Doomed to Fail - Ep 15 - Part 1: Fight for your right to party - Hatfields & McCoys

Episode Date: February 8, 2024

Let's revisit our episode on the Hatfields & McCoys! They lived in the wilds of Applaciacia; there was a whole thing with a hog, lots of homemade hooch (which was a problem because of taxes), and a few love stories.Join us for this classic tale of rivalry and revenge!  Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

Hi, friends. Today we are re-releasing episode 15, part one about the Hatfields and the McCoys. This is one that I, Taylor, from Doom to Fail, did earlier, or I guess last year in 2023. It's a classic fun story, and I hope that most of more stories are that. This is about the family feud in Appalachia. And I say fun because it's wild and a lot of people died. and it is a glimpse into a life that a lot of us, I don't know, we'll never live, unless you're making moonshine in your backyard and shooting your neighbors, which I don't know, you could be, I don't know your life.

Anyway, if you have any questions or want to suggest something that we can cover, feuds are fun, riots are fun, explosions are fun. Let us know, Dumb tofell Pod at gmail.com. Thank you. Is it a matter of the people of the state of California, First is Horanthall James Simpson, case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.

What's your banter for the week? I, oh, God. No, I told you I just woke up, but I did do all my work. I outlined yesterday because yesterday was a day off because the New York Stock Exchange just closed on Good Friday. And it was awesome. It was the best. I wish I had every Friday off.

Are you a stockbroker now? And I don't know this. I am. It's because I'm a stockbroker. No, I work at a fintech company of ours. I see. So, but we, yeah, so I went to a little coffee shop in town and I wrote my outline. It was the first nice day that I've seen in so freaking long.

So it was really nice. That's awesome. That's not a good way to do it. Yeah. And then I did a bunch of errands, today's Miles's, birthday party so i bought some stuff for that and then we have easter on sunday so i did buy all that shit yeah is it actually his birthday today no it was on tuesday got it okay sweet um my banter for the week man my brain's working a little bit slow today at one of those nights last night i went to bed

really early so i don't know what my problem is i want to bed really late that's my problem yeah and i was like I was like, forget it. I'm going to bed really early. And so I just went to bed at like 9.30. And it was lovely. Oh, that's so nice. Yeah, that was not the night I had. I'm probably going to repeat it more tonight. So it is what it is. That's the best I got.

You do you. You live your life. Your free, child-free life in a big city. Someone told me that it's Easter, which I totally forgot that it was. And I put this on, like not even knowing that. And so. Is it upside on cross? Yeah. I was like, wow. How weird. I've won this like maybe once. That's so funny. And I put it on. And so when he was like, oh, yeah, it's Easter. And I was like, oh, shit, what a weird time that I picked to wear this.

It's a sign from heaven. I know, wait. Well, my family, this makes my mom annoyed, but we always say, can't wait to see if Jesus sees his shadow on Sunday. It's more weeks of winter. She's not like me. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's go ahead and in. introduce the show. What's my tackling going to be? Hold on. Yeah, okay. I got it. All right.

Welcome to Doom to Fail, the podcast where we keep intermittently switching off. Who's the most tired person? And today I'm winning. I'm Farr's. I'm joined here by my co-host. Taylor, Taylor, how are you doing? I am good. I'm up. I think I've been up for like a solid five minutes. So now I'm starting to feel it. I can see the sun. I had

half a can of Diet Coke. So yeah. Isn't it weird? Like, you know, I used to do this thing where if I, because it's so obvious whenever I wake up and I go straight into a Zoom call. Yeah. And there are sometimes when those Zoom calls are happening like noon, so I have no justifiable reason for having just woken up. And I'll just like sit in my room and just like clear my throat over and over again and shout and then whisper and try to get my voice to modulate enough so that it doesn't sound like I literally just woke up. I've been up for hours. Yeah. It sounds just like it too. Um, but yeah.

so we're going to be covering our red flagged relationships one is historical one is true crimey taylor is is you go this week okay i never remember and you always keep me on the straight and arrow so why don't you introduce your drink and then you can say well actually should i do my first yeah yeah and then i'll go so mine's going to be um gutter and sewer water because the people that we're covering are just gutter trash people that probably should have been killed with a rock as children um so yeah that's that's what i'm drinking what are you okay well that's really funny okay this week i'll switch to my story we're drinking apple whiskey distilled by a very dirty man in a very dirty shack in the middle of the woods but it's so is apple whiskey whiskey that

is flavored with apples or is no i think it's just like moonshine Like, it's like whatever booze you can get out of doing that. Got it, got it, okay. I've never heard of it called Apple Whiskey, though. I think today you could probably get Apple Whiskey. Like, I got like a peanut butter flavored whiskey one time. Like, I think you could get that. Was that screwball?

