HENRY ZEBROWSKI
A lot of massacres in this one.
MARCUS PARKS
It's a big massacre. Well actually there was a massacre last time and there's a massacre this time. But the funny thing is that less people died in the second one and yet that's the one that's known as the massacre.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think maybe again, branding. It's about when it arrives.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Rick Rubin talked all about the idea of it's not about what you make of the project, it's about when you deliver it. So maybe it's got a lot to do with it.
MARCUS PARKS
Quite possibly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Maybe Rick Rubin was there. He looks like it. Time travel.
MARCUS PARKS
He does.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Can you imagine Appalachian Rick Rubin?
ED LARSON
There'd be a lot more banjo, that's for sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) Yeah.
ED LARSON
Have you thought about playing the feet?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What do you mean, play the feet? Like yeah, (Appalachian accent) can't you see your feet are drums that you don't have to pay for, Jay-Z. And then he's just like no way, we could have had feet rap. We could have had a whole world of board stomping samples. Man, I wish Rick Rubin was Appalachian.
MARCUS PARKS
Welcome to the Last Podcast on the Left everybody. My name's Marcus Parks, I'm here with Henry Zebrowski.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) Yeah!
MARCUS PARKS
And Ed Larson.
ED LARSON
Mud!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's his favorite word. Apparently it was his first word.
MARCUS PARKS
Mud!
ED LARSON
Yeah. Butt was my second.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
We're here for part two of the Hatfields and McCoys,
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And we're going to get a little bit more death?
MARCUS PARKS
A little. Actually when you compare the death in this one to the death in the last one, about equal.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Got it.
ED LARSON
All right.
MARCUS PARKS
So when we last left the Hatfields and the McCoys, a Hatfield vigilante group had just executed three McCoys by firing squad after a Hatfield had been murdered in a drunken fight that had allegedly started over a standing fiddle bet.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey.
ED LARSON
Why was the show so long? You just did it all right there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Congrats. That shows the power of storytelling.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Brevity, brevity. Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So let's get it straight. Now remember, so the Hatfields, they got money and strength and numbers.
MARCUS PARKS
And land.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And land.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And they got all the timber. McCoy's, glandular issues-
ED LARSON
Angers, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Make them super angry. Yeah, yeah, they have anger spheres deep inside of them. Remember that? So yeah. So right now, what, so technically it's Hatfields 3, McCoys 0. Or 2.
ED LARSON
No, one.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
One.
MARCUS PARKS
No, it's Hatfields 4, McCoys 1.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Got it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah because you can't forget about Harmon McCoy way back in the day.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Oh okay, that's right. Like during the war.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, during the war or right at the end of the war, yeah. Which is that's technically the first shot fired.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But yeah, it is 4:1 at this moment.
ED LARSON
And how many men are named Bad?
MARCUS PARKS
Two.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah.
ED LARSON
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
In this episode there will be two men with the modifier Bad attached to their name.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But they are very bad.
ED LARSON
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
They are very bad. One of them however did give himself the nickname Bad.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Dang. It's because he was like (Appalachian accent) I wanna be worse. That'd be fun. Worse.
MARCUS PARKS
Well after the pawpaw murders, the patriarch of the McCoy clan, Randall McCoy, had taken his wife's advice to let the law take care of Hatfield vigilantes. Randall had come to call these vigilantes Devil's Hellhounds.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cool!
MARCUS PARKS
After the Hatfield patriarch Devil Anse Hatfield. Why did he make them sound cooler?
ED LARSON
I know, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then you cut to the Devil's Hellhounds and you know it's just three guys sitting on the porch going like (Appalachian accent) feels like it's gonna rain today.
ED LARSON
(Appalachian accent) I found something new on my nuts.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) Yeah. Is it another one of them ornery spheres?
MARCUS PARKS
Well I mean technically the guys in Deliverance weren't up to much until Ned Beatty and Burt Reynolds showed up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Finally an inciting incident!
MARCUS PARKS
Was it Burt Reynolds or was it Jon Voight?
ED LARSON
What do you mean?
MARCUS PARKS
In Deliverance.
ED LARSON
They were both in it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They were both there.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ned Beatty had that... You know.
MARCUS PARKS
Well we'll talk about that later.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Delicious sliding backside.
ED LARSON
Burt Reynolds broke his leg and John Voight was the unlikely hero.
MARCUS PARKS
Gotcha, okay. And so in September of 1882, a grand jury issued indictments against 20 Hatfield supporters and Devil Anse Hatfield himself, even though Devil Anse claimed to have once again been sick in bed when the triple execution had taken place.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) I had the goddamn sniffles!
ED LARSON
(coughing)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(coughing) (Appalachian accent) I'm sorry, I can't go to the feud today. (couching) Someone bring me some chamomile.
MARCUS PARKS
(Appalachian accent) I'm thinking about y'all because I got my crud and I don't want to give y'all the crud.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent)I don't want y'all to get it. Because it zips through a feud. You wouldn't believe.
MARCUS PARKS
It seemed however as if there wasn't much urgency behind those warrants, either because the Sheriff of Pike County had figured that the eye for an eye principle had been applied correctly, or more likely because the Hatfields were a heavily armed and highly capable crew.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He doesn't want to deal with them.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
ED LARSON
They're scared.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. I mean these are extremely dangerous people.
ED LARSON
Yeah. There's more Hatfields than cops probably.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And you gotta go look for them. Like it's not like they're all in one big office building. It's not like you're attacking Tesla.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is a place, you have to go deep in the woods and scurry them out.
MARCUS PARKS
It's like Vietnam. You're going out into the bush on their territory.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But for whatever reason, no Hatfields were arrested for what came to be known as the pawpaw murders for the next five years. But while some historians claim that those five years were peaceful, they really only say that because those years were free from multiple murders and massacres.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's kind of like what we're going on like in America right now.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know what I mean? We're not directly in a war but it sort of feels like it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it feels like it all the time. It's uneasy. Yeah.
ED LARSON
Now how many people is a massacre? Is three a massacre?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Let me ask Google.
MARCUS PARKS
If I were to guess I would say a massacre... Well I think massacre-
ED LARSON
Five was the Boston massacre.
MARCUS PARKS
Massacres also I think depend on intent.
ED LARSON
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think it depends on a reporter. Mass killings, it's a mass killing. It says here... There's no legal jurisdiction.
MARCUS PARKS
Because these days we use the word mass killing, the phrase mass killing more than we use the term massacre.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. Because massacre is just like again, it's about branding.
MARCUS PARKS
Well it's also massacre is something that you attach more to like a horror movie, like Slumber Party Massacre.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
It doesn't have quite the same weight as it once did.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What Joan Rivers used to say about like an outfit.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh my god, it's a massacre.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a massacre.
MARCUS PARKS
See after the execution of the McCoy brothers, men armed themselves with knives and pistols wherever they went even if they weren't a Hatfield or a McCoy. And as we all know, the more weapons people have, the more likely they are to use them on each other.
ED LARSON
Dude, I got this kitty clomper at the house, it's like an ebony stick with a ball in the end of it and there's like a point at the end of the ball.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
It's like I got it in Africa, they use it to like hit lions in the head as they're charging you and shit and fucking kill them. I'm fucking waiting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's all he's been talking about.
ED LARSON
I'm waiting, dude.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I fear for the Amazon drivers on his street.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I fear for-
ED LARSON
I just got my Christmas ax out of storage.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
God help if an Uber Eats guy accidentally delivers him the wrong meal.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh dude, I've got house axes that are like hidden in strategic places around the house.
ED LARSON
Oh absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS
I'm not telling anyone where my fucking axes are. Just know there's a lot of axes sitting around ready to be used.
ED LARSON
I got two.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I will let my weapons remain anonymous.
ED LARSON
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So you don't know what's coming.
ED LARSON
Julie tried to get rid of one of my axes and there one of them is red and I was like well that's the Christmas ax.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's for Santa Claus.
ED LARSON
So now I can only bring it out during the holidays.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Watch out! You're looking like a tree!
MARCUS PARKS
Well to make matters more stressful, the local deer population which was used by a lot of the mountain folk for regular sustenance, that was stricken by a mysterious disease.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, those deer thought that they could fuck without condoms for too long, man.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, deer syphilis. Just ran right through them. Reportedly, deer staggered around with swollen black tongues until they fell dead and the corpses littered the forest in such numbers that it was compared to a biblical plague.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) God's coming for our venison!
MARCUS PARKS
But what kept things simmering more than anything was Randall McCoy's unabated rage.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(groaning) That's what it sounds like to me. (groaning) It's tumors growing.
ED LARSON
Imagine him just screaming, taking a shit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ow! Ow!
ED LARSON
(Appalachian accent) This goddamn shit won't get out my ass!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) Someone call the doctor, I'm making red rocks.
MARCUS PARKS
Well besides the fact that he was down three sons after the pawpaw murders, Randall McCoy's timber operations were failing while Devil Anse Hatfield was becoming one of the most successful men in the Tug Fork Valley. This rage was fueled by the aforementioned Von Hippel-Lindau syndrome, which we discussed last week. And after I learned a bit more about it, I can see even more how it only exacerbated the feud.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it's hard when you get a bunch of anger berries growing inside your organs, man.
MARCUS PARKS
And it's not just that. I mean basically, this is what I think I may have figured out here.
ED LARSON
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Basically the Hatfields could actually see the McCoy's anger physically manifest. And as we know, Yosemite Sam levels of anger could be very funny.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(growling)
ED LARSON
(Appalachian accent) Goddamn motherfuckers right here!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's what my father used to do.
MARCUS PARKS
So I'd imagine some of the Hatfields might have poked the McCoy bear a few times on purpose just to get a patented McCoy reaction.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) Hey Sam, watch this. I'm gonna throw an apple at that moron over there. Hey there, got you McCoy! And he's like god! Shit, man! You're wasting apples! You're wasting apples! That's so much fun.
MARCUS PARKS
So as a consequence of the disorder, McCoys would reportedly get beet red in their face as their overloaded adrenal glands became engorged at the most insignificant slight.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What if we told you that these were light Folgers crystals?
ED LARSON
(growling)
MARCUS PARKS
Their hands would start shaking, they'd get splitting headaches, their hearts would beat out of their chest. In some cases their faces would like wildly twitch. In some extreme cases of VHL, a person can get so angry that they actually pass out from what one author so poetically called an overdose of wrath.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's amazing.
ED LARSON
Wow, that's fucking cool, man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I gotta get there.
ED LARSON
You're not far.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
I'll tell you that much.
MARCUS PARKS
But that's all to say that the McCoys held grudges and were generally unpleasant to be around. And that went double for Randall McCoy. Now after the pawpaw murders, Devil Anse Hatfield stayed in hiding while his so-called hellhounds acted on his orders. Top amongst his men was his son Cap Hatfield, so named because he'd lost an eye after an accident with a percussion cap.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah because Cyclops was already trademarked by Marvel.
