Hatfield/McCoy Feud

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Hatfield/McCoy feud, post updated

I finally (at long last) finished my post comparing the Hatfield/McCoy feud as I know it, having heard the oral family history, with the miniseries starring Kevin Costner.

It is significantly more detailed than the original relatively short post, and it also answers many questions which were asked repeatedly in comments on the prior posts about the feud.

If you have an interest in the subject matter, feel free to check it out here.

Surviving the Storms of Life: The 1937 Flood

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1937 flood, A James Manchin, Country Roads, creeks, flash flood, flood safety, flooding, floods, floodwall, Huntington, Huntington WV, John Denver, natural disaster, nature, Ohio River, rivers, streams, Take Me Home Country Roads, US Corp of Engineers, West Virginia

Huntington, West Virginia, during the great flood of 1937

The severe weather we have been experiencing here reminds me to tell you about the Great Flood of 1937, known in these parts as simply the 1937 Flood.  While it was long ago, and obviously before my time, people in this area still talk about it, and there are old photos in many homes and businesses of the damage.  The water was so high in places that it even covered and washed away houses, and it completely wiped out entire towns along the Ohio River.

West Virginia has many, many large bodies of water.  We even have a lot of waterfalls, which is not well known to those who have not actually explored the more rural areas.  There is not only the mighty Ohio River, which is a mile across where Huntington meets Ohio, there is also the Guyandotte River, Big Sandy River, Monongahela River, Kanawha River, Greenbrier River, New River, and too many others to list.  Lots of the creeks here are so large that they are considered to be rivers as well.

Naming the rivers reminds me of an amusing story.  When I was in high school, I was very involved in 4-H and student government programs.  Through those programs, I came to know the late A. James Manchin, at that time Secretary of State.  Now, A. James was quite the character.  A tubby man with a loud booming voice, he was a real oldtime politician, and quite beloved throughout the state.  For some reason he took a shine to me, probably just because I was an awkward brainy kid from a poor family – salt of the earth, as he might say.  I actually liked A. James quite a bit, and he was always very nice to me, but even as a kid I realized he was a little on the wacky side.

When the hit song “Take Me Home Country Roads” (which was about West Virginia) came out, A. James wanted singer/songwriter John Denver to change the words, because the Blue Ridge Mountains are not even in West Virginia, and the Shenandoah River is mostly in Virginia.

So he came up with this brilliant (okay, not really so brilliant, LOL) plan to change the lyrics of the song.  He wanted to change the words “Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River” to “Appalachian Mountains, Monongahela River”.

Obviously those words would not fit into the song based upon the number of syllables alone, but he made quite a show of asking Mr. John Denver to change the lyrics to the song anyway.  That still cracks me up to this day, though it happened over thirty years ago.

But, I digress.

There are many streams and creeks in West Virginia which can also become deadly when it rains, and usually they are deadly because people try to either walk or drive through their floodwaters.  Now, one should think that people here would know better, but some do it anyway, and meet their demise that way.  What many people do not seem to understand is that if there is water on the road, even if it seems perfectly calm, there may be water rushing under the surface.  That rushing floodwater can easily pick up a car and toss it like a rag doll.  It can drag a person beneath the surface so fast, they have no chance of escaping.

If you learn nothing else from this blog, please remember to never, ever try to drive or walk through floodwater, even if it seems very calm and not very deep.  People actually die that way all the time.

We also have lots of flash floods in West Virginia, which is when a flood arises out of nowhere, many times from a seemingly benign creek, and it happens within minutes.  Those floods are particularly deadly, needless to say, and I have experienced that phenomena firsthand.

Mamaw in my kitchen, all gussied up for her 87th birthday party.

A few years ago I was sitting with my then-86-year-old grandmother at my aunts house, so my aunt could get out of the house for a while and attend a college graduation.  I used to go visit with Mamaw (pronounced mam-maw) there all the time, to give my aunt a break since she is up in years and Mamaw could be quite a handful at times, LOL.  Mamaw had raised me from the time I was a baby, so she was the only real mother I ever had, and I absolutely adored her.  She eventually came to live with me, because we spent most every day together anyway and it was getting far too hard on my aunt to keep her, so my presence there that day was not at all unusual.

My aunt lives in a country area just outside of town, and there is a lovely little creek which runs in front of her house, which is very calm and only less than a foot deep most of the time.  Her house is not far from the creek, it has a big inviting front porch and a big side yard filled with flowers, and the backyard (if you could call it that) is actually a hillside.  So it is a very peaceful and beautiful place to live, and my aunt and uncle have lived in that same house for nearly 50 years.  Bear in mind, that house was very old and broken-down when they bought it long ago, and they fixed it up themselves, at least as much as it could be fixed up given its age.  It is a very nice little place, very homey and inviting and decorated with lots of homemade crafts which they made themselves.  I just love it there.

That evening, while I was reading to Mamaw (she was blind and almost deaf, and crippled as well), it started raining.  Now, I did not think much of the rain at all, though I did get up and look outside, but all was fine and I just went back to reading to Mamaw.  A few minutes later I heard a strange rushing sound, so I got up to see what was going on.

What I saw shocked me to the core.  In less than ten minutes the creek had risen so high that the entire road was gone, the yard was gone almost up to the porch, and there was nothing but deep rushing water everywhere.  It was as if the house had suddenly landed in the middle of a river.

I moved Mamaw to the kitchen in the back of the house and kept an eye on the water, thinking I would have to somehow carry her up the extremely steep hillside out back, if the water got to the porch.  A flash flood can easily wash a house right off its foundation, and that is a very, very old house, kind of rickety and not particularly stable.  I seriously doubt it even has a foundation like we think of foundations today.  So if the rushing water got up to that house, it could actually collapse the entire house and kill everyone inside.

I will never forget that day, because I knew we were both in extremely serious danger – flash floods are one of the most deadly situations in nature – but we were trapped by the floodwater and the only possible escape was up that hillside out back.  Problem is, that hillside is so steep that it is not easy to walk up it even under optimum conditions, including for people like me who grew up on a very steep hill, and am very used to hiking in the mountains.  Obviously the heavy rain had made the hillside extremely slick, on top of the other problems involved in getting up it with a crippled and blind 87-year-old lady in tow.

That was the most frightening thing which has ever happened to me because I had to save Mamaw, and not just myself.  If it was just me, I am sure I could have gotten far enough up the hill to avoid the water with no problem, since I am used to climbing very steep hills and mountains, and have been doing it since I was a little kid.  I know without even thinking where to put my footing (and more importantly, where not to put it), I know how to dig my feet into the ground to secure myself, I know how to use my center of gravity to my advantage, I instinctively know what I can grab which can (and more importantly, cannot) support my weight if I start to slip, and my normal footwear (which I was wearing that day as well) is a pair of sneakers with a hiking sole.  So I could have done it by myself, that was never even in question.

However, I was not sure exactly how I was going to physically manage to do it with Mamaw as well, since I am a very small woman and have severe arthritis in my upper spine, as well as an injury to my T1 spinal nerve which causes my upper body to be weak.  Yet I was fully prepared to do whatever I had to do, in order to get her to safety.  I actually had it worked out in my mind how I was going to get her over my shoulder, to free my hands in case I started to slip due to the wet ground and the extra weight.

I was not the least bit worried about hurting myself, and that was never even a consideration to me, strangely enough considering my physical limitations.  That was literally a life and death situation if the water got any higher, because my instinct told me that the house would collapse.  However, I loved Mamaw very dearly and would do anything to save her without a second thought, just as she had saved me when I was an infant, so I never even thought about myself, though in retrospect, perhaps I should have done so.

Luckily the waters stopped just short of the porch, so I did not have to find out the hard way whether my adrenalin would kick in sufficiently to overcome my disabilities and thus help me actually get her up the hillside, or whether I was just going to end up hurting or even killing us both.

That was nothing, however, compared to the 1937 flood.  Mamaw had lived through that too, and had quite an interesting story to tell.

At the time of the flood, she was 14 years old and already married.  Now, Mamaw was a small woman as well, and her husband (my biological grandfather) picked her up and carried her through the rushing water to high ground and thus safety.  Along the way, she was hit in the face by a heavy tree limb, and it broke her nose.  She told me that her nose bled so profusely, it looked like she was bleeding to death, and she said they were both drenched in her blood.

Her nose had a slight sideways crook in it for the rest of her life from being broken while escaping the flood, but at least she survived.  Others were not so lucky.

The 1937 Flood caused the Ohio River to crest at about 65 feet, which is 19 feet above flood level, so all the sandbags in the world were not going to hold back that river.  Thousands in the Huntington area were displaced, as the flood waters washed away some houses and covered others.  The entire downtown district was flooded to the first floor ceilings, and all the roads and railroads in and out of the city were blocked by floodwater.

Luckily the flood was foreseen, since there was record rainfall along the Ohio and it had first hit other states, so there was at least some warning, and loss of life was minimal compared to what it could have been.  However, overall damages from that flood were estimated at $500 Million, which translates to over $8 Billion today.  Damages in Huntington alone were $18 Million, which translates to about $300 Million today.

Following the 1937 flood, the US Army Corp of Engineers surrounded the historical town of Guyandotte (part of Huntington now), as well as the areas of Huntington along the river, with floodwalls.  I grew up around those floodwalls, which were specifically designed to withstand another flood like the one in 1937.  At 20 feet tall and almost 12 miles long, and several feet thick, they are massive.  They have gates which can be closed in the event of anticipated flooding, and people who live here are so used to seeing them, we really do not even notice them or think about the reason they are there, unless the gates are being closed.  Those gates are closed whenever the river rises above a certain level, and the Corp of Engineers estimates that the floodwalls have saved Huntington from massive flooding at least twelve times since its construction, including as recently as 1997, when the river crested at 57.5 feet.

Had those floodwalls been in place in 1937, the water would have crested three feet below the top of the wall, and the city would have been saved.  It is not as if the flood and its damage was completely unpredictable, since Huntington had been flooded an unbelievable twenty-three times in the fifty-five year period between 1882 and 1937.  We do still get severe flooding in this area from time to time, especially in low-lying regions near creeks and streams, but hopefully will never again experience a flood that massive.

West Virginians are a very hardy people, though, so we move on from disasters like that but never forget, and we pass the stories down through the generations as a cautionary tale.  The 1937 flood was even voted the most significant news story of the last 100 years, in a poll by the Huntington Herald-Dispatch just a few years ago.

There have been a few news stories in recent years about how the floodwalls are deteriorating, which is not at all surprising considering that they are so old and made of concrete, and that they need to be either repaired or replaced.  Obviously,  that needs to be done, because it will be a lot cheaper than the damages (not to mention potential loss of life) from another flood like the one in 1937, especially if we are lulled into a false sense of security by the mere existence of those floodwalls.

By the way, speaking of the 1937 flood, there is a very talented local bluegrass band in this area called The 1937 Flood.  Though I am not a huge fan of bluegrass music, I do very much appreciate the musicianship since I used to play violin (albeit badly) when I was a kid.  I also have to admit that I cannot help but smile and tap my toe when I hear bluegrass, so I also do not avoid it like I do some types of music (I am looking at you, rap).

The gentleman playing the fiddle in the video below, who looks just like Santa Claus, LOL, is founder Joe Dobbs, who also owns a really cool and extremely unusual old music store in St. Albans called the Fret & Fiddle, which has vintage instruments of every imaginable description.  If you are ever in the Huntington or Charleston areas and you are a musician or music lover, it is well worth the short drive to visit the Fret & Fiddle.

This video is of The 1937 Flood performing a little ditty called Jug Band Music, on the riverfront in downtown Huntington (so you can get a very good look at the floodwall too).  Hopefully this will give you a little taste of West Virginia wherever you may live.  Enjoy!