I don't know, maybe. It was, it is disgusting. So you know how much I like my bourbon? I bought a bottle of screwball when I first moved to Austin. I had that thing for like two and a half years. I couldn't get through it. It was just so disgusting. I don't remember what it tasted like,

but I remember it existed. Yeah. The topic goes. Not a fan. Okay. So I want you to try to guess far as what we're going to talk about. And we're going to get there because I'm going to do the second and maybe last installment of my weekly segment, which is called I already have children.

I will have no more. Here are some names I forgot to consider when I was having them and I give them to you. You're welcome. It's a long segment name, but this is episode two of that. So I'm going to give you some names and then you tell me if you know who I'm talking about. Okay. I love this. Cap.

I'm just going and then you let me know. John Z. Squirrel hunting Sam skunk hair. Cotton tap. Bad Frank and devil ants.

It all sounds like Frontiersmen in Texas. Pretty close. We're talking Hatfields and McCoys. Oh, so good. We're on the border of Kentucky and West Virginia. So good.

Yeah. So super excited. I did a bunch of research. I read the book Feud. I read like half of it. And then I started over because I watched the Hatfield McCoy's miniseries on Netflix. And then I had to like go back and like reread the book because then it kind of like know who it was talking about. And I swear last week it wasn't available. But then all of a sudden it was like the mini series is on Netflix. It starts Kevin and Koster as himself slash Devalanse. It's kind of like just Kevin Koster being Kevin

Koster. And Bill Paxton, RIP, as Randall McCoy. So it's great. Yeah. Yeah. It's a three episode series and it's very, it's very fun. Yeah. It also ties back two other, my other stories in different ways. So one is the book feud that I read.

It opens up with the author talking about how JFK Jr. wanted to do a big story about the Hatfields and McCoys in George magazine because he was really interested in doing more like American history stuff in his magazine but he died so he didn't get to do it and then i know same don't get it out of plane with kennedy and then number two eleanor roosevelt was very personally invested in this community in abalachia um in this like area and she made a community called arthurdale which was like a place where they like built houses for people gave them skills and she was able to like help them kind of figure themselves out um it was pretty good it was some parts of it were segregated which is

great but it was still like a good effort by er so she spent time in there too Also, my algorithm is hilarious because all the articles I get and, like, my pop-up news are like, now we know what Cleopatra smells like. And we found ambulance necklace. And I'm like, oh, my God, the algorithm is like out of control right now. I'm going to blow my nose. Can you hold, please? Yes. Taylor's off camera blowing her nose.

I'm not going to leave this part in or edit it out, but just not y'all should know. Okay. I feel less sniffy. Perfect. All right. So anyway, the story unfolds on the banks of the Tug River. The Tug River separates Kentucky. in west virginia this land is a very very rough it's scary but it's not like eastern massachusetts

it's still just like it's like very woodsy there's a podcast that i really like called the old gods of appalachia and it's like about telling stories of like earthy gods and witches and things in this area so it's pretty fun if you ever want to do something cool have you ever been to kentucky or west virginia no i've done kentucky before and it is um it's it's really really Lilville, it's true. Yeah, that counts. Well, I mean, like the countryside. Like, I, it is, it's incredible.

It's beautiful for one. But then it's, the juxtaposition of that is abject poverty, which is really strange to see in a place that is that rich and natural resources. Like, it's just, you would think it would be like a tourist hotspot, but I guess it's not because it's just like, there's no like cottages to go sleep in or, you know, it doesn't have the ambiance of like a Vermont let's say it's true but it's beautiful yeah definitely I know there's like the Appalachian Trail it's like really beautiful and the whole area is beautiful yeah so I'll tell you a little bit more about it I also listened to some banjo music on Spotify to get in the mood

and by the time I was writing this someone was doing Taylor Swift's anti-hero in banjo version it was great so it was fun the Native Americans didn't really live in this area. They use it for hunting. There's a lot of like bears and deer and animals and things that live there. The tug river itself is not like the Mississippi. It's like pretty small. It's something you could like swim across. It's not like a huge river that divides Kentucky and West Virginia. And I'll share a map when I'm doing the socials, but everything in the story is within like two miles of each other. It's all very close. Everyone lives really close to each other. But they live in different states because they live on different sides of the tug. So I looked at the demographics in the area

today that you're talking about it obviously isn't great it's not like the worst in the country there's a lot of people below the poverty line everywhere it's like small town stuff um according to arc.gov the high school diploma rate is approaching the national average there are 87 percent but the bachelor's degree rate is still really low at 25 percent so people are like getting out of high school but not really leaving and going to college there's a diane sawyer's 60 minutes that came out in 2009 and i remember my coworker watching it being like it was crazy i didn't i couldn't watch all of it but i could find parts of it on youtube it's called hidden america and two stories that stood out there was this poor girl and everybody like nobody has teeth like everyone's like really poor and one girl was like we're not like other