MARCUS PARKS
Known as one of the most merciless and just plain nasty members of the Hatfield clan, Cap would be responsible for some of the most reprehensible and inexcusable actions to come. As far as appearance went, Cap was described as a grim figure with a trimmed beard, a mustache, and bangs slicked across his forehead that made him look, in the words of author Lisa Alther, like Adolf Hitler only gloomier.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow. That's hard.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
To be a sadder Adolf Hitler. Because it's not like when I see Adolf Hitler's face, the first thing I think of like that guy's got it figured out. That guy is loving life.
ED LARSON
Imagine if he only had one eye, how much angrier he'd be.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Or it would make him more empathetic.
ED LARSON
I don't think so.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know. I don't know. We'll never know.
MARCUS PARKS
Well supposedly he had one testicle.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well we know that, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But that did nothing, that just made him angrier.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, yeah. Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Cap also had a bad go of it when he was 15, after being shot in the stomach on Christmas Eve. The bullet destroyed part of his colon and for a long time it was said that anything he ate would partially spill out of the wound.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) Now I've got of mind to show you my second butthole if you quit talking.
ED LARSON
He's such a dick that he had two assholes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) I got two. All right? I call one Asshole A and I call this one my sidepiece. Here's my little finger, look at it. I can stick my finger in there.
MARCUS PARKS
Ultimately though, Cap Hatfield was a quarrelsome and vindictive young man, described as simply bad without a single redeeming point. A prime example is how Cap got his wife.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And the keyword is 'got'.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
He had become enamored with his first cousin, Nancy Smith. But she turned down his offers of marriage for years on end.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) She got all the finest qualities of my aunt, meaning bosoms and legs, and she got all the finest qualities of my uncle, being the big old face.
MARCUS PARKS
Eventually Nancy Smith married a timber merchant but he somehow managed to get mysteriously murdered two years after their wedding. Murder was never solved. But after that Nancy Smith finally gave up and married Cap Hatfield.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
See? Romance.
ED LARSON
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That used to be romance.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
ED LARSON
When a woman just decided to make the rest of her life horrible.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. You're scary enough.
MARCUS PARKS
Or it was decided for her.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But while Randall McCoy stewed in his juices, Devil Anse built up his timber business from various hidey holes. And random Hatfields and McCoys murdered each other with fair regularity but little fanfare. There was however another character waiting in the wings to join on the side of the McCoys, a man who had been biding his time for years. That was the son of Rich Jake Cline, Perry Cline. This was the man who'd gotten the shit end of the stick years earlier when Devil Anse Hatfield had swindled him out of Cline's 6000 acre birthright.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah. And those tender memories go long.
ED LARSON
Yeah. He's the only one with like an actual education.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, he becomes an attorney.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
In the years since, he'd become an attorney and he spent a lot of time forming political connections which he'd use against Devil Anse Hatfield in service of both his own personal vendetta and the McCoy cause. See once Perry Cline became reasonably successful, he cosied up to an up and coming Kentucky politician named Simon Bolivar Buckner.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Great names in this whole fucking... I love all of those names.
ED LARSON
There are so many great names, it's hard to remember whose side what person is on.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well that's the funny thing is that it's an interesting name because Simón Bolivar.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Simón Bolivar.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, Bolivia. He was a huge figure in South America.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They probably saw it in a magazine or something. They're like (Appalachian accent) Bolivar! That's incredible.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Buckner was running for governor of Kentucky and Cline promised the relatively ample McCoy vote if Buckner promised to bring the Hatfields to real justice for the pawpaw murders.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And this is where the government comes in.
MARCUS PARKS
See at this time and place, murder was a relatively loosey goosey charge, it's more akin to today's charge of manslaughter. This was due to the fact that Kentucky's prisons were so packed that if a murderer was not sentenced to death, he could expect a release after only eight years or so on average.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like Norway.
ED LARSON
Such extreme differences.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it really is. Well it's because it shows they're like (Appalachian accent) well they're either a supervillain, like they have killed dozens of people and they're a war criminal, we gotta kill them right now. But if you just kill like one guy, it's like (Appalachian accent) we got enough people to feed anyway. We don't need all these people.
ED LARSON
(Appalachian accent) Well how hard can you break a rock?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It would help.
MARCUS PARKS
I think I need to go.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I gotta go.
ED LARSON
Bag him!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, I could break some rocks.
MARCUS PARKS
Furthermore, the governor at the time was pardoning as many people as he could to earn votes. By the time he was out of office, he'd released over 1000 inmates. In other words, if the Hatfields were caught, convicted, and incarcerated, the punishment would most likely not fit the crime in the minds of the McCoys and Perry Cline.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They want total destruction of the Hatfields.
MARCUS PARKS
Yep.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They want them to be taken down, they want their lands back, they want them all dead.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. So Perry Cline hitched his star to Simon Bolivar Buckner. And after Buckner was elected, Perry Cline was able to get the pawpaw murder indictments brought back to the forefront five years after the murders had occurred. And when it came to feuds, Buckner was no longer all that concerned with rankling the locals, as feuds in general were starting to become a serious problem in Kentucky. Besides the Hatfield-McCoy feud in Pike County, there were five other feuds that were even bloodier, although none of those had the natural narrative structure of the Hatfield-McCoy feud.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, that's why we can't get into it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because they're really just a bunch of guys killing each other in the woods.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, that's it.
ED LARSON
And no one even knows their names.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, they knew their names but nobody remembers their names today.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Gotcha.
MARCUS PARKS
And looking back, it's also very poorly recorded.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
It was a violent mess. Kentucky was a violent mess.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
As we have said before, it's just interesting because this one feud just serves as a weirdly picture perfect way to look into this phenomena.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And it's all spelled out that shows kind of like the dynamics between the groups.
ED LARSON
They just kill someone and dress them up like a dead deer and call it a day.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah. Being like (Appalachian accent) oh someone must have been a Hatfield.
ED LARSON
Paint his tongue black!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) My god, that deer was just enjoying his life, dancing disco, anonymous partners, and then the grim reaper comes.
MARCUS PARKS
But besides the fact that the previously entertaining feuds were becoming a real danger, the feuds in a much more historically consequential sense were getting in the way of the industrialization of Appalachia. Or Appa-latch-a, Appa-lay-sha.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I got enough response back that said Appa-lay-sha is fine.
MARCUS PARKS
Cool.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's just Appa-latch-ans do that and they're the ones that get mad when you don't.
MARCUS PARKS
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But most don't. But to people within Appa-lay-sha and Appa-latch-a it does exist. But you know, it's you, it's on you.
MARCUS PARKS
All right.
ED LARSON
It's like the N'awlins thing.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah.
ED LARSON
No matter how you say it, they get mad.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. I understand.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, saying New Or-leans is not correct, it's at least New Or-lins. But most of the time you go N'awlins.
MARCUS PARKS
N'awlins.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But then also Rob understands, it's like Long Island.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Technically Long Island is one word.
MARCUS PARKS
Long Island.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. While the railroad, coal, and timber industries were still rapidly expanding, the feuds were not what you'd call business friendly. And if Buckner could get these feuds under control, then he'd be able to bring in the serious money men, people like the Rockefellers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And everyone involved could become truly wealthy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And now you guys get to all be brought into the fold. And then just so you know with these great opportunities for all of you guys to work yourselves to death in our mines while you guys used to just live here for free and sustain yourself. But you needed us.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because now we give you this opportunity to die underground.
ED LARSON
Yeah, yeah. If you stop killing each other, you could die slowly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Slowly with a paycheck.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, you could die slowly in my name. It's great. And so in 1887, Buckner posted rewards for the 20 some odd Hatfields who'd been indicted five years before. This attracted loads of bounty hunters who made life even more dangerous for the people caught in the middle. Additionally, Buckner also reached the governor of West Virginia, a man named E. Willis Wilson, who was nicknamed Windy not only because he gave long speeches but because he was a frequent and fragrant farty bitch.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) Now listen, all right, my speeches are not that long. This is about the farts. And I know because I am Windy, all right. They call me Windy because (farting). Honestly I'm having a hard time even getting through this speech. (farting) Name's Windy. (farting) And you'll remember it. Stupid.
MARCUS PARKS
Well I expected it and wanted it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. It was included for a reason.
MARCUS PARKS
It was encouraged, it was encouraged. But farty or no, Governor Buckner asked Governor Wilson to authorize a special deputy to hunt the indicted Hatfields. And that's how Bad Frank Phillips got involved in the Hatfield-McCoy feud. Bad Frank, he was the one who gave himself the nickname.
ED LARSON
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But he deserved it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's the one that deserved it. Now did he have a Grogu? I can you imagine the weird little Appalachian preemie that somehow continue to live like in a little satchel next to him. You must protect the child.
MARCUS PARKS
But while you may imagine Bad Frank to be an old grizzled bounty hunter type, a Clint Eastwood if you will, he was in fact just 25 years old and already had two ex-wives and five children under his belt.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I fuck.
MARCUS PARKS
And I'd argue that he hadn't earned the nickname Bad Frank yet.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Not yet.
MARCUS PARKS
I think Bad Frank is for someone 35 and older. You don't get Bad Frank until you hit 35.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well mostly it's because in my mind, if I'm calling somebody Bad Frank it's because I know a good Frank and I'm just labeling a Bad Frank because you gotta know that's the Frank you don't get haircuts from anymore.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah but you also don't give yourself your own nickname.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Well I guess you don't.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. So if you start telling people no, it's Bad Frank, then there's something going on.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) Hey now, hey. I'm Bad Frank. Yeah that's sad.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You can't stop and correct people.
MARCUS PARKS
No. Described as a rat terrier of a man, Bad Frank was small but fierce and was feared even by the McCoys with which he'd allied himself.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's just a scene from a movie. You could totally be like (Appalachian accent) all right, now who's gonna handle our little Hatfield problem? They're like we can get super tall Greg! No, no, he got hanged last week. We're gonna get-
ED LARSON
Quite the feat to hang super tall Greg, by the way.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) Honestly we had to put a tree on top of a tree. It was an almost Egyptian level architectural marvel.
MARCUS PARKS
(Appalachian accent) What about Cholera Jim?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) Also passed recently. And there's a hat going around for that for his family also by the way, it's called a GoFuckMe. But also... But the crowd parts and it's just this little tiny man being like yeah, I'm bad. (humming Bad by Michael Jackson)
MARCUS PARKS
Well as far as what Bad Frank did for fun, he drank.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
MARCUS PARKS
But he was also said to accost strangers he came upon during his travels by shooting at their feet to make them dance, all while he laughed himself silly. That shit's not like-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Is that real?
MARCUS PARKS
That's real.
ED LARSON
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
People would do it. (Appalachian accent) Dance, dance! Yeah all right, you can go now.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) All right. Well I've wasted all my bullets. Because then the gun is like empty and now the guy can just kick you in the nuts.
