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Hey, everybody, it's me, Josh. And for this week's X Y as Case Selex, I've chosen our classic episode on the classic feud between the classic families, the Hatfields and McCoys. It's one of the more interesting stories of American history. And it's way more nuts than you even thought. And I don't know about you, though. I just want to put a little bug in your ear.

Every time I hear the name Jim Vance in this episode, I always want to follow it in my mind with Vance Refrigeration, see if that happens to you. Now that I've said that, I hope you enjoy this one. It's a classic, as I said.

So enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know. A production of Pirate Radio's HowStuffWorks. Hey, and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Charles. We took Brian is staring at me right now to make me uncomfortable. Jerry's over there. I can feel her eyes burning in my head. So this is stuff you should know. Would you like me to look at my ear? Oh, that's always so weird when someone's like looking. Are you doing it right now, like, right at your hair or is it really.

Yeah. Interesting. Try my other ear. Oh yeah. That's that's the stuff on the right. Oh I'm sorry. That's your left. It's my left ear. All right. I remember that.

Look, watch this, Chuck. After seven years, can you see that I can wiggle ears independently.

Yeah. Drives me crazy. So you sit around and do it properly.

I try. Not like a good husband. Um, Chuck. Yes. We have a bit of an announcement here. Yeah. You talk about what we just heard. Yes. Yeah. We are in the room with either a Hatfield or McCoy. Jerri doesn't know which family she's related to. She just knows that she's related to one of them.

Yeah. Like, literally right before we press record, she's like, oh, by the way, I'm related to one of these families. I'm just not sure which. Right. And a family member told her. But she cousin Tyler, who was I don't know. I think that's what she said it.

Cousin, I get the impression from Jerri story, though, that she's sort of like glazed over and that's why she doesn't know. Right. But she does carry a six shooter on her hip. And that explains that.

That says McCoy on the barrel.

Yes, I may be correct, but does that mean that it's a bullet from the McCoys or for the McCoys, the mystery remains, you know. Good point. So we are talking about the Hatfields and McCoys. For those of you who don't live in the United States, you probably have heard of the Hatfields and McCoys.

It's a pretty legendary feud. Yeah, right. We've heard of some of your history. UK Tour, Australia, Matthew Flinders. There's a name drop for you. Yeah. So hopefully you've heard of the Hatfields and McCoys.

Yeah. I mean, that was if nothing else, there was a big miniseries a few years ago on television. Yeah.

With Kevin Costner and Bill Paxton. And apparently it was a. Really dramatized. Yeah, like is in fictionalized, yeah, sure, cinema and yeah, a little not quite fully accurate, but LCB at least they brought attention to the feud because it needs agreed.

So the Hatfields and McCoys, um, is a family feud.

So much so that in 1979 the Hatfields and McCoys were on the TV show Family Feud, apparently for a full week from what I saw and I read that legend has it actually inspired the TV show?

But I didn't get good verification on that now.

And there have been other family feuds. Right. But none are as famous as the Hatfields and McCoys, although at the time there were more famous family feuds. But the Hatfields and McCoys just lived, took it to another level. Yeah, because all of the murder. Yeah.

There was a lot of murder.

It was mountain folk versus mountain folk families that had been intermarried and worked for one another and had lived together for decades, if not longer, along side in this little area along the Sandy River. I believe the big Sandy River in something that's called the Tug River Valley. And on one side, mostly the Hatfields lived on the West Virginia side in Logan County and right across the river on the other side in Kentucky, the McCoys lived in Pike County and that's how it was for days gone by.

Yeah. And they they were not new to the United States. So I guess it wasn't the United States then, was it? Yeah, OK, sure.

We're talking about the eighteen 50s, 60s, 70s.

I was way off then, but they came to America many, many years before that. Apparently the Hatfields were some of the very first to come to the new world from northern England and the McCoys are obviously from Germany.

Well, the Hatfields were originally the heath fields in England. That sounds way more British. Yeah, but you know how you do. You come over to America and you you dumb it down a little. I know Heath Ledger changed his name to that ledger when he got here, didn't he?