Surviving the Storms of Life, West Virginia Style

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asbestos, cancer, electrical outage, extended family, family, heatwave, life, narcissism, selflessness, storm, storm damage, surviving the storm, tornado, West Virginia

Last night, probably in part due to the extremely high heat, we experienced a storm far more severe than we usually get in these parts.  Hubby and I were sitting in the family room watching television during the storm, the electricity was going on and off, and all of a sudden he was up in a flash, running outside and looking at the sky in a particular direction.  When I went to ask him if everything was okay, he said that the wind just did not sound right.

That may have been the understatement of the year.

He was listening for a train sound (which we get here all the time, since there are lots of railroad tracks in the area) because he said that is the sound of a tornado.  Mind you, we do not normally get tornadoes in this area since we are surrounded by hills, but it has happened, and that wind was fierce.

My niece was in her apartment at the University of Alabama when the tornado tore the town of Tuscaloosa to bits.  Her phone was down and I was the only family member online at the time, so she sent me a chat message and asked me to tell her mom and dad that she loved them.  Of course, I had no idea what was happening there, but I was alarmed by that message, obviously.  When I asked her what was going on and she told me about the storm and described the horrible sound she was hearing, hubby told me to tell her as quickly as my fingers could type to stop what she was doing immediately, grab her mattress, get in the bathtub and pull the mattress over her, because she was about to get a direct hit by a massive tornado.

His immediate recognition of the sound she was hearing saved her life.  The tornado hit just moments after she got into the tub with the mattress.  It tore that building to shreds, but she survived without serious injury.  Without hubby and his quick thinking, there is no doubt whatsoever that my niece would be dead.  Needless to say, when hubby is worried about a tornado, I take his concern seriously and without question.

The storm from last night ripped through the region with a fury.  It tore roofs off houses, collapsed porches, ripped very large trees out by the roots, and even picked up and flipped an airplane at the airport.  My son was transporting a client home after a shopping trip when the storm hit (he treats the behaviorally disabled one-on-one in a community setting, to teach them how to control their behaviors with the goal of independent living), and he said that he saw a funnel cloud when it picked up a car and tossed it around like a rag doll.

Thank God my son was not harmed, and his client was not harmed.  Also, thank God that he had the sense to immediately seek shelter, and not to even try to drive back into town in that storm, because he would have been driving right into the eye of it.  He was very close to our home when it happened, so he immediately brought his client to my house for safety reasons.

His client has the mind of a child, so he was absolutely terrified of the storm.  I had met this client once before when I ran into him with my son out shopping one day, so he already knew who I was, and knew that he could trust me to protect him from the storm.  Once we reassured him that he was perfectly safe inside our brick house, he played with our dog while I chatted with him about an outdoor concert my son had taken him to see, which was very exciting for him as he had never been to a concert before.  When he got bored with the chit-chat, my son (a very popular musician in this area) pulled out his guitar and played music for him.  He was mesmerized by seeing a guitar being played up close, and my son even showed him how to play a couple of chords himself, which absolutely delighted him.  These pleasant distractions took his mind completely off the storm, bless his heart.

My phone was ringing off the hook as soon as the storm was over, with my future daughter-in-law just wanting to know if we were okay (though I was far more concerned about her, since her shift at work ended just as the worst of the storm hit).  I called relatives to check on them, checked on the neighbors door-to-door, and hubby was out with his chainsaw removing downed trees, and checking for damage on all the neighborhood houses (he has been in construction for over 30 years, so he can easily spot problems which laymen might overlook).  Luckily, our street is fine.

Today, hubby is riding his truck up and down a holler which was hard-hit by the storm, and stopping to help anybody who needs assistance.  I am staying home because we take care of his best friend, who has stage 4 lung cancer due to asbestos exposure.  Normally I would drop our friend off to visit with his grandkids on Saturdays, but their mother has no electricity due to the storm.  This means there is no air conditioning on yet another 100-degree day, so it is not really safe for him to be there in his condition.

Instead they will all be coming here, as will my future daughter-in-law and her dog, since none of them have electricity today, and it is unclear when electrical service will be restored due to the extent of the outages.  Luckily we have a big house, so there is plenty of room for everyone, even if they need to stay overnight.  We also have a big fenced backyard for the kids to play in and lots of food for the grill, so I expect a very pleasant day today, despite the storm of yesterday.

As the saying goes, There but for the grace of God go I.  This applies whether you are taking care of a friend with cancer, helping a stranger who has damage from a storm, or providing respite for friends and family from a deadly heatwave.  In West Virginia, we are raised to put the needs of others first, and we are all the better for it.

We are not on this earth to only think of ourselves, after all, though that narcissistic viewpoint is increasingly common.  We are social animals for a reason, and that reason is that we cannot make it in this world alone.  So West Virginia may be a very poor state, financially speaking, but our culture of caring makes us very wealthy indeed.

I sometimes ponder how different the world would be if everyone put the needs of others before their own selfish desires, like we do in West Virginia.  I suspect it would be a far better place, and that there would be far less hatred and discontent.  It is hard to hate someone who loves you enough to help even if you are a complete stranger, after all, and there is a great deal of contentment to be had in viewing the entire world as your extended family.  We are indeed all relatives from some ancient point in time, after all.  :-)

 

Catfish Man of the Woods

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Appalachia, autistic savant, Catfish Man of the Woods, Clarence Gray, folk medicine, herbal medicine, Native American folk medicine, West Virginia

Catfish Man of the Woods

When I was a child, I remember my grandparents taking me to see an Appalachian herbalist named Catfish Man of the Woods (his real name was Clarence Gray, but everyone called him Catfish).  He was quite the character, to say the very least, LOL.  He kept a canning jar filled with his own urine on his mantle, and I remember that it was clear as water, which he attributed to his herbs having long past cleansed his body of toxins, and he would drink it because he believed drinking ones own urine had health benefits.

Do I drink my own urine?  Absolutely not, LOL.

So Catfish was a very unusual person, to say the very least.  He lived in Mason County, which is very rural to this day.  He was barely literate, having been declared ineducable by the third grade, and he talked a mile a minute so you had to listen carefully to understand what he was saying, but he had an encyclopedic knowledge of herbal medicine.  His knowledge of herbs was so advanced, in fact, and he was such an unusual and interesting person, that a documentary was made about him, and he was even once a guest on The Johnny Carson Show.

Some have said that Catfish was an autistic savant.  Back when he was a child, an autistic child would (incorrectly, obviously) indeed have been considered ineducable, especially in rural schools.  I cannot say whether he was an autistic savant, since I am not a doctor.  However, having met him many times, what I can say is that it is very possible, and even somewhat probable.  Either way, Catfish was a great guy, very funny and very friendly – he never met a stranger – and I thought the world of him.

Catfish combined traditional Appalachian folk medicine with traditional Native American medicine, and many people absolutely swore by him and his treatments.  Even today, many folks in West Virginia use traditional Appalachian herbal medicine, including me.

When I hit menopause and started getting severe hot flashes, I did not go to the doctor for hormone replacement therapy.  Instead, I started taking an herb called Black Cohosh, which I had learned about many years ago from Catfish.  Not only does it completely alleviate hot flashes without the need for hormones, but there are no side effects, and no known cases of anyone ever being harmed by taking it.  It is therefore far safer than hormone replacement therapy, and I would highly recommend it to any ladies out there who are going through menopause.  It has the additional benefit of alleviating some of the mood effects of menopause as well.

Bear in mind, menopause is a natural life stage, and if I had an actual disease, I would see a medical doctor without fail – luckily I am healthy as a horse, according to my checkup last week – but I would also examine the various folk remedies available.  People in this state tend to live to a ripe old age, and many of them have used only folk medicine, and some never saw a medical doctor in their entire life.  As Catfish used to say, a big problem in the modern world is that people tend to rely too much on doctors, while filling their body with poisons through their diet and pharmaceutical medicines.  Certainly some diseases require pharmaceuticals, and they can definitely be life-saving, but many times our bodies will heal themselves, if we only use the natural remedies available in nature.

Catfish was very deeply in touch with nature, and he got his vast knowledge of herbal medicine from his family, who had long been herbalists, as well as from some local Native Americans.  As he once stated,

It was handed down to me from my great-great-grandaddy, to my great-grandad, to my grandad, to my mother and then to me.  And my grandmother lived to be 99 years old.  She died doing house-work when she was 99, living by herself. At 70 years old, she married her third husband, and she married another at 98 and wore him out in half a year.

Though Catfish had learned of herbal medicine from his family, he was not particularly careful about his own health until he was in middle age, and experienced a health scare of his own, which he states was a series of heart attacks, and that a doctor told him he was dying.  He claims that he was cured of heart disease by an herb given to him by a Native American, and relates the story as follows:

Here come an Indian walkin’ out of the woods carryin’ green things in his hand. Had a feather in his hat, brand new moccasins, ole deerskin coat.  So he come over to me and said, “You sick, you get well. Friends send me. You sick. You get well in six months. Mind me.” He told me to boil the herbs [pipsissewa] down in two quarts of water until it’s one quart and take a teaspoon three times a day. “Keep in the ice box [oldtime refrigerator],” he said. “You’ll be in the woods huntin’ for it soon.” I said, “Now, where you from?” He said, “Durham, North Carolina, in a reservation,” and then he said, “I go.”  So he went and never came back. And I can feel blessing!  I was in the woods five months later gettin’ pipsissewa. Never had no more heart trouble, in fact wasn’t anything wrong with me after that.

Catfish believed the Indian was sent to him by God, to save his life and help him rededicate his life to the Lord, while helping others through his knowledge of herbal medicine.

During his younger years, Catfish worked in construction.  He injured both of his arms in a construction accident, and was unable to work, so he started selling wildflowers at the Farmers Market in Huntington, and was pretty successful at it since he was such a friendly guy.  It was there that people began to realize the sheer extent of his knowledge, and began to come to him for herbs and health advice.

Catfish designed his advice based largely upon what he observed in the animal world.  For example, he stated that no one should ever eat tomatoes, because he believed that tomatoes cause cancer.  He believed this because, as he stated,

Cows, horses, sheep, goats, and deer don’t eat tomatoes. They don’t get cancer. Now rats, mice, pigs, and chickens do eat tomatoes. They get cancer.

Catfish was a strong believer in the use of baking soda (which he called sodey, as do many older country folk here even today) as a health supplement, and he believed it would cure anything except cancer.

Now back when I was a kid, this was when I was eight years old, here’s what the people did. They had sodey in beans, sodey in biscuits, sodey in groundhog, sodey in the chicken; wasn’t no rheumatism, neuritis, arthritis, bursitis, high blood pressure, dropsy, gall stones, kidney stones, fat, overweight, any of that stuff-there wasn’t none of that. Just think of it. What people did, just put a little bit of sodey in everything they cook; sodey take care of everything you eat.

Obviously, most of those diseases did exist when Catfish was a kid, but he has a point in that many of those diseases were not as common back then, and most people were not overweight.  Of course, back then the average diet was very different, so it could be that baking soda is irrelevant to all of it.

Still, is it possible that common baking soda helps with preventing disease?  Your guess is as good as mine, but I brush my teeth with it once per day in addition to using toothpaste (it is great for removing stains, such as from coffee, and I also have not had a cavity in decades), and I drink a teaspoon of it in a cup of warm water every other day after supper (and I am never sick, not even with a cold, though I do have severe osteoarthritis in my spine so it definitely does not work to prevent that, LOL).  I also use it in my laundry, because it helps to take out stains.  So I swear by baking soda, but not for the same reasons as Catfish.  Still, he introduced me to sodey as a cure-all when I was a kid, and I am thankful for that because it has served me well.

