It’s a grim title, but Murderland it was, a term coined by a New York reporter who had come to expose the story of the two feuding families on the West Virginia and Kentucky boarder. We have long been enamored with the story of the Hatfields and McCoys- our very own fair Verona tragedy, only more backwoods and less…well, fair. Recently the History Channel undertook this infamous generation-spanning inter-family squall in the form of a miniseries and companion documentary. Now Dean King has joined the ranks of committed researchers who have decided to sink their teeth into very often two-sided tale with his new book The Fued: The Hadfields & McCoys, the True Story.
The Fued reads beautifully, like fiction even, which isn’t a hard thing to believe considering that the whole story seems too bad to be true. King follows the two families from the first shot, to the rumored romance between Johnse Hatfield and Roseanne McCoy, all the way to the official peace treaty signed by Reo Hatfield and Bo and Ron McCoy in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. King experienced first hand how tense the situation is even today, as he wrote in the author’s note:
“On my first trip, in the summer of 2009, with the help of two forest rangers and my daughter Hazel, I bushwacked down to the mouth of Thacker Creek on the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River to see the place where Jeff McCoy had been shot and killed in 1886. We had not been there fifteen minutes when some locals let it be known in a feud-worthy fashion that they did not appreciate my snooping around…gunshots sprayed the river surface near us– making me, as far as I know the second chronicler of the feud (Creelman being the first, in 1888) to be warned off with rifle fire while researching the story.”
This is the best kind of “fly on the wall” book, and King has researched so thoroughly that it transcends dry history text and is transformed into a real story. In some cases, truth really is stranger than fiction, and maybe that’s why we love this story so much. The tragedy, passion, and longevity of this feud is irresistible to us- and I imagine it always will be.
The Hatfield clan
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