manifesting into Virginian lore.

Did the Press at the time hold the same class-built school of thought that today's media has that implied
supposedly 'uneducated folk' would always deal with such matters in the same manner the Penny-Dreadful
portrayed the Wild West or had that region been singled out due to their assumed isolationism beliefs?

I would dare to say such disputes occurred elsewhere in the US, but this one seems to be the mainstay.

It was already well under way and pretty deadly before the press ever got a hold of the story. When they did, that didn't help matters much. It got sensationalized in short order.

The basis was general attitudes around here. Folks can take umbrage pretty quick, even to this day. For example, I've got a childhood friend cooling his heels in a jail this instant, awaiting trial. Last Tuesday, he was out riding around on a 3-wheeler motorcycle. He is a vet, and lost a leg in the service, so a 3-wheeler is the way to go for him. He's 70 right now. A 32 year old kid was also out tooling around in his car, but yakking on a cell phone at the same time, not paying attention. So he cut Dennis off, which is a dangerous event when it's car against motorcycle.

It escalated pretty quickly from there. Dennis followed the guy to where he parked at a Walmart (the US version of Tesco, I reckon). Dennis started giving the kid a ration of shit for driving dumb, probably using some pretty colorful language, and the kid took umbrage to that, and knocked Dennis flat on his ass... but then kept advancing to give Dennis some more. So, Dennis whipped out his pistol and center-punched the kid, the end.

Then Dennis compounded matters by telling some bystanders he was gonna go over to the Mexican restaurant to get a bite to eat while he waited on the cops to show up... and that while the kid was laying there bleeding out.

Now, in that tragedy, there were several points where it could have been de-escalated, but that's just not the way it usually goes here. Dennis could have just let it the hell go and went on about his business. OR, the kid could have apologized, and gone on about his business. BUT those were not the choices either one made. Now one is dead, and the other is waiting for a life prison sentence at 70 years old.

All over a cell phone conversation and a moment of inattentiveness.

Folks here can just get pretty het up pretty quick, and then all hell breaks loose.

So, strike one is just general attitudes in these here hills. Once it got started, it wasn't going to stop until one side or t'other either cried uncle or was all dead. Some folks around here just have way too much pride to back down, and the result is predictable.

Now, when the press got ahold of it, they seem to have hammered on the "backwardsness" of us hillbillies. That stayed with us for generations. even into the 1950's and 1960's and 1970's, a hundred years after that particular feud. And, by the way, the blood feuds here appear to just be extensions of the blood feuds in Scotland and Ireland of days gone by, and, as I understand it, the feuds between the Border Reiver families.

The isolation of this area carried a guarantee that news of most of the events that happened here would never get out into the World. That feud just happened to be one event that DID get out, and created a sensation. It created an image, and a reputation for backwardness for hillbillies that still prevails to this day out in the World. I've used it to my advantage out there as recently as 2014. All I have to do is talk the part, play the part, and act stupid, and the legends take it from there. Folks out there would automatically categorize me, and it turned them a flip when they found out that I might not be as dumb as I was acting... or as dumb as they expected.

For a long time, Hollywood took their cues from the news media. It's not been that long ago that Ma and Pa Kettle were a big hillbilly deal out in the flatlands. The Beverly Hillbillies. Several episodes of the Twilight Zone. The news media created an image that Hollywood felt compelled to keep alive, and so they did.

The last clan feud around here that I'm aware of was the one between the Duncans and the Grizzles, in the late 1970's into the early 80's - but keep in mind I was gone from here for 30 years and didn't keep up with events much, and when I came back I mostly kept to myself - still do - and don't always get the latest news of what's going on beyond my yard fence.

The Hatfield-McCoy Feud has been over for well over 100 years now. It's so over that the Hatfields and McCoys have been intermarrying for over 100 years, and have big family cookouts and such now... but still the legend, and to some extent the reputation, lives on. It's not like we've not earned it, though, with our overabundance of pride and tendencies towards hot-headedness. We're not all like that, but enough are that all of us get painted with the same brush... because if it bleeds, it leads, and those are the stories that get out into the world via the wires.

Apologies, 727Sky. I'm about to hit the rack, but maybe when I get up, I'll start a "Feud" thread and move these feud posts into it.

If I can figure out how to move individual posts to other threads, that is.