All right. He and the McCoys come from Scotland. Of course, you could figure that out, move to Ireland before they came to the new world. In the first known McCoy was John McCoy in America. When was that? Uh, 1732 from Belfast, Ireland. So did they move directly to the Tug River area? Is that where they settled? Now, the McCoys first settled in Maryland and where he was a prominent landowner. And I think the Hatfields first moved to Tug Valley in 1820 and the McCoys in 1882, OK, with their twelve kids.

So they've been like, really, these families had grown up living and working with each other. It was, yeah, not just these two families in the area. There are plenty of other families, but like they were neighbors, co-workers, boss and employee, they were they were husbands and wives. They intermarried, you know, I mean, like they were they were living together for decades.

Yes. I think the two that originally settled that tug fork where the actual parents of the two main protagonists. Right. Or antagonists, I guess they were both. Yeah, they were both pro and and rightly so.

They the the story our story really kind of begins round about the Civil War. Um, this area of the Tug River Valley was mostly Confederate, and both the Hatfields and McCoys were Confederate sympathizers, if not outright Confederate soldiers. The antagonist, your protagonist, the patriarch of the Hatfield family. When the story begins, his name was Devil Anse Hatfield, right?

Yeah, that was his nickname. His real name was William Anderson Hatfield. Yeah, but Devil Anse, what a cool name. Yeah. And I saw a couple of different explanations for where it came from, but my favorite one was that his mother said he was so mean the devil himself was scared of him.

Yeah. I saw one that said he was six feet of devil in one hundred and eighty pounds of hell. They had stupid sayings back then. Yeah, it doesn't quite add up, especially in the backwoods of Kentucky and West Virginia. You know, they just said stuff. They just made up names, as we'll see throughout this whole episode. But Devil himself was a he was from what I saw, he was described as somebody who took life by the horns, right?

Sure. He was very much a self-made man. He got he became a pretty wealthy timber merchant over the years. But he was he was a violent man and he was a well, he had some violent tendencies, for sure. Yeah. And, you know, if you want to trace back the reason for the Hatfield McCoy feud, there isn't I think from everything I read, there isn't one single thing. It's often blamed on the big deal, which we'll hear about coming up.

That seems to be the one that historians point to the most these days, though. Yeah.

But is sort of a convenient way of telling the story because like what what better way to kick off a feud than, like, with the stolen pig, right?

Definitely. There were other problems or issues between these families before that, right?

Yeah, but the point is there are a lot of different things going on. And one of them was, like you said, was Devil Anse made a lot more money than McCoy as a timber guy.

So on the other side of the river in the Kentucky side, Pike County, Kentucky, there were the McCoys. And at the time that Devil Anse was the patriarch of the Hatfield clan, a man named Randall McCoy. All Rantall was the head of the McCoy clan across the river in Kentucky, right?

Yeah. I just get the sense that he had his sort of smaller business and was always a little bit envious of the larger timber business across. Oh, very much so, yeah. He was the way that I saw him described was if Devil Anse is a man who took life by the horns all Rantel was somebody who got hooked by lights, horns, and he was very bitter about his lot in life.

Gocha, his father, I saw, was described as didn't much care for work.

He didn't leave with his kids anything. Yeah. So his son had to be a self-made man, but he was a self-made man who never really made himself. He married a woman named Sara and Sara's father died and left them some land and he was able to homestead on that. So that's how he was able to establish himself was through his wife's inheritance of her father's land. But it was enough to set him up. They were fine. They weren't prosperous, but they weren't like just completely poverty stricken.

Like Randall had grown up. Right.

But just across the river in this other family that he had to deal with and work with and just kind of see and interact with was a man who he, you know, had made himself. And definitely Randall was bitter about that idea and the comparison between himself and Devlins. Yeah.

And I think some of the McCoys even worked for some of the Hatfields. Yeah. Which is always going to be a little tense when you feel like maybe that feeling of superiority comes over one family because you're working for me. Right. You know. Yeah.

