UBC: Dean King, The Feud

The Feud: The Hatfields and McCoys, The True Story by Dean King

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



This is a well-written, entertaining and (relatively) easy to follow history of the feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys. (I say "relatively" only because the material itself is so confusing that no account can possibly be an easy read.) King has assembled an impressive array of primary sources and it's only toward the very end, after the execution of Ellison "Cotton Top" Mounts, that the book slips and starts to read like a collection of anecdotes instead of a history---which is to say that King stops assessing his sources and merely relays them.

King does a good job of showing the links between the fortunes of the two families and the late nineteenth-century despoliation of West Virginia and eastern Kentucky: timber and coal and corruption (holy buckets the corruption) run like leitmotifs through the opera-worthy goings-on: betrayals and murders and star-crossed lovers and shoot-outs and biased trials and one execution. And under it all, like the beat of a big hollow-voiced drum, the aftermath of the Civil War keeps unspooling.

For the most part, Jacobean revenge tragedy (my academic specialty) has only the most fleeting of acquaintances with verisimilitude, but in this one way, life and art are indistinguishable: revenge may feel like a solution in the short term, but in truth it does nothing except compound destruction with destruction. No one wins. No one triumphs. There is no kind of satisfaction in the three-on-one murder of Ellison Hatfield or in the "executions" of his murderers (and don't forget the innocent Bud McCoy, murdered in mistake for his brother Bill). Only by the cockeyed internal logic of the feud does the cold blooded murder of Alifair McCoy make any kind of sense, but the judicial execution of her murderer, Cotton Top Mounts isn't a fair answer, either. The only people who "win" are the ones who survive long enough to outlive the dying-snake paroxysms of their family enmity, and even then, there was no survivor who had not lost a sibling, a parent, a child, or a spouse (or any combination of the above) to an absolutely pointless exchange of violence. And that's not winning, either.



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