ED LARSON
If he's got any toes left.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean yeah, if you dance fast enough.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Now Bad Frank almost immediately got overzealous when it came to his appointment as special deputy, he overstepped. The people of West Virginia soon came to fear Bad Frank as a man who would invade homes without a warrant, kidnap anyone who he thought might be involved with the Hatfields and whisk them away to Kentucky. In one instance, Bad Frank Phillips arrested a man that he thought was a Hatfield ally named Tom Chambers. But while the guy he arrested was named Tom Chambers, it was not the right Tom Chambers. Strangely, the man Bad Frank arrested was Tom Chambers' stepfather who was also named Tom Chambers.
ED LARSON
This is what I'm talking about.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a pain in the ass.
ED LARSON
Their story is like so annoying sometimes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's just like name each other different! Have different names!
ED LARSON
Awful Frank.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Nuisance Joe.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Stinky Tom.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Stinky Tom!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But even though Bad Frank quickly lost his official position as special deputy because of fuck ups like this, he continued his duties in an unofficial capacity. Due to his tenacity, he and his posse had by Christmas Day, 1887, illegally abducted most of the indicted Hatfields for trial in Kentucky.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Damn.
MARCUS PARKS
Now Devil Anse Hatfield was at a bit of a loss as to how to stop this without killing a government appointed official, even if Bad Frank's title had been stripped away. Finally though he figured that if he took out the angriest, most rageful McCoy, the rest of the family would run out of steam. That of course is how Devil Anse Hatfield decided to justify a murderous raid on the home of one Randall McCoy in what came to be known as the New Year's Night Massacre of 1888.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) Now I want y'all boys to remember, right. Randall's gonna be ornery. Gonna be lazy, right. He's gonna be sitting in a chair. Seems to be almost like useless in a way, unable to defend himself and many others. We're gonna get him tonight.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Now to take down Randall McCoy once and for all, Devil Anse tapped Bad Jim Vance as head of the raiding party.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Bad Jim Vance very much earned his nickname. He was a little older. In the years since the feud began, Bad Jim also came to be known as Crazy Jim.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
See this is a good... That's a promotion.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. In this time and place, Crazy Jim was a nickname to take seriously.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah. Nobody's wearing a shirt. Right? You're in an area where nobody is a normal man. Normal doesn't exist.
MARCUS PARKS
That's going a little bit far, that's playing into the stereotype.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm sorry.
MARCUS PARKS
They aren't necessarily true.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're right.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean there are men who don't wear shoes, that's Squirrel Hunting Sam.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's different.
MARCUS PARKS
THat's different.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's natural.
MARCUS PARKS
But still, these people were by evidence unhinged.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's what I'm saying. On the whole I'm saying they're unhinged. So he's Crazy Jim.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Crazy Jim. Because it's not Wacky Jim.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Like Wacky Jim and Crazy Jim are two entirely different people.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Honestly I'd rather be next to Crazy Jim than Wacky Jim.
ED LARSON
Wacky Jim will get you caught.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean that if you upgrade to Wacky Jim-
MARCUS PARKS
I think Wacky Jim was the guy in the fucking scene in Deliverance.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah. That's Wacky Jim being like (Appalachian accent) hey, he's always got some left field idea.
ED LARSON
He's like the kind of guy whose like suspenders break and he replaces it with two belts.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah. (Appalachian accent) Anything's clothes to me.
MARCUS PARKS
And so on the same Christmas day that Bad Frank Phillips and his posse rounded up the last of the reachable indicted Hatfields, Devil Anse sent Bad Jim Vance with a small band of raiders to kill Randall McCoy in his own home. Now out of the 37 Hatfield family members and goons who participated in the overall feud, 9 came along on this mission. The party included, amongst others, the intellectual disabled yet highly violent Cottontop Mounts.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Gotta have him.
MARCUS PARKS
Remember he was the so-called wood cult son of Devil Anse's brother.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
You had Devil Anse's three eldest sons, Johnse, Cap, and Bob. A timber crew member named French Ellis, the real Tom Chambers.
ED LARSON
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Great. Good, good. He's there.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And a son-in-law of Devil Anse's sister Matilda named Guerilla Mitchell. And that's 'guer' not 'gor'.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
ED LARSON
I just watched Captain Ron, I get it.
MARCUS PARKS
Guer, gor! Told you to watch out for guerillas. Now the raid was supposed to take place on New Year's Eve. But as the raiding party was approaching the house, someone knocked down a fence and sent it crashing down the hill.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was probably Cottontop.
ED LARSON
Yeah, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah.
ED LARSON
That's a shitty fence by the way. Why even have it?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Tripped over a frog, fell down the fucking hill.
MARCUS PARKS
This of course alerted the McCoys and the raid was therefore postponed until the next night.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) They won't see it coming tomorrow night.
ED LARSON
(Appalachian accent) I think I heard a dagnabbit come from the woods.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. That's definitely, well let me use my listening ear. Yeah, that is definitely the tumble of an intellectually disabled man through the woods. I know it well because I've done it myself.
MARCUS PARKS
And according to legend, right before the crew approached Randall McCoy's home on the actual night of the raid, Bad Jim Vance turned to the men and said quote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) "May hell be my heaven. I will kill the man that goes back on me tonight. If powder will burn."
ED LARSON
It's a shame for this, he could have been a poet.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) Yeah but I hate punctuation. I guess maybe in a fashion I would be like E. E. Cummings.
MARCUS PARKS
But if he was a poet it'd be more like may hell be my heaven-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
May hell be my heaven!
MARCUS PARKS
I will kill the man that goes back on me tonight! Powder will burn.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. You will all see what I plan to do. Oh yes. Oh there's mud on my gloves.
MARCUS PARKS
Now Randall McCoy was by no means alone in his cabin. With him was his wife Sarah, his 25 year old son Calvin, Tolbert McCoy's young orphan son Mel, and four daughters ranging from 5-29 years old.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I just see them all sleeping in one big bed.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like it's the Looney Tunes.
ED LARSON
Literally on top of each other.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
All in sleeping caps. (snoring)
ED LARSON
(snoring)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's all I see.
MARCUS PARKS
I am Mel, son of Tolbert.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Son of Tolbert.
MARCUS PARKS
All were asleep when the raiding party was spotted by the McCoy watchdog who barked at the first sign of intruders.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Bark.
MARCUS PARKS
Bark bark.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Bark bark.
ED LARSON
It's the love of characters, that's nice.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Bark.
MARCUS PARKS
Once the lamplight inside went on, Bad Jim Vance yelled:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) "Come out you McCoys! Surrender as prisoners!"
MARCUS PARKS
But before the McCoys even had a chance to think it over, Johnse Hatfield, either nervous or drunk, probably drunk, he fired first, which caused every other member of the raiding party to open fire on the home.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There's gotta be fucking trigger discipline. There's gotta be something.
MARCUS PARKS
Gotta be.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like you got the one guy going hold! Hold!
ED LARSON
Yeah, the Braveheart.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. No. Well you also just gotta keep your team sober. Make sure Johnse doesn't get too fucked up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But how do you get them in the killing rage?
MARCUS PARKS
Ah that's true.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well determined to defend what was theirs, both Randall McCoy and his son Calvin returned fire, wounding Johnse Hatfield in the shoulder. Right around that time, Bad Jim Vance got the idea to set the roof of the cabin on fire. And he sent either Tom chambers or Guerilla Mitchell to climb to the top with a torch. The sources vary.
ED LARSON
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'd say Guerilla Mitchell.
MARCUS PARKS
Probably.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's what he does.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What does Tom do? Sounds like Tom's the guy from MySpace. Like I just see the guy from MySpace just hanging out.
MARCUS PARKS
No, Guerrilla Mitchell's gonna clamber.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's his job.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But before they could set the roof alight, Randall McCoy shot the fire starter in the hand and blew off three of his fingers down to the knuckle.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) Them fingers belong to my sister! That's racist against other people and I'm sorry.
MARCUS PARKS
And that sent him tumbling off the roof. Others in the raiding party however managed to set the cabin on fire on the ground level. But since there were no Hatfields on the roof anymore, Calvin McCoy climbed into the cabin's loft which had holes cut every 6 ft so it could be defended in just this type of situation.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
ED LARSON
Man, you know that was an argument between the wife. (Appalachian accent) You gotta stop cutting holes! I'm telling you, the Hatfields are coming. They're gonna start burning out cabin from the bottom and then I'm gonna climb up in the holes. It's like you're crazy!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) There is snow on the turkey! There is a squirrel in the bathroom.
MARCUS PARKS
And right in the middle of the gunfight, he just looks over at his wife with this shit-eating grin.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) I told you so.
MARCUS PARKS
(Appalachian accent) What'd I say? What'd I say, Sarah?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
See sometimes husbands are correct.
MARCUS PARKS
Sometimes husbands are correct.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But from that vantage point, Calvin was able to hold off the raiding party from invading the house. Meanwhile Randall's daughters, Alifair, Fannie, and Adelaide, tried putting out the fire with water and the only other liquid in the house, buttermilk. It did little to abate the blaze but it did create the horrible stench of scorched dairy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's the smell of war.
ED LARSON
Been there, done that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, scorching that milk.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Out here scorching that milk. Now after the girls ran out of water in the house, Alifair, the eldest, tried making her way out to the well for more water, despite being disabled from a polio infection.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) No, don't send Quick Stephanie. Send Alafair whose legs don't work works. Yeah, that'll work, yeah. She'll lose her arms.
MARCUS PARKS
But she was the oldest.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
So you didn't want to send the little girls out there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I guess so.
MARCUS PARKS
But in an action that would sway public opinion against the Hatfields, Cap Hatfield mercilessly gunned down Alifair with a bullet to the chest.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, not good.
MARCUS PARKS
Almost immediately Alifair's mother Sarah rushed to help but she was stopped by Bad Jim Vance. Bad Jim Vance clubbed her with his rifle, breaking her arm and hip. Joining in, either Johnse Hatfield or Cottontop Mounts pistol whipped Sarah so hard that the gun butt left an impression on her skull. She was 58.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, that's fucked up.
MARCUS PARKS
Like 59.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But this is why in the end it's not good for them.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. The rest were still busy with Calvin McCoy, who was still popping out of the loft holes, firing shots to keep the writing party from advancing further. Eventually he hit Cottontop in the forearm and drove the Hatfields away from the house entrance into a covered passageway.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Something jumped up and bit me!
ED LARSON
I feel like at any point every character in the story has like 2-4 bullets in them.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes, it does get there. There's softer bullets.
MARCUS PARKS
That's actually a question that's asked later on. It's just like why is everyone getting just wounded? Why are there so few deaths and so many wounds?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think because it's hard. It's like extremely, extremely hard.