So there's definitely, like you're saying, tension. Right. And you can point to maybe these guys coming into their own as the heads of the family when the tension really started. Yeah. For many years, historians pointed to a specific incident as the source of the family feud, but that's since been abandoned. So like we said, the civil war is about the time when this story really starts in earnest. And most of the Tug River Valley was Confederate Devlins.

Impossibly, Randall McCoy were part of what were called the Logan Wildcats, which was a militia. But during the civil war, they were in actual like army unit of the Confederate Army. Yeah.

And that's all where Lance was even the leader in one place. But I didn't get that verified a bunch either. So so very least was in the brigade. Right. And I got the impression that if he wasn't a leader, he was a de facto leader because that was just this type of personality.

Lance, don't answer to nobody. Right? You answer to him. That's right. That was a great lance, by the way.

So I think the leader of the Logan Wildcats is another character who will come up later. And his name is Jim Vance. Yeah. So Jim Vance.

He was not a very great guy, from what I can understand, but I'll let him paint his own picture, OK? I he coming in. He will in a little bit. Instead, we're going to focus on a guy named Aiza Harmon McCoy and this guy I don't have a bead on. He decided in in just complete contrast of the place where he grew up, he was going to join the Yankee Union Army.

Yeah, he did. Yeah. But he broke his leg and left the service after I think a year.

Yeah. Back while he was in service, his commanding officer in the Union Army ordered him to fight Devil Anse because there was rumors that he was a Confederate spy. Oh yeah. So Harmon fights double, loses the fight. And I didn't get a sense of what kind of fight it was, whether it was like queered a gun battle or whether he literally just, like, spit on his boot and, like, took a swing. All right. I'm not sure.

I don't know if that was even in the miniseries. Um, so they get in a fight, he loses. And then, uh, the the union troops went after devilment at that point, which is really what caused a lot of the early issues. Uh, and then later on, Harmons shot a friend of devilment while stealing his horse. So in turn, he killed Harmons commanding officer in the Union Army. OK, there's a lot of bad blood.

The guy was like literally General Bill. France was peeing off his porch like I do, and Devlins shot him in cold blood. I hope that does not happen to you. I really hope so. To be a bad way to go.

Gives you pause, you know. Yeah. So the after the war, after Aiza Harmon McCoy came back home, I did not realize that tensions were already that high. I had the impression that it was just because he fought for the union. I didn't know he had been made to directly target Neverland's. Yeah, well, double agents in the Logan Wildcats basically sent a message saying, watch yourself because we're coming for you. And he very wisely went off and lived in a cave for a while.

He hid out. And so with this guy, you're like, why did he go fight for the union? Was he an abolitionist? No, he had a slave. And the slave kept him alive by bringing him food and stuff while he was in the cage. So I have no idea why he went and fought for the union. It's weird.

The fact that he did, though, meant that his own relatives, his own McCoys, including Randall, his brother, really were just kind of like, yeah, the Logan Wildcats are out to get you and you brought this on yourself. So we don't really feel for you. And they didn't apparently make much of a problem or much. They didn't take issue with it. When the Logan Wildcats tracked him down in the cave and killed him.

Well, he was actually coming home when they killed him. Oh, it was I think he finally thought, like, surely after all this time, they've forgotten about this troglodyte bite that troglodyte. Yeah. So he was walking home to see his family that he hadn't seen in years and Jim Vance shot him. That's how long he was in the cave. Well, that might have been part of the war as well, but it said a few years, man alive.

So well, actually, man dead is the Harmon McCoy is killed by the Logan Wildcats. And apparently at first everybody thought it was devil and who did it. But he turned out to have been bedridden at the time. So he had an alibi. And they think instead that it was Jim Vance who led and probably killed Aiza. Yeah, who is devils uncle OK.

And Strong Ally. Sure.

Jim Vance was so Aiza Harmons dead. The first shot has been fired in the family feud, so thought the historians for years. And then I guess after interviewing actual Hatfields and McCoys, they realized that no, actually the McCoys were like he brought it on himself. Yeah, that's that. We made peace with this and no charges were even brought in the murder of a McCoy. Yeah. I saw one article that described it as a murder agreement, which apparently used to have that, like blood in, blood out.