Other things which Catfish said we should all avoid eating include pork, cabbage, instant coffee, soft drinks, prepackaged tea, fish without scales, web-footed birds, round-hoofed animals, and artificial sweeteners.  He based this upon his belief that these foods gum up the kidneys, and make it impossible for the body to effectively eliminate waste products (which he called corruption), and that those waste products then build up in the joints and organs, and cause disease.  Of course, there was a little Old Testament teaching thrown into that list as well.

Catfish was best known for a concoction he called Bitters, which he said would cure pretty much anything that ailed you.  Bitters was a potent combination of fifteen herbs: Ginseng, Wild Cherry Bark, Comfrey Leaves, Black Cohosh, Lobelia, Peppermint, Solomon Seal, Slippery Elm, Burdock, Pipsissewa, Queen of the Meadow root, Sasparilla, Spikenard, Yarrow, and Blood Root.  You boil the herbs in two quarts of water, reducing it to one quart, then refrigerate.  You take one teaspoon of it three times a day, or in the case of terminal illness, one tablespoon three times a day.

Obviously, I am not giving medical advice, nor am I suggesting that anyone take or not take Bitters, since I have no idea of your health status, and I am not a doctor.  I am only repeating the information for the purposes of this post about Catfish, who invented it and swore by it, and many people in West Virginia swear by his Bitters to this very day.

To conclude, I thought I would post a video with clips from the documentary about Catfish Man of the Woods, so you can get a feel for him yourself.  Enjoy!

Propagation of Flowering Bushes Using Softwood Cuttings

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butterfly bush, crape myrtle, crepe myrtle, flowering bushes, flowers, gardening, how-to, plant cuttings, propagating butterfly bush, propagating crepe myrtles, propagation

Crape Myrtle

Gardening is one of my hobbies, and I have a few magnificent flowering bushes in my front yard which I love so much that I would like to also see them in my backyard.  However, I am nothing if not cheap, LOL, so I plan to propagate them this year using cuttings.

Basically, propagating is making an entirely new plant out of an existing plant, by taking a cutting from the plant and coaxing it to grow its own root system.  This process takes about a month or so, depending upon the plant, but it is extremely easy to do.

Propagation really needs to be done at this time of year so the new plants have a long growing season prior to dormancy, so start looking around at your flowering bushes to see which ones you might want to propagate, either for yourself or to share with a friend or loved one, and we can do it together.

You will need the following items, which you probably already have at home if you do any gardening:  (1) a planting container for each cutting, which must have drainage holes at the bottom; (2) equal parts peat moss and perlite; (3) Saran wrap; (4) sharp pruners (but really sharp scissors will also do); (5) a spray mister; and (6) a location which gets plenty of light without being in the direct sun.

(Note that I usually use a high-quality commercial soil in place of the peat moss and perlite, which you can also do, but bear in mind that since I no longer have any children at home, I have time to fuss with the cuttings on a daily basis to ensure sufficient moisture levels.  For those of you who work a lot and/or have children at home, the peat/perlite mixture will probably work better, because it will retain moisture much better, and thus require less fuss.)

Starting tomorrow (assuming I do not get heat stroke, LOL, since it is over 100 degrees in West Virginia right now – yikes!) I will be explaining how you can propagate your flowering bushes with cuttings as well.  It is really easy to do with just some very simple instructions, it saves a ton of money, and is a great way to fill your yard with your favorite beautiful blooms for as close to free as you can get.  If you have friends and family members who have woody flowering plants you admire, as most of us do, you can very easily trade cuttings with them as well, and both benefit from this knowledge for many years to come.

I plan to show you how to do cuttings with both a pink crepe myrtle and a lavender butterfly bush, and will post detailed step-by-step instructions on the blog, including photographs, so you can see for yourself exactly how it is done.

See you soon!  :-)

Attorneys, Books, and Casey Anthony

Tags

attorney/client privilege, Casey Anthony, Casey Anthony book, Casey Anthony trial, Caylee Anthony, Cindy Anthony, George Anthony, Jeff Ashton, Jeff Ashton book, Jose Baez, Jose Baez book, Lee Anthony, Presumed Guilty, privileged information, Tot Mom

I am a compulsive reader.  When I say compulsive, I mean that I even read the toothpaste tube every time I brush my teeth, LOL.  Needless to say, I have a huge collection of books.  My hubby actually told me just the other day that I should open a used book store to get rid of some of them, LOL, but as I told him, that is never going to happen.  I love the feel of books, and I even love the smell of them.  I love holding them in my hands, and they bring me comfort for some reason I cannot explain.  Needless to say, I am not a Kindle kind of gal, LOL.

Still, since I do buy lots of books of every imaginable description – my preference is nonfiction, reference and the classics – I am always interested to know what nonfiction books are being released.

I saw on The Huffington Post today that Jose Baez, former attorney for Casey Anthony, has written a book about the case.  In that book, according to HuffPo, he discloses detailed information about the alleged abuse by her father, among other things.

This concerns me because, if the information was given to him by Casey Anthony during the preparation of her defense, and she did not disclose it to third parties, that information is privileged under attorney/client confidentiality.  The privilege attaches to the client, so it cannot be disclosed without her permission.  So I have to ask, is it privileged information?  Did she give permission for him to disclose such sensitive information in a book?  If she gave permission, did she realize exactly what she was permitting him to do with that information?

Even the idea of an attorney disclosing privileged information in a book makes me queasy.  This has nothing to do with Casey Anthony, mind you, and everything to do with the fact that each person who hires an attorney has the absolute right to believe that nothing they say in confidentiality will end up in a book.  Obviously, I do not know for a fact that what he is saying is privileged or that the privilege has not been knowingly waived, since the book has not even been released yet, but it sure seems like it is privileged information based upon the HuffPo article.  That really and truly bothers me, as would be the case regardless of the client, because it eats away at the basis of our justice system.

It also concerns me a great deal because I seriously doubt that any of those sexual abuse allegations are true.  This is a young woman who lies compulsively and seems to live in a world the rest of us cannot see, after all.  In my opinion, she is quite obviously mentally ill (or as we say in these parts, nuttier than squirrel crap) and as such, no responsible person would ever repeat those kinds of allegations from her without proof that they were true.  Yet if Baez had proof that the allegations were true, he would have presented that proof at trial, since he made the sexual abuse allegation a major part of his opening statement.  I am therefore more than a little disturbed that those types of accusations are being repeated and even expanded upon in a book, from which this attorney will no doubt handsomely profit.  It will thus be very interesting to see if he he ends up getting sued by George Anthony.

At any rate, I have seen lots of people on the internet saying they will not buy or read this book.  However, I will not go so far as to say that, because it simply is not true.  When excerpts show up on the internet, and they will, I will read them out of curiosity.  I might also read the entire book if I can borrow it from a friend or the library.  I might eventually even buy it if it shows up at one of the used book stores I frequent, or at the library sale we have several times per year here.

What I absolutely will not do, however, is put money directly into the pocket of an attorney who appears to be profiting by disclosing privileged information, especially about a case involving a dead toddler and a mother who is very obviously nuttier than squirrel crap.  That is just me, and my personal ethics, and I do not expect anyone else to agree with that stance.

For the record, I did not buy the book by prosecutor Jeff Ashton either, because he is also profiting handsomely from the death of a child with a mother who is obviously nuttier than squirrel crap, and I find that absolutely abhorrent, especially since he was the prosecutor and therefore should be held to a higher standard than the defense attorney.  This is not to say I will not one day read it, because if I can borrow it or buy it used, so he does not profit from my reading it, I probably will.

I guess I just have a problem with attorneys profiting by writing a book about a case involving a dead child and a mentally ill defendant, regardless of which side they may have been on.  I say this because if they were giving all the proceeds to a legitimate charity, I would not feel the same way about it, as long as I did not have the feeling that they were disclosing privileged information.  Again, that is just me, and I do not expect anyone to agree.

This brings me to the poll.  Most online saying they will never read or buy the book give as their reason that they think Casey Anthony actually did kill her child, but I suspect most will buy it anyway.  I actually expect it to be on the New York Times Bestseller List very quickly, and that most people who will buy it are the same people who are saying they would never do so.  They are the ones still talking about the case on an ongoing basis a year after the verdict, after all, so they are the target audience for a book of this nature.

In this poll, you can reveal whether you will read or buy it, without anyone knowing who you are or what you may have said in internet comments about it, LOL.  Please be honest when answering, because – being a big fan of books, who has taken an interest in this particular book due to the nature of its alleged content – I am truly curious.

Our quest for an effective hip dysplasia treatment

Tags

canine, dog, elbow dysplasia, hip dysplasia, hip replacement, laser treatment, pet ownership, pets, severe hip dysplasia, shoulder dysplasia, veterinarian, veterinary treatment

Napoleon

We are big animal lovers here at my house.  We have had lots of pets over the years, of pretty much every imaginable description, and they are family members to us, not just pets.  None of them are outside pets, they all live in the house with us.

We have a big dog – a Rottweiler / German Shepherd mix – named Napoleon.  We should have named him Bear, because in reality, he kind of looks like a bear since he has a huge body, and a much smaller head with a pointy snout, LOL.

We got Napoleon in an unusual way, in that he chose us.  We had gone to eat at a local restaurant which had karaoke, because at the time my son was dating a girl who aspired to become a singer, and we thought it would be good practice for her to sing in front of an audience of strangers.  When hubby went out onto the patio to get some fresh air (and a break from some of the horrendously bad singing, LOL), he found that a couple of employees were out there with a puppy on a leash.

As the story was told to us, this puppy had been owned by some people out in the holler whose house got busted for making meth.  When the cops burst into the house, the puppy ran like crazy, out into the woods.  The owners went to jail, and the neighbors started looking for the puppy, since there are some wildcats and bears in that area, which meant the poor puppy was in danger.  They eventually found him days later, half starved, and this young couple (relatives of the folks who found him) took him in, only to find that their landlord would not allow them to have any pets.  It was obvious even then that he was going to be huge, after all.

So, they took him to work in the hope that someone there would take him in, and they would not have to take him to the pound.

As soon as Napoleon laid eyes on hubby, he ignored everybody else and headed his way.  Hubby is a bit of an animal whisperer, you see, and critters of every imaginable description are automatically attracted to him.  At that time we had a cat and two very elderly dogs with serious health problems – a 17-year-old beagle and a 19-year-old cocker spaniel / pit bull mix – and were not really looking to add to the family, because of concern about stressing the elderly dogs.

This puppy was not about to take no for an answer though, so he really laid on the charm.  Before I knew it, hubby was in love with this dog and was asking if I wanted to adopt him.  Of course, after seeing those expressive eyes and realizing he had chosen us as his new owners, I could not say no.

Now, in all truthfulness Napoleon is not the smartest dog on earth, probably due to having been exposed to meth fumes from the time he was a tiny puppy, but he is extremely sweet.  He is also extremely spoiled, as are all our pets, and sometimes we laughingly say that he does not even know that he is a dog, LOL.  Other times, it is obvious that he has no idea how big he is, because he wants to be a lap dog though he outweighs me.  He will actually hug us by getting up close and leaning into us, and his giant tongue is always ready to cover our faces in doggie kisses.  Needless to say, we absolutely adore him.

Napoleon is now seven years old, and we have never regretted for even one minute taking him in and making him part of the family.  He had been diagnosed with elbow and shoulder dysplasia years ago, when he was limping on and off on one front leg.  Okay, we thought, we will treat that and move on, and thus we did.  He takes a glucosamine/chondroitin supplement, and is treated with Tramadol for pain.  He cannot take Rimadyl or other NSAIDS, however, because it caused him to develop a hemorrhagic condition of the intestines which landed him in the ICU for days, and nearly killed him.