MARCUS PARKS
It's extremely difficult to shoot a man.
ED LARSON
Yeah. And the bullets are different back then. They're like little-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, they're soft.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
I don't know, man. This is the time when the Winchester repeating rifles started coming along.
ED LARSON
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
You know when the Colt lawmaker, lawgiver, I can't remember what it's called. But like Colt just came out with this pistol, the pistol they say won the west. But yeah, those guns are solid.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Like they're not fighting with like muskets or like single shot rifles anymore.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because you can fight with them now.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like you can shoot one of those guns now.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah, you could hold off somebody with a Winchester repeating. It's the one that you go like (gun cocking sounds).
ED LARSON
Okay, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I can't wait.
MARCUS PARKS
Because it was the first rifle that you could use without having to reload after each shot. So it changed the fucking game. And guess who had the Winchester repeating rifles? The McCoys.
ED LARSON
Oh okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. So the McCoys were the ones who actually had the better guns, which is why they were able to hold off a larger force.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's really interesting.
ED LARSON
The Hatfields are the ones with money! Get the good guns!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well it shows what happens when you cut corners.
MARCUS PARKS
Well this is a funny thing is that eventually Devil Anse Hatfield was like (Appalachian accent) they got these good, we gotta get some of them guns! And so they ordered a bunch of rifles and 10,000 rounds of ammunition. But his wife filled out the order form and instead of bringing in 10,000 rounds of ammunition, they brought in 1000 rounds of ammunition.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it's not enough.
MARCUS PARKS
Which is nowhere... That's like one gun battle.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
With the McCoys. So it's not, yeah, she fucked up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it's about inventory.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And this is why CIV is important.
MARCUS PARKS
It really is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's all about CIV, it's about RPGs. If you could actually sit and understand what's in your quaver, what do you have in your supply area? All right, because that's as good as your fight's gonna be.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Why didn't Devil Anse's wife have a Steam account way back when?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Why didn't she?
MARCUS PARKS
But in the end, there were just too many Hatfields. Because someone did manage to set the roof on fire, which took away Calvin's advantage. He was forced downstairs but still he and Randall were able to hold off the Hatfields for the time being. Overall the battle lasted for an hour and a half. But the climax came when Calvin made a break for the corn crib about 100 yards from the house to provide further defense and cover for Randall. At this point though, events occurred very quickly. As Calvin ran, the Hatfields turned their fire on him which opened them up to an attack from Randall McCoy, who busted out dressed only in his nightshirt and long johns, holding a double barrel shotgun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) Well now we've woke up daddy! Now he's ready to go. That's scary.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, this is the 19th century version of the game Don't Wake Daddy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
The first barrel of the shotgun hit Johnse Hatfield in the shoulder, although most of the damage was absorbed by his thick coat. Likewise, Guerilla Mitchell was shot in the gut by the second barrel but his cartridge belts stopped most of the pellets. Because Randall McCoy, what it sounds like, he's just too far away for the shotgun to do damage.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, he's just blasting from the porch.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Out of shots, Randall then went for cover but he hadn't kept the Hatfields busy enough for Calvin to make it to his own cover behind the corn crib. Just as he was almost there, either Johnse or Cap Hatfield aimed and shot him in the head from 75 yards away, at night no less, killing him instantly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's like one of those things they'll talk about forever as friends.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah. (Appalachian accent) You remember?
ED LARSON
Those are like the kind of guys who do all those Instagram tricks.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah.
ED LARSON
They sit there and throw the card for fucking four days until they get it. And we're supposed to pretend like-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow, that was in one go.
ED LARSON
They've been there for an hour and a half shooting. They're gonna hit him eventually.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Eventually.
MARCUS PARKS
Randall meanwhile managed to slip away to a neighbor's farm where he burrowed and hid in a haystack to save himself from death by McCoy or exposure. With their target long gone, the Hatfield gang rode off with their wounded in tow. And just before Cottontop Mounts passed out from the pain, he famously said:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) "Well we killed the boy and the girl, and I am sorry for it. We have made a bad job of it. There will be trouble over this one."
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
The only rational person is Cottontop?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's the only one being like-
MARCUS PARKS
He's the only one that like sees ahead.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) I feel like that was bad.
MARCUS PARKS
(Appalachian accent) That was bad.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) And I feel like it's gonna come back and haunt all of us.
MARCUS PARKS
(Appalachian accent) Y'all think maybe we should hire a PR firm?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) It'd be nice. Maybe we should talk to a lawyer.
MARCUS PARKS
Now despite being clubbed and pistol whipped, Sarah McCoy, 58 at the time of the attack, she survived. She had however been knocked unconscious. And by the time she woke up on that cold night in January, the blood from her head wound had frozen her hair to the ground.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yikes.
MARCUS PARKS
Eventually neighbors came to help. And the story that told showed that the Hatfields had finally gone too far even for the feud obsessed people of Appalachia. Particularly people took issue with the murder of Alifair McCoy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS
And the nature of a midnight raid on a family home, that just generally left a bad taste in people's mouths as well.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) You kill people outside at an election. And that's how it's supposed to go.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. I mean instead of being basically another spontaneous gang fight or a gun battle between a bunch of idiots, the Hatfields had engaged in a premeditated raid against a family.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It wasn't just guys blowing off steam anymore.
MARCUS PARKS
No. They'd set fire to a home without regard to the children inside. They'd savagely clubbed a grandmother nearing her 60s. They'd gunned down a polio survivor, who was a woman to boot, for no crime greater than trying to keep her family cabin from burning down.
ED LARSON
Yeah. You don't have to complete all your New Year's resolutions on the first day.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's like get through to March, all right. Shoot a girl, a survivor of polio, in the springtime.
MARCUS PARKS
But even though public opinion had turned against the Hatfields, Randall McCoy and his two surviving sons still had to move out of the Tug Fork Valley because there was nothing left for them on the farm. They moved into town, into Pikeville over in Kentucky.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So right now Hatfields have won.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's how I put it. Hatfields are currently winning the feud.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. They're winning the feud but they're-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They're losing the people.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But they're winning the feud.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes. But as far as Devil Anse Hatfield went, he was far more upset that the raiding party had failed in their mission to kill Randall McCoy than he was about how badly they'd fucked up the job.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because there's partially a little bit of him that does sort of, maybe it's too much credit, give him a little bit of practical... Like he knew that if they killed Randall McCoy, it will end.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The feud will go if we knock him out.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But it was also-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But you still killed a bunch of little girls in the process.
MARCUS PARKS
Well that's the thing, it was also on him to realize that if you send a fucking band of raiders to a person's home-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And if you don't, I mean this is fucked up, if you leave witnesses.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's also the thing.
MARCUS PARKS
They left a lot of witnesses though.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But they could have killed everybody.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean if you killed the entire family and burnt the house down.
ED LARSON
You have to finish the job if you're gonna do something this horrible.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But you also want people to know that it was the Hatfields.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh they'll know because they'll go to the McCoy house and it's gone.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's like a burning, it's like a pile of cinders and everybody's dead.
MARCUS PARKS
That is true.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But because the raid had gone so badly, Bad Frank Phillips and attorney Perry Cline formed a posse of 20 men to resume the raiding of random homes in search of the Hatfields. Because Perry Cline, you would think oh he's the guy, he's an attorney, he's involved in politics. He was fully involved in capturing these people.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Like he was out there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's angry.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes. He's very angry.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's motivated.
MARCUS PARKS
But where not a single Hatfield had been found in five years following the pawpaw murders, it took only eight days to find and kill the leader of the New Year's Night Massacre. On January 8th, 1888, Cap Hatfield and Bad Jim Vance were walking along a mountain path, carrying a bucket of gutted squirrels.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) (singing) Just me and my buddy going through the forest, gonna have ourselves some squirrels. You are my best friend, Bad Jim. You are my best friend, Mr. Cap. Sh!
MARCUS PARKS
Well Bad Jim, he wasn't in any mood to sing any songs because even though they had a bunch of gutted squirrels, he made himself sick because he'd eaten too much raccoon meat.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) It's just so sweet and slimy.
ED LARSON
When you got a bucket of squirrels, save a little room, don't eat all the raccoon meat.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) It's one of those things where I sit down and the first thing they serve is all this delicious raccoon meat, right. And I'm starving. And I'm blowing through the appetizers, I don't even get to the entrée.
MARCUS PARKS
(Appalachian accent) I gotta work on my portion control.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) I gotta think about my eyes are bigger than my stomach.
ED LARSON
(Appalachian accent) I didn't wanna finish the raccoon but I needed a new hat.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) Man, my hat's wet.
MARCUS PARKS
Now Cap and Bad Jim Each were able to see the posse led by Bad Frank Phillips and Perry Cline coming down the road, so they hid behind some rocks. When the moment was right, they started shooting. But maybe because Bad Jim was still reeling from his succulent raccoon meal, he was quite quickly shot in the arm. Knowing that it was all over for him, Bad Jim told Cap to run off and warn the other nearby Hatfields about the posse. And this posse also included Squirrel Hunting Sam and a man curiously named Shanghai Will Ferrell.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Think about this, that there was a man named Shanghai Will Ferrell during this time period.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And we know nothing else about it. There's no history about it. We just have the single, I'm gonna say mysterious, that's a mysterious name. I think it was him.
ED LARSON
Will Ferrell has had him expunged from the internet just out of fear of getting canceled.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Where is Shanghai?
MARCUS PARKS
Well he might have got shanghaied.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Because that was an actual term. Like it was an actual thing that people did. I mean it was probably a racist term, wasn't it?
ED LARSON
Now what is it again?
MARCUS PARKS
Shanghaied is when you are, it's kind of like...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well the term-
MARCUS PARKS
From what I remember, it's you get kidnapped and forced to serve on a ship.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Basically. I don't know the origins of the term but that's what it is. We did an underground tour many years ago of San Francisco.
ED LARSON
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Where they talk about that you go to a specific shady bar that you probably shouldn't go to and like that bar would kind of be known as a place that would deliver free workforce to these two shipment people.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the reason why it was called shanghaied is because yeah, they were kidnapping guys and they were putting them on ships.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They would get them all drunk and they'd wake up on a boat.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And the reason why it's called shanghaied is because Shanghai was the common destination of ships with abducted crews.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Okay. All right, thank you. I appreciate that.
MARCUS PARKS
Sure.
ED LARSON
Now why wasn't Squirrel Hunting Sam hunting the squirrels?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because again, he was told to take a break.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They're all like sitting him down here, being like (Appalachian accent) we think honestly, we haven't seen a squirrel in months, Squirrel Hunting Sam, all right? We gotta think about this, all right? It's getting personal for you. We need you to... Especially after that incident with the full grown man dressed as a squirrel. All right, we know it's set off the whole feud.
