MURDERLAND: The Hatfields, the McCoys, and the Smearing of Appalachia
The story that wrote off an entire region as irredeemable and gave outside money a moral framework for pillaging was assembled by a reporter who needed copy for three Sundays in October.
The story that wrote off an entire region as irredeemable and gave outside money a moral framework for pillaging was assembled by a reporter who needed copy for three Sundays in October.
(The Smear naturally extended to the Ozarks and anywhere south of the Ohio River above 200’ elevation. An excellent read! - DD)
(In The Shadow of Yesterday) - There’s a dinner theater in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, where you can watch actors dressed as Hatfields and McCoys shoot at each other between courses. The show runs nightly. It seats over 700 people. You can get a pulled pork platter and watch the whole thing from a picnic table.
That’s where the story ended up.
Most Americans know some version of it: two mountain families, a stolen pig, generations of pointless bloodshed, the whole thing soaked in moonshine and stupidity.
Bugs Bunny did an episode. The Family Feud television program put actual members of both families on stage in 1979, with a live hog as a prop, because CBS thought that was clever.
In 2012, Kevin Costner played Devil Anse Hatfield in a miniseries that drew 14 million viewers. Fourteen million people watched that and came away thinking they understood something.
They understood the myth. The myth is not the story.
Here is what actually happened in the Tug Fork valley of West Virginia and Kentucky between roughly 1878 and 1890: two neighboring families had a series of violent disputes, rooted in…