And everyone's like, all right, even Steven. OK, so done. Yeah, the first death has occurred in the Hatfield McCoy feud, but it has nothing to do with the Hatfield McCoy feud. Technically, yes. That seems like a pretty good time to take a break. Don't you agree, sir?

America. Are you listening? Emmy Award winning host and journalist Carlos Watson. It may not feel like it, but we've been here before and it's up to us to lead the way. Resetting America, The Carlos Watson show, the L.A. Times says this is what true discussions should look like. If we're going to do bold things, we've got to have bold conversation. Good Morning America says this show is changing the conversation if we're ever going to reset America.

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So, Chuck, we're back and Eslam instead, things are whatever between the Hatfields and McCoys, nothing, nothing big is going on, even if there were any sort of skirmishes or little fights or run ins or that kind of thing. I get the impression that the families, when they saw each other, there was like a slight percentage that the sides were going to get in at least a fist fight, not take part shot together with their guns.

I just think they probably just didn't like each other very much from the beginning. Right. So it's possible those things. Why not? Nothing big happened, though, until the pig the pig incident.

And apparently it wasn't just one pig. It's what it's been boiled down to, but it was several. Yeah.

And it was a big deal. If you think about a pig, stealing a pig is not a big deal at the time. There's a book called The Feud by dinking, dinking. Dean King thinking said it's a weird thinking and he said, where was their next meal going to come from and how could they feed the children in the winter?

They're lucky enough to have one pig or razorback for sell or trade. The proceeds were used to acquire flour, sugar, coffee. Sometimes shoes or boots for their families was a mainstay for the family.

So these days you hear a pig or even a couple of pigs and you think, what's the big deal? But in the region at the time, these these pigs were very valuable. So it was a big deal, right? I saw a hand in the front. I saw a dude. Well, yeah. And that was another thing. Again, we're talking about backwoods Appalachian folk. In the 19th century. There was a lot to the idea that you would stolen their property.

Yeah. Which as it should be. But even that aside, I saw this historian on a CBS Sunday Morning clip from a few years ago and he explained, like, you can feed a sizable family for a month with a single pig.

And this guy stole several pigs. So the guy who was accused of stealing the pig was who was it?

Chuck Randolph McCoy accused Floyd Hatfield. OK, right.

So old Randall himself, said Floyd Harefield, cousin of Devlins. I know that you stole those pigs and I'm taking you to court. Well, they went to court. The problem is the local magistrate was a Hatfield, but in this guy's favor, his name was Preacher. It was his first name, I believe. And he was basically what amounted to the local judge in the Tug River Valley.

He he tried to make it a fair trial. Is he the one that placed it in McCoy land because the trial took place in McCoy territory?

Yes. Excited by Hatfield, though, right. And he made sure that the jury had six Hatfields and McCoys on it. He did.

And nobody else. No, Joe. Yes, it's weird, but he was trying to make it as fair as possible. Right. And so they they had a trial where Floyd Hatfield was tried for hog theft.

Have you ever had something stolen from you? Sure. Like, you know. Not hugely valuable, but, yeah, it's one of the things that irks me most. It's very irritating. There's something about like just someone taking something that you worked to buy. It just really boils my blood. Now, imagine if they took that thing that you worked to buy and they were directly taking food out of your child's mouth at the same time.

Yeah, it make you mad. I'd pull a Hatfield. The weird thing is, is that the McCoys in the Heffel is at this point are saying we will that we will leave it to the courts, right? Yeah, sure. So they did go to court. They did try to have a fair trial, or at least the preacher did.

A preacher, Hatfield preacher, Judge Wright. It's confusing.

And the the jury was split except for one who was a McCoy who sided with the Hatfields. His name was Selkirk McCoy, another made up name. And so Selkirk, he voted that because of a guy named Bill Stayton who had testified that Floyd had not stolen the pigs. He said, you know what, I'm not going to contradict Bill Stayton. I know him to be truthful or whatever was I work for. Devil Anson is logging operation, so I'm going to vote pro Hatfield and exonerate Floyd.