MARCUS PARKS
Nevertheless the gunfight continued. But after Bad Frank Phillips shot Bad Jim Vance in the chest, it was all but over. Both of them aimed their respective weapons in what was to be the final shot but Bad Frank squeezed first, hitting bad Jim in the head which sent his hat flying with brains in tow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cool!
MARCUS PARKS
Supposedly two McCoys shook hands over Bad Jim's corpse and dipped a corner of a handkerchief in his blood to signify a blood feud revenge.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You just got Coyed.
MARCUS PARKS
Another source claims that Bud McCoy dipped his fingers into Bad Jim Vance's exposed brains and used them to polish his boots.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) Look, I'll show you what I'm about to do, boys. Yeah, all right. Ew. Yeah, show the ultimate disrespect. I'm gonna polish my boots with his brains. Man, I ruined these boots.
ED LARSON
(Appalachian accent) My wife's gonna be so mad.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) So goddamn mad at me.
MARCUS PARKS
He then licked his fingers clean and went on his way, leaving Cap's nearly headless corpse on the path. Now over the next week and a half, seven more Hatfield feud participants were rounded up by Bad Frank Phillips and Perry Cline. Although now that big Jim Vance was dead, Cap Hatfield was the top target.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Why do I see in my head Perry Cline, David Hyde Pierce.
MARCUS PARKS
I don't know. David Hyde Pierce doesn't have the toughness.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Devil Anse, Kelsey Grammer.
MARCUS PARKS
Now that I could see. That I could very much see. I could very much see-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You don't see Perry Cline as David Hyde Pierce?
MARCUS PARKS
No because David Hyde Pierce is too fussy.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Randall McCoy, the father from Frasier.
MARCUS PARKS
Ah yeah, that's pretty good. That's pretty good.
ED LARSON
So you're just casting Frasier.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm just saying if you think about it.
MARCUS PARKS
Who's Daphne?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She got shot. She was the one, she was Alifair.
ED LARSON
Squirrel Hunting Sam is gonna be played by the dog.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah! That's cute. It's like Wishbone. But he's getting the brains shot out. Which is a good new pitch for a re-up of Wishbone.
MARCUS PARKS
But on January 19th, 1888, my birthday, Bad Frank's posse-
ED LARSON
You're old.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I thought it was the 21st.
MARCUS PARKS
Huh?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I thought it was the 21st.
MARCUS PARKS
I know when my own fucking birthday is. It's January 19th.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He might be wrong.
MARCUS PARKS
Holden's birthday is the 21st.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
28th.
ED LARSON
28th of December.
MARCUS PARKS
Fuck.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
ED LARSON
Yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Anyway, Bad Frank's posse ran across a sizable Hatfield force at the banks of Grapevine Creek in West Virginia, where another drawn out yet ultimately feudal gun battle was to take place. Now there's no definitive account of this story as everyone had their own version. But by the end of the two hour long gun battle, neither side had killed or captured anyone of any consequence from the other side. Although there had been several gunshot injuries.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, there should have. There better have been.
ED LARSON
How many of these are ricochets?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I feel like a lot of it is them shooting themselves. It's like them literally dropping bullets on their feet is what's hurting.
MARCUS PARKS
There was however a death after the gun battle that would not hurt the Hatfields at all but would greatly damage the reputation of the McCoys.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So now they got one.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. See after the Hatfields retreated, they left behind an ally named Deputy Bill Dempsey.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Aw.
MARCUS PARKS
Supposedly Bad Frank Phillips walked up to the wounded Deputy Dempsey, who'd already surrendered, and put a shotgun to Dempsey's neck. And as Dempsey begged for mercy, Bad Frank pulled the trigger and blew Dempsey's head clean off his shoulders.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cool.
MARCUS PARKS
But the problem for Bad Frank and the McCoys was that Dempsey was an actual lawman. So arrest warrants were issued for Bad Frank and the McCoy posse.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
See? This is the thing, now you fucked up.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Now if he's not a Hatfield, does this count on the scoreboard?
MARCUS PARKS
No.
ED LARSON
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
No, no.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, no, no. But it does count against the McCoy, again helping in the feud, hurting them personally.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, I mean the Hatfields lose a soldier but that's it.
ED LARSON
Yeah, it's a flag on the play.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Everyone's mad. Penalty.
MARCUS PARKS
Well this swayed public opinion back towards the Hatfields or at the very least brought the needle back to the center as far as who are the white hats and who were the black hats.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) Becky, I was reading the news this morning. Is it possible that all war is bad? Becky, I'm so used to things being simple and easy to decide. Which is the difference?
ED LARSON
Also how is Cap still alive with this second asshole?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Again man, it's just people were different.
MARCUS PARKS
He got better.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
He got better or it was legend.
ED LARSON
Yeah, okay.
MARCUS PARKS
It might have been legend.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, again if you're so much an asshole that you have two, that does sound like a folklore.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Cause they say that food would spill out of it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It just doesn't happen.
MARCUS PARKS
I don't think it happens like that.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean it's more like shit's gonna spill out of there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Colostomy bag nation, sidestorieslpotl@gmail.com. Does poopoo just shoot out of that hole every once in a while?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Thank you!
MARCUS PARKS
You know what? I think-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Done! And research done.
MARCUS PARKS
From personal experience that I'm not gonna get into here, I think the food does sometimes come through partially undigested.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like a big corn on the cob?
ED LARSON
Spinach as well, I've been having some spinach show up in my poopoo, not digesting.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Skittles? Would they pop out?
ED LARSON
Only if you swallow them whole.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
MARCUS PARKS
No, I mean like bits of chewed food.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sidestorieslpotl@gmail.com. Do you have two assholes? Please let us know what it's like.
MARCUS PARKS
No, I have someone I can call like right after this.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't wanna harass someone. I don't wanna hunt them down.
MARCUS PARKS
Now the New Year's Night Massacre and the ensuing battles turned the Hatfield-McCoy feud from something the national papers might pick up every once in a while if they needed to fill space, turned it from that into front page headlines across the country. In these stories the Hatfields were portrayed as ruthless desperadoes, while the McCoys were the good guys upholding the law.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Interesting.
MARCUS PARKS
Intent only on bringing the murderous Hatfield vigilantes to justice.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's an interesting first blush.
MARCUS PARKS
Well remember that's kind of what the point was. Because after the pawpaw tree murders, Randall McCoy wanted to form a posse and go get them and his wife said like no, let the law take care of it. And that had been the McCoys' line all these years, we're gonna let the law take care of it, we're gonna do this legally.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
The Hatfields are a bunch of psychopaths.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. They're evil capitalists.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, they're evil capitalists. Yeah.
ED LARSON
It's so weird because they're the ones with the tempers.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But they are righteous in their anger. And again it's about small scale warfare vs large massacres. Like that's kind of what we're looking at. It's more they pop off easy but they have a guiding line of we're supposed to be allowing the courts to handle this at some point.
ED LARSON
Yeah, the New Year's Massacre was like horrible.
MARCUS PARKS
It was bad, it was terrible.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it was very bad. That's why they're losing.
MARCUS PARKS
As a consequence of the tide of public opinion turning, Devil Anse Hatfield's creditors decided to call in all of his debts at once, which he'd been refusing to pay out of principle because he believed he was being overcharged by all of them. But once the debts were called, Devil Anse was forced to sell off the land he'd strong armed from Perry Cline. And who else bought it but a coal agent working for a group of Philadelphia capitalists who paid Devil Anse's debts as a part of the deal. In the two years following, much of Devil Anse's land was cleared for a railroad that increased the value tenfold, because as it turned out that land was located not too far away from a 13 ft wide coal vein.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And now this is kind of what we're leading to in this series is this idea that this was the true consequential part of this story.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Was that they used all of this shit to just slide on in. Because they're dealing with local problems and handling local problems.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well this is the problem when you're dealing with somebody who has a "long view" quote unquote of history, that you're just a fucking little bump on the road.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Who bought the land? Who is this guy?
MARCUS PARKS
A coal agent representing a group of Philadelphia capitalists.
ED LARSON
So they're Yankees.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, they're Yankees. No, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's a guy who probably had a suit but he probably showed up in a straw hat, like when I used to have super powerful agents and when they used to take me out to lunch. And they would be like well Henry likes big sloppy fat boy barbecue, right? They would take me to some big gross restaurant and then they'd eat nothing.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And they'd sit there and eat like a salad. And they're like get it, fat boy. Like they want to see you do it. They'd be like get a big rack of ribs, we know what you like. So he probably showed up dressed like a Hatfield, like straw sticking out of his mouth, being like well I do know what it's like out here, I reckon. Dealing with these hardscrabble times. Sometimes you need to reach out.
MARCUS PARKS
Well who I would compare him to the most, a character, an example that I know you know, the psychopath advance man in Deadwood.
ED LARSON
Oh yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's that guy.
MARCUS PARKS
It's that guy.
ED LARSON
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, the agent that goes out in advance of the very, very rich people before they come in and destroy everything.
ED LARSON
Yeah, this is how we take out all these idiots.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes, exactly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is how we make it so that your stuff is our stuff.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Now that isn't to say that Devil Anse was landless or penniless. Since the coal agent had paid his debts, Devil Anse still had $7000 from the sale of his land. And it's hard to calculate what that would be equivalent to today but it's probably in the range of like a quarter million dollars, if not more. I mean he's still a rich man in that time and place. But that's all to say that Devil Anse still had plenty of money to buy a new homestead off an eccentric wanderer named Old Hawk Steel. He just didn't have any use for it.
ED LARSON
He was also 25 years old.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
God, I love these names.
MARCUS PARKS
Interestingly though, Devil Anse now lived several 1000 acres inland from the Tug Fork, meaning that both he and Randall McCoy had now been forced out of the area where their families had lived for almost 100 years as a consequence of the feud.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's almost like it's good for nothing.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes. But even though-
ED LARSON
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
War, what is it good for?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What is it good for? The economy, we talked about it.
MARCUS PARKS
Say it again.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. National exports.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But even though Devil Anse was far away, his new cabin was built alongside a fort with logs 2 ft in diameter and walls 12 ft high. Inside this windowless fortress, he had stocks of food, water, ammunition, and weapons, enough to fight off a small army.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Fun.
MARCUS PARKS
To defend the fort, Devil Anse organized a small army of his own and a system for summoning them with a code of rifle shots, whistles, bird calls, and animal cries.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) All right. Now when I do three rifle shots-
ED LARSON
Bang, bang, bang!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) Two whistles, all right?
ED LARSON
(whistling)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) I do my squawk.
ED LARSON
(squawking)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) And then I make a rhino grunt.
ED LARSON
(grunting)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) You bring me my coffee. What are we doing here?
MARCUS PARKS
Well so intense was Devil Anse's paranoia that he installed a drawbridge over the creek in front of his own cabin.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(metal guitar riff)
ED LARSON
Goals, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's the shit, dude. I want a fucking moat so bad, dog.