Last week, it became obvious that he was in severe pain, but this time, for the first time, it was in his rear legs.  First it seemed to be one, then the other, so we began to worry that he had injured his spine.  Even just lying down, he would whine in obvious distress, though he was already on Tramadol for his other pain, so we took him to our veterinarian immediately.

We were quite surprised by the entire situation, because as far as we were aware, he had suffered no injury.  Napoleon is an inside dog, who goes outside just to potty or nap in the sunshine, but we have a fenced backyard and nothing out there which could hurt him.  So we just thought that perhaps he had sprained a muscle while running up and down the fenceline, which he does sometimes when he sees other dogs outside.

The vet did x-rays of his rear legs and his spine, and we were shocked to be told that in addition to the shoulder and elbow dysplasia, he has severe bilateral hip dysplasia as well.  They doubled his dosage of Tramadol, as well as his dosage of supplements, but he is still in tremendous pain.

They said that they do not recommend hip replacement surgery due to his age and the fact that he has multiple dysplasias.  They did recommend that we consider starting laser treatments in a couple of weeks, when we have his pain more under control, and said they have had some good results with it in treating hip dysplasia.  However, I had never even heard of that treatment before, so I still have to do some more research on it.

One thing is for sure, and that is that we are not giving up on Napoleon, anymore than we would give up on any other family member.  Some people, as we all know, simply euthanize dogs with a diagnosis of severe hip dysplasia.  However, other than being in pain which restricts his movements quite a bit – but which we hope will become more manageable as we try different treatments – he has a good quality of life.  He is spoiled rotten, gets lots of love and attention, still enjoys that love and attention, and the truth is, he was never a very active dog anyway (and now we know why).

Until and unless the vet tells us that there is nothing which can be done to alleviate his suffering, we will continue looking for treatments, and we will spend whatever is necessary to help him.  We are not at all interested in any of the various scam treatments seen on the internet, though.   We want (and need) to find proven treatments used by experienced veterinarians for this particular condition, and of course, it is possible that there are treatments out there with which our vet (who we love and trust) is not familiar.

That brings me to the point of this blog post.  If anyone out there has dealt with severe hip dysplasia in their dog, what worked and what did not work?  Can you share your experiences?

What Is A Dad? [Fathers Day]

Tags

dad, family, family history, Fathers Day, grandparents, life lessons, Mamaw, Papaw, parenting, West Virginia

I wanted to take a quick moment to wish all the dads out there a Happy Fathers Day!

Today got me thinking, what is a dad?  We all are accustomed to thinking of dads in terms of biological fathers, adoptive fathers and stepfathers.  However, that has not really been my experience.

There are lots of unsung dads out there, who deserve the title as much as (or more than) those we normally think of as fathers.  They can be grandfathers, uncles, or even friends of the mom when there is no dad in the picture.  I find those men to be extraordinary individuals, since they become dads purely out of love, and not due to obligation.  Those of us who have those dads are especially lucky, because we can honestly say that our dads chose to be our dads.

Papaw with his dog Bear, sitting at the end of the driveway to my childhood home on the hill. This was taken circa 1985, after he got sick, and about a year before his death.

My dad was my step-grandfather, who we called Papaw (pronounced pap-paw).  He was an extraordinary man, simply stated.  He started taking in his step-grandchildren very shortly after marrying my grandmother (who he barely knew when they married, but that is another story for another time), starting with my brother and me when I was only a few months old.  He eventually raised four of us from infancy.

Papaw worked his fingers to the bone in order to provide for us, but he never once complained.  He was not very educated, though he was also neither illiterate nor stupid, and he valued education for us kids; he worked most of my life as a local truck driver.  Though he could have made much more money driving long distance, since he had the license and skill to do that, he wanted to be home with us every evening.

I do not remember him ever taking a day off, or even a vacation day.  We certainly never went on any vacations of any type, because there was just not the money to do things like that.  We lived in a very poor part of town, in a rundown little house up on top of a hill so steep, with a road so winding, that you could not even get up or down it when the snow fell, unless you walked.  Papaw used to park his car at the bottom of the hill and walk on snow days so he could still get back and forth to work, both arms inevitably filled to overflowing with groceries.

It takes a lot of food to feed four growing kids, after all, and Mamaw took in babysitting for extra cash as well, so there were always at least three or four additional mouths to feed (but usually even more than that, especially when their mothers could not get up the hill to pick them up).  That translates into daily trips to the grocery store just to keep food on the table, but as always, he never once complained, even when he had to carry those groceries on foot up that steep winding hill in a big snowstorm.  Instead he would walk in the door after working all day and then taking that long freezing walk, Mamaw would make him some fresh hot coffee in her old percolator on the stove to warm him up, and he would come into the living room with a smile as big as the whole outdoors, to play with us kids and watch the news while Mamaw cooked supper.

We never once went cold or hungry, but we also did not exactly live in the lap of luxury.  We three girls all slept in the same room on twin beds pushed together, and my brother had a room (which was not really a room, since it was completely open and only big enough to hold a twin bed) right off the kitchen.  Other than that, we had a living room, a kitchen, and my grandparents had a very tiny bedroom.  That was the entire house.  We had an old floor furnace in the middle of the house which would get so hot in the winter, we all had to be careful not to step on it, because it would melt our shoes.  The plumbing was not the best, so there was always a strange odor in the bathroom, and the roof was falling down and had to be repeatedly repaired with hot tar, applied using old cotton mops.  The windows had to be covered with plastic in winter, to keep out the cold, and in the summer to keep out the insects.

So that old house was not much, and in truth it was kind of falling apart, but it was still the best house in the whole world, because it was filled with love.

Papaw worked extremely hard and he could have afforded to live much better, if not for the cost of raising four grandchildren, but I honestly do not think that ever even occurred to him, because he was the most unselfish person imaginable.  We were not on welfare of any type, though obviously they could have gotten it; however, he was far too proud to accept that kind of help, and he instilled that pride and that work ethic in us kids through example.

The most important things he taught us had nothing to do with pride or work ethic, though.  Instead, he taught us profound lessons about the way to view and treat others, and as always, he did so by example.

I remember when the ice cream truck started coming up on the hill in the summer.  Needless to say, we were always very excited to hear that music playing!  However, poor though we were, we had neighbors who were far poorer; and Papaw believed it was cruel to get a treat for us out where those kids could see it, and not get a treat for them as well.  They were good kids too, you see, and equally deserving of a tasty treat on a hot summer day, but their parents simply could not afford it.  Papaw had grown up extremely poor himself, so he had been those other kids, and he understood all too well the pain it would cause them to be left out.  For that reason, if he did not have enough money to buy ice cream for all the kids who were playing outside that day, no one got ice cream.

While as a child I thought that was very unfair, as an adult, I understand completely why he felt that way, and cannot imagine why any adult would ever act otherwise under those circumstances. So that particular lesson has had an extremely profound effect on my life and viewpoints, to the point that I would be a far lesser person without having learned it.

What I remember most fondly about Papaw, though, was his sense of humor.  Even today, I still laugh aloud when I think of some of the things he said when I was a child.  My grandmother (Mamaw, pronounced mam-maw, another extraordinary person in my life and the only real mother I ever had) used to say he was a big kid, and she was actually not too far off in that assessment, at least insofar as his sense of humor was concerned.  He would say something funny, completely out of the blue, then have this exaggerated look of shock on his face as he peered over at us kids out of the corner of his eye, to see us laugh.  It was hilarious.  For example, one of his favorite funny things to blurt out, without any context whatsoever, was

Here I sit all brokenhearted.  Tried to poop, but only farted.

Needless to say, we kids never got tired of hearing that one.

I remember once he took me to the grocery store with him (which was rare) and he farted in an aisle, then ran to the end of the aisle and peeked around so he could laugh when he saw someone walk into the stench he left behind.  Sure enough, a lady in her Sunday best walked right into it, and she looked like she was going to throw up.  That may seem like very odd behavior to others, but it was absolutely hilarious, and I am laughing about it even now, as I write this.  I am sure he did not normally do embarrassing things like that in public, mind you; but on that day, he did it just to see me laugh.

Now that, my friends, is love.

Papaw was never the type to actually say “I love you”, though he never had to say it for us to know that he loved us with every fiber of his being, and every bit as much as he would have if we were his own children.  He might actually have loved us even more than he would have loved his own kids (he had no biological children) because we had no one else to love us or protect us, and that touched his heart and made him even more determined to give us all the love in the world, to make up for what we had been deprived of by our biological parents.  So his entire life revolved around us kids, and he showed us his love in every single thing he did.

We were poor, but if love were measured in riches, we would have been the richest kids in the world.  Papaw and Mamaw saved our lives by taking us in and protecting us from the life we would otherwise have been forced to live, and I will always be in awe of the depth of their love, as well as their many ongoing (and completely selfless) sacrifices.

So to me, based upon my experiences, a dad is defined as a man who loves the child unconditionally, is always there for the child, and always puts the best interests of the child above his own interests – even to his own detriment – regardless of legal or biological relation.  Fart jokes do not hurt, either.  ;-)

What is your definition of a dad?

Thanks for questions

Tags

Hatfields and McCoys

After answering over 300 questions about the Hatfields and McCoys, and having hundreds more remaining, I find that it is taking me far, far more time to answer questions than I ever expected, since most of the answers require a full explanation.  Honestly, I expected a handful of questions at most.  Then this evening, I realized it is playing on yet another network, and thought, Yikes!

I am sure you understand when I say that I do not have the ability to answer questions full time, since few people could do that.  Responsibilities await which require my full attention, and for that reason, I regret to report that I have no choice but to close discussion on those posts.  Not to worry, I am not ignoring any questions already submitted, and will attempt to answer the remaining questions as I have more time.  However, for the sake of my own sanity, LOL, I will not be accepting more.

I do, however, truly appreciate the unbelievable level of interest in the history, and hope that you will find the answer to your question in the many questions I have already answered.  Chances are, you will.  :-)

Seeking McCoy Descendants To Tell Their Oral Family History

Tags

Hatfields & McCoys, McCoy family members

Since there are some knowledgeable McCoy family members commenting here, I am wondering if any of you would like to write about your oral family history, to add to this main part of the blog and thus make sure both sides are equally presented.

It is my sincere hope that if we compare and contrast the oral family histories of the two families, we can come to some consensus on what really happened, and why.

If any of you are interested, leave a comment here, making sure to include your correct email address in the comment form provided, and I will send you an email to discuss it further.  :-)

Thanks for your questions about the Hatfields

Thanks for your interest in my posts about the Hatfield family, and our oral history of the circumstances surrounding the feud.  I am really very honored that you are taking such an interest in my family history, and since you took the time out of your day to ask questions, I believe that each of you deserve the respect of a real response, and not just a few words thrown onto the page.  Unfortunately, due to the number of comments and the fact that the circumstances surrounding the feud are so complex, it is taking a lot more time than I ever expected.  

However, I promise that I will indeed respond to each and every question to the best of my ability.  Just remember, I am answering from the perspective of what I was told by the Hatfields many years ago, so in some cases my friends the McCoys may disagree.  Of course, I welcome their responses as well.  :-)

Hatfields & McCoys: Could genetics have contributed to the feud?

Tags

Hatfields & McCoys, McCoy DNA, McCoy genetics, what caused the feud, what caused the Hatfield McCoy feud

I ran across this article years ago, and thought those watching the Hatfields & McCoys may find it interesting.

The most infamous feud in American folklore, the long-running battle between the Hatfields and McCoys, may be partly explained by a rare, inherited disease that can lead to hair-trigger rage and violent outbursts.

