Word: hatfields
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Exactly what made the clans so extravagantly unfriendly is open to conjecture. Maybe Randolph McCoy was sore at a Hatfield for stealing a razorback hog. Maybe he was angry at his daughter Rose Anne, pregnant by Johnse Hatfield after a frolic in 1880, for moving, unmarried, into the Hatfield compound. Or maybe the cause was the packs of Hatfields who crossed the Tug Fork and went swaggering around the Kentucky election grounds. Whatever the reason, the furies were unambiguously loosed on a whisky-sodden day 100 years ago next August. One of McCoy's sons taunted an unarmed Ellison...
Around Matewan, W. Va. (pop. 803), probably one-tenth of the inhabitants are Hatfield kin. Clarence ("Dutch") Hatfield, 69, Ellison's grandson, lives up the hollow from Matewan. A short walk away his great-grandfather Ephraim, the family progenitor, is buried in what used to be a potato patch, and a little way beyond is Dutch's birthplace. Says...
...survivors did not encourage myth-making once the perfervid killing had finished. Says Dutch: "My grandmother, Ellison's wife, wouldn't talk too much about it. She lost her husband. It was sad for her." Dutch's cousin Belle Hatfield Pendergrast is 80, and full of a delighted sassiness about everything except the feud. Her father was indicted in Kentucky for a feud crime, and as long as he lived would never cross the Tug Fork...
...know, they kept it secret from us children," she whispers, as if the taboo were still enforced. "My daddy was in the war for 16 years. He was just a young boy but he was still goin' at it in the mountains." Henry D. Hatfield, 53, says of his great uncle Henry D., a physician and politician: "He would actually, physically, throw you out of that hospital if you'd ask him about that feud." Peacemaking was an active mission among both families. "My parents," Belle says, "made us be friendly with the McCoys...
...being subjected to a tyranny of numbers," complained Oregon Republican Mark Hatfield, head of the Senate Appropriations Committee. "Computers have overtaken the people, and the everlasting bottom line has supplanted good judgment." Hatfield's impassioned complaint, amid Senate debate on the budget, was partly right. In a sense, the contest turned on which computer to believe, and Ronald Reagan chose the figures printed out by an electronic brain under the care of his budget boss, David Stockman...