Conclusions

My great-grandmother
Francis Marcum (Spaulding) 
daughter of Mary Sidney McCoy

Why the interest in the Hatfield / McCoy legend? For starters, my great-grandmother was the daughter of Mary Sidney McCoy, a niece of Randolph McCoy. I heard family stories as a young boy of the feud, heard opinions on what really happened, and got an early earful of how no one in the family really liked Randolph McCoy.

The facts uncovered in my research tend to support the premise that contrary to popular belief, neither Anderson Hatfield, nor Randolph McCoy were clan leaders. Whether it was in court, or in lawlessness, neither had a large number of followers. Despite over two hundred family members named Hatfield and McCoy in the Tug River Valley, the total number of persons involved in the violence sharing either of those names was just over twenty.

So, was there a feud? I don't believe so, the record doesn't support it. What can be the cause of so much folklore and legend around these two families? Well, everyone likes a story, particularly one with drama. That certainly wasn't lacking with the Hatfield and McCoy families.

Historian Thomas Dotson claims, “The feud story was a creation of the big city newspapers.  The immediate purpose for its creation was to devalue the people and thereby facilitate the transfer of ownership of the wealth of the Valley to the same big city financiers who controlled those newspapers.   The ultimate purpose was to transform the independent mountaineers into docile and willing wage workers. This transformation was abetted by the state governments and the elites on both the state and local levels, who hoped to profit by the transformation.”

There may be room for debate on Dotson's viewpoint, yet the fact remains that residents of the Tug River Valley to this day still suffer economically and are still looked upon as "less than" by those whose perceptions of Appalachia have been molded by stories such as the Hatfield and McCoy feud. They deserve better.