Dozens of McCoy descendants apparently have the disease, which causes high blood pressure, racing hearts, severe headaches and too much adrenaline and other “fight or flight” stress hormones.

No one blames the whole feud on this, but doctors say it could help explain some of the clan’s notorious behavior.

You can read the article in its entirety at http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2007-04-05-hatfield-mccloy-disease_N.htm

Hatfields & McCoys: A comparison with the oral family history [Updated]

Tags

Anderson Hatfield, Anse Hatfield, Asa Harmon, Bad Frank Phillips, blood for blood, Cap Hatfield, Cap Hatfield escape, Cap Hatfield eye, cause of feud, Civil War, conspiracy, Cotton Hatfield, Cotton Top, Devil Anse, Devil Anse Hatfield, Ellison Hatfield murder, execution, Frank Phillips, Hatfield family history, Hatfield judge, Hatfields & McCoys, Hatfields and McCoys, Jim Vance, Johnse Hatfield, Johnse Hatfield pardon, Levicey Hatfield, Nancy McCoy, National Guard, oral family history, Perry Cline, Preacher Anse Hatfield, Randall McCoy, Roseanna McCoy, Tannerite, Uncle Jim Vance, Wall Hatfield, West Virginia

As previously stated, I hail from the Hatfield clan, of the infamous Hatfield/McCoy feud, and have heard the oral family history since I was a young child.  I thought it might be interesting for viewers of the Hatfields & McCoys miniseries if I compared the series to the family oral history, as well as history in general.

Devil Anse was a very tough character, that much is undeniable.  There is a reason they called him six foot of the devil and 180 pounds of hell, after all.  What they did not show at all is that he had a great sense of humor, and loved to play practical jokes.  He also looked absolutely nothing like Kevin Costner in the miniseries, as you can see in the photo at left.

The actors portraying the family are far more attractive than the actual Hatfield family (naturally, since they are actors), which is something my family finds endlessly amusing.  Not only did Anse look absolutely nothing like Kevin Costner, but Vicey was actually short and plump, and Johnse did not look like the dreamboat he is portrayed as being.  Roseanna McCoy was not even a blonde.  The offensive thing about that is, there is nothing wrong with not looking like a Hollywood actor, and in fact most people do not look like a Hollywood actor, so why did the actors not look anything like the actual people involved?  You can see individual photos of Johnse and Roseanna by clicking the link below to my post about their relationship.  The following is a photo of Devil Anse and his wife Levicey, to show you just how much they did not look like the actors in the miniseries.

In fact, for anyone interested, here is the uncropped photo from my header, and a list of who is in that photo:

Front row, left to right: Tennyson (Tennis) Hatfield (son of Devil Anse), Levicy Hatfield (daughter of Johnse),Willis Hatfield (son of Devil Anse), and “Watch” or “Yellow Watch,” Devil Anse’s coon and bear dog.

Second row: Mrs. Mary Hensley-Simpkins-Howes, (daughter of Devil Anse) with daughter Vici Simpkins, William Anderson “Devil Anse” Hatfield, Levicy Chafin Hatfield (aka Vicey, wife of Devil Anse), Nancy Elizabeth Hatfield (wife of Cap) with son Robert Elliott Hatfield, Louise Hatfield (daughter of Cap), Cap Hatfield, and Coleman Hatfield (son of Cap).

Top row: Rosa Lee Hatfield (daughter of Devil Anse), Detroit (Troy) Hatfield (son of Devil Anse), Betty Hatfield (Caldwell) (daughter of Devil Anse), Elias Hatfield (son of Devil Anse), Tom Chafin (nephew of William Anderson), Joe D. Hatfield (son of Devil Anse), Ock Damron, Shephard Hatfield (son of Cap), Levicy Emma Hatfield (daughter of Cap), and off to the side is Bill Border, some store clerk who happened to get into the photo (LOL).

The Hatfields were always posed with guns by photographers passing through (which is how family portraits were taken back then), due to the feud.  So they were exploited in that respect, and it never even occurred to them how history would view them in light of those photos.  They did not ask to be famous, nor did they ever aspire to be famous, so they just did not think that way.

There is far more to the feud itself than is being portrayed on television.  You must remember, what you are watching is a feud spanning many years, compressed into only six hours and sanitized for a viewing audience, so much of the inaccuracy is in the little details.  However, there were some major inaccuracies as well, and of course they are far more troubling.

An underlying theme to the real feud, which was barely touched upon in the miniseries, was the attempts by some McCoy relatives, and powerful people connected to those relatives, to steal the Hatfield timber rights.  You must remember, Devil Anse worked that land himself for many years, cutting trees by hand which was very hard labor in the days before chainsaws or railroads, and he scrimped and saved to buy the vast majority of his land, rather than inheriting it.  He was not a fool, and he was certainly not going to sit back and allow people to steal his land from him, but that is exactly what they were trying to do.

The McCoy attorney/cousin Perry Cline shown in the series was related to some state authorities in Kentucky, and they had sent him to Tug Fork for the specific purpose of stealing timber rights from Devil Anse.  When Anse saw through the ruse and called him on his lies, and took the Cline timber rights in exchange for not filing criminal charges for fraud of official documents, they were all enraged, and they were determined to get revenge against Devil Anse, who they had incorrectly assumed to be just a dumb hillbilly.

To that end, Cline stayed close to the McCoys.  He fed the McCoy children a steady diet of hatred and lies about the Hatfields, and continuously fed into Randall’s hatred and paranoia of Anse, which is really horrific behavior given that Randall clearly suffered from what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder (back then, it was called shell shock).  If not for that highly manipulative and deceitful behavior, intended to fuel violence against the Hatfields, it is possible and even probable that the McCoy sons would never have gone so far as murder, and Devil Anse would never have felt the need to take revenge; ergo, rather than a feud, it would have been at most an ongoing argument between families which occasionally resulted in a fistfight, and nothing more.  Needless to say, Perry Cline was every bit the slimey snake he was portrayed in the series, and more.

When the feud first started on the series with the death of Asa Harmon (a McCoy cousin), some McCoys (including Randall) accused Devil Anse of the murder, though that accusation is not covered at all in the miniseries.

In reality, Anse was home from the war when the murder occurred, but was in bed sick at the time of the murder.  His uncle (on his mother’s side) Jim Vance had become enraged because Harmon had come home from the Civil War still wearing a Union jacket, when most in that area – including Devil Anse and Randall McCoy – had fought for the Confederacy. Harmon was murdered because he was an unrepentant Union supporter – meaning that he was viewed as a traitor, and had been on the side which had killed some of the Hatfields – and not because Harmon accused Jim of having sex with his dog.  It does make for good television, however, to not delve into the true motives for the first murder or the accusation against Anse, and attribute it instead to a grudge over a drunken statement, since that is a recurring theme.

Jim Vance was, in the words of my family, “mean as a damn snake”.  He had not only killed Asa Harmon among others, he also had the ear of Anse when it came to how to react to the McCoys.  Anse very much kept his own counsel, but it is undeniable that he was influenced, at least to some degree, by his uncle.

The story of Johnse and Roseanna is yet another recurring theme in the miniseries, but it is based more on well-known fable than fact.  You can read the Hatfield family oral history of Johnse and Roseanna on this blog by clicking here.  Roseanna did not die dramatically as shown on the miniseries, while caring for her mother, right after finally confronting her father.  She relocated to Pikeville years before her death and died, it is said, of a broken heart at about age 29 (as covered at the link, my elders told me that dying of a broken heart was a term back then for committing suicide, but a McCoy commenter kindly informed me that she died of a heart attack, and they would know the McCoy family history far better than I, so I and my ancestors stand corrected on that).

The New Years Eve attack upon the McCoy household was neither planned nor perpetrated by Devil Anse, though the miniseries shows otherwise.  In fact, he did not even know anything about it until after it was done, nor would he have agreed to it.  He knew there was a woman and children in the house, and he was not a murderer; nor did he have any interest in harming women and children.  His plan was to end the feud by cutting it off at its head, which meant killing Randall McCoy, but his plan was to catch Randall away from his home, so as not to endanger the McCoy wife and children.  To do otherwise would be to rain hellfire and brimstone upon his own home, where his wife and younger children still resided, and Anse was, simply stated, not that stupid.  The fact that the Hatfield home was never raided or burned as revenge by McCoys or their agents/supporters is proof that the McCoys knew Devil Anse was not behind that fatal raid.

The feud is portrayed as having started with the death of Asa Harmon, and common folklore is that the feud started with the theft of a pig.  In reality, however, the feud started with the coldblooded murder of Ellison Hatfield, because it was only then that Devil Anse struck back.  Prior to that time, Anse had great empathy for his old friend Randall, due to his understanding that Randall was extremely traumatized by the war, and not in his right mind anymore.  Anse even employed many McCoys in his timber business, so any bad blood was on Randalls side only up to that point.  Once the McCoy boys viciously murdered his brother for no reason, however, Devil Anse struck back very hard by personally executing the McCoy sons – which he did mostly because they had already been set free without punishment for one murder, so he understandably did not trust the justice system to stop them from murdering again – and the feud was on.

A question which came up in comments repeatedly was the miniseries portraying McCoys as being on the Hatfield side of the feud.  That part of the miniseries was very accurate.  The Hatfields and the McCoys were actually all friends prior to the feud, some Hatfields were married to McCoys, and as stated, many McCoys were employed by Devil Anse in his timber business.  Several McCoys who worked for Anse continued to show allegiance to the Hatfields during the feud, and they were considered Hatfields even though there was no blood relation.  Claiming them as Hatfields had nothing to do with the feud, however.

Claiming someone as a relative when they are not really related to you is not at all unusual in West Virginia, since we tend to take in what we call strays (people who are estranged from their own family).  I have taken in many strays myself over the years, all friends of my now-grown son, and I took them into my home at various times during their childhood, and cared and provided for them as if they were my own children.  As a result, though I have only one child, I have about a half dozen young men who call me Mom to this day, and several young ladies who dated my son over the years do the same, since I treated them like daughters, and cared and provided for them as well.  These young men and women, now grown and most moved away, will come visit me first when they are in town, even before they visit their own families, and they usually stay with me during their visit as well.  It is a kind of extralegal adoption, basically, meaning that I never legally adopted them, but they view me as their mother and I view them as my children.  They are always welcome in my home, and always will be, because they are family though there is no blood relation.  In fact, most friends of my son call me Mom, because I treat them all like my own children whether they ever lived with me or not.  So McCoys being viewed as Hatfields (or Smiths being viewed as Joneses) is not unusual at all, even to this very day in West Virginia.

The miniseries shows Nancy McCoy leaving Johnse to marry Bad Frank Phillips, but there is no mention of any children, and it makes it seem like Nancy and Johnse were married for an extremely short period of time.  In reality, Johnse and Nancy were married for years and had two children, Ancie and Stella; Ancie was born about four years after they were married, while they were married five years before Stella came along.  So they were married and lived as husband and wife for far longer than was portrayed in the miniseries.  Insofar as Nancy leaving him for Bad Frank, as portrayed in the series, I was always told that Johnse left Nancy for another woman.  Nancy did indeed eventually marry Bad Frank Phillips, though.

I got a lot of questions about what happened to Cap with regard to his eye, and whether he was really blind.  Cap was portrayed as having lost his eye in a timber cutting accident, which was very dramatic of course.  However, he actually lost his sight in one eye due to a percussion cap accident.  Percussion caps were shown on the miniseries, when they showed people putting an anvil over gunpowder, then hitting it with a sledgehammer in order to cause a small explosion.  Obviously that is extremely dangerous, but it is not an unusual activity even today in some parts of rural West Virginia (and yes, people get seriously injured that way all the time).  However, most of us who want to cause an explosion for fun now use Tannerite and shoot it from a distance with a high-powered rifle, which is both far safer and makes a much bigger explosion.  Either way, though he was indeed blinded in one eye, his eye did not look all white like on the miniseries.  His eye looked normal but he had what we call wall-eye, meaning that his bad eye did not track with his good eye when he looked at something.