people we can't afford food after food after food because they like barely had any food it's pretty sad and there was a guy who was a football player and um he had potential and so he um is going got like a little scholarship to college and they were focusing on him and then in the middle of his interview things go crazy because they find his stepbrother sleeping with his underage step sister and everyone is like yeah it's not great because they're blood diane soyer's at your house you can't like skip this today you know have you have you ever seen the uh mark later project that he calls soft white underbelly on YouTube it's really interesting like he interviews i mean it's basically what it sounds like the soft white underbelly it's like it's like drug addicts prostitutes you know uh people like that but

there's one part of it that he turned into a series because he found the subject so fast iny and he went to west virginia and basically met this family that all lives in this shack and apparently I went down a rabbit hole on Reddit on this apparently they're very very inbred so all the siblings were just having sex with each other but the way this the group that was currently alive came about was because there was two two like a male and female set of twins and they enter and they were direct first cousins and they intermarried and so it basically just double tripled everything down the next generation over but it's it's really fascinating i mean you just feel bad for them right like you look at people like that and it's they had they had no hope right like they

there wasn't no you know i mean they lived in a shack and i think i saw that recently on the news because my new algorithm is crazy but yeah they had them like one of the men like couldn't even talk he like kind of barked like a dog just bark yeah yeah yeah i know exactly you're talking about yeah super sad like it also it's like that x files episode do you remember that one where the mom and has all the inbred kids. And the mom is like not a full body. They do all these bad things and they have to like get away. And it's like a really good X-Files episode.

I'm going to admit something to you that I've never told you before. I've never watched X-Files. All right. Well, you have stuff to do today. Cool. Well, I'll give you a list of good ones. It's so good. I've watched all of it twice.

Yeah, it's great. Give me like a hit list because I'm going to be on a lot of planes for the next like two weeks. Okay. there's one that our friend Laura is in I'll give you that one that's a good one wait Laura Harris no way okay yeah she's a little she's like a little girl but it's cute yeah cool I also watched a long time ago so my friends and I had a website called pop 10 that was like top 10 lists of stuff I don't know it was like 12 years ago 15 years ago and someone sent us a DVD like they like sent us things so I got a DVD called the wild and wonderful whites of West Virginia which is about a family of last name is white

is produced by Johnny Knoxville and it talks about like a family that similarly is like opioids and drugs and just living in that area. Yeah, it's weird. It's like two different versions of sadness. One, they're not in red to the point where they can't communicate or walk or anything,

but they're also like horrible drug addicts that can't help themselves. Yeah, it's real sad. So yeah, two things to highlight before we start. The first is obviously incest. We just talked about it a little bit. When I was reading this book, this was the first time I've heard the word double first cousin and i was like oh my god what does that mean but that can be not terrible if you do that the right way like if you married my sister and i married your brother

and we all had kids they'd be double first cousins is it not related no no the next generation is a problem so what i mentioned earlier with the two sets of twins having sex it's not like it's bad at that level but it's doubly worse when their children have sex with each other you see what i'm saying no no no but i was saying there's no nobody related is having sex right now you're just about first cousins because you have like your you only have like one set of grandparents as cousins you know how like your cousins have other grandparents like so they you don't have those you only have like the grandparents but you're not sleeping with your sister or anything it just happens to be that your dad is like related to your uncle you know i really love that all it took was for us to get into

like redneck incest to start going down a genealogy map and actually learn this stuff for real we'll do a thing but i also want to say that like we've definitely brushed off a lot of cousin and sibling marrying when we're talking about like queens and kings and pharaohs and emperors so like because it's not as gross i don't know why but it's like when you do it in a shack it's different than when doing it in a castle isn't it i guess no one smells good while doing it i think that's a good thing too and then also we talk about guns in state for the record fuck your guns there's a lot of guns in this story it's right after the civil war we'll talk about some dates but they're like homemade guns it's like lead bullets and gunpowder and a lot of people

get shot and live like a lot of people like a lot of people just like oh he shot me it's fine you're either going to die of infection or maybe something gets amputated it's not like uh they're not shooting each other with like machine guns there's no air 15 in this story they're like homemade bullet lead bullet guns so i also know that i promise to talk about stereotypes today So PBS has a documentary that you cannot watch all of, no matter how hard you try. But in the intro to it, talk about industrialization, the old versus the new. So like this story of the Hatfield and McCoys in the late 1800s when it was happening, it was in the New York Times. Like people were watching it.

And like it was city folks watching this story, judging them, calling them hillbillies, which like, sure. What I just said. But it was like national news. So what it was doing was inadvertently making the Hatfield and McCoys the stereotypes of the American Hillbilly, whether or not like there's other stories, other people, because it was so popular. And so the question that the PPS documentary that I'm unable to finish poses is did industrialization and post-Civil War reconstruction push rural people into this other and we've been separated since then, especially now? So, like, how much did, you know, the, like, eyes on the story from the city? And even, like, from big cities in Kentucky, they would look down at these folks and listen to this story.

So it's weird. Like, I kind of look at it as, like, a badass. Like, I, it's so old American frontiers living. It's just like, because I don't know enough about it to, like, say anything pithy, but I would say that, like, they really did fuck each other up. Like, they shot each other. Or they, like, killed their relatives. And it's just like, I don't know.