MARCUS PARKS
But just as private detectives and bounty hunters galore were drawn to the Tug Fork Valley in search of fugitives, a newspaper called the New York World sent a reporter named TC Crawford to see if he could find and interview Devil Anse Hatfield himself.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Quite a fortification you've got here, Devil Anse. Is it cool if I call you Devil? It's nice to say. I'm back from New York and I gotta hear all about this amazing feud.
MARCUS PARKS
Now TC was a city boy through and through, and once he arrived in Pikeville, he complained that every night the town turned into quote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
"An absolute orgy of unruly crowds, routinely overwhelming the local sheriffs."
ED LARSON
And he's from Brooklyn.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. This is when the Bowery was like at its worst.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. There was literally, it's called Gangs of New York, it was an entire movie.
MARCUS PARKS
As far as where all this happened, the people of Pikeville allegedly used the courthouse to sell moonshine-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Gamble, fight, fornicate, swear, and smoke.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's fun.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Sex workers were referred to as she devils, who wore quote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
"Scandalous dresses with not much below their knees besides coarse wool socks and men's boots."
MARCUS PARKS
But TC Crawford was able to find Devil Anse Hatfield through a friend of Devil's. The interview and the additional coverage would be the basis for the first book about the feud, 'An American Vendetta: A Story of Barbarism in the United States'.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This might be completely wrong but wasn't this in like, didn't Sean Penn like meet with Gaddafi?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Was it one of those where he like sat down and they liked talked?
MARCUS PARKS
I think he did.
ED LARSON
He met with El Chapo.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Is that who it was?
ED LARSON
El Chapo. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was El Chapo. Where he sat down with somebody where you're like-
ED LARSON
He also went to Gaza.
MARCUS PARKS
Sean Penn...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Is he still just saying I'm sorry for I Am Sam? He doesn't have to, it was a different time period.
MARCUS PARKS
He went to Libya after Gaddafi was-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
For vacation?
MARCUS PARKS
No, no, no, to tell all the people good job.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh good, good.
ED LARSON
He's a war tourist.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's a war guy, yeah. He likes it.
MARCUS PARKS
Well this book would help create the stereotype of the uneducated, violet, deviant hillbilly, although Devil Anse didn't do the people of Appalachia any favors when it came to his interviews.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He had to keep kayfabe, man.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, he did. When Crawford asked Devil Anse why there were so many shots fired in the feud but so few people hit or killed, Devil Anse said quote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) "I'll tell you. A human varmint is the most curious and cunningest varmint there is. And when he goes into a fight, he turns his body sideways. There is presented for the bullet only four inches of life space. And even that he doesn't hold up fire and squire, right. He just keeps a-dodging and a-frisking about. And so when the bullets come, they don't find him."
MARCUS PARKS
Direct quote.
ED LARSON
Yeah, they're so skinny.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's the thing.
ED LARSON
Because they're only eating squirrels.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) When a man turns, he becomes completely invisible. Have you not seen Bugs Bunny vs Elmer Fudd?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, that's true. Yeah because I haven't come across a single person in this story named like Fat Bill.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No. This is a time period where they didn't eat like that. I don't know. I'm sure there was big guys. There was definitely big guys.
ED LARSON
Yeah but they just sat at the bar or whatever.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. So when Crawford returned to New York City with what he believed was a full accounting of the feud, along with a healthy dose of yellow journalism, his stories ran for three weeks straight in two newspapers right next to dispatches from England about Jack the Ripper.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Why true crime now?
MARCUS PARKS
I actually did see a newspaper, there's a story about Jack The Ripper on one side and a story about the Hatfields and the McCoys right next to it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Man, that was the time for podcasts.
MARCUS PARKS
Golden age.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
That is great newspaper reading.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, that's fun as hell. Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But even though TC Crawford did make up a lot of shit, his writing was nonetheless captivating. He wrote: "I've been away in murderland for nearly 10 days. No one, unless he has had the actual experience of a visit to the region made notorious by the Hatfield-McCoy feud, would believe that there is in this country such a barbarous, uncivilized, and holy savage region." TC Crawford, 1888.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(snoring)
MARCUS PARKS
And I realize that he is like from New York but it doesn't go with the music to be like (New York accent) I've been away in murderland for nearly 10 days! No one, unless he's had the actual experience...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's not. Because that's before New York was like New York.
MARCUS PARKS
No, at this point the Brooklyn accent was like in full effect.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Really?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. It'd be like (Brooklyn accent) I've been away in murderland for nearly 10 days.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow, I did not know that.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah, man. Brooklyn accent was in full effect in the 1880s.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I did not know that.
ED LARSON
The Italians were there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, some Italians had it but also that was kind of a Dutch thing too.
MARCUS PARKS
But just as the bad press was coming in about Appalachia in general, more men involved on the Hatfield side were getting themselves captured, including a particularly violent goon named Alex Messer. Widely considered at the time to be the man who had blown off Bill McCoy's head at the pawpaw trees as opposed to Bad Jim Vance, Alex Messer had a reputation for being one of the most dangerous men in the Tug Fork Valley, with a reputed 27 notches on the butt of his gun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I always find that the guys that you haven't heard about are actually a lot more dangerous than the men that you have.
ED LARSON
Yeah. Also no nickname.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No nickname.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes, exactly, yeah. Because he don't like them.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, no, no. Yeah because again, it lets you know I'm coming. If I'm Bad Frank, you know that I could do something bad to you. If I'm just Alex, you could take you by surprise.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Alex Messer's capture however was totally bloodless. On November 16th, 1888, two bounty hunters came across Messer at a general store off Big Ugly Creek and they struck up an amiable conversation.
ED LARSON
Even the creek has a nickname.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, exactly. The creek didn't want that. The creek is just like I'm just here, there's no reason to come at me.
MARCUS PARKS
I'm just a-burbling and a-gurgling.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's all I am. Just using me for your coal and logs.
MARCUS PARKS
Well making fast friends, Messer invited the two bounty hunters back to his place for a drink. But just as Messer was putting away his groceries, jabbering along, one of the bounty hunters cuffed him without a struggle. And that's all it took to capture one of the most dangerous men in the Hatfield-McCoy feud.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I guess they call me Captured Alex Messer for a reason.
ED LARSON
Bad groceries Alex.
MARCUS PARKS
A similar trick was tried with Devil Anse but to no success. A detective got the bright idea to dress up as a tramp to get close to the Hatfield patriots.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He wanted to do it.
ED LARSON
Like old school tramp with like the stick in the bundle?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just wandering through with my bindle.
MARCUS PARKS
But a neighbor spotted the detective before he put on his costume and warned Devil Anse that someone was coming for him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) Honestly though I wanna see him because I wanna see how good of an actor he is.
MARCUS PARKS
Well apparently unwilling to commit all the way, the detective was captured and his tramp clothes were removed to reveal a brand new suit underneath.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) I knew if it wasn't for these meddling Yankees, I wouldn't get so much bad press!
MARCUS PARKS
I mean I get where he's coming from because like if you take your suit off, you got one. Where are you gonna put it?
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, where does it stay?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, where does it stay? So yeah. But thankfully this too ended bloodlessly when Devil Anse's men simply escorted the detective home all the way back to Ohio. They took him to his front door and said do not come back.
ED LARSON
First nice thing they've done.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So far.
MARCUS PARKS
But it's also the idea of not getting into any more trouble.
ED LARSON
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, trying to de escalate.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But the man who didn't get away was Cottontop Mounts, who was far harder to catch than one might expect. Detectives tracked Cottontop for days, then ambushed him near Mate Creek. Cottontop was able to get off a shot that wounded one detective in the leg but he was eventually subdued.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) Y'all can't see me! I'm just a pine cone.
MARCUS PARKS
After his capture, the detectives took Cottontop to the town of Edgar, Kentucky, where word quickly spread that one of the men involved in both of the most consequential events of the Hatfield-McCoy feud had been taken alive. Soon enough, Bud McCoy and a posse showed up and demanded that Cottontop be handed over so McCoy could quote "kill him and cut them up in 10 inch pieces". Oddly specific. The lawmen refused but did promise that Cottontop would be returned to Pikeville unharmed to face charges, which is supposedly what the McCoys were asking for all along.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Now even though Cottontop was a violent individual, he was also somewhat of a tragic figure.
ED LARSON
I feel like even Cottontop is surprised he's still alive at this point.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) Honestly I just want to going on stop living.
MARCUS PARKS
See in order for the few to reach a conclusion, there needed to be a blood sacrifice on the Hatfield side. And since Cottontop was technically a Hatfield by blood because he was a so- called woods cult child of Randall's brother, he fit the bill. But it could also be that Cottontop became a sacrifice because he not only confessed to his own crimes but implicated a lot of proper Hatfields and their henchmen in both the pawpaw murders and the New Year's Night Massacre.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So yeah, he flipped hardcore.
MARCUS PARKS
He flipped hardcore.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's Sammy the Bull Gravano. He is that.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Believing that he would avoid execution by cooperating and confessing, Cottontop pled guilty to the murder of Alifair McCoy, Randall McCoy's polio stricken daughter, even though it had been Cap Hatfield who pulled the trigger. But ultimately someone had to pay for that death and that someone was Cottontop.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Again.
MARCUS PARKS
And the Hatfields engineered it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And you this is called going to college. This is a part of getting made. You go, you do your time, right. You can do a little bit in there in the hoosegow, you come back out, they're gonna put you in the books.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. That's not what the Hatfields did at all.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, no.
MARCUS PARKS
No, no. See that's the thing is that Cap Hatfield was the one who had shot Alifair McCoy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And they needed to get Cap Hatfield out of trouble. And somebody needed to go down for Alifair McCoy's murder. It wasn't gonna end until someone went down for that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
ED LARSON
It might as well be the most annoying Hatfield.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And the most dangerous and unpredictable.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And Cap also took great advantage of Cottontop by promising him $500, a rifle, a saddle, and a rescue from jail in exchange for a confession. (Appalachian accent) Don't worry about it, just confess, you'll come out of it, we'll break you out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) It's almost Christmas time, I'm gonna show up dressed as Santa Claus. I'm gonna explain that you have been absolved of your sins and you're coming with me to the North Pole. That's in the legal documents that says I can pop you if I'm Santa.
MARCUS PARKS
But by the time Cottontop realized that nobody was coming to save him, he was already on his way to the gallows.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) I think it might be too late.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Now on the day of the execution, Cottontop Mounts wanted to wait until his mother arrived so he could say goodbye. She never showed, much to Cottontop's sorrow. But not because she chose not to come. In another tragedy, Mrs. Mounts died of a heart attack that morning on the road to Pikeville.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Jeez.
ED LARSON
It's stressful when your kid dies.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's time for him to go.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Did he know, you think, that she died?
MARCUS PARKS
No, he didn't know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
MARCUS PARKS
No, they didn't find her body until days later.
