FP reader Cooter Brown kicked up a piece of Frontier Partisans trivia that was unknown to me — one that goes to the touchstone of Continuity & Persistence.
Ellison Hatfield, whose death really kicked off the infamous Hatfield & McCoy Feud in West Virginia/Kentucky in the 1880s, named a son after West Virginia’s most famous/infamous Frontier Partisan, Lewis Wetzel.
Lewis Wetzel by Timothy Truman.
The naming a century on from Wetzel’s exploits as a hunter of Indians is indicative of how deeply his legend had permeated the consciousness of the mountain people of West Virginia. Wetzel exemplified capabilities that were still valued in those hills: exceptional woodcraft, athleticism — and a ruthless violent streak.
Ellison Hatfield was a Confederate Civil War veteran, and the brother of Hatfield patriarch Devil Anse Hatfield. The Hatfields had some trouble through the 1870s with the McCoy family, who resided mostly on the Kentucky side of the Big Sandy River — but it wasn’t until Ellison got into a brawl with several McCoy boys that the the feud burst into full flame. From the Hatfield/McCoy Foundation:
The real turning point in the feud, according to most historical accounts, occurred on [a] local election day in August 1882. Three of Randolph McCoy’s sons ended up in a violent dispute with two brothers of Devil Anse. The fight soon snowballed into chaos as one of the McCoy brothers stabbed Ellison Hatfield multiple times and then shot him in the back. Authorities soon apprehended the McCoys, but the Hatfields interceded, spiriting the men to Hatfield territory. After receiving word that Ellison had died, they bound the McCoys to some pawpaw bushes. Within minutes, they fired more than 50 shots, killing all three brothers.
The flame of the feud guttered then rekindled through the 1880s, and — thanks to mass media coverage — became the most famous inter-family quarrel in American history. IKt ended with the hanging of Lewis Wetzel’s purported half-brother, Ellison “Cottontop” Mounts in 1890.
Lewis Wetzel Hatfield seems to have led an uneventful — and short — life. He died at 43, but not from violence.
*
A 2012 miniseries Hatfields & McCoys was real good — and the soundtrack is outstanding.
Jeremy says
I remember my old man and me watching the Hatfield & McCoy miniseries when it came out. I should rewatch it.
JimC says
It’s worthy of a rewatch, I think. I sure do like that soundtrack.
Quixotic Mainer says
I’m not ashamed to say I bought that soundtrack! I Look to No-one was a cool track. At the time I was doing very long work commutes in my rusty VW diesel Golf and it changed things up.
Cooter Brown says
Naming the boy that might also say something–maybe unexpected to some–about the relative education and for lack of a better word sophistication of these people. They were the inheritors of and themselves lived in a place and time that could be violent and bound by different codes and virtues than ours, but they were not the ignorant hillbillies portrayed by media at the time.
Even today, we see the cliched portrayals of the ignorant and violent–they sound like what people think the Hatfields and McCoys did.
The Hatfields were successful in business, particularly timber sales, owned a good bit of land, and were fairly prosperous at a time and place many were not.
Letters between them exist, well written ones, some on new-fangled typing machines, that are much better put together than all but a tiny fraction of written communication today. Anse’s son Cap, one of the most violent of the feud’s participants, became an attorney and was apparently a voracious reader. He was a pretty good writer himself.
The point of all this being that oral tradition might not have been the only thing that informed the decision to use a name from local history…
And yeah, the miniseries is excellent. I need to fire it up again.