The Hatfields and the McCoys (14 page)

Nearly ten days passed before Perry Cline arrived in Louisville for the prisoners. By then not only had West Virginia refused to bear the expenses of their journey to Louisville, but the United States marshal had also refused to accept responsibility. Cline, therefore, interrupted his plans to go to Frankfort, where he persuaded Governor Buckner to seek a special appropriation from the Kentucky legislature for the costs involved. On March 16 he returned to Louisville and arranged for the journey back to Pikeville.
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While the West Virginians remained in Louisville, Wall Hatfield continued to attract reporters. He steadfastly maintained that not a single man among them had anything to do with the murder of the McCoy brothers. Instead, he fastened the guilt upon Devil Anse and his sons, Cap, Johnse, and Bob, and four or five others. With a sense of humor, he then expressed the wish to one reporter that his newspaper would retract a printed report that Wall had seven wives. “I ain't never had but one,” declared Wall, “and I don't want any more.”
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After some disagreement over whether the appeal of the habeas corpus case should go directly to the United States Supreme Court, Judge Barr ruled that it should follow regular procedure and be heard in the United States Circuit Court. With the prisoners no longer on hand, the case presented in the Circuit Court before Judge Howell E. Jackson had little of the drama of that heard in Judge Barr's court and attracted relatively little attention.

On April 5 Eustace Gibson opened the testimony by reviewing the evidence presented at the earlier trial. He again emphasized the wrongs done the prisoners through their illegal seizure, which constituted a violation of the Constitution of the United States. Knott admitted that the West Virginians had been taken from their state illegally, but he denied that the mode of their apprehension in any way affected the legality of their arrest once they were in Kentucky. He declared that the arguments of the opposing counsel seemed to imply that “the Constitution of the United States was drawn expressly to give each state the power to harbor criminals.” Governor Wilson even alluded to the possibility of war between two states. Hardin expressed no desire to speak. Judge Jackson, who had to remind all the speakers to confine their remarks to the issue in question, granted the appeal of the case to the United States Supreme Court.
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On April 13 Gibson and Knott, who had served together in the United States House of Representatives, arrived in Washington to present the cases of their respective states. The attorneys succeeded in having the Supreme Court advance the case, know as
Plyant Mahon, appellant
v.
Ahner Justice, jailer of Pike County, Ky.,
on the docket and began their arguments on April 23. Speaking for one hour and thirty minutes, Gibson held that the “taking and holding” of Mahon (and inferentially of the other eight men) “was one continuous act by the same officers of the State of Kentucky,” and “the act
01
Phillips in capturing and Cline in locking up in jail without warrants of mittimus, were both wrongful acts of the State of Kentucky.” Knott, who spoke for only about twenty minutes, maintained that the question was one of law and in no way a case between the states. Had it been, West Virginia should have instituted her suit in the Supreme Court, which had original and exclusive jurisdiction, and not in the District Court.
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A reporter for the
Wheeling Intelligencer
noted a general opinion that West Virginia's procedures had been “wrong from the beginning” and that Wilson had “applied at the wrong shop for redress.” West Virginia, it was feared, might be “kicked out of the Supreme Court on the question of form, without reference to the merit of her case—and it is conceded that the merit was great.” The reporter cited a common belief that if the case came before the Supreme Court in proper form the West Virginians would win their freedom, although they might later be rearrested under legal circumstances.
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The Supreme Court, in an opinion presented by Justice Stephen J. Field, upheld the judgment of the lower court. The opinion held that although the arrest and abduction of Mahon (and, of course, the others) were “lawless and indefensible acts,” the “authority from the Governor of Kentucky furnished no ground for charging any complicity on the part of the State in the wrong done to the State of West Virginia.” The opinion maintained that no legal means existed whereby a person accused of a criminal offense in one state could be turned over to authorities in another state except through positive law on the subject.
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Justices Joseph P. Bradley and John M. Harlan offered dissenting opinions in which they stressed the view that the court should have recognized the invasion of West Virginia by Kentucky. Bradley expressed the opinion that the writs of habeas corpus had been properly issued and that Mahon (and the others) should have been discharged and permitted to return to West Virginia. He further declared that Mahon “was kidnapped and carried into Kentucky in plain violation of the Constitution of the United States, and is detained there in continued violation thereof.” He held that the Constitution “clearly implies that there shall be no resort to force” for the purpose of apprehending persons charged with crime and fleeing into another state and that it had, in fact, “abrogated, and the States have surrendered, all right to obtain redress from each other by force.”
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Once the Supreme Court rendered its decision on the arrest and confinement of the West Virginians, attention reverted to the prisoners themselves and to others who had been indicted for the McCoy murders but remained at large. That the men confined in Pikeville would be brought to trial and that Kentucky authorities would redouble their efforts to apprehend those still at large was a foregone conclusion.

