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Hatfields made me do it! 10 Seconds later, the only person legally
executed in this long and bloody feud plunged to his death.
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82 GREAT FEUDS IN HISTORY
Ellison Mounts s execution signaled the end of the feud. It had
lasted a dozen years and cost a dozen lives. By 1892, the rail-
road through the Tug Valley was completed and coal began to
be shipped out, and as the railroads opened up more and more
of these isolated valleys, internecine family feuds like that
between the Hatfields and the McCoys withered away. There
were new enemies to fight now, most notably the rascally coal-
mine owners. As the owners soon discovered to their cost, the
bruising violence that had hallmarked the beginning of South
Appalachian economic modernization was now aimed in their
direction. Mountain men turned-miners had lost none of their
combative spirit, as they so ably demonstrated in a long conflict
with owners that culminated in the bloody coal wars of the
1920s.
As for the two patriarchs who had instigated all this mayhem,
they lived long lives. Ran l McCoy operated a ferry in Pikeville until
his death on March 28, 1914, from burns caused by his clothes
catching fire. To the end he was consumed by bitterness, having
never recovered from that dreadful New Year s Day of 1888.
Anse Hatfield moved his family away from the valleys to Main
Island Creek, near Sarah Ann, West Virginia, where he got reli-
gion and started a lucrative logging operation. Unlike Ran l, who
never quit ranting against his hated enemies, in later years
Anse refused to even mention the feud. Maybe it was con-
science after all, there was an awful lot of blood on Hatfield
hands more likely he was anxious just to bury the past and
concentrate on his business dealings. Along with the money
came respectability, since he lived to see his nephew Henry first
become governor of West Virginia and then a United States
Senator.
Anse s death on January 6, 1921, at the age of eighty-three,
even made the New York Times, which reported that the old
feud leader  died quietly in his bed last night of pneumonia.
Hundreds attended his funeral, and later the family erected a
$3,000 marble statue carved in Carrara, Italy, over the grave.
But anyone seeking a more appropriate epitaph to the blood-
stained history of these two families need look no further than
04 evans ch 4 1/30/01 12:51 PM Page 83
Hatfields versus McCoys 83
the account rendered by John Spears, an early historian of the
feud, who in the late 1890s visited the long-abandoned cabin of
Anse Hatfield on the east bank of the Tug Fork. Inside, so the
story goes, he found hanging over a fireplace a gaudy lithograph
that read THERE IS NO PLACE LIKE HOME, a homily lost on some
other anonymous visitor who had scrawled in the margin,
 Leastwise, not this side of hell! 11
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CHAPTER 5
Stalin versus Trotsky
Years of feud: 1907 1940
Names: Joseph Stalin Leon Trotsky
Strengths: Infinite patience, ability to Magical orator, with
see the big picture, always an intellect to match
one step ahead of his rivals
Weaknesses: Psychopathic contempt for Narcissistic and self-
human life obsessed
At stake: The legacy of Lenin and control of an empire that
spanned half the globe
No one in history has murdered so often or with such disdain
as Joseph Stalin. The numbers beggar belief some put the body
count as high as twenty million most either shot by firing
squad, starved to death, dispatched to the front in some suici-
dal military disaster, or else worked beyond the limits of human
endurance in the gulags, the network of labor camps that
scarred the Soviet landscape like thousands of evil carbuncles.
Quite why this former theology student felt the need to slaugh-
ter on such scale is a mystery forever buried in the black morass
of his psyche, but the fact remains that when it came to geno-
cide,  Uncle Joe acted with a murderous efficiency that made
every other twentieth-century tyrant appear amateurish.
Wherever Stalin looked he saw, or imagined he saw, enemies,
and he attempted to kill them all. But as we shall see, the one
85
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86 GREAT FEUDS IN HISTORY
person whom he wished to eliminate above all others proved to
be tantalizingly resilient.
Their paths first crossed at the 1907 London Congress, a
grandiose title for a smallish symposium given over to Commu-
nist writers, thinkers, and activists who wished to exchange
ideas and theories. At that time Stalin then still using his real
name, Joseph Dzhugashvili was a thuggish, street-toughened
revolutionary who had already packed a lifetime s experience
into his twenty-eight years. He was born on December 21, 1879,
the son of a drunken cobbler in Gori, Georgia. Growing up in
Georgia, which had suffered centuries of tsarist oppression,
meant that rebellion was in his genes; so it came as no surprise
that while training for the clergy at a seminary in Tiflis (Tbilisi), [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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