Infamous America - HATFIELDS & MCCOYS Ep. 2 | “Forbidden Love”

Episode Date: September 15, 2021

A trial leads to murder. A relationship between a Hatfield young man and a McCoy young woman deepens the divide between the two families. And Devil Anse Hatfield makes new enemies who join the McCoy side of the feud. Thanks to our sponsor, Simplisafe. Get 20% off your entire new system and your first month of monitoring service free when you enroll in Interactive Monitoring at SimpliSafe.com/infamous Join Black Barrel+ for early access and bingeable seasons: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join For more details, please visit www.blackbarrelmedia.com. Our social media pages are: @blackbarrelmedia on Facebook and Instagram, and @bbarrelmedia on Twitter. This show is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please visit AirwaveMedia.com to check out other great podcasts like Ben Franklin’s World, Once Upon A Crime, and many more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Colonel John Dills and Devil Ants Hatfield had history, as they say. The colonel was a prominent citizen in Pikeville, Kentucky, and he was an outspoken supporter of the Union. When the Civil War arrived, he commanded the 39th Kentucky infantry, the unit that Harmon McCoy eventually served with later in the war. The Kentucky Regiment often fought a Confederate unit called the Virginia State Line. In the state lines cavalry was a lieutenant named Devil Anz Hatfield. Both units tore up the countryside and raided farms and created bad blood wherever they went.

But it was Hatfield's unit that got Colonel Dills kicked out of the army. Dills was a prominent citizen in Pikeville because he owned steamboats and stores and tanneries. Early in the war, he ordered some of his soldiers to protect some boats that were headed up the big Sandy River to Pikeville. The boats were loaded with military supplies, but also supplies for the colonel's stores. He was using military transports and military escorts to deliver merchandise to his stores, and he told his men to make the run even though they'd been warned that Confederate cavalry was in the area. A force of 800 horsemen attacked the convoy and stole the supplies. After that, President Lincoln himself dismissed Colonel Dills because of misuse of an army transport

for personal profit, among other things. Dills went home to Pikeville and formed a militia unit that battled Devil Ants Hatfield's Logan County Wildcats. By the end of the war, Dills and Devil Ants were firmly against each other. But then the enmity went deeper. Dills was the legal guardian and mentor to two young men who became bitter enemies of the Hatfields. One was a lawyer who used his legal training to chip away at the Hatfields, and the other was a

a killer who went straight at them with bullets. From Black Barrel Media, this is Infamous America. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer, and this is a six-part series on the most infamous family feud in American history, the Hatfields and McCores. This is episode two, Forbidden Love. The trouble between the Hatfields and the Guardians of Colonel John Dills arose in 1872, seven years after the end of the Civil War. The timber industry was booming in the Tug Valley, and the Hatfields.

fields were all in on it, it quickly became their chief enterprise. But the industry scared many people, and it could easily be viewed as shady and dishonest. Legal agreements in the industry were complex and hard to understand. Land deeds were vague at best. Property lines were often based more on tradition than legal documentation. Neighbors sued each other for trespassing. They now hotly contested the ownership of the wooded mountain signs that used to be opened to everyone for hunting and fishing. And they frequently charged each other with illegal timber cutting, which was how Perry Klein entered the feud on the side of the McCoys against Devalance Hatfield. Perry Klein and his brother Jacob were in their early 20s. They had been orphaned 10 years

earlier, and eventually Colonel Dills became Perry's legal guardian. When their father passed away, they inherited a huge tract of land in Logan County, West Virginia. The inheritance made made Perry and Jacob two of the wealthiest landowners in the area. As they came of age, they moved into the timber business, like many families in the Tug Valley. Farming in the Valley was incredibly difficult, as Rannell McCoy's family knew well. But the timber industry brought fast cash, and it was the first industry that connected the commerce of the Tug Valley to the outside world. Before this, families in the valley grew their food on their own farms and sold it or bartered it to friends in neighbors. And they did the same thing with their moonshine whiskey. But as the United States grew

and expanded after the Civil War, the residents of the Tug Valley realized they had something other people wanted. Lumber. Lots of lumber. They started harvesting the giant poplars, hickories, elms, and walnut trees that covered the hillsides. They cut down the trees, loaded them onto boats, and then floated them up the Tug River to larger towns and cities. Business was booming in the early 1870s, and that's when the Klein brothers lost a massive tract of land to Devils Ants Hatfield. Ants accused Perry and Jacob Klein of cutting, destroying,

and hauling away valuable lumber from his land. If the charge was true, there was no clear explanation for why the clines would cut down trees on ants' land when they had so much rich timber land of their own. But ants claimed the boys owed him $3,000 in damages, which would be about $62,000 today. The case went to court, and Ants believed he would be awarded 5,000 acres of land for the damages. Ants seemed to have the support of many people in the community. He was so confident in his case

that he used the new land as collateral in other deals before he legally owned it. And it turned out that ants had good reason to be confident. The court did award him the 5,000 acres, which of course infuriated Perry and Jacob Klein. Jacob said devil ants strong-armed them into giving up their land. He said ants took it by the muzzle of a gun, as he put it. The experience turned the Klein's and the Hatfields into enemies. Perry moved across the Tug River to Kentucky. He was appointed deputy sheriff and then elected sheriff of Pikeville a year later.