The miniseries showed only Wall Hatfield as a judge.  In reality, there were two Hatfield judges.  The other one was Preacher Anse Hatfield, so named because he was a minister, and to differentiate between the Anses in the family.  Preacher Anse actually presided over the famous pig trial, not Wall.  Wall presided over the murder hearing of the three McCoy boys, and set them free (though he later regretted doing so, for obvious reasons).  This is very important to understand about the feud, and a very important (and completely unnecessary) error in the miniseries, because the fact that multiple Hatfields were judges is the very reason why the McCoys felt they could not get justice in West Virginia for the execution of the McCoy sons.

I got lots and lots of questions about Cottontop Mounts as well.  The miniseries portrays Cotton as mentally retarded and very childlike, and that was a major part of the storyline.  In reality, though, he was neither.  Cotton was, however, what we call in these parts crazy as hell, meaning that he was mentally ill in a dangerous way.  In fact, when he was in jail awaiting execution, there was discussion (which is well documented) about bringing in a psychiatrist to examine him, because he appeared to be insane and they were very concerned about the moral implications of executing an insane person.  Note that there was no concern stated about him being childlike or mentally retarded, but if he were either, or especially both, obviously that would be an even bigger concern.  Needless to say, in the 1800s, psychiatrists were not brought in to examine the condemned, so that was extraordinary in and of itself.  Some believed that he was faking insanity to avoid execution, though, so ultimately a psychiatrist did not examine him.  However, he was not faking.  Cotton was indeed severely mentally ill, and had been for long before his arrest.  The miniseries also misquoted his final words.  He did not praise the Hatfields for loving him.  Instead, he blamed the Hatfields.  I am not sure why they felt the need to change something like that, since his final words are very well documented, except that they built the entire storyline around the idea that Cotton was mentally retarded and childlike.

What I found most disturbing about the miniseries is that Devil Anse was portrayed as someone monstrous enough to sacrifice his own mentally retarded and childlike nephew.  That could not be further from the truth.  In reality, he allowed Cotton to hang without even trying to intervene because he believed Cotton killed the McCoy child in cold blood, and Anse believed in blood for blood.  Remember, Cotton was neither mentally retarded nor childlike, but he was crazy.  Cotton had actually been in on the planning of that bloody raid with Johnse, so there was no reason for anyone in their right mind to believe he shot that poor child by accident.  Anse could not very well execute the McCoy boys for the murder of his brother then help Cotton get away with the murder of an innocent McCoy child, after all.  In fact, he would not have done that, because his sense of justice was very well defined.  Like I said, he believed in blood for blood, meaning that he strongly believed that coldblooded murderers had to pay with their lives (which is a belief still extremely common in West Virginia, though we no longer have the death penalty).  So I found it extremely disturbing that the series portrayed Cotton as having been sacrificed by Devil Anse, just for the sake of making a neat little drama to end the feud.  The truth is, the feud continued after Cotton was executed.

The National Guard was brought in to control the feud at one point, just to give you an idea of how bad it really got.  It was actually far more disturbing than what was portrayed on the miniseries, and there are even names for their battles, just as if it were an actual war.  There were shootouts in the mountains, with the McCoys using explosives in an attempt to blow up the Hatfields while they were shooting from a crag.  It was really the sort of violence one would never expect to see outside an actual war.

The truth is, neither family was completely innocent, neither family was completely guilty, and both sides were being manipulated by the people who wanted to steal the Hatfield timberland.  So it became a full-on war between the two clans, which became particularly bad because the McCoys brought in mercenaries with promise of payment for killing the Hatfields, which the Hatfields predictably picked off for target practice.  I say predictably because, to this day, many Hatfield descendants are known for their marksmanship ability, including me; it is just a natural ability we inherited.  Of course, nowadays we are shooting only at game and targets (targets only for me), and not human beings.  Then again, we do not have people trying to kill us these days, either.   The Hatfields and the McCoys have been friends now for many, many years, and I personally think they are wonderful people.

So while I do very much appreciate the attempt to humanize the feuding families, because that is something which really needed to be done since neither Anse nor Randall were evil men, there is no neat little story to be made for such senseless loss of life, no matter how hard Hollywood may try.  If they wanted to tell the story in a documentary manner, they should have examined far more closely the conspiracy by powerful third parties to steal the Hatfield timberland.  It is not as if this is unknown, after all, since multiple scholars have discussed it in detail as the true underlying cause of the feud.

Last, but certainly not least, many people in comments asked about Johnse and Cap, specifically what happened to Johnse and why Cap was never arrested.   Though not shown on the series, they were both arrested.

Johnse went into hiding but was arrested about ten years later when he returned.  He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison, but was later pardoned after an inmate tried to kill the Lieutenant Governor of Kentucky with a homemade knife during a prison visit, and Johnse saved his life.  Ever the Lothario, Johnse married several more times after his release from prison.

Cap was arrested and held in the Mingo County (WV) jail, but he hacked his way out of the jail with a hatchet which was smuggled in to him.  Needless to say, it was not a very secure jail, LOL.  He continued to fight with the Hatfields for a time after his escape, including in some of the more well-known battles of the feud (including the one where the McCoys tried to blow up the Hatfields on the crag), and he was never recaptured.  Eventually a general pardon was issued for all feud participants, so Cap no longer needed to worry about being re-arrested.  He went on to become an attorney and a sheriff.

All in all, the miniseries was interesting even to me, but it was historically inaccurate in many ways, some far more serious than others.  So while I do appreciate the miniseries and especially its attempt to humanize the feud participants, the real story of the Hatfield/McCoy feud, as usual with historical dramas, is far more interesting than anything which might come from Hollywood.

The true story of Johnse Hatfield and Roseanna McCoy

Tags

Anse Hatfield, Devil Anse, Devil Anse Hatfield, Ellison Hatfield, family history, Hatfield McCoy feud, Hatfield women, Hatfields and McCoys, Johnse and Roseanna, Johnse and Roseanna love story, Johnse Hatfield, Levicey Hatfield, love story, Randall McCoy, Roseanna McCoy, Roseanna McCoy death, true story of Johnse and Roseanna, Vicey Hatfield

Roseanna McCoy

The story of Johnse Hatfield and Roseanna McCoy has been romanticized for years, and it is indeed a tragic love story akin to something Shakespeare might have devised.  However, the story as it is usually told is far from the truth, and since the miniseries Hatfields & McCoys is currently being aired on The History Channel and seems to be repeating those stories, now is as good a time as any to clear it up for those interested in the feud.

The story as it is usually told is that Johnse and Roseanna fell in love at first sight, and were kept apart by their families.

Bear in mind, I am descended from Devil Anse Hatfield.  I therefore heard various feud stories directly from elderly Hatfields many times while growing up, but the story of Johnse and Roseanna was never even once relayed to me as a love story.  This is not because they were painting Johnse in a better light, either – far from it, in fact.

I absolutely believe the story I have always been told, especially since it does not reflect at all well on Johnse.  As far as I am aware, the truth about the relationship between Johnse and Roseanna has never before been spoken outside the Hatfield family.

So what follows is the true story of Johnse Hatfield and Roseanna McCoy, as it was told to me many times over many years, by several different elderly family members.  If you prefer to believe the oft-repeated love story between Johnse Hatfield and Roseanna McCoy, however, you probably want to stop reading now.

Johnse Hatfield

Johnse was what my family calls “a lover, not a fighter” – in other words, he was more interested in the pursuit of girls, than in anything else.  He was a huge flirt who had lots of girlfriends, and was not above lying to a girl so he could have his way with her.

Roseanna was a very good girl who had lived an extremely sheltered life, and who desperately yearned for love and affection.  She was thus very easily coerced into a sexual relationship through declarations of love, and promises of marriage, by the far more worldly Johnse.  When he told her that he loved her and swore he was going to marry her, though they barely knew one another, she never doubted him.

Johnse, on the other hand, was still seeing other girls the entire time he was seeing Roseanna.  The truth of the matter is that Johnse did not love Roseanna, and certainly had no intention of marrying her.  That had all just been a lie to get her to have sex with him.  However, he continued his lies, and even expanded upon them, just so he could continue his sexual relationship with her.

That of course is a story which plays out every single day all around the world, even today.  However, there were other aspects to the relationship, especially involving the families, which have also not been accurately portrayed.

The Hatfields were strongly opposed to a marriage between Johnse and Roseanna, even after she became pregnant.  Though Randall had by then already disowned his daughter, Devil Anse had daughters too, so he was well aware that Randall still loved Roseanna deeply, and had only disowned her due to the shame her actions brought upon their family.

Despite how the story is usually told, the feud had nothing to do with Anse’s opposition to the marriage.  At that point, Randall hated Anse with a passion, but Anse did not yet hate Randall.  Quite the contrary, in fact, since he felt sympathy for his old friend, up until the murder of his brother Ellison.  He believed that Randall had his spirit and mind broken by his experiences in the Civil War, but that he would eventually come to his senses and allow Anse to help him.

Anse’s opposition to the marriage therefore lay in the fact that he refused to defy (and thus disrespect) Randall with regard to his daughter.  Knowing that Randall would never approve of the marriage is the reason Anse refused to give the young couple his blessing, even after Roseanna became pregnant.

So while a shotgun wedding was the norm during that era when a girl became pregnant outside marriage (meaning that the boy was forced to marry at gunpoint, whether he wanted to marry the girl or not), the Hatfields were opposed to the marriage even when society expected it, and even though they themselves would have demanded it of Johnse, if the girl had been anyone but Randall McCoy’s daughter.

There was also very strong opposition to the marriage by Anse’s wife Vicey, though for different reasons, and she had far more influence in the family than most understand.  In my family, mothers are extremely doting on their sons and have extraordinarily close relationships with them, and they also rarely make demands upon their sons.  When they do make a demand, it is expected that the demand will be honored.  As a result the sons only rarely defy their mothers, even as adults, and especially when it comes to something as important as marriage.  So the women in the Hatfield family were far more powerful and influential within the family, and far more outspoken, than history makes it appear.

Vicey was certainly no exception.  She was a very strong woman, highly respected within the family and the community, and she had a very strong influence on both her husband and her sons, though she wisely used that influence judiciously (which only rendered her more powerful).

Vicey liked the young naive Roseanna, and felt protective of her.  Since she knew that Johnse was continuing to see other girls behind Roseanna’s back, she believed that a marriage between them was doomed to fail.  In that era, a failed marriage meant that the wife and children would suffer greatly, and could even starve without a man in the household to provide, especially without the financial support of their own family.  Furthermore, given that Roseanna was a McCoy, Vicey and Anse would be severely restricted in their ability to help them in the event the marriage failed, if in fact they would be allowed to help them at all.  Roseanna and her children would be completely at the mercy of the McCoy family, and thus become nothing but pawns in the sick game that her father was playing.

For those reasons, to protect the young naive Roseanna from making a terrible mistake by marrying Johnse, Vicey put her foot down about a marriage between them very early in the relationship.  Everyone knew that Johnse would not defy his mother, since he did not love the girl anyway, and never had any intention of actually marrying her.

It is true that the McCoy sons hated and repeatedly tried to kill Johnse.  However, they did that because common sense told them that he was having sex with their sister, and no other reason.  Even today in this region, having sex with a virginal girl can result in violence from the brothers, especially if the brothers believe their sister was coerced.  In this case, they were right to believe that, though of course no one in the Hatfield family (least of all Johnse) was going to admit it.

