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Around Matewan, W. Va. (pop. 803), probably one-tenth of the inhabitants are Hatfield kin. Clarence ("Dutch") Hatfield, 69, Ellison's grandson, lives up the hollow from Matewan. A short walk away his great-grandfather Ephraim, the family progenitor, is buried in what used to be a potato patch, and a little way beyond is Dutch's birthplace. Says he:
"They undoubtedly was mean men back in that time."
But the survivors did not encourage myth-making once the perfervid killing had finished. Says Dutch: "My grandmother, Ellison's wife, wouldn't talk too much about it. She lost her husband. It was sad for her." Dutch's cousin Belle Hatfield Pendergrast is 80, and full of a delighted sassiness about everything except the feud. Her father was indicted in Kentucky for a feud crime, and as long as he lived would never cross the Tug Fork.
"You know, they kept it secret from us children," she whispers, as if the taboo were still enforced. "My daddy was in the war for 16 years. He was just a young boy but he was still goin' at it in the mountains." Henry D. Hatfield, 53, says of his great uncle Henry D., a physician and politician: "He would actually, physically, throw you out of that hospital if you'd ask him about that feud." Peacemaking was an active mission among both families. "My parents," Belle says, "made us be friendly with the McCoys. If you met one of those McCoy men that was in the fighting, you'd be nice and kind."
Still, the children wheedled old battle stories out of the principals. They know the creek bend where a grisly ambush occurred, and the ridge where Jim Vance (a Hatfield inlaw) made a hellbent stand against far too many McCoys. And they think they know who was to blame, though their opinions tend to run along family lines. Robert McCoy, 36, the well-fed and worldly mayor of Matewan, points a finger at the meddlesome Hatfields who invaded the election grounds: "Politics—that was what the whole thing was about. One family meddling in the other's interests." Another McCoy, twice the mayor's age, takes his own backhanded swipe: "Those poor Hatfields, as I understand it, were too easy with their drinking back then. It took away their sense, made 'em too brave." Given the chance, Hatfields abandon impartiality as well. Says Henry D. cheerfully: "Really, the Hatfields won the feud. Devil Anse would have ended it any time. But Randolph McCoy was so irate. . ." Even Dutch, appalled by his ancestors' attack on a McCoy family home in 1888, reminds a visitor that the victims had "done something bad to my grandmother."