ED LARSON
Well at least there's that.
MARCUS PARKS
Sadly, not a single Hatfield showed his face at the execution. And the only people who showed up on that day who had any connection to Cottontop were his enemies.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And both of them showed up highly intoxicated and belligerent. The first was Bad Frank Phillips who, prior to Cottontop even showing up at the gallows, had fired his pistols into the air, shouting that he dealt with the Hatfields and he's now ready to run Pikeville himself.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) Again Bad, we're trying to just kind of deescalate here. All right, this whole thing, we're trying to put a button on this.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Deputies eventually overpowered Bad Frank-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(shouting) So crazy.
MARCUS PARKS
And they confiscated his guns. And he ended up missing the execution altogether because he was in an alcoholic coma while Cottontop was being hanged.
ED LARSON
Oh man. Same thing happened to me at Bonnaroo.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it's scary similar.
ED LARSON
I fucking slept through Pearl Jam. I still never forgive myself.
MARCUS PARKS
Likewise, a drunk Bud McCoy got aggressive and knocked the sheriff to the ground, prompting a swarm of militiamen to take him down as well. But concerning the execution itself, Kentucky had banned public hangings eight years before. But to technically uphold the law, a fence was built around the gallows but the gallows had been built near a hill where the hangings could easily be watched by the 7000 people who showed up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And there's just legal guys standing there being like yep. Nailed it. Exactly.
ED LARSON
Everybody shut your eyes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) Everybody just close your eyes, we ain't doing this.
MARCUS PARKS
Well true to form when it came to public executions, women sold baked goods, men drank moonshine, and a good time was had by most involved.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, everybody but one.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Everybody but one guy. Everybody but Cottontop was having a good time. Yup.
MARCUS PARKS
But as the black hood was being pulled over Cottontop's head, he finally realized that he'd been had, that nobody was coming. And his last words were that the Hatfields had made him do it. Days later, a McCoy supporter delivered a package to Devil Anse's house that contained the rope that had been used to hang Cottontop.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) Well thank you.
ED LARSON
I needed a good rope.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) This is amazing!
ED LARSON
It's obviously strong, it killed my kin.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) This is incredible true crime memorabilia.
MARCUS PARKS
But after the trap was pulled and Cottontop was hanged, there was then the matter of what to do with the body. The Mounts family couldn't afford to bring it back to West Virginia. And the Hatfields were distancing themselves as much as they could from the whole affair. So Cottontop Mounts was buried in the Pikeville graveyard in sight of the gallows, which soon became a local hangout where drunken hillbillies held card games and engaged in the occasional fistfight.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's fun.
ED LARSON
Yeah, it's like Jim Morrison's grave.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, man. Except it's French people hitting each other with baguettes.
MARCUS PARKS
I went to Jim Morrison's grave, they've got these weird barriers around it. And it's really trashy because the barriers are covered with like decals of people's shitty bands.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah. They use it as a promo spot.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Now even though Devil Anse, Cap, and Johnse Hatfield were still technically wanted for the pawpaw murders and the New Year's Night Massacre, the people of the Tug Valley figured good enough after Cottontop was executed. The government followed suit in wanting to move on, although they had their own motivations for doing so.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
See the next year, a man named Aretas Fleming was elected governor of West Virginia. As it happened, Fleming was connected to Standard Oil, owned by who else but John D. Rockefeller.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
John D. Rockefeller.
ED LARSON
Finally makes his fucking face.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, finally, welcome to the Last Podcast. We haven't gotten to John D. Rockefeller yet.
MARCUS PARKS
Yep.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And now he's in the lexicon.
MARCUS PARKS
The end of the feud, you see, made the Tug Valley far more attractive to investors. And so Kentucky and West Virginia agreed that the remaining indictments for both the Hatfields and the McCoys would stay unenforced just so long as none of these guys restarted the feud.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Now you're done. You're done! And that's it! All right? We need this coal, it's done!
MARCUS PARKS
All right.
ED LARSON
(Appalachian accent) You don't gotta yell.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's over!
MARCUS PARKS
Fine, fine. As a consequence, the Cumberland Mountain region was soon carved up by corporations who turned the formerly bountiful wilderness into a wasteland of railroads and coal mines.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(singing) America! Oh America!
MARCUS PARKS
See since the media had already inadvertently laid the groundwork for portraying the people of Appalachia as barbarians, Americans generally applauded the invasion.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yay! Get the landscape. Yay! Blow up the river!
ED LARSON
(applauding)
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Have you ever tried to blow up a river? No! Let's do it!
ED LARSON
It's surprisingly flammable in West Virginia.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yay! Cool! The river's fire now!
MARCUS PARKS
Local politicians also welcome the corporations because their pockets were being heavily lined at the same time that their constituents were slowly being turned into wage slaves.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wage slaves, yay! We did it!
MARCUS PARKS
There was however a moment when it seemed like the cease fire had been all for naught. Two years after the execution of Cottontop Mounts, an enemy of the Hatfields named Dave Stratton was found unconscious near his house with a badly battered head and a chest that had been nearly caved in.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) Wait, before we jump to conclusions, maybe he did it himself. This is some form of the worst suicide I've ever seen.
MARCUS PARKS
And he died a couple of days later and almost immediately people assumed that the Hatfields had been responsible. And the officials issued warrants for the arrests of Devil Anse, Johnse, and Cap Hatfield.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. And you're like goddamn.
ED LARSON
Finally a person they didn't kill it.
MARCUS PARKS
Upon closer inspection, it was found that Dave Stratton had simply got drunk and run over by a damned old train.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know what honestly really should have teed us off was that his head was on the tracks. Because it's hard to get missed by a train if we're on there.
MARCUS PARKS
I don't know if he got run over by the train but he definitely got hit by the train.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He got clipped, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, he got clipped real hard. Yeah. Not too long after that though, another McCoy turned up dead when the body of Bud McCoy was found with 18 gunshot wounds near a lumber yard.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) Again, before we jump to conclusions. What if a train shot him? Dumb Steve, you get the hell out of here. Bad Investigator Fred, you're in.
MARCUS PARKS
Again everyone was quick to blame the Hatfields. But Bud had actually been killed by another McCoy, Pleasant McCoy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
His name was Pleasant. Pleasant McCoy shot him.
MARCUS PARKS
Over a personal grudge.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I just... Ugh.
MARCUS PARKS
Pleasant, if you'll remember, was the man who'd sued Randall McCoy years before because Randall had spread a rumor that Pleasant had fucked a cow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey!
MARCUS PARKS
And considering how nicknames associated with events tended to stick in that area of the country, Bob McCoy's murder might well have had something to do with that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You call me Cow Fucker McCoy one more time.
ED LARSON
Name's Pleasant, motherfucker!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Pleasant, you fucking bitch!
MARCUS PARKS
But no matter how much people wanted the feud to reignite, Cap Hatfield wrote a letter to the editor of the Wayne County News, announcing that an amnesty had been declared and the so- called war spirit within himself had abated.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) I looked in the mirror and I declaimed myself innocent.
MARCUS PARKS
The feud was finally over with the final score being 7 Hatfields and 10 McCoys.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Whoa! Wow.
ED LARSON
(applauding) But you said it might have been 24.
MARCUS PARKS
I said between 12-25.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And 17 is right in the middle.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Right in the middle.
MARCUS PARKS
As far as what the survivors did with the rest of their lives-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So now we're at the end of Animal House. So this is the end of Animal House, all right. So the feud is quote unquote "over".
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So now it's all like...
ED LARSON
So Squirrel Hunting Sam lived?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Squirrel Hunting Sam survived.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
A lot of them, more of them lived than didn't.
MARCUS PARKS
Squirrel Hunting Sam, I'll get into him but he lived a long life.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey man, it's easy going out there, living a squirrel's life.
ED LARSON
Surprisingly nutritious.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well Randall ran a ferry boat until he died but made sure to complain bitterly about the Hatfields to any and all passengers who had no choice but to use his services.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Can't wait to go on vacation with Old Randall McCoy.
ED LARSON
Yeah. I dare you to talk about the Hatfields while we're on the ferry.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) Yeah, I'll tell you another story. You're on the lido deck, trying to-
ED LARSON
(frustrated grunting) 10, 9-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's like running the omelet station.
MARCUS PARKS
So annoying was Randall McCoy that neighbors said it was a shame that he hadn't been killed in the feud.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) You know sometimes honestly I wish I was too.
MARCUS PARKS
Finally though, Randall met his end in the year 1914 when a cooking stove caught his clothes on fire during a visit to his grandson's house.
ED LARSON
Oh man, that was a fucking Hatfield. It's like the Brave Little Toaster.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, he never knew. Yeah, yeah, it was alive. Gotchu.
ED LARSON
Surprise!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Holy shit, the stove's a Hatfield.
MARCUS PARKS
And Randall died two months later of his injuries at the age of 88.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
Concerning Squirrel Hunting Sam-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yup.
MARCUS PARKS
He wandered the country. He went to Nevada, California, but always made his way back to the Tug Fork Valley.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
He married four times.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Can't fucking settle down with a guy of the forest.
ED LARSON
And two of them women.
MARCUS PARKS
And wrote a book... The other two squirrels.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes, yes, yes.
MARCUS PARKS
And he wrote a book about the feud in the 1930s. Surprisingly, he put a lot of the blame on the McCoys for antagonizing the Hatfields.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Very interesting. But it was also a lot about acorns.
MARCUS PARKS
He met his end however in 1940. See Sam never wore shoes. And after a particularly cold day traipsing the wilderness, Sam's feet froze and had to be amputated. Soon after he died from complications related to the surgery.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's real hard to hunt squirrels on stumps. It's real difficult to do it from a chair.
MARCUS PARKS
But hey man, can you blame him? He spent 60 years hunting squirrels barefoot.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Never thought about it I guess.
ED LARSON
At some point the circulation stops.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It does.
MARCUS PARKS
It does, it does. As far as the Hatfields went, Johnse was eventually captured and sentenced to life in prison. But six years into the sentence, he saved the prison warden's life by cutting an inmate's throat with a pen knife.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, good behavior. That is good behavior.
MARCUS PARKS
For this he was granted parole and went on to work as a land agent for a coal company owned by John D. Rockefeller.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey! Hits keep on coming.
MARCUS PARKS
Cap Hatfield meanwhile died an unceremonious death from either a brain tumor or a long held bullet fragment that eventually pushed its way into his brain.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) Either way, let's go.
MARCUS PARKS
Concerning Devil Anse Hatfield however, arguably the prime mover of the feud, he never went into town without a pistol or rifle in his hand ever again.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And stood with his back to a tree or a wall while constantly scanning his surroundings whenever he talked to anyone.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, he must honestly, it's traumatizing for himself.