Eventually, he set up a law practice in Pikeville, where his guardies, where his guardian, Colonel John Dills, was still a prominent man. Perry's Law Office and the town of Pikeville became the headquarters of the anti-Hatfield Coalition. It took six long years for the timber case between the Klein brothers and Ants Hatfield to get resolved. The year it did, 1878, the next infamous event in the feud happened. In later years, Devil Ants liked to tell fascinated outsiders that the feud started over. over a pig. It was simply easier than trying to explain the complicated relationships between the Hatfields and McCoys, and the years of legal haggling and hundreds of courtroom appearances

for mundane things, and it was also funnier. The feud didn't start because of a pig, but like the murder of Harmon McCoy, the story of the pig took it to a new level. Ants had a cousin named Floyd who worked for the Hatfield timber operation. In the fall of 1878, Floyd Hatfield rounded up his hogs and drove them to his farm. Hogs in the Tug Valley were a variety of Russian boar, and they were allowed to roam freely in the spring and summer. Owners gathered them in the fall and drove them back to their farms to continue fattening up over winter. Farmers cut specific types of notches in the hog's ears to distinguish them from one another. The process was similar to branding used by the ranchers of the West.

And some ranchers did both. They used a brand and a notch in the ear. One such rancher was cattle baron John Chisholm in New Mexico, who, at this time, was about to start having problems with a young outlaw named Billy the Kid. In the Tug Valley, it was Randall McCoy who was about to have the problem. with Floyd Hatfield. Floyd rented his farm from a McCoy cousin. In the fall of 1878,

Rannell stopped by Floyd's farm and noticed a hog that had been notched with his marking. Rannell accused Floyd of stealing the swine. Floyd retorted that the hog was feral and therefore up for grabs. Rannell immediately went to the justice of the peace. And unfortunately, in a classic example of the messy nature of the feud,

we don't know for sure who the justice of the peace was. It might have been Devil Ants' older brother, Wall Hatfield. It might have been Devil Anz's cousin, Preacher Ants. Or it could have been a guy we know only as Stafford. But Preacher Anzance seems to be the most likely candidate. Rannell McCoy charged Floyd Hatfield with stealing the hog, and that was a felony in Kentucky at the time. It was similar to stealing a horse in the West.

A hog could be critical to survival. A single animal could feed a family for a month in the winter. Now it was up to preacher-a-aunt's Hatfield to preside over the trial. He held it right in his home, and he appointed a jury of six Hatfields and six McCoys. He was trying to stay impartial, and on the surface he succeeded. But the equal split allowed for an obvious problem, a deadlocked jury. But in a strange twist, that didn't happen. though it might have been better if it had.

On the day of the trial, it was said that mountaineers deserted their cornfields, moonshine stills, and logging projects to witness the administration of justice at Deacon Hatfield's cabin. Tradition says that a small room was filled with rowdy spectators who were armed with rifles. They cheered for their respective families as both sides presented their cases.

And the most compelling testimony came from a fella named Bill Staten, He provided the information that swung the jury, and it was the worst mistake of his life. Bill was pulled in two directions. He was Rannell McCoy's nephew, but two of his sisters were married to Hatfields, and one of those sisters was married to the defendant in this case, the suspected hog thief, Floyd Hatfield. So Bill was torn between his McCoy uncle and his Hatfield brother-in-law, and his testimony supported his brother-in-law. Bill testified that the notch on the hog's ear was not from Rannell McCoy.

He said he'd watched Floyd Hatfield make his mark on both of the hogs' ears. The McCoy faction was in an uproar. Order had to be restored to the makeshift courtroom. When the tempers finally calmed down, the jury voted. They decided in favor of Floyd Hatfield, 7 to 5, and he was found not guilty. Now there was new outrage for the McCoy. First, Bill Staten testified against them. Then the jury voted against them, and it did so because a McCoy defected and voted with the Hatfields.

That McCoy worked for Devil Lance Hatfield's timber operation. Though the defector said he'd been swayed by Bill Staten's testimony, the McCoy clan accused him of voting for his paycheck instead of his kin. And there was yet more insult added to injury. Floyd Hatfield had just bought some rich timber land from his cousin, Devil Ants. Now that Floyd was free, he planned to move from Kentucky over to West Virginia, and the land he'd just bought used to belong to the young lawyer Perry Klein. The McCoy's still believed ants had strong-armed Perry to get the land. Now Floyd Hatfield was about to move on to it.

