New York – Once was (Briefly) “Nieuw Oranje”

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
International Relations, Popular Culture, Regional History

America’s greatest city, the vast metropolis of New York, can claim an interesting and varied history of nomenclature. Until the English hold on New York was established permanently in the late 17th century (permanently that is until the American Revolution!), the settlement changed hands and names several times.

⇩ Manhattan Island 36811F8E-D75C-46AC-87ED-19993BDAB5BAAnyone with a rudimentary grasp of the early colonial period of America will know the early Dutch association with the area of New York. Based on the earlier exploration of the area by Henry Hudson, the Dutch West India Company (WIC) established a trading post on the southern tip of Manhattan island in 1624. The Dutch named the post New Amsterdam✲, the capital of its American colony Nieuw Nederlandt (New Netherland) – comprising an area including the hub of modern-day New York City, a strip of upstate New York including Beverwijck (now Albany), centre of the WIC fur trade, part of Connecticut and New Jersey and bits of the coastline down to the Delaware.

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⇧ 17th century map of Nieuw Nederlandt

The English already had a foothold on Long Island and were keen on securing New Amsterdam and New Netherland for themselves…the English king Charles II granted his brother James, Duke of York rights to a large chunk of land on the Atlantic Seaboard. James duly launched an invasion fleet in 1664. Under pressure, the unpopular Dutch governor Pieter Stuyvesant failed to muster any significant support for its defence and was forced to surrender the settlement without any bloodshed. The occupying English force renamed it New York in honour of the Duke and future king of England and Ireland, James II. Richard Nicholls became the New York colony’s first governor.

A much less familiar fact is that New York was known by two other names at different periods in its history. The first European to set eyes on New York harbour was Florentine Giovanni da Verrazzano in 1524 …. Verrazzano named the place New Angoulême after his patron Francis I of France (formerly the Count of Angoulëme). Verrazzano never attempted to establish a settlement there✥.

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Manhattan Transferred

In 1673 during the Third Anglo-Dutch War, a sizeable Dutch fleet led by Admiral Cornelis Evertsen the Youngