Won'tcha Be My Neighbor? (cont.)

Outside Magazine July 2001

Page:

AMERICA'S MOST NOTORIOUS feud was played out in a forested floodplain not unlike that of the Clark Fork. Trouble on the remote Tug Fork River, the border between Kentucky and West Virginia, had been percolating long before Randolph McCoy accused Floyd Hatfield in the fall of 1878 of stealing his hog. But contrary to folklore, the families didn't take up arms to settle the dispute; they went to court. A jury ruled in Hatfield's favor, and McCoy abided by the verdict, although he did not accept his defeat gracefully. However, none of the preexisting bad blood (which compelled the judge to stock the jury with equal numbers of Hatfields and McCoys) was spilled until Johnse Hatfield knocked up Randolph's daughter, Rose Anna. Two years later, in 1882, three of the girl's brothers murdered Ellison Hatfield on election day. Then the Hatfield patriarch, "Devil Anse," avenged his brother by executing Randolph's three sons near what is now Matewan, West Virginia. This blood feud would roil Kentucky and West Virginia for another decade, bring the dispute over borderland jurisdiction to the U.S. Supreme Court, and cost eight more lives.

During the same decade a lethal running battle broke out between cattlemen and sheepmen along Cherry Creek in the Tonto Basin of what is now central Arizona. For years the first cattlemen in these meadows, where grama grass grew to the stirrups of a horse and the ridges were black with heavy pine forest, had vowed that no matter what squabbles arose among themselves, not a single sheep would enter this open range. They looked down on sheepmen and the Navajo herders they employed, and were horrified by the grotesque damage done to other areas of the territory, where sheep had been allowed to graze grass to the nubbin and their sharp hooves had torn up the turf. In 1886, when the biggest sheep outfit in the territory, the Dagg Brothers of Flagstaff, decided to move a herd south over the Mogollon Rim from exhausted pastures, they hired a local clan, the Tewksburys, for protection. Within a year cattlemen had driven the sheep out of the Tonto Basin, instigating a full-tilt feud that would claim the lives of a score of men over the next six years and would become known as the Pleasant Valley War.

Men learn to quarrel with one another in the same way they learn to sit a horse or talk to a woman; that is, from their dads.

Range wars between ovinophiles and bovinophiles would flare across the grasslands of the West for many decades to come. In Wyoming, it's estimated that in the two-decade period surrounding the turn of the 20th century, raiding cattlemen and their henchmen would bludgeon and shoot to death more than 100,000 sheep. It was predicted that this sort of carnage would occur in the unbelievably rich prairies of Montana, but in fact many cattlemen here were hedging their bets and setting aside part of their range for sheep. Even so, when Kitty was a child growing up in the 1960s on a thousand acres of irrigated Hereford ranch in Montana's Helena Valley, the frontier prejudice against woollies was still rampant. Every fall when the cattle buyer came to call, Kitty and her five siblings were compelled to hide their 30-head herd of Suffolks—each beloved 4-H sheep bestowed with a name like Stuart, Stanley, or Stephanie—because their presence might make the buyer lower his price for the family's beef.

Old-fashioned feuding also endured into modern times in the hollows of Greene County, Virginia. The players in this running skirmish were from the Shifflett and the Morris clans, families that had intermarried so often during their two centuries of coexistence in the Blue Ridge Mountains that their surnames were simply formalities. No one knows the origin of the free-for-all—except that it was born from the "Code of the Hills," a body of unwritten rules about vengeance, vigilantes, and hillbilly conduct holding that, for instance, if you knock up my sister, I'll burn your house down—but at its most violent it seems to have revolved around moonshining. One early fight, however, was a rock-throwing battle in 1922 over the issue of abusive language. During the next nine years a dozen men were murdered by gunshot or bludgeon, and there were scores of assaults, murders, and weddings. In 1931 a local newspaper, the Daily Progress, reported that "wholesale hot-headed shooting was the order of the day yesterdayÉwhen two men stood face to face and killed each other in a fierce pistol- shotgun duel." The combatants were Manuel Morris, 45, and Bernard Shifflett, 35. Three bystanders were also wounded in the melee. According to witnesses, Shifflett's carcass was filled with lead from head to toe. These dysfunctional families were still devouring themselves as late as 1961, when a jury sentenced 40-year-old George Shifflett to 60 years in the state pen for shooting to death his cousin, Eugene Morris, a 38-year-old father of nine, in a dispute about a stolen barrel of corn mash used to make whiskey.

Men learn to quarrel with one another in the same way they learn to sit a horse or talk to a woman; that is, from their dads. The eccentric habits of my father were legendary in the marshy boondocks where he raised me and my sister without the benefit of a woman's touch, after our mother died when I was seven. We lived on three bushy acres straddling Sand Coulee Creek south of Great Falls, Montana, in a hayseed's paradise called Rat Flats. Although it was scraped from the Great Plains instead of the Rockies, Rat Flats, which also lay in an economy-class floodplain dotted with shabby, cold-comfort ranchettes, was culturally identical to my new Squalor Zone. The refurbished commercial turkey coop we called home was less than a quarter-mile from the Missouri.

My old man kept chickens and pigs and a horse named Pinky, and for a time he owned part interest in a buffalo named George. He fed his pigs stale doughnuts he fished from bakery trash cans. For his sake it was probably a good thing he had this menagerie to fuss over, to distract him from his darker passions. Besides bars and bar fighting, he also enjoyed spreading roofing nails in the ditches of the county road because he didn't like the growl of dirt bikes. After shooting a neighbor's noisome dog he claimed that he was just trying to scare it into silence and it musta hadda heart attack. He regularly strode along the creek and shotgunned crows in the box elders because their cackling put him on edge.

In his later years he sought to augment his civil-service pension with extra cash, so he invested in plumbing and electrical outlets in order to create lots on his front acre for three rental trailers. The neighbors circulated a petition intended to stem the buildup of his rural slum and forced the county commissioners to deny him permission for any hookups. Cantankerous to the end of his life, he trucked three dented mobile homes to his pasture anyway, and parked a couple of his vintage Dodge Darts out there as well. When the neighborhood complained, he gleefully pointed out that since I ain't hooked up nothin' no law was broke.

Page: