The Hatfield & McCoy Feud After Kevin Costner: Rescuing History

For a century we read in books and newspapers and saw on screen, the legend of what is the most famous feud in American history: the Hatfields and the McCoys. What we had was legend, and not history, mainly because the story consisted of a few historical events inside several layers of tall tales an [...]
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For a century we read in books and newspapers and saw on screen, the legend of what is the most famous feud in American history: the Hatfields and the McCoys. What we had was legend, and not history, mainly because the story consisted of a few historical events inside several layers of tall tales and fables reported by the yellow journalists of the late nineteenth century. The same moneyed interests who owned the newspapers also wanted the vast mineral riches underlying the land occupied by the Hatfields and McCoys, and their reporters' depictions of the people of Tug Valley as immoral and violent barbarians helped to make the swindle more palatable to the public. In the 1980s, the historian, Altina Waller, published her ground-breaking book, placing the feud in the proper economic and political context. Professor Waller's book removed the feud from the fiction category and laid the foundation for serious historical study of the events of that period in the Tug Valley. As fiction can be made just as exciting as the screenwriter or author desires, the 2012 TV epic, "Hatfields & McCoys," and the recent fictional 'history'' books are great entertainment, but they are not history. Some of the books that followed the movie contain an even greater ratio of fable to facts than did the movie. One recent book cites the yellow journalists of the 1880s more than two hundred times. With a rare combination of facts and humor, this author calls them all to task. Tom E. Dotson, holder of an Ivy League graduate degree, and descended from both the Hatfields and McCoys, asks the question: "When only five Hatfields (along with three McCoys) were among the twenty men indicted for the vigilante slaying of the three McCoys in 1882, and only nine of the forty who rode with the Phillips posse in 1887-8 were McCoys, why is it called 'The Hatfield and McCoy feud'?" With solid research and a unique insight, Dotson answers that question.