11

HAWKSHAWS IN THE HILLS

D
URING THE WEEKS following the decision of the Supreme Court, detectives arrived in Kentucky and West Virginia from all parts of the nation. They hoped to collect the rewards offered by Kentucky for the Hatfields and by West Virginia for the McCoys, which by the summer of 1888 totaled almost eight thousand dollars. Some of them aspired to the fame that might come from capturing the principal feudists, particularly Devil Anse.

The wily mountaineers took precautions against capture by ambitious and unscrupulous detectives. None did more to insure his safety than Devil Anse. Shortly after the attack on the McCoys on the night of January 1, 1888, he purchased two tracts of land, of 200 and 250 acres, on Island Creek, a tributary of the Guyandotte River.
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He built a cabin near present Stirrat, West Virginia, about midway between his old home near the mouth of Peter Creek and present Logan. He chose a site in a narrow valley between two ridges that extended down the highest mountain between Logan and the Kentucky border, a location so isolated that “people with no business there knew instinctively that they should stay away, and those whose duties called them to the lonely valley went in trepidation/
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In withdrawing from his lands along the Tug Fork, Devil Anse made a major concession to the reduction of tensions, but he had no intention of surrendering to Kentucky authorities. Some distance from his cabin he erected another structure designed as a fortress for use in case the McCoys sought further retaliation or legal authorities or detectives tried to take him and his supporters by force. Built of twenty-three-foot logs almost two feet in diameter, the building had only one entrance, with a massive solid oak door nearly twelve inches thick and capable of stopping bullets of the most high-powered Winchesters. Portholes in all walls enabled defen
_:
ders to fire in any direction. Devil Anse stocked the fort with adequate food and water, as well as sufficient fuel for the large fireplace, against the time when he and his friends might have to take refuge there and endure a long siege.
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Devil Anse formed a cadre of well-armed men prepared to assemble at the fort on short notice. They included Cap, who had returned from a trip to the western states, which he had involuntarily taken following the battle of Grapevine Creek. Devil Anse also laid in a supply of arms and ammunition, newly purchased from the manufacturers. Although his purpose was purely defensive, news of the purchases aroused fears in Pikeville that the Hatfields might attempt a rescue of the prisoners in jail there. Captain CM. Parsons of the Buckner Guards, Pikeville's newly organized militia unit, appealed to Kentucky Adjutant General Sam E. Hill for aid and received in response a generous supply of ammunition.
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Meanwhile, West Virginia authorities took legal initiatives of their own. At its spring term of 1888 the Logan County Circuit Court indicted Frank Phillips, Deputy Sheriff John Yates of Pike County, Bud McCoy, James McCoy, David Stratton, and twenty-three others for the murder of Jim Vance. Governor Wilson promptly offered rewards of five hundred dollars for Phillips and one hundred dollars each for the other twenty-seven men. During the summer of 1888 most of those under indictment in both Kentucky and West Virginia remained in hiding in the woods and left the care of their farms to their women and children.
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Both the Hatfields and the McCoys held the detectives in contempt. The editor of the Louisa
East Kentucky Magnet
voiced a commonly held opinion that it did not matter to them “whether they arrest a McCoy or a Hatfield just so they see a few dollars in the transaction.” He proposed, “Hang the detectives, drive off all who are not residents, and those most concerned will soon find that it is safe and profitable to attend to crops and get their timber ready for the spring rains. Offer rewards for the detectives, and enough honest Hatfields and McCoys will unite to clear the country of them in less than two weeks. When the Hatfields and McCoys realize the injustice that is done them, and the opinions held in regard to them by the outside world, and all brought about by the workings of detectives, they will make it so hot that, if any of them (the detectives) escape, they will bury their bought badges and swear that they never heard of the Big Sandy country.”