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[Ninurta]

Sky727 created a thread on killer drones, and it got a bit side-tracked on the topic of Appalachian Blood Feuds, specifically the Hatfield-McCoy Feud. This thread is an attempt to create a thread for that topic, and move the posts to here instead of gobbing up 727Sky's thread, since the drone thread really deserves a place of it's own, without the side discussion.

I'm going to try to move those posts to this thread to clean that one up, and give a place for the discussion to continue here.

If I can't get those posts moved here - and this is an experiment in the impossible - then this thread will disappear like a fart in a windstorm.

ETA: It seems to have worked, moving the posts to this thread, but had the untended consequence of putting this post, which was the original opening post of the thread, down here to the bottom of the thread, and making BIAD's post the OP of the thread, transferring creation of the thread to him. How odd.

Maybe one more try....

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[Ninurta]

Second post

I give up. There seems to be no way to retain the OP as the OP when moving posts. Looks like it's always going to be at the bottom of the thread, or in the middle, or somewhere other than the top.

BUT - I seem to have at least gotten the posts moved, and un-spammed 727Sky's thread, so I'm going to consider it a success, such as it is.

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[BIAD]

Forfive my poor modern-day perception of this situation...

"...Most experts agree that the infamous Hatfield-McCoy feud began with another court case.
In 1878, Hatfield's cousin Floyd was accused of stealing a hog from Randall McCoy. Another cousin,
Preacher Anse Hatfield, the local justice of the peace, presided over the trial. In the interest of fairness,
he created a jury of six Hatfields and six McCoys.

The jury found Floyd Hatfield not guilty, and Randall McCoy and some of his family blamed the Hatfields
for this defeat..." Source:

...So is it accepted this was the 'sudden' change in attitudes of both families?

[Ninurta]

That's the legend of it, and it's what the media hammered on to the outside world - that it was "all over a hog". The reality is a little more complicated and nuanced.

There were other factors that led to escalations. Things like a logging contract, which stood to net a fair bit of coin to the winner. When you go to messing with someone's money and livlihood, things can escalate pretty quickly, not just here, but the world over.

And there were other killings at the foundational level of the dispute, "scores" settled stemming from the Civil War, and who served on which side. That seems to have been a general thing in the Appalachians, as we have a funny idea of "loyalty", and where it ought to reside... and of the proper remedy for "disloyalty".

My own paternal great great grandpa may have been caught up in such a dispute. I don't know, as I can't get to the bottom of it. He died in 1866, at the relatively young age of his early 30's, and I've never been able to discover what he died of. However, the timing of it - in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War - combined with his age at death and the general unrest flowing out of the Civil War in that area of Virginia / West Virginia gives me certain suspicions that I can't lay to rest without knowing the facts of it.

I do know that in that area - my GG grandpa's area of WV - there was a lot of unrest and killing surrounding Civil War partisans. Some of my ancestors, maybe that one in particular included, were members of partisan guerrilla bands in those days, outfits like "the Hellfire Band" and "The Moccasin Rangers". Old animosities left over from those associations lived on past their sell-by date in the aftermath of the Civil War.

I have found his name in the membership listings of both the Hellfired Band and the Moccasin Rangers, as well as the 19th VA Cav, but cannot be certain the name is really the individual who is my direct paternal ancestor. Around here, some more popular names tend to get re-used along different branches of a family tree, with the net result that just finding a name doesn't necessarily mean you've found the right person - it could be the name of a cousin or other relative that just so happens to carry the same name. So, without further corroborating evidence, you just can't be sure you're looking at the same individual.

So, while the hog connection may have been a factor, I'm sure it was not the only, or even the determining, factor.

Keep in mind too that back in those days, hogs were not kept in hog pens here. They were instead allowed to run wild through the forest, finding their own tucker on things like oak mast. Ownerships were kept track of in the free-ranging hogs by means of ear-marks cut into the hog's ear. Sales records were non-existent, and some times disputes over ownership of a hog developed under those circumstances.

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The "Moccasin Rangers" were a rowdy group, and their legend lives on. They originated as a guerrilla band that formed around the time of the beginning of the Civil War, with many of their members coming out of other organizations like "the Hellfired Band" of pre-war days. They were originally an impromptu "militia" of partisan guerrillas, without government sanction. Later in the war, around 1863, they gained government (Confederate) recognition and became the officially sanctioned "19th Virginia Cavalry" for the duration of the war, at the end of which they were officially disbanded.

