Family Feud

The New Year's Night Raid of 1888 began like so many others in the hollows along the Big Sandy River—quiet, cold, and dark. But on this particular January night, a group of Hatfield men crossed the river, crept onto the McCoy farm, shot several McCoy men dead, and set the house on fire. The attack was not the beginning of the feud, but it was the climax of a cycle of violence that had been building for decades, leaving fifteen people dead and earning a place in American folklore that persists more than a century later.

The Slow-Burning Origins

The trouble between the Hatfields and McCoys did not erupt from a single incident. It accumulated over years, fed by the wounds of the Civil War and the poverty of Appalachian life. Patriarchs William Anderson "Devil Anse" Hatfield and Randolph "Old Ranel" McCoy lived on opposite banks of the Big Sandy River, which also placed them on opposite sides of the war itself. When soldiers returned home, they brought with them the psychological and physical injuries of combat, and those injuries did not simply disappear.