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On June 1, 1888, Captain Alfred Burnett of the Eureka Detective Agency and two assistants left Charleston, West Virginia, for the Tug Valley. The primary object of their journey was the arrest of Dave Stratton, who had been with Frank Phillips at the time of the killing of Bill Dempsey. The detectives proceeded to the mouth of Pigeon Creek, a West Virginia tributary of the Tug Fork, and from there to Blackberry Creek, on the Kentucky side. Two of them called at the house of Stratton at the mouth of Knox Creek and learned that he was flatboating. They combed both sides of the Tug and about daybreak on June 22 found Stratton asleep on a sandbar just inside the West Virginia border. They approached him with great stealth, and when they were near him one of them leaped astride him and pushed the barrel of his revolver against Stratton's head. Resistance being useless, Stratton surrendered peacefully. The detectives took the Winchester rifle and the Colt revolver, which he carried, and escorted him to the Logan County jail.
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Most of the detectives had no encounters with the feudists, and many of the rumors emanating from the Tug Valley probably grew out of efforts to cover up their lack of success. One of the stories involved a man known as William L. Minyard. Reputedly from the Indian Territory, Minyard dressed in im itation of Buffalo Bill Cody and called himself “Wild Bill.” He claimed that he concentrated his efforts upon the capture of the McCoys and that on one occasion he barely escaped capture himself by hiding in a hollow log while Frank Phillips and a band of McCoys searched all about for him. Unfortunately for him, he was arrested on charges of peddling moonshine, which he contended in vain was part of his plan for taking the McCoys.
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On July 23 detectives of the Eureka Agency, along with “Wild Bill” Minyard and a stranger, arrived in Charleston and claimed rewards for the arrest of two of the McCoy partisans. They reported “a sharp fight” at the mouth of Peter Creek in which one member of a band of some thirty McCoy supporters had died and several others were wounded, but otherwise they were “very close-mouthed” about matters on the Tug. Perhaps more action was generated when Eustace Gibson, the West Virginia attorney in the habeas corpus case, and the editor of the
Saint Marys
(West Virginia)
Oracle,
came to blows in Parkersburg over the congressional election of July 25.
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Reports persisted that several Hatfields, including Devil Anse, Cap, Elias, and Tom Chambers, fearing that the large rewards would lead to their arrest, had left or were leaving the state. Police at Roanoke, Virginia, reported several Hatfields quietly moving northward along the Norfolk and Western Railway, and newspapers warned readers that they were desperate men who would not give up without serious trouble. Most rumors credited the McCoys with being ahead of the Hatfields in the new phase of the feud in the summer of 1888.
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Despite the stream of rumors, the hills along the Tug remained relatively quiet. Judge W. H. Weddington of the Pike County Criminal Court, annoyed over newspaper reports that any unknown person in Pike County would be shot, declared, “Strangers are in no more danger here than they would be in Frankfort or Lexington.” Moreover, he stated, “The McCoys are all pursuing the peacable [
sic
] avocations of life, while the Hatfield party who are not in jail in Pikeville are fugitives in the mountains of West Virginia.” Ignoring the fact that Frank Phillips had taken up with Nancy McCoy Hatfield, Johnses wife, Weddington stated that the Pikeville attorney and agent of Governor Buckner was living as a private citizen on a farm about ten or fifteen miles from Pikeville.
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