And Floyd got off in old Randall went nuts.

Yeah, Stayton was the main witness and he was a relative of the McCoys, but he was married to a Hatfield. Right. So and while they did intermarry, I saw that there was way more marrying within the family to avoid intermarriage. Oh yeah. There was a lot of first cousins. Yeah. That were when you watch that Family Feud clip, you can go find it on, I'm sure, on YouTube. But there is a mental floss article that we found that had it embedded at the bottom.

Yeah, that's where I first heard about it. The that when they're introducing the families they keep introducing one another is like kissing cousins. This is a kissing cousin, Diane. Right. And the families are saying this is 1979. Yeah.

So, yeah, there was a lot of like intermarriage within the family itself.

Well, they were probably just joking, right? No, no. On Family Feud, you don't think the guy didn't sound like he was joking that he kissed his cousin on TV? No, but Richard dossing kissed her. He kissed every guy, kissed any woman who would stand still long enough. What a flirt.

Not Richard Dawson. So, yeah. All right. Yeah. He didn't change his name even though he was British. Uh, well, you don't know that that's true. Could have been Richard Dimson or Chumlee Dawson. That's a great name.

So, so old Randall has just lost this court case. Yes. And even worse, he was made to pay the Hadfield's court costs for taking him to court.

And remember, we characterized old Raynal as a kind of a bitter man.

Any time life handed him lemons, he just squeezed him into his eyes right out of anger, right?

Yeah. And he went on for this for basically years about how this is a miscarriage of justice, how Floyd had stolen his hogs. And so now any time Hatfields and McCoys, depending on their allegiance to the Klan. Yeah. Or Klans, any time they saw each other, they were shooting at one another. They were getting into fights. They were throwing rocks. Like one of one of Lance's sons was standing there when all Raynal rolled up once and all, Randall started railing on him about how Floyd had stolen a hog and the McCoys or the Hatfield son grabbed a rock and just threw it at all.

Randall's mouth just crushed his mouth of the rock. Because that's what you did back then.

Yeah, sort of like you killed my brother Harmon, but you stole my hog, right? You know, I'm cool with the brother killing. Harmon had it coming. Right. But that hog never hurt anybody. Yeah. We were going to eat it. So to recover the fact that Stayton two years later was killed, this is inaccurate. I was that not true. Bill Stayton Jr. was killed. Oh, Bill Senior was not killed in this skirmish.

This is another was that retribution, though. Uh huh. OK, for his pause. Yeah.

Because remember the money after the hog incident in the hog verdict, the the Hatfields and McCoys did not fight it out. Right then at the at the magistrate's office, it judge Preachers' place. Right. Yeah.

But every time the Klan saw one another they would shoot at each other, they would get in fights, they would take rocks to the faces. And then it culminated finally in this really, truly violent incident between Bill Stayton Jr. and Paris and Sam McCoy.

Right.

OK, so Bill Stanton Jr. is out hunting, sees these McCoy sons and says, oh, I'm in a world of trouble. Yeah, I better take a shot at one of them and shoots Parris McCoy in the hip. And Sam McCoy was like, You shot my brother. You're going down and he shoots Bill and wounds him and then goes over and executes him point blank in the head.

And this Bill Jr., Bill Jr. See, I got another article that said it was Bill, but it also said he's Bill Stanton. So I'm starting to doubt all kinds of accuracy.

There is a lot of inaccurate stuff. So I got, I think, the description of that incident from a really great book by a guy named John Ed Pierce. It's Days of Darkness Colen. So, you know, it's legitimate.

The feud's of eastern Kentucky.

Yeah. So there's been serious bloodshed here. Now, one of the this and this is direct retribution for the hog stealing verdict. A man has been executed point blank in the head and the two McCoy boys just tried to get away with it. Yeah. So blood is spilling. Uh, fast forward a bit to eighteen. Eighty two and three of Randol sons are attacked, stabbed twenty six times and shot Ellyson Hatfield, who was devil's younger brother to death.