MARCUS PARKS
Not only that but I mean even after Cottontop Mounts was executed, bounty hunters would show up at his place and would just start taking pot shots at the fortress to see what like shook out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
There was even one time where a dude, a bounty hunter infiltrated the Hatfield fortress, worked as a handyman there for six months, waited for his moment when him, Devil Anse, and this little boy that Devil Anse had taken under his wing were out hunting raccoons. The little boy shot a raccoon, Devil Anse grabbed it and was like (Appalachian accent) hey, good job! Look at what he did! And he turned around and the fucking dude's got a rifle pointed at him. And he says drop the fucking raccoon.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's like (Appalachian accent) that's my raccoon!
MARCUS PARKS
And so Devil Anse like dropped the raccoon, brought his hands to his sides, and then like in a fucking flash just-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, quick drawed him.
MARCUS PARKS
He quick drawed him and just shot him in the fucking head.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Damn.
ED LARSON
Whoa!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Dropped the dude, him and the four year old buried the body where it fucking laid, and they never talked about it again.
ED LARSON
Wow!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) Now I'm gonna tell you a little thing about called hiding a body. All right, it's an important apprenticeship that you learn something like this.
MARCUS PARKS
(Appalachian accent) Now we don't have any access to lime here.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) But normally you would smash the teeth, cut off the hands, cut off the feet, and you gotta cut up the meat, feed it to the dogs.
ED LARSON
(child voice) Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) Feed it to the hogs, it's fun to do. You put it in a song, it's easy to learn.
ED LARSON
(child voice) I'd do it for you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
But that's why he was paranoid.
ED LARSON
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Because people were still constantly-
ED LARSON
Was he still wanted?
MARCUS PARKS
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He wasn't even desired.
MARCUS PARKS
Well after Cottontop Mounts was executed, the warrants were still in effect for a little while.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
It was a bit before they finally made kind of the truce of like all right, if you guys keep your noses clean, we're not coming after you. And it's in that period of time that the bounty was still out. So yeah, I mean he was technically still wanted until he died.
ED LARSON
One more question. How legal is it to kill a bounty hunter? Is that like a fair fight?
MARCUS PARKS
That's why they buried him in the fucking woods.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it's illegal.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But it depends because you could be working for the US government.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Yeah, he might be under contract. Eventually though, Devil Anse found the lord Jesus Christ in 1911 at the age of 72. He was said to have been baptized with a pistol in his pocket.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's cool.
MARCUS PARKS
And he sent an offer of $10,000 to the McCoys to withdraw the old murder indictments, some of which were almost 30 years old at this point. Incredibly though, the McCoys refused this large sum of money but assured Devil Anse that they no longer sought revenge.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They just didn't want anything from him.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah, no. That would have drove them crazy if they took that money.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah. 10 years later, Devil Anse suffered a stroke and died at the age of 81.
ED LARSON
That's pretty old!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
These guys all made it a long time.
ED LARSON
He won? In a weird way.
MARCUS PARKS
Well I mean technically Randall McCoy had seven years on him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Oh okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, Randall McCoy was 88.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'd say it's as close to a draw as you can get.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Except for the entire region which absolutely lost.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
I'd still rather have a stroke than be killed by a living stove.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes, I would definitely much rather die in my sleep of a stroke than be consumed in flames.
MARCUS PARKS
And then spend two months dying from it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, going ow, ow, ow!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Now concerning the legacy of the feud, nothing in American history did more to cement the reputation of the people of Appalachia as violent, backwards, illiterate hillbillies.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And I think that what we have done in this series is destroy that stereotype. I think that we have finally shown that the people of Appalachia are fine.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Besides TC Crawford's book, 92 movies about feuding hillbillies were produced during the silent film era, not to mention all the Looney Tunes portrayals.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
As such, Appalachia's reputation has never really recovered and the stereotype was given an extra layer of deviancy with the infamous 'squeal like a pig' scene in 1972's Deliverance.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And I tell you what it wasn't helped by was the show that Ed brought to my attention.
ED LARSON
Buck Wild.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a show called Buck Wild.
MARCUS PARKS
Woof.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Which was in Appalachia. It was MTV-
ED LARSON
Jersey Shore of West Virginia.
MARCUS PARKS
Jesus.
ED LARSON
It went a season and a half until one of the main stars died mudding.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, died literally, his car sunk in mud and he died.
ED LARSON
Him and his uncle and some other guy.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh my god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Here's a little clip. (audio plays) Yeah, they're spanking each other, they're jumping in the rivers. Yeah.
LPOTL
(female voice) I'm normally a chill girl but I've been known to get into a fight or two.
ED LARSON
She went to jail.
LPOTL
(male voice) They call me Justin Bieber. I don't know about the Justin but you know I know about the beaver.
ED LARSON
I think Joey got out clean.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Joey got out clean. Well he knows about the beaver.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
So that kept him focused. But even though the stereotype of the deviant hillbilly lives on, the feud between the Hatfields and McCoys has long been squashed. Starting in the year 2000, descendants of the Hatfields and the McCoys began having joint family reunions where they adorably engage in an annual tug of war across the Tug Fork.
ED LARSON
I think that's beautiful!
MARCUS PARKS
It is, it's very nice.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's cute, it's funny.
MARCUS PARKS
Very nice. But in 2003, 3 years after the union started, an official truce was declared by descendant Reo Hatfield who stated that the two families had put aside their differences for good in honor of 9/11.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So anybody who doesn't say that 9/11 wasn't good for anything, don't say that it really helped. So that the Hatfields and McCoys could get together and as a unit attack Arabian people.
MARCUS PARKS
And that's the Hatfields and McCoys. They fell so much.
ED LARSON
I was wondering how 9/11 was gonna get involved.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah! Woo! It always does.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. How'd these fucking dickheads manage to make 9/11 about them?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) Just in case y'all forgot, I know everybody's too busy remembering 9/11. We were first.
MARCUS PARKS
Fucking all over the goddamn country.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) We were the first 9/11.
MARCUS PARKS
(Appalachian accent) Now how can I make 9/11 about me? How can I make something that happened in New York City about me?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Appalachian accent) Let me think. I know!
ED LARSON
Well in Virginia, there was an attack in Virginia.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes of course.
ED LARSON
So there was a little bit of close to home. But it's still stupid.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But it was an attack on the Pentagon.
ED LARSON
It is weird how every person that hates New York has like a twin towers painting in their house.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Absolutely. No, I fucking remember that when I worked at The Onion, there was a headline that said very much the same thing as that. Like Toby Keith coming out with all these fucking 'stick a boot in your ass', it's like when he wouldn't piss on New York if it was on fire.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Like fuck every single one of them.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well what a wonderful tale.
MARCUS PARKS
What a wonderful tale.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's really important American history. Next week we're getting into a super fun story for Christmas.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This next little series that we're doing, it's really fun, I love this topic. And it's gonna get real cold.
MARCUS PARKS
Let's call this a winter wonderland episode.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. It's gonna get real cold and you're not gonna be happy with it.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I can't wait.
ED LARSON
I'm excited.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I really, really can't wait. First things first, we are experimenting with new logos.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
ED LARSON
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So we are putting out, so we're going to be doing like... There are a lot of changes here which you guys are fucking obviously aware of. And so we're going to be sort of playing around with how we kind of portray ourselves.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, gonna see what sticks.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. So just so you know that, that's what you're gonna be seeing.
ED LARSON
Can we get like a snake fighting a hawk?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Honestly I don't mind it. I don't mind it. You can send in something.
MARCUS PARKS
Idea #34.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Put it on the list.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So we thank you guys for obviously supporting us and being there and listen to all the bullshit. Come out see Eddie and I December 22nd, we're going to be at the Knitting Factory, North Hollywood. We're gonna be doing Classy Night Out. It's a Christmas spectacular, it's gonna be a lot of fun.
ED LARSON
It's gonna be great. We got all the people from LPN that are in town are gonna be there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
ED LARSON
It's gonna be so much. It's basically a reason for us to all hang out with each other.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's basically what we're doing. We can't wait.
ED LARSON
Yeah. Also tonight and tomorrow, if you're in Florida, I'm all over the place. I'm in West Palm opening for Jeff Ross and I'm in Boca Raton doing my own thing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
ED LARSON
Well not my own thing, with Brian Kylie. But it's gonna be a lot of fun. So Boca Raton at 8 pm, West Palm at 7 and 9:45. I'm a fucking lunatic.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
ED LARSON
I'm gonna be driving all over South Florida and then I'm going to the Dolphins game on Monday.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's good.
MARCUS PARKS
Fuck yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah. So fucking I can't wait. I'm so excited.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You deserve it and it's gonna be fun as hell. And don't get into a fight.
ED LARSON
Oh never. What? Me?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Don't you get into a fight!
ED LARSON
If I see a McCoy!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And also check out the Christmas Pudtacular, we're doing it, we're putting the family back in Christmas. Jackie and I are doing our Gud Pud Christmas special December 14th. You're gonna be amazed, you're gonna learn lessons, we're all gonna share in the warmth of the holiday, eating savory pudding.
ED LARSON
Thursday night.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You guys are all gonna like it.
ED LARSON
Yeah, Thursday night on LPN TV.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
5pm.
ED LARSON
Twitch.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
On twitch.tv/lpntv. 5pm PST. You guys are all gonna get to experience some of the Christmas joy and I can't wait for you guys to be there for Eddie, Marcus. You're gonna be there.
MARCUS PARKS
I'd love to. I mean what kind of pudding am I gonna get to try?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You'll see. You're gonna see.
MARCUS PARKS
Well I mean Christmas for me equals ham.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know.
MARCUS PARKS
So that is one thing that I love. But also sugar cookies.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Who knows?
MARCUS PARKS
So that's also very good.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Who knows what's gonna come out? Because it's a little secret.
ED LARSON
Very nice.
MARCUS PARKS
Hail Gein.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hail Satan.
ED LARSON
Hail me. Hail Ed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're gonna steal that from me?
MARCUS PARKS
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's mine.
MARCUS PARKS
That's great.
ED LARSON
Yeah, yeah. I took it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's me.
MARCUS PARKS
Guess what?
ED LARSON
I'm me.
MARCUS PARKS
Guess what?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm me.
MARCUS PARKS
Two to one, I'm giving it to him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What the fuck?
ED LARSON
Yay!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Fuck you!
ED LARSON
You're not me.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, that's mine! That's my branding!
ED LARSON
Did you say, what did you say just now?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I said hail Satan but I didn't say hail me at the end.
ED LARSON
Yeah, yeah, but you didn't say hail me.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I say hail me at the end!
ED LARSON
But you didn't say it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I say hail me!
ED LARSON
Hail me.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm hail me!
ED LARSON
I say hail me.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm hail me.
ED LARSON
I'm me!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hail me.
ED LARSON
You're Henry, I'm me.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm me.
ED LARSON
No, hail me.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Okay.
ED LARSON
Hail ham.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We're working it out.