There's something weirdly charming about, like, they're like their own military, like their own army, their own nation states. Yeah. And then also, yeah, because I'm going to talk about violence. There's a lot of violence. These are, like, very fiercely loyal and stubborn people. There's a theory that the McCoys had a disease called Von Hippel Lindau disease. It's not a theory because descendants have it.

So, like, people on McCoy family do have it. And it can make you really short-tempered. So that could have escalated it on the McCoy side, at least, that they had, like, a disease that made them more short-tempered, but they're exceptionally short-tempered. Like, crazy things happened. Okay. So for years, the Hatfields and McCoys lived on the Tug River Valley.

They sort of lived together, like, just like neighbors. They did intermarry a little bit, like not incest, intermarry, but, like, family intermarry. So people could be both in McCoy and the Hatfield, and they lived in the same community. It's like a small mountain community. community. It escalates with our two main patriarchs. So William Anderson Hatfield was born in 1842. That's devil lance. Devil Lance is the nickname he got by his mom. There's a story that when

he was a little kid, like 10, he tracked a bear through the woods. And the time he got to it, he had dropped his bullets and he couldn't kill it. So he was so mad, he kicked it. And the bear went running up into a tree. And he sat at the bottom of the tree for like two days until the family found him because he didn't want to leave. So he was very sad. stubborn. Wow. So Devlance is also Kevin Costner, if you want to picture that. He married a woman named Levi C. Chafin in 1861, and they would go on to have 13 children. So there's a lot of kids in this story as well. And then Randolph Randall McCoy is a little bit older. He was born in 1825. He did marry his first cousin, Sarah Sally McCoy, and they would have 17 children.

What is it about being poor and having a lot of children? I don't know. I, don't get how the two are correlated well it's a couple things it's like one you don't have access to birth control so you don't have a way to not have baby if you if you want to not have one and then also like the the the kids the especially in this time and in in the past I mean more so than now like a lot of kids died in when they were little you know so you that was like a part of life like a lot of kids died in infancy a lot of kids died when they were toddlers there's like disease they would get lost you know And you just needed the kids to work on the farm.

So you're just having more kids. Do you remember how they would do abortions back in the day from the Dahmer Party episode? Just, no, being on a horse. No, because during the Donner Party fiasco, a lot of women would just, like, get pregnant on the trail. And, like, that was the worst possible time to get pregnant because you're on a trail and there's no medical, anything around. And so what they would do is they just find the biggest, strongest guy and put, the lady on his lap and he had just had to shake his legs like really really hard and that would apparently induce your portion so it wasn't really scientific but it apparently worked yeah and

i do remember from that they were like they wanted to do that because they were like i can't have another baby like i can't have a baby on this thing and like no way yeah and then it was later yeah oh god terrible so there's tons of kids in the story in the in the miniseries they are there are kids around but there aren't like tons of kids but like in real life like it's It's like grandkids are the same age as the kids. Like, it's just tons of people constantly having babies. So it's April 1861 and the Civil War begins. So, thank you, fact check.

So you would think it was like a hundred percent Confederate there. It's not a hundred percent. There's a little bit of like a little bit of tension, a little bit of back and forth. But Devillance and Randall both joined the Confederate Army. Sorry, your point was that you would think that West Virginia and Kentucky are full of um confederate okay i mean i would stereotyping them you are stereotyping there a little bit yeah um so um devil lance actually desserts and goes back to his family that's not part of why there is a feud but it is interesting that devil lance desserts and he's he is going to be one of the

the hat fields are a lot more um they have a lot more money than the mccoy's they have like a timber business they do bootlegging the hat fields are more well off than the mccoys are and the mccoy's are And there's a few instances that could have started the feud. So the feud starts officially after the Civil War. Randall's brother Harmon McCoy was a union soldier. So he did fight for the North. He was injured in the war a bunch and was sent home in December 1864. So Harmon gets sent home back to this area and everyone's pissed because he was a union soldier, essentially.

And the Hatfields are like, we're going to kill him. He was a union soldier. so he goes home and his family's like oh my god we missed you we're so happy you're here you're injured what can we do and within a week he has to go hide because the hat feels are going after him and he goes and hides in the woods they end up finding him because of footprints in the snow because it's like january in in the mountains and crazy uncle jim who is devalance's uncle he kills him so he kills randall's brother harmon in 1865 leaving his wife widowed and she has a bunch of kids that we're going to talk about later.

Okay. So that's an instigating thing for sure. That was the start. The start was the Union Confederate divide, basically. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yes. And then just like this one guy happened to be a McCoy and they killed him, Carmen.