Right.

And that was on Election Day. And election days were like drunken affairs. Do you remember when I think in the bars episode we talked about like, what was it? You get people drunk and doing something like the planners.

Yeah, Bumbo planting the plying the planters with bombarding the voters with Bumbo.

Yeah, man.

But it was Election Day so everybody would get super drunk. And when you get to Klans that don't like each other super drunk in the same place, they get in fights and people get stabbed twenty six times and then shot in the back.

Yeah. So those three sons of Randall were actually arrested and were presumably going to go to trial. But vigilantism took hold and they were kidnapped on the way to the trial by the Hatfields and they said, we're going to take care of this our way. Yeah. And they like I don't know if they let them get away with it, but they got away with it. No, they did not let them get away with it. This was a huge turning point, right.

When the Hatfield or the McCoy boys were intercepted by the Hatfields and taken across the river to West Virginia, which is basically like taking them to Fortress Hatfield.

Yeah, country justice was going to happen. Yeah. But Devil Anse vowed that if Ellyson made it and didn't die, he would not kill these Hatfield or these McCoy boys. Yeah, but Ellison succumbed to his wounds and did die. And so they took these McCoy boys out and tied him to trees and. Shot them, I think, more than 50 times or something like that, yeah. So you were saying like they got away with it, not for lack of trying.

It basically set off this huge, huge issue like this was even for the Tug River Valley.

Chuck, this is pretty flagrant frontier justice. You're not supposed to this. There's a magistrate named Preacher who's supposed to settle this kind of stuff. Right.

So a guy named Perry, what was Perry's name? Perry Kline. You know what this is? This is too big. We need to take a break. All right. And get to the story of Perry Klein.

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Come on in, Perry. You're an attorney. He was married to Martha McCoy. And here's the deal. Years before there was a situation where Perry Kline was cheated out of, I think, 5000 acres of land. Was he cheated?

I didn't know if he if it was actual like justice because he had supposedly been cutting timber from Devil ANSYS Timberland.

Well, here's the deal. Every thing you read will say it depends on who you sympathize with. Oh, yeah. Is how you think Perry Kline and really all of them were viewed. Sure. So I read articles that said that he was cheated in articles that said he wasn't cheated. And I think the family still today, like while there is a piece which will get do they still disagree over Perry Klein's role?

OK, so but Perry Klein was married to a McCoy actually is Harmon McCoy's widow, right? Yeah, Martha. And so he had lost 5000 acres. Really? Yeah. That's how much he was forced by the court to cede to devilment for allegedly cutting his timberland. Yeah.

So he was he had a he had a retribution in mind as an attorney.

Right. So when the Hatfields executed the McQuoid, the three McCoy boys, Perry Kline used it as a chance, depending on how you look at it, either use it as a chance for retribution or his family allegiance was stirred up. Yeah. And he, being an attorney, had contacts with the governor, Governor Bunker, I believe, of Kentucky and said, Governor, there's some horrible stuff going on down here that's being perpetrated by some West Virginians against some law abiding Kentuckians.

Yeah, and you guys need to do something about it. And it worked, actually.

Yeah. They reinstated the charges and basically put out awards on the head bounties on the head to arrest bounties, that is, of the Hatfields, including Six Feet of Devil and one hundred and eighty pounds of hell. Yeah.

Devolites himself. Yeah. His sons. Some of the family allies like dogs. His uncle Jim Vance. Yeah. I think there were there was 20, 20 men who had indictments against them. And since they had indictments against them and they were hanging out in West Virginia, they had bounties on their head. And one of the bounty hunters, the main bounty hunter who came around, it was a it was a problem that they had bounties on their head because any crackpot who wanted to could come and take shots at those guys.

And it was happening quite a bit.

Yeah, they wanted to collect some dough. Right. But there's one guy in particular who is a real thorn in their side. His name was Mad Frank Phillips. And Frank Phillips was a bounty hunter extraordinaire. He was about as legally gray as you can get and still not be just on the darker side of the spectrum. And he made it basically his personal war to get as many Hatfields across the river into Kentucky as he could so he would carry out raids on the Hatfield stronghold in West Virginia and basically just abduct Hatfield and bring him to Kentucky so that they could be put in the Pike County jail.