That is the reason why Devil Anse allowed the McCoy boys go free repeatedly, without even so much as a beating, even though they had repeatedly tried to kill his son.  Anse understood his son, you see.  He knew Johnse was doing Roseanna wrong, and that Johnse had sweet-talked Roseanna into having sex with him though he did not love her and had no intention of ever marrying her; and Anse was both ashamed and embarrassed by this behavior.

The truth is, Devil Anse would have reacted the same way as the McCoys, had it been his sister or daughter being treated like that, so he was not about to kill those boys for reacting in a way he considered understandable.  Instead he told Johnse that he was not to have anything else to do with Roseanna, because the McCoy brothers would kill him for it.

Still, the reality is that Anse would not have killed the McCoy boys even if they had killed Johnse, because Johnse had provoked them into that reaction by sleeping with their sister.  Anse only killed the McCoy boys when they slaughtered his brother Ellison in cold blood, without any provocation.

That reaction to the death of Ellison undoubtedly saved Johnse’s life, because his coercion of Roseanna into a sexual relationship had brought shame upon the McCoy family.  The McCoy boys were therefore not going to stop until Johnse was dead

The interesting thing about that situation is that Johnse’s relationship with Roseanna – and the inability of the McCoy boys to take revenge upon Johnse, due to repeated intervention by Devil Anse – was the underlying motive for the murder of Anse’s beloved brother Ellison.

Despite the betrayals and lies by Johnse, and despite the fact that he was only using her, Roseanna did indeed love Johnse, and the opposition of her family to the relationship – as well as the opportunity to marry into the loving and wealthy Hatfield family – only made her want him more.  Like naive young ladies everywhere, Roseanna equated sex with love and, thinking that her love would change his cheating ways, she fell deeply in love with Johnse despite being treated so badly by him.  When her relationship with Johnse ended and just months later he married her cousin (one of the girls he had been continuously seeing behind her back all along), she pined for him endlessly, not being able to accept that he had never loved her at all.

It is said that Roseanna never got over losing Johnse and their baby, and that she died of a broken heart shortly before her 30th birthday.

Given that there were no real medical records kept back then, we are not privy to the exact cause of Roseanna McCoy’s death. The oldtimers who told me the real story said that she committed suicide, since that is what ”died of a broken heart” meant back then.

No matter what actually caused her death, the love story between Johnse Hatfield and Roseanna McCoy is not a love story at all, except on her part, which only makes her death at such a young age even more tragic.

Devil Annz? No, Devil Ants.

Tags

Devil Anse, Devil Anse Hatfield, Hatfields & McCoys, Hatfields and McCoys, historical accuracy, Kevin Costner, pronunciation of Devil Anse, The History Channel

Dear Mr. Costner,

Thank you for making the documentary miniseries Hatfields & McCoys for The History Channel.  As a direct descendant of Devil Anse Hatfield, and as a fan of your work as an actor (I especially enjoyed A Perfect World), I am very pleased that you chose to make this film, and I am hoping it fulfills its promise of historical accuracy.

The reason I am writing is for the purposes of historical accuracy, in fact.  While watching the trailer for Hatfields & McCoys, I noticed that you are mispronouncing the name Devil Anse.  It is not pronounced Devil Annz.  It is pronounced Devil Ants.  His given first name was Anderson, so it was a play on that name, intended to be a reference to the oldtime name for fire ants.  Just as fire ants attack without mercy, so would Devil Anse during the Civil War.

My concern is this, simply stated.  Since you produced the series and play the part of Devil Anse, I fear that the mispronunciation is in the miniseries itself, and will annoy me to no end while I am watching it.  Worse, it will cause all of America (and eventually the world as well) to start mispronouncing his name, though no one mispronounced it before.

I sincerely hope that will not be the case.  While I realize that you may have made an assumption about the pronunciation based upon what you have heard elsewhere, you must always remember (if in fact you ever even knew) that people in these parts tok uh lil difernt.

(And I can write that completely without humor or insult, since I freely admit that I talk like that as well.)

At any rate, I look forward to watching.

UPDATE:  After watching the program, I am happy to note that my fears were unfounded.  Not only did they pronounce Devil Anse correctly, they also pronounced Randall correctly (it is pronounced as Ranol, and he was also called Ole Ranol).

Now if only all the characters spoke with an authentic accent for this region, that would be great, since it is hard for even us to understand some of them.  I can therefore only imagine how difficult they are for others to understand.

Devil Anse and Vigilantism in West Virginia [Television]

Tags

Bill Paxton, corruption, courts, crime, Devil Anse, Devil Anse Hatfield, documentary, feud, Hatfield McCoy feud, Hatfield/McCoy feud, Hatfields and McCoys, historical documentary, history, History Channel, justice system, Kevin Costner, magistrate, Randall McCoy, The History Channel, vigilante justice, vigilantism, West Virginia

The History Channel will be airing a three-episode historical miniseries on the Hatfield/McCoy feud starting tonight, starring Kevin Costner and Bill Paxton.  I have a unique interest in the miniseries, since it is actually reenacting part of my family history.

As a direct descendant of Devil Anse Hatfield (my great-great-great grandfather), of course I have heard stories about the feud for my entire life. It will be especially interesting to see to what extent the miniseries corresponds with that oral family history.

My great-grandmother remembered Devil Anse fondly. She said that he had a great sense of humor and loved to play practical jokes, that he always had a twinkle in his eye, and that he absolutely doted on his children and grandchildren.  She also said that he was fiercely protective of his family, as history is very well aware.

She once told me that no one was surprised when Anse kidnapped the McCoy boys and ordered their execution after they murdered his brother Ellison, and that no one really cared that he did it because they considered it justice done. This does not surprise me at all, even today.

In West Virginia, families are fiercely loyal, even if they otherwise do not get along.  When I was growing up, with three siblings all being raised by my grandmother, the only reason any of us were spanked was if we were fighting with one another.  Due to that inbred sense of loyalty, if you harm our family, we take it very, very personally, and we do not forgive, much less forget.  We will take that anger to our graves.  The truth is, you can do whatever you want to me and I will eventually find a way to forgive you for it; but if you harm my family, it absolutely enrages me, and there is no forgiveness, ever.  I would never act upon that rage, but it is still there, and it rears its ugly head whenever anything reminds me of the incident in question, even many years after it happened.

So I understand all too well where the vigilante mindset comes from, since the only real difference between those who engage in family-related vigilante justice and me, is that I do not believe I would ever be morally justified in committing violence, except purely in self-defense.  That said, I also have no sympathy for those who find themselves on the wrong end of vigilante justice, as long as I believe they got the right person.  Most family-related vigilantes in West Virginia are not violent by nature, you see.  When they react with violence, it is usually because someone committed a crime against them or their family which, in the outside world, would result in a prison term.

I am hardly alone, since most people in this region do not frown upon vigilante justice. It is very common to hear people say about defendants in criminal cases, “they ought to hand him over to the family, and let them take care of it”. It is also not uncommon for families to go looking for the person who committed a violent act, saying “he better hope the cops find him before we do”. I have heard those statements so many times, in fact, that those are actual quotes.

The vast majority do not kill, obviously, but beatings severe enough to require hospitalization are not at all unusual.  Those crimes usually are not prosecuted, because juries in this area will generally not convict once they hear the reason for it.  Vigilante justice is thus so common and so accepted in West Virginia, and of course it has an extremely long history, that it has affected how justice is administered in this state.

The cops here usually view vigilante justice the same way everyone else does – that “they had it coming” – though of course they will usually deny that if asked by an outsider.  When they receive a call about an unexplained act of violence, they always consider that it may have been a reaction to a prior crime.  If there is reason to believe that is the case, they usually will not even make an arrest.  I have even known cops in West Virginia who will tell victims of violent crime that hopefully they learned their lesson about whatever it is that they did to provoke the beating.  The problem is, most people here do not consider them victims, if the violence was in reaction to a prior criminal act.  We consider it justice, because we do not have faith in the criminal justice system.

Most cops here do not bother to show up for magistrate court, even knowing that the case will be dismissed if they are not there.  The reason is that backroom deals in criminal cases are extremely common, even in cases involving violent crimes, and many times those deals are based upon a personal or social relationship with the magistrate.

Magistrates are elected officials who preside over the vast majority of court cases in this state (misdemeanors, traffic violations, civil claims under $15,000).  There are no qualifications whatsoever for the office, beyond being of legal age.  Candidates are not required to have legal training or experience of any type; they are not even required to have a high school diploma.  They also do not recuse themselves from criminal cases in which they have a personal relationship with the defendant or the family of the defendant.  They sometimes do not even recuse themselves when they are related to the defendant.

As a result, those with connections to the magistrates can get the case against them dismissed very easily, or given a slap on the wrist in the form of a small fine even in cases where they would get prison in other states.  Unfortunately, since even the biggest cities here have a population of less than 75,000, most people do have connections of one type or another to the magistrates.  Therein lies the problem.

Since backroom deals are so common, and reporting crime usually results in only disgust at the way the case turned out, most here do not bother to report crime unless they need a written report for some reason.  Some will just install more locks and hope it does not happen again, while others prefer to mete out justice themselves.  It is therefore not at all uncommon to find that someone was attacked because they had committed a crime against the assailant or a relative of the assailant, and inevitably, the underlying crime was never reported.

So while Devil Anse took justice into his own hands over 100 years ago, the vigilante mindset is still very common in West Virginia today.  Unfortunately, until and unless the citizens of this state trust that they can obtain justice through the courts, family-related vigilantism will continue to be a problem in search of a solution.

What Hath Denton Wrought? [Insane Internets]

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AJ Daulerio, American Apparel, bestiality, Brian Williams, Burner accounts, child pornography, comment auditions, comments, Deadspin, Dov Charney, Gawker, Gawker Media, NBC News, NBC Nightly News, new Gawker commenting system, Nick Denton, Remy Stern, spammers, starred commenters, trolls

I am an avid longtime reader of Gawker.  However, something has gone fundamentally wrong at Gawker.  Very, very wrong.  Horribly wrong.  And I suspect it is already too late to fix it.

The problems started when they got hacked in 2010, and the hackers not only stole login information, they also posted conversations between the writers, which angered many commenters when they saw that writer Richard Lawson referred to them as ”peasants”.  As if that was not bad enough, Gawker then had to roll out its new format early, since the hackers had stolen their source code as well, and many readers hated it.  It has only gone downhill from there, but the latest problems are completely self-inflicted.

They replaced well-liked editor Remy Stern late last year with AJ Daulerio, editor of Deadspin (a related blog which covers sports).  Yet there is absolutely no comparison between Gawker and Deadspin, other than that they are owned by Nick Denton, founder of Gawker Media.  While Deadspin did occasionally make some interesting posts – all sports-related, obviously – the audiences for the two sites could not be more different.  In other words, what worked great on Deadspin would never work on Gawker.

That was the beginning of the end for Gawker.  It was not long before Dauliero started posting some very, very strange stuff which seemed intended to provoke ire from the commentariat.  For example, he would make posts which said merely not to comment there, left the comments open, then banned everyone who commented.  He even banned many of the respected starred commenters who had been on Gawker for years.

Thinning the herd, perhaps?  Or was it more along the lines of ridding himself of those who would not accept him as the new sheriff in town, since many had questioned whether he was an appropriate choice as editor?  Then again, perhaps it only amused him, but it infuriated the commentariat, and many longtime Gawker fans stopped reading the site as a result.

Soon thereafter, Nick Denton gave an interview in which he bemoaned the triumph of mediocrity in internet comments, and embarked upon creating a new commenting system for Gawker, which he believed would be unlike any other commenting system in the history of the world.