So 13 years later, in 1878, there's an issue with hogs. So Razorback hogs are just a big part of life out there. They're like what you get your food from, all that. You would generally let them wander around and then pick them up when it was time to like slaughter them because like they were just going. go into the woods and eat and to kind of take care of themselves and you would mark your hogs by cutting their ears so it'd be like oh the pinero cut is like two cuts in the ear of this hog that's how you know it's mine but that got confusing because there's only so many ways to do that and like

people would get them confused all the time and randals hogs go missing and he goes looking for them and devilance's cousin floyd says they are his so now there's two people fighting over these hogs or just kind of wandering in the woods and it ends up going to court and a lot of stuff goes to court in this story also so they do try to like be litigious in and um solve things that way but the problem is like the justice of the peace is a hatfields like this is all the people that live here you know and so like literally the jury is half hatfields half McCoys there's so many relatives because there's so many of them yeah and then there's a split because one of the McCoys works for Devil Lance at his like timber place and a man named Bill Stanton who

works for Devillance as well testifies that the hogs do belong to Floyd Hatfield. So Floyd wins and Randall McCoy has to pay all the legal fees so he's pissed. Bill Stanton who is the one who kind of swayed the jury to the Hatfield side isn't long for this world. Randall's sons, Sam and Paris kill him in 1880 and they claim self-defense and they get off but it was because of the hogs just do whatever you want yeah they choose him into the woods and shoot him yeah so there are some people that I haven't mentioned that I won't really mentioned in this story but one of them is the McCoys do have a lawyer in their family his last name is Klein he's in a lot of these stories kind of like as like the person who's a little more educated so he helps the McCoys get legal justice

he also happened to have inherited some land from his father and ended up having to give it to devil lance because of like threats and like other things so he also has like a personal vendetta against the hatfields makes so they have this like lawyer on their side so now everyone's like really mad because like the hog thing harmon's dead tensions are up and then a third thing happens johnsy hatfield whose devilance his oldest son is a bit of a philanderer he it's actually like not the end of the world to have sex before marriage there's like saloons with sex workers everyone knows it's not puritanical you know it's just like kind of wild and they go to a party they go to all these like community events together and at

this party john zee sees randall mccoy's daughter rosanna like potentially for the first time but that can't be true because there's like everyone lives so close to each other i'm sure he knew she existed but he like sees her and he like likes her for the first time she's a little bit older she's very pretty and they hook up and they want to get married randall mccoy is like absolutely no and he disowns her and he never talks to her again what's her name again rosanna or Zanna McCoy she's very pretty you can see this is a picture of her did you find her yeah I mean look uh beauty standards change over time I would assume she she kind of looks like John Wayne Gacy she does not for fuck sake far she's very she's very pretty I'll put the picture

on the internet but yes yeah I mean look the people that played her are exceptionally pretty like I don't know who this is had phil and mccoy's this is a 2012 movie yeah yeah yeah lindsay pulcifer something place i mean she's very pretty i mean i don't think this woman is anyways whatever different standards fine i think she's pretty it doesn't matter and no but um and then so anyway this is the red flag they literally say in feud this is a red flag of the of the of the whole feud is because randall is so willing to never talk to her again he's like you're my daughter you're my favorite I loved you so much I will never talk to you again in the show bill paxton takes her hope chest you know what a hope chest is uh no it's like if you have if you have a daughter in like the in the past I don't know people do it now but literally it's like a wooden chest and you put things in it for her for when she gets married like you make as she's growing up you make like embroidered napkins for her and you find like special dishes and special things and you put it in there that she can take with her to start her married life that's really cool but we should do that like that should be a continuation i have a i have

a plastic container filled with stuff from when obama was running for president for the kids yeah that's stuff like that that's really cool new york times and all that yeah so anyway in the show bill pexton takes her hope chest and destroys it in the rain and it's very dramatic he's like very dramatic in this movie so i don't know if he really did that but anyway he said no rosanna like you are out of my life so devil lance lets rosanna stay with them on the west Virginia side of the tug. While they aren't married yet, Rosanna does get pregnant. And John Z is a bootlegger of moonshine. So it's not illegal to have alcohol now. It's not like prohibition, but it's illegal to make it and sell it without telling the IRS, essentially.

They want this to be like a legitimate business. So Rosanna is torn. She goes home. She's pregnant. She's upset. Her dad doesn't want to talk to her. She's trying to figure out what to do. And John Zee comes to get her because he does love, they do love each other. Jansie comes to get her. And her brothers try to arrest him because they have a bootlegging warrant against him in West Virginia. So they try to arrest him and they take him to a place like they're going to arrest him, put him into jail. And Rosanna, despite being very pregnant, she steals a horse from a neighbor and rides to the Hatfields to tell them that Johnzie is being taken away and they go and save him. So this is even more betrayal to her family because she left her house and told them that. But she moved in with her aunt instead of moving back in with her family or with Johnsy.

She has the baby. Her name is Sarah Elizabeth. She dies before her first birthday. So unfortunately, the baby dies. John Zee does love her and tries to go back to her, but she, you know, feels like she's broken. Then, you know, there's a terrible story because John Zee's, like, still kind of a flanderer. And he's been spending time with a sex worker to kind of, like, heal his broken heart. And his family's super pissed.