Yeah, and while he did this, he was also executing people left and right, like Jim Vance. He shot and wounded so that he just wounded him, walked around from behind, and while Vance was begging for his life, shot him in the head. And like, this is Frank Phillips M.O., he would execute you just as soon as he would capture you.

Yeah. And this was this was becoming a big deal. And the press at this point. Yeah. Newspaper started carrying the stories and became, by all accounts, like national news and legend like it was. Everyone knew about the Hatfields and McCoys by this point. Right.

And the press apparently very much sided with the McCoys. They painted the Hatfields to seem like backwoods murderous rednecks who just cause trouble everywhere they went and painted the McCoys as innocent, law abiding victims of of this this whole feud. And the whole legend, like you're saying, like this is all it all begins about right here, when when there was what amounts to almost a war between Kentucky and West Virginia because Frank Phillips kept going and getting people and bringing them back to Pike County and West Virginia got involved and the two governors were basically standing toe to toe, almost about to go invade, sending National Guard troops in across the border.

But instead they left it to the courts. And actually this court case about whether it was legal or not for Frank Phillips to have abducted the Hatfields and taken them to the Kentucky jail, reached the Supreme Court, actually, which is pretty amazing.

It is in the Supreme Court said, you know what? Probably is illegal, what happened, but Kentucky is a sovereign state and there's really nothing West Virginia can do about it, so go ahead and try them. But before the trial, actually, and while the these abductions were going on, these raids carried out by Frank Phillips, the Hadfield's, like I said, like it was a big deal to them that there were bounty hunters out to get them and they came up with a plan to just end the whole thing.

Yeah.

In 1888, a murderous killing spree is what they came up with. In January of 1888, a group of Hatfields said, we're going to attack Randolph McCoy and his entire family kept little Coppy, double ANSYS son and an ally to Jim Vance kind of led the way. And they ambush them at their home. On New Year's Day 1888, Randolph actually escaped, which is they kind of coming after him. And he's the only one who escaped. Well, they were coming after the whole family.

Yeah. Like they ran. The whole intention was to just murder this whole family. Oh, yeah. The problem.

Yeah. And Randolph was the key guy. He actually got away. His son, Calvin, daughter Alafair were killed in what they called CROSSFIRE. But they were, you know, let's get real. And his wife, Sarah, was suffered a crushed skull. She was beaten so badly. Yeah.

So they set the house on fire. Alafair opened the door to put the fire out and she was shot and killed. And then her mom, Sarah, wanted to come in like comfort her dying daughter. And when she came out, they beat her head in with the butt of a pistol. I think Kat Hatfield did. And then Calvin provided cover for his dad and ran to track their gunfire so his dad could get away. And it worked. But Calvin died as a result.

And then two other daughters have McCoy daughters survived. So Randall and two daughters survived this attack on his family. And this is when it was like if the press wasn't paying attention before now, they really were. And basically everybody was outraged at this. And like this legend, Chuck, is one hundred something years old, right? Yeah. And it's easy to kind of see these people as caricatures or, you know, just historic. But when you think about what the Hatfields plan to do and tried to do to the McCoys in that case on New Year's night in 1888.

Yeah, the New Year's massacre was what was known as that's like objectively despicable, no matter when you when you when it happened, going after an entire family to kill them.

Yeah.

To wipe out a legal entailment, you know. Yeah, it is.

And it really kind of brings home like the actual humanity of all of this, you know.

Yeah. So it went all the way to the Supreme Court and they decided, you know what, these Hatfields should be tried in in 1889, they were tried and eight of the Hatfields and their supporters were sentenced to life in prison.

And one Ellison Mount's, who people think is the son of Ellison Hatfield and his first cousin. Yeah. Was actually sentenced to death. And the one issue here was a lot of people now think he was a kind of a scapegoat because he was mentally challenged and maybe an early false confession happened. Right, exactly.