Just because they lost government sanction, however, does not mean they in fact disbanded. In the several years beyond the Civil War, old animosities and scores continued to live on, with "settlement" occurring here and there to settle scores that should have been long dead, but were not. So that was another source of family feuds in those days, a variant of which may have also played in to the Hatfield-McCoy feud.

The Moccasin Rangers also factored heavily in the events that are now known as "The Legend of Booger Hole" in Clay County, West Virginia.

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Some folks are of the opinion that "Uncle Jim" Vance is the one who actually kicked the blood feud into high gear by killing a McCoy who had served in the Union armies rather than the Confederate armies. I think that we can all agree that killing off a family member tends to make a hog-stealing pale in comparison, and could potentially serve to re-heat an otherwise dying conflict.

So, while an alleged hog-stealing was alleged by the media to be the root of the matter, there were other escalatory events that got ignored in the rush to tell the tale to the outside world, when the media seized on the more outlandish "justifications" for the feud, and ignored what may have been more serious core events that escalated it.

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[BIAD]

That's the legend of it, and it's what the media hammered on to the outside world - that it was "all over a hog". The reality is a little more complicated and nuanced...

...Some folks are of the opinion that "Uncle Jim" Vance is the one who actually kicked the blood feud into high gear by killing a McCoy who had served in the Union armies rather than the Confederate armies. I think that we can all agree that killing off a family member tends to make a hog-stealing pale in comparison, and could potentially serve to re-heat an otherwise dying conflict...

...So, while an alleged hog-stealing was alleged by the media to be the root of the matter, there were other escalatory events that got ignored in the rush to tell the tale to the outside world, when the media seized on the more outlandish "justifications" for the feud, and ignored what may have been more serious core events that escalated it.

I would suggest the 'Hog-concept' was more conducive to a media with a certain agreed perception on the
working-class folk of that region and pushed because the need for nuances connected to the Civil War would
require them to explain to a reader that they believe is comprehensively dumb!

[BIAD]

As a side-issue, two families in southern Ohio seemed to have the same view of what being
'neighbourly' means as the earlier Hatfield/McCoy situation!

[sailorsam]

the feuding mountaineer trope is in our culture and can be seen in shows like the Flintstones and Andy Griffith.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0580170/

I read somewhere that that sort of thing is endemic to East / Central Europe.  don't know the source but an author opined 'which side of a mountain your grandparents were born determines your status even in the USA'.  apparently a lot of families bring this stuff with them.

[Ninurta]

As a side-issue, two families in southern Ohio seemed to have the same view of what being
'neighbourly' means as the earlier Hatfield/McCoy situation!

I recall when those killing happened. I didn't consider it to be the same caliber as the Hatfield-McCoy feud. It didn't take long for those folks to start rolling over on one another to save their own asses, and I've got doubts that either the Hatfields or the McCoy would have done the same.

Those Wagners are a rough bunch. When I was a teenager, a Wagner (not one of those specifically, but probably kin from across the state line in West Virginia) gave me advice on how to win a fight. He said, specifically, "You get into a fight, you do yer damndest to kill yer opponent. That's how ye win."

I knew a Wagner whom it took 7 years to pull a 2 year hitch in the Army. He went AWOL a lot, whenever it suited him. Once he was up in I Corp in Vietnam, went AWOL, and went all the way down to Saigon to visit a friend down there. Went back and turned himself in when he was ready. He went AWOL once and somehow managed to get back to the states. MPs picked him up at his house After he'd been AWOL for 2 years. Took 'em that long because they were scared to go in there and get him, I reckon. I have no idea why they didn't court martial him for desertion.

Rough bunch.

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[Ninurta]

the feuding mountaineer trope is in our culture and can be seen in shows like the Flintstones and Andy Griffith.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0580170/

I read somewhere that that sort of thing is endemic to East / Central Europe.  don't know the source but an author opined 'which side of a mountain your grandparents were born determines your status even in the USA'.  apparently a lot of families bring this stuff with them.

A lot of the settlers here were Scotch-Irish and German. The Wagners are German, I believe. The Scotch-Irish in particular brought feuding over with them. It was a way of life in Ireland and Scotland both, in the Highlands all the way down to the Border where Border Reaver families fought feuds with other families across the border in England.