And they find, I mean, this isn't even, this isn't in the movie, but they find this sex worker hanging in the woods. They hung, they hanged her naked with a dress of her. her face and she was hanging for two days before someone found her. So someone got rid of her so that Jansy was stopping so much time with her, which is horrifying. So Rosanna's heartbroken. Jonsie actually ends up marrying her cousin Nancy. So another McCoy. So Jonsie marries Nancy McCoy. And even in the book, Feud, they say that he loved her less. Like he just didn't love her so much as he loved Rosanna. Yeah, there's Nancy in this picture.

Nancy is the daughter of Harmon, the union soldier who was killed in the beginning. Right. So it's like, Nancy, what are you doing? And the movie she's portrayed as being kind of awful, but you're like, you're not only betraying your family by marrying a Hatfield, but you're also marrying the person that you know your cousin loves. So Nancy has a whole thing. So Rosanna eventually just dies of being sad.

She dies. A couple of women in the story just die of being sad. So here's where things are getting a little bit crazy. and we get into the real escalation of the feud. So there are states issues because they're in different states. So we're like, who's jurisdiction is this? I can see across the tug, but it's a different state. But generally, the Hatfields and McCoys have the same political views.

So when there is a big election, like in the area, they're usually on the same side of the election. The voting in this time is very public. It's obviously just men, but you go to an all-day-long event and they say, like, everyone who wants this person to win, stand over here, raise your hand. this person stand over here raise your hand like it's not private you're like raising your hand to say that and so it's kind of a fun a fun day like everyone comes you bring your family there's food there's music and there's a lot of whiskey so a lot of this like moonshine whiskey it involves like i said apples you like ferment them in the woods and you like heat it up and boil it and like let it sit

for a while and so now it's 1882 and there's an election so one of these big election parties it's in kentucky and everyone's there all of our main characters are there someone brings even more whiskey than usual and they bring corn whiskey and like the you know the thing is if you mix corn and apple whiskey like you're fucked it's like much worse for you to like drink both of them well you get just drunk faster yeah yeah exactly so devil lance has a brother ellison who had a baby with their cousin i don't know anything about her but like he has his baby she's not in the picture he has the baby or not the baby's like a young man their son cotton top is important later in this story. Cotton top was slow and possibly albino but either way he was very blonde and that's where

they call him cotton top. Get it because he's like way here. Yeah. So at election day, Ellison gets in a fight with some of the McCoys and is stabbed over 20 times and then shot. So by they just got him this like drunken brawl over whatever and the three McCoy boys Tolbert, Farmer, so as well as the pH and Bud, they are taken away by the law. The Hatfields. are the cops in this area in Kentucky. So they take the boys to Pikeville. And they say boys, but they're not boys. Tollbert already has kids.

They're just like young men. And they take him to Pikeville in Kentucky. Ellison isn't dead yet. He's been shot once and stabbed 20 times, but he's not dead. And on the way over to put them in jail in Kentucky, devil lance and a posse stop them. And they're like, give them to us. Like screw all the paperwork. We're going to take him to West Virginia and tie them up.

And if Ellison dies, then they die. Like, we're going to do this vigilante justice. If he dies, then all three of these boys are going to die. They kind of like, even though they're like kind of, the hat feels on the law on the Kentucky side, he's like, we're taking them over to West Virginia. I kind of love this. It's like a lot. So he takes the boys, they take him up in an abandoned schoolhouse, and they're waiting to see if Ellison dies. So they're like, if he dies, you die, FYI, but they're just waiting for the news.

And he's like definitely going to die because he just stabbed so many times in job. Yeah, they're probably hoping that like, they're able to kill this guy. So the boys are tied up in this abandoned schoolhouse. For Sarah, their mom and Mary, who's Tolbert's wife, they come to the schoolhouse and they cry and they pray and they pray and they beg for the freedom. And the Hatfields are like, no. If Ellison dies, they die. Ellis and dies, spoiler alert from all the stuff. and all three McCoys are walked like a mile into the woods tied to trees and shot so the shooters are basically every single Hatfield johnsy's there devilance is there cotton top cal a guy named skunk hair because he had a big shock of white hair they're all there and they all just like shoot at the same time poor mary who's toldbert's wife just dies of being sad so now i mean can you imagine three of her sons Sarah's sons were just like killed in this like vigilante thing so she has had the 17 children

and three of them are dead from this. Everyone's like super, you know, upset and obviously. But now the McCoys want revenge for this revenge killing. And there's a man that comes to town for, who's a bounty hunter. And his name is Bad Frank Phillips. So Bad Frank, yeah. The governor of Kentucky, Simon Buckner, Bucker, appoints him a special sheriff. And Bad Frank comes to town to help the McCoys get the Hatfields for this, for this vigilante murder.