That decision was the final death toll for Gawker.

The old Gawker commenting system was based upon starred and non-starred commenters, with the starred commenters taking a type of restricted moderation role; for example, they could approve comments from new commenters, but they could not delete or move comments, or ban commenters.  Most importantly, though, the old commenting system required new commenters to audition.  To become approved as a commenter, and thus be allowed to post without moderation, readers had to post something which caught the fancy of a starred commenter.  The rule was that it had to be not only interesting, but also grammatically correct, no misspellings, etc.  The idea was to keep the conversation on a higher level than other sites, and it worked.

The truth is, Gawker is far more respected for its great comments, than for its articles.  Certainly some bad commenters got through from time to time, especially after Gawker editors started starring commenters for specious reasons – such as agreeing with their personal opinion on issues like gay marriage – but for years, the system worked exactly as it was intended.

Personally, I thought it was a great system because it kept out the trolls, the spammers, and those who could otherwise not be bothered to take the time to make a good comment.  If the system became a problem because too many people were starred who should not have been, the fix was easy: Just unstar everyone, and start from scratch.  Simple.

Rather than becoming more restrictive in starring commenters, thus ensuring that all comments maintained a minimum level of credibility, Denton decided to do the opposite.  He starred every single user, plus some, by allowing commenters to dismiss responses they did not like.  This allowed the comments of spammers and trolls – even if they were posting a site with malicious code, and even if they were posting nothing but lies – to stand unchallenged.

Not only do they now have trolls spewing lies and disinformation without fear of being challenged, which is bad enough, but they also now allow completely anonymous comments under disposable, untraceable Burner accounts.  Boy oh boy, was that ever a mistake.  While Denton thought it would get people to comment who otherwise would not – the example he used was that Dov Charney of American Apparel (a regular Gawker target) might comment under a Burner – all it really did was give the trolls and spammers free reign, and they took over the site almost overnight.

The weekend after the new commenting system went live, Gawker was inundated by comments which included images of child pornography, bestiality … you name it, if it was vile, it was posted.  Though Daulerio deleted them and responded in the comment section to concerns about that problem – the most serious of which is that being on a page which has child porn posted can cause you to have child porn on your computer – he actually got annoyed that people were so upset.  Even after Gawker disabled the ability of Burner accounts to post links, photos or videos, they are still getting hit by spammers.  Worse, extremist political trolls have literally overtaken the site, spewing their venom even in threads which are unrelated to their comment.

Gawker still seems unable (or unwilling) to control or fix the troll problem.

This problem with the new commenting system was completely predictable to anyone who has spent more than five minutes on the internet, and why Gawker did not foresee it or plan for it is something of a mystery.  Needless to say, there have been no comments by the likes of Dov Charney – far from it, in fact.  The truth is that neither the subjects of their posts nor would-be Deep Throats are going to leave comments on Gawker like Denton envisioned, even if they can do so anonymously without leaving a trace, when the comment section is now overflowing with obvious trolls.

There is also the question of whether any Deep Throat would ever trust Gawker to maintain their anonymity as long as Daulerio is at the helm.  He posted a private email to Denton from NBC Nightly News anchorman Brian Williams, without any consideration for how doing so may harm Williams, and without asking permission from Williams first.  He also inexplicably called Williams a ”gossiping secretary”, by the way.  He then refused to take the post down even after contacted by NBC, which pointed out that it was private correspondence between friends which was never intended for public viewing; instead, he then posted the NBC email as well.  Yet the email from Williams was just him talking about how bad the Lana Del Ray performance had been on Saturday Night Live, as well as a few suggestions for the site – and it was clearly an email between two friends, just as NBC had stated – so there was certainly nothing newsworthy in it.

At that point, Daulerio proved that he cannot be trusted with information from anyone, because what he did was more akin to what one might expect from a teenage girl, than what should be expected from the Editor In Chief of a successful internet media site.

Without insiders commenting as hoped, and with trolls overtaking the site, the new commenting system seems a complete disaster.  The problem is that, as an aggregator, Gawker is really not telling us anything we cannot find elsewhere in far more detail, nor do they add anything of import to the story itself.  Even when they post original long-form posts, the posts are not any better than something one might read on a personal blog (and in many cases, it is worse).

So the truth of the matter, as much as I hate to admit it even to myself, is that there is no longer a reason for anyone to read Gawker.

 

What Really Happened In The West Virginia Primary Election [Insane Politics]

Tags

Barack Obama, Keith Judd, Obama 2012, Obama campaign, politics, Presidential election, primary election, racism, vote, West Virginia

Well, I guess I need to address the Keith Judd issue, since I live in West Virginia.

First, in the interest of full disclosure, let me say that I am a lifelong registered Democrat, which is really not unusual in this state.  I voted for Barack Obama in the last presidential election, but I also have questioned some of his decisions.  Nevertheless, since I have far less confidence in those who would run against him, I will vote for him again.  For the purposes of this discussion, I guess I should also state that, being a redhead of Scots-Irish descent, I am one of the whitest-looking people you are ever going to meet.  That said….

When I was voting in the primary, expecting no one to be running against Barack Obama for President, I noticed that there was an opposing name on the presidential ballot which I had never heard before in my entire life: Keith Judd.

Of course I did not vote for someone I had never heard of before in my entire life.  He could be anything.  He could be a criminal, or an insane person, or a convicted felon, or even a prisoner.  As it turns out, he is all those things.

Unfortunately, lots of people in West Virginia did vote for someone they had never heard of before in their entire life. In fact, 4 out of 10 cast their vote for federal inmate Keith Judd. They all said they did it because it was a vote against Obama, though of course they also had the option of not voting for that office.

I make no excuses for those people, because frankly, there is no excuse.  What kind of idiot votes for someone they have never even heard of, for what is arguably the most powerful position in the world?  I guess now we know the answer to that question.

I do know some of those people, and a few were rightfully concerned when I pointed out the truth about Keith Judd.  Most, however, thought it was funny that a prisoner got almost as many votes as the President of the United States.

Those people are brain dead.  Sorry, but I just cannot be nice about that, because their actions made a mockery of our election system.  A federal prisoner and known crazy person is now entitled to a delegate at the Democratic National Convention, thanks to those brain dead morons who voted for him despite having no idea who he was, or anything else about him.

Look, people can vote for whomever they want, and it is none of my business who they vote for …. that is to say, it is none of my business until they make me look like an idiot in front of the entire world, just because I live in this state.  Then, it becomes my business.

So let me explain what is really going on in West Virginia.

The people who voted for Keith Judd are not voting against the policies of Barack Obama like they claimed.  They do not even understand most of the policies and issues, if I am being completely honest, and I know this because I spend entirely too much time explaining those issues and policies to ever believe otherwise.

The real truth is, they are racists, and that is the real reason they voted for a man they have never even heard of before in their entire life, and the real reason Obama lost West Virginia in the last presidential election.

There, I said it.

The problem is not only racism, though.  The real problem is that the vast majority of people in this state do not even realize that they are racists.  They think that because they cheer on black athletes, it means they cannot be racists.  They think that because they were fans of Michael Jackson when they were kids, it means they cannot be racists.  They think that because they know someone who is black and they are not cruel to them, it means they cannot be racists.

See, the racism here is usually hidden beneath the surface.  You see it when people talk about the drug problem, and blame African-Americans for it though the vast majority of the drug problem in West Virginia involves whites.  You see it in the way they look at mothers with mixed-race children, and assume they are on welfare.  You see it in the way they laugh at ethnic-sounding names, including that of the President of the United States.  You see it in the way they claim Obama got to where he is today due to affirmative action.  You see it in the way they claim that a member of Congress who happens to be African-American – but who also happens to be a Harvard-educated attorney and longtime Professor of Constitutional Law – is not qualified to be President of the United States.

You see it most clearly, however, when they give their vote for President of the United States to an insane federal prisoner with a white-sounding name, who they have never even heard of before in their entire life, when his opponent just happens to be African-American and has one of those ethnic-sounding names.

I am just not sure how to correct that problem, unfortunately.

Are the Real Housewives real? [Insane Internet]

Tags

Albert Manzo, Caroline Manzo, Chris Laurita, Jacqueline Laurita, Joe Giudice, Joe Gorga, Kathy Wakile, Melissa Gorga, Real Housewives of New Jersey, Reality television, Reality TV, reality tv producer, reality tv production, Richie Wakile, Teresa Giudice

I watch some of the Real Housewives shows, so I read a few Real Housewives blogs via RSS.  Every once in a while, one of those blogs will provide an RSS feed which also shows the comments. I have no idea why it does that, since it only happens occasionally; but when it does, I read the comments as well.

Today, I was reading through my feed for a blog called All About The Real Housewives, and saw the following comment directed at someone who said that table-flipping cast member Teresa Giudice was in the wrong in the feud with her family.

it’s very funny that you have the nerves to say that TERESA is %100 wrong! No let me revised it, TERESA is not 100% wrong, you are the one who is confused by your own family Drama and need to leave your brother’s life alone! BITCH GET A LIFE, YOU KEEP ON CHANGING YOU NAME! GUESS WHAT? I HAVE A NAME FOR YOU! LIZARD STRIPPER WONNABEE PORN DIRECTOR, HOW ABOUT THAT? YOU ARE THE SAME PERSON WITH MULTIPLE NAMES COMMENT ON THIS BLOG, AND ALSO HARASSED ROXY.. BITCH BRING IT ON. SHAME ON YOU, GO AND KISS MELISSA’S BUTT. BRING IT ON BITCH AM SOOOO READY FOR YOU. GET THE FUCK OUT OFF THIS BLOG BITCH.

Obviously, someone missed their Thorazine shot this morning.

Still, it makes me wonder, why do some viewers take these shows so seriously?  They are all edited to portray only what the producers want us to see.  There are even multiple takes of each scene, just like with any other television production.

In other words, as David After Dentist might say, this is not real life.  It is not reality.  It is simply a soap opera designed for the voyeur in all of us, and the cast members are portraying caricatures of themselves.

At the beginning of each season, each Housewife is given a storyline.  Characters on these shows live and die by their storyline, and if they do not come up with a good one, or one which producers think is relatable to viewers, they are off the show, and their income – which includes sometimes-lucrative endorsement deals and personal appearance fees – goes bye-bye.  So of course they are going to play along with their storyline both on and off the show, since their livelihood (not to mention their continuing pseudo-celebrity status) depends upon it.

It is called a storyline for a reason, and that reason is that it is not completely true.  It is a story.  The situations are predetermined, usually made up out of whole cloth, and the end result has already been decided.  We are not seeing the day-to-day interactions between the cast members, as much as producers want us to believe otherwise.  What we are seeing is a television production designed specifically to entertain us.  Will Teresa and her brother Joe mend fences?  The producers decide that.  Will Caroline continue to be angry with Teresa for some perceived slight, which may or may not be related to a cookbook?  The producers decide that.

The truth is, none of us know what is really going on in their lives, and if we did, we would probably be bored to tears.  Sure, they all sell stories to magazines, leak information cloaked as anonymous sources, and tweet like there is no tomorrow, but that is all done in furtherance of their assigned storyline.  If any of them tell you differently, they are lying, and they are being paid very well to lie to fans of the show, and thus protect the storyline at all costs.  Entertaining us is how they make their living, after all, and of course none of them want to lose the limelight, since they are all attention whores by definition, or else they would not be on a show like that in the first place.

In other words, the Real Housewives is the furthest thing from real or reality, and some people watching those shows really need to get a grip.

I’m gonna sue you like your mother didn’t know! [LOL]

Tags

Reno 911, Sue you like your mother didn't know

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