And he actually really his was if he didn't do it or even if he did, he really got screwed over by the prosecution. They they said that if he confessed and cooperated, he would get a lighter sentence when really he was the only one who confessed and he was the only one who was hanged. Yeah. So in his dying words, I think we're the Hatfields made me do it and they hung him. Yeah. And there were no public executions at the time, but that did not stop hundreds of people, thousands even from coming out and watching anyway.

Right. So it was a public execution.

And with the what's odd, though, is the ten, ten men had been captured by Frank Phillips and had been indicted and tried and nine of them got life in prison. Ellison Mount's was was hung. And this was apparently enough to. I guess mollify Randall McCoy at first, I think he tried to like rail against the verdict, but ultimately it was enough to just calm him down and he went and lived a quiet life, quiet, haunted life as a ferry operator, I think, and lived to like age 88.

Yeah.

And about a year later, it was when the families both said enough is enough, let's call a truce. And from I think it was an 11 year period, almost twenty four people were killed. And both families. Wow, like close to two dozen folks or 11 year period. That's legit. Yeah, that's a that's a family feud right there. That's a big feud in Devil Anse lived to a ripe old age to he lived to I think 83 or something like that.

73. That's not that old. Well, he was born again at 73. I think he lived into his 80s. Oh, really? And but he he was paranoid for the rest of his life because I think there is still bounties on his head. So we moved to an island and carried a rifle with him at all times for the rest of his life.

Well, if you look at pictures of the families, they all had their guns. I mean, that's what you did back then. Yeah, but it's it's funny to see a picture of like 20 people and, you know, 12 of them are brandishing weapons. That's right.

You know, in the in the one photo that will ever be taken of them, they've got their gun out, too.

So since then, they've been all over the place in pop culture. We mentioned Family Feud. There was an Abbott and Costello movie in 1952. Buster Keaton did a movie, too. Oh, really? I feel like he was on or not. Looney Tunes. Excuse me, Mary. Melodies big distinction, but still Bugs Bunny. Um, nowadays there are even some medical professionals who think that there was a condition that the McCoys had that led them to be violent.

What it's called, uh, von Hippel, Lendell disease. And these geneticists study dozens of McQuoid descendants and said they have a really high rate of this disease. It's inherited it's rare, produces tumors in the eyes, ears and pancreas. And a notable side effect is high blood pressure, racing heartbeat and increased aggressive behavior, increase fight or flight hormones.

And it was the McCoys that may have had that because from everything I've read, it seemed like the Hatfields would have been the one to have that. No. Wow. Maybe I'm a victim of contemporary press bias.

Media bias. You got nothing else? I got nothing else. There's other stuff.

There's plenty of stuff that I'm sure we didn't hit. And you should go read some of the cool books written about this stuff.

I got one more thing, actually. Here comes World War two. Life magazine uses the families as a way to unite America's war effort by featuring them in a big photo spread. The Hatfields and McCoys like working together in factories for World War Two. That's awesome. Yeah, and they. I think they even met recently in like they're still out there and they're still meeting and talking about this and disagreeing friendly disagreements on people like Perry Klein. And it was the other guy, mad, mad, mad, mad, Frank Mad, Frank Phillips, who remember I said he was legally gray.

Yeah. He married a McCoy who ended up who had had a baby with John C. Hatfield. They ran off together and got married. Yeah. Frank Phillips and Nancy McCoy and ended up being prosperous bootleggers in the region. Wow. Well, and there was also a spurned romance, too, that led to tensions. I forgot about that.

Yeah. Roseanne, Roseanne McCoy and John Hatfield. Yeah, they had a little tryst and a child together, but the child died, I think, aged eight months from measles. But he kicked her to the curb before that and then went married. Her cousin, Nancy, although there were no curbs back then, he kicked her to the riverbank right to the creek side.

Yeah. Again, we could probably keep doing this for another 45 minutes, but we're not. If you want to know more about Hatfields and McCoys, just go search it in your favorite search engine. I said search engine. It's time for listener mail.

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