But the person who really had to watch out was Bill Staten. After Bill testified against his uncle, Ranel McCoy, he went about his business with extra caution. For the next two years, he kept a weapon close at hand, and he needed it. One day, he and his brother were pulling a boat up the Tug River. They spotted two of Ranel McCoy's sons pulling a boat in the other direction. The two pairs dragged their boats to opposite sides of the river and then opened fire on each other. The gun battle ended when the sun went down, and no one. one was injured, but it was just the first of three reported violent incidents for Bill Staten.

The next supposedly came when he was confronted by a nephew of Ranel McCoy. That nephew was colorfully nicknamed Squirrel Hunting Sam McCoy because of his apparently over-the-top love of squirrel hunting. Sam confronted Bill, and the legend says that he shot the gun out of Bill's hand. He had Bill dead to rights, but then the younger brother of Devil Ants Hatfield stepped in to stopped the fight. It was the second violent incident for Bill Staten. The third would be the last. Some time later, Bill found himself in another confrontation with squirrel hunting Sam McCoy, but this time Sam's brother, Paris, was also there. Bill might have been tired of more than two years of threats from various McCoys, and he might have initiated the confrontation to make it

all stop. Or, Sam and Paris might have started it in their relentless pursuit of revenge for Bill's testimony at the Hogg trial. Either way, the three young men found themselves alone in the woods. Like almost all events of the feud, there are at least two accounts of what happened next. In the more vicious of the two, Bill supposedly jumped on Paris McCoy's back and sank his teeth into Paris's neck like a vampire. Sam McCoy shot Bill to stop the attack. Another account said Bill shot Paris in the hip. Then Sam McCoy returned fire and killed Bill Staten.

Again, whoever started it and however the events played out, the result could not be disputed. 28-year-old Bill Staten was shot to death and his body was left in the woods. When Bill's body was discovered, everyone suspected, Sam and Paris McCoy. Devil Lance Hatfield's younger brother filed murder charges against the two McCoys. Paris was arrested immediately. Sam

was arrested two years later. They both went to trial in Logan County, West Virginia, the home of the Hatfield clan. At their trials, two ironies surfaced that proved the unpredictable nature of the feud. Number one, multiple

McCoys testified against their own kin. Number two, a heavily partisan Hatfield jury found both young men not guilty on the grounds of self-defense. But of course, it helped Sam and Paris that they were the only ones who were alive to tell the story. The jury had no choice but to accept their version of events. At the same time, the tragic events of Bill Staten ran their course. Another sequence began that entangled the two families to their core and had long-lasting effects. It was a real American version of Romeo and Juliet, said in Southern Appalachia.

In 1880, the year the trials finally ended in the cases of Paris and Sam McCoy, Johncy Hatfield and Rosanna McCoy began an illicit relationship. Johnson Hatfield was the 18-year-old son of Devil Lance, and like his father, Johnson's name was abbreviated. Everyone called him Johnson. He was good-looking and carried himself with a confident, and he was a known ladies man. He worked for his father's whiskey operation on the Kentucky side of the Tug River,

the McCoy side of the river, if you want to think of it that way. The Revenue Act of 1862 made it illegal to distill whiskey without a federal license, but that didn't stop devil ants or even slow him down. He kept making his good shine, and he was the biggest bootlegger in the area. Johnsey ran the operation over in Pike County, Kentucky, the home of the McCoy family. Two of Rannell McCoy's sons were almost certainly customers, and one might have worked for the operation for some period of time.

And this was probably how Jonsie Hatfield met Rosanna McCoy. She was Rannell's 21-year-old daughter, and she was said to be a beauty with dark hair and dark eyes. In the tradition of the feud, the two star-crossed lovers met at a party on Election Day in the fall of 1880, But it's entirely possible, and may be plausible, that they came into contact long before then. But Election Day 1880 is when things really took a turn. Election Day was a big deal in the Tug Valley.

It was a time for folks to come together and cast their ballots and have a party. It was a day-long festivity full of drinking and games and electioneering. The story goes that the son of devil ants and the daughter of Ranel McCoy snuck off into the woods during the festivity. They spent considerable time together, and when they finally returned, everyone was gone. Rosanna was scared to return home. She would have to explain her absence.

So Jonsie convinced her to go with him to the Hatfield homestead. Reportedly, devil ants and his wife Levisi allowed Rosanna to stay with them, reluctantly. In the feud tradition, the relationship between Jonsi and Jansy and and Rosanna was the true breaking point for the families. The lore of the feud says that both sides rejected a marriage of the new couple. Devil Ants and Ranel McCoy didn't want a mixing of the blood, as some called it.

But Hatfields and McCoys had married each other for generations. Their bloodlines were so tied together, you couldn't pry them apart. The thing that might have made this marriage different, though, was that it involved the immediate families of Rannell and Devil Anz. While the clans had intermarried for years, no member of Anse's family had married a member of Rannel's family. So they might have stopped it on those grounds. It was certainly a more dramatic story.

But just as easily, it could have been Jonsie's fault. There was definitely a mutual attraction between Jonsie and Rosanna, but it's impossible to know how deep it went. Their relationship, whatever it was, didn't stop Jonsie from flirting with other girls in the area. and of course, maybe it went beyond flirting. At some point, Rosanna grew tired of Jonsie's behavior. It didn't look like marriage was in sight,

and she might have been pregnant by that point, so she returned home to her family. Now, the stigma of being an unmarried pregnant woman was not nearly as severe in the Tug Valley as it was in many other parts of America. Rosanna's mother, Sally McCoy, was unmarried with a child when she met Rannell. Sally had a daughter named Josephine before she married Rannell, and Josephine went on to have two children of her own as an unmarried woman.

But this didn't mean that Rosanna was fully accepted back into the household. She endured her father's griping about the relationship for some period of time, and then she decided she'd had enough. She went to live with her Aunt Betty in Stringtown, Kentucky, and a relationship with her father, Rannell, was never the same. Johnsey continued to visit Rosanna at Aunt Betty's house, but at the same time, he was reportedly romancing Rosanna's cousin Nancy.

Nancy was the 15-year-old daughter of Harmon McCoy, the younger brother of Rannell who'd been murdered in January of 1865. At the time of the murder, Harmon's wife had been pregnant with their sixth child. That child was Nancy McCoy. So now, the son of Devil Anne, Hans Hatfield was connected to the daughter of Ants' arch rival, Rannell McCoy, and the daughter of the man he supposedly helped murder, Harmon McCoy.

One evening in October 1880, Jonsie planned a secret meeting with Rosanna. When they got together, two of Rosanna's brothers jumped out of some brush and surprised a couple. One of the brothers had been appointed a special deputy in Pike County, and they said they had a warrant to arrest Jonsie for carrying a concealed weapon. It was obviously a ridiculous charge. Most men in Pike County carried concealed weapons. Rosanna was afraid her brothers were going to kill Jonsie on the road to Pikeville.

According to the legend, she borrowed a horse from a nearby farm and raced to the closest Hatfield residence. It was the home of one of the many brothers of Devil Ants, and Devil Ants happened to be there at the time. Rosanna explained the situation, and ants quickly gathered some men to try. track down the McCoy brothers. The Hatfields galloped through the woods and took shortcuts to make up time.

They landed on the main road ahead of the McCoys and intercepted the dubious extradition. The two McCoy brothers suddenly faced a group of angry Hatfields. It didn't take long for Devil Lance to persuade them to give up Jansy. That's how the story goes anyway. But the secret meeting and Rosanna's moonlight ride to save Jonsie were probably fabricated, and they've been great fodder for reporters and authors and Hollywood screenwriters ever since. The second half of the story was real, to some degree. Rosanna's brothers did try to serve a warrant on Johnsey Hatfield, and a party of Hatfields did force the brothers to give up

their prisoner. And this set the stage for the next evolution of the feud. Johnsey left Rosanna and married Nancy McCoy. In the McCoy tradition, Rosanna was actually pregnant. She gave birth to a baby girl, but the child died eight months later, possibly of the measles. All these events spun forward two years to the next election day. It was the first direct violence

between the family of Devil Ants Hatfield and the family of Ranel McCoy. It was a cold-blooded murder with plenty of witnesses, and it changed everything. Next time on Infamous America, we get to the real bloody meat of the feud. A Hatfield is killed by some McCoys. The McCoy killers are held hostage by the Hatfields and Devil Ants issues an ultimatum. Then a McCoy is killed, and the feud reaches

all the way up to the governors of Kentucky and West Virginia. That's next week on Infamous America. And members of our Black Barrel Plus program don't have to wait week to week. They receive the entire season to binge all at once with no commercials. Sign up now through the link in our show notes or on our website, Black Barrel Media. Memberships begin at just $5 per month. This season was researched and written by Jen Labyrinths, script editing by Christopher Marcaicis, audio editing and sound designed by Dave Harrison, original music by Rob Valier. I'm your co-writer, host, and producer, Chris swimmer. Find us at our website blackbarrelmedia.com or on our social media channels. We're Black Barrel Media on Facebook and Instagram and B-Barrel Media on Twitter. And you can stream all our

episodes on YouTube. Just search for infamous America podcast. This show is part of the Airwave Media Podcast Network. Please visit airwavemedia.com to check out other great podcasts like Ben Franklin's world, once upon a crime, and many more. Thanks for listening.