Who care? Like, all, they're just, there's just two groups of serial killers. Like, who, who's keeping count at this point? Just assume that all your family members are going to die and then you're going to kill theirs. Like, what? Well, everyone, I mean, like the, but it basically the governor, his stance is like, you're giving us a bad name. Like your people are, some people would you get caught in the crosshairs? He's like, you guys have to cut it out. You can't just have, like, a violent area where you kill each other. Like, yeah, it's probably not good for tourism. Yeah, you just can't. So, so. bad frank the first McCoy he kills the skunk hair or the first Hatfield he kills the skunk hair

because he's the guy who has like that shock of white hair is why he's called that and he scalps him and brings his scalp to prove that he's dead which is gross and also makes sense because he has a special hair so now other things are happening John Zay and Nancy are married

Nancy's brother Jackson gets into a drunken fight with a mailman and kills him just no one knows why I got in a fight so now there's a bounty on in Jackson McCoy's head, and he goes and lives with Nancy and Johnson's like, doesn't love this. He's the one outlaw McCoy at his house, and he tells his brothers that Jackson is there, and they come and get him, they chase him across the tug, and they shoot him. So now Nancy's mad because her husband told his family where her brother was, but like,

what did you think was going to happen, Nancy? You're married to a Hatfield in the middle of this. And so she starts telling bad, frank things, and they end up hooking up. She has a couple of kids, Nancy has a couple of kids with bad Frank while he's married to someone else and while she's married to Jonsie, but eventually they do get married. And I just wrote Nancy for fuck's sake, like, Beijing girl. So now the Hatfields are being hunted by the McCoy's and Bad Frank for the murder of the three McCoy boys. And they're pissed. So the Hatfields do another horrible thing.

On January 1st, 1888, they ambush the McCoy house while everybody is sleeping. This is called the New Year's Night Massacre Randall McCoy runs His wife Sarah is like run They're after you They want to kill you because you're the You know you're the man You just run and go

So Randall McCoy runs out of the back And no one sees him leave There's a couple other people in the house There's a lot of kids in the house There's Alifair is the oldest daughter She's 27 But she's there to like help take care of all the kids Tolbert's son is there

So one of the men who died His son's there Lots of other kids Crazy Uncle Jim Hatfield, who killed Harmon, throws Molotov cocktails into the house, and now the house is on fire, and it's full of women and children. One of the Hatfield's Cap,

I've said his name a couple times, but he's essentially the meanest Hatfield, and he injured his eye in, like, a gun thing when he was a kid, so he has, like, one milky eye. And when he died in 1930, they found a bullet next to his brain, which they think maybe made him, like, super aggressive, but Cap is there.

All the Hatfields are there. They're shooting at the house. The house is now on fire. women have buttermilk and a little bit of water but they can't put the fire out um this is the 1870s isn't it it's 1888 okay okay that makes sense that he died in 1930 okay yeah yeah the women are trying to put the fire out they can't do it cal mccoy he goes to the attic and tries to shoot from there they'd actually cut like holes in the attic wall to shoot out of like a fortress like a medieval fortress even though it's a one room cabin if something that's

happened so he's shooting out there the house is filled with smoke and alifair the oldest daughter takes the children and runs from the house they run up the back cap and cotton top see them and cap yells the cotton top to shoot her and cotton top shoots her and kills her so alifair dies and the girls run and hide in the woods they hide for the whole night they're going to end up with like frostbite injuries but they get out in the book it says that alifera lives long enough to say it was cap and no one else who shot her when asked. I don't know if that's true, but if it is true, it sounds like she said it to be very nice because Cotton Top did shoot her, but Cap told him to, and Cotton Top was like, not all there.

Right, right. So that's super unfair. Cal, the McCoy boy leaves the house. He's also killed. This is like, Sarah has had so many bad days in this. So Sarah McCoy, the mom, is freaking out. She leaves the house. She knows Al Affair is dead.

She knows Cal is dead. She knows it's all because her three boys are dead. And Uncle, Crazy Uncle Jim, hits her with his rifle and she passes out. She survives, but she's, like, laying in the snow all night because they have, like, a tactic number down their house. That's horrifying. And now they have to get the Hatfields for doing this to the McCoy. So it's just, like, back and forth, back and forth.

Between 1880 and 1891, like the height of the feud, you know, over a dozen people died of the two families. So it's like a lot of people are dying because of this. There's a little battle called the Battle of Great Bine Creek to get the Hattfields arrested for the murder. And that involves more like actual law enforcement because the governor is really pissed. He's like, stop doing this. So they do go to trial. And August 24th, 1888, eight of the Hattfields and some of their co-conspirators are indicted

for murder. It includes Cap, Johnsey, Robert and Elliott Hatfield, Ellison Mounce, French Ellis, Charles Guseppe, and Thomas Chambers. most of them get life in prison which doesn't mean life because they get out you know in a couple years johnsy gets married four more times after the story ends so like they get a lot of them get to go out and live their lives but cotton top gets sentenced to die because he's the one that killed alifair so this is a big deal like this is the thing that's in the paper people come from all over there's like thousands of people that come to watch this this poor boy get get hung get he's the one who's not all there yes mm-hmm And it's a big deal. People get hanged all the time in this area, but nobody had officially been hanged by the government in 40 years, and it would never happen again after this, because it was just so awful. So poor cotton top is taken to the gallows on a wagon sitting on top of his own coffin. They take him from the jail.

Yeah, from the jail to the gallows. There's a picture. There's like one photograph of it. They string him up. His last words are the hat. Fields made me do it. And he is a Hatfield. That's the last thing he yells because he knows that, like, Cap told him to do it. And he didn't really know what was going on. And he killed Alaffair. So he's, he's hanged. It's in the paper, all these things. And this is like sort of the end because it was so awful. You know, like, was so awful about it. Was it like, was, did his neck not break? No, no, not, not, not like the hanging itself. But like, the fact that after this murder of like women and children and they like attacked and burned down the McCoy house that, like, like, like after that the justice was like hanging a person who was not all there it just like got gross you know people were just like upset and it's sort of the spot in the in the miniseries as

well where they're like it kind of gets boring after this because they kind of are like whoa we really have done a lot we should calm down like people are like need to recover like in the coysies rebuild their house like the hat fields are all in jail they need to like recover everyone is tired most of the aggressors are in prison or dead and so that's how it kind of like peters out so really the highlights were those like the mccoy's being boys being killed in the woods and then the half the um the mccoy house being burnt down and the two men live for a long time devil ants doesn't die until 1921 he dies at the age of 81 um of pneumonia randall dies at 88 after after uh getting burned from a cooking fire so he just he doesn't even die of old age

she dies of burns. In the miniseries, there's like this scene that's incredible where Bill Paxton now has a white beard and white hair and he's burning, he's like in his PJs and he's burning a bunch of like new sippers and pictures of his family and drinking whiskey and it gets out of control and that's how his house burns down. But everything else is it's a cooking fire. He dies and he has for a fire. And today there's still Hatfields and McCoys living in the same place. Like there's still people there. There have been a few public truces most recently. in 2003 in the wake of 9-11 Rio Hatfield is one of the Hatfields there and some McCoys sign a truce along with 60 members of both families and this is the quote they say when they are signing the

truce they say we ask by God's grace and love that we forever be remembered as those that bound together the hearts of two families to form a family of freedom in America we're not saying that you don't have to fight because sometimes you do have to fight but you don't have to fight forever. That's nice. Yeah. That's it.

I'm sorry. So 9-11 is what brought this to a conclusion. Yeah, because they were like, we can't be fighting inside America. We have enemies. And I guess, I mean, it could be done any of the World Wars. Whatever.

They did it. Yeah. There's been a lot of other situations where America's been attacked. Pearl Harbor is a big one. I know. I don't know. That's what they did.

That's what they did most recently. Hey, so where do I find the miniseries? What is that on? It's on Netflix. Okay, perfect. It's called Hatfields and McCoys, three episodes. That's fun. A lot of shooting.

A lot of great accents. I love that stuff so much. I think the longer I've been in Texas moving back, the more into it I've gotten. It's just, it's old-timey. I was seeing when you were talking, I was like, they should create a new category of serial killers, which is like families. like it's not like one person necessarily killing people in succession it's like

this one family just had this like blood but these two families had this bloodlust and they really executed on it yeah so many people died so many people were like permanently injured you know and it's like a time when you know it's

and during a civil war you know if they shot in the leg they cut off your leg and you probably died from blood loss you know it's not like the height of of medicine either. So a lot of people, yeah, just getting hurt and hurting each other because their feelings are hurt because, you know, they think they were betrayed in some way. It's like when you tell someone to like calm down because they're like, that guy said something to me and they like won't calm down. You're like, who cares? But like escalated times of a

bigillion. How did you come up with how Field and McQuay's? Like, what was the impetus for that? I think I, gosh, I don't remember. I was thinking about, I don't even know, what did I do last week? I think I was just, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know where they came from. I have like a list of ideas and I kind of go through it sometimes and then I'll be like, oh, what about this? And then I just whatever. So I started this two weeks ago because I had to read a book and watch a miniseries. So what's the red flag? Well, I think they, in the book they specifically say the red flag is when when Randall McCoy disowned his daughter for being with Johnsey. Like that was like a no turning back point. And it's like the red flag is like these

perceived injustices. Some of them obviously are real because people die. like to escalate to just madness so you just like get so angry that you can't do anything but do but like avenge it and that's like also like if you're in mccoy don't marry hafiel's yeah just don't i was gonna say like like that's probably the biggest takeaway for me is like if your family's in a feud and they yeah you know that they kill each other regularly yeah why pour gas on that like oh my god like romeo and juliet exactly you're both going to die you It's, don't do that. There's tons of other people.

Wild stuff. Wild. Well, I'm going to go ahead and transition us over to the true crime part of our day. Oh, right. I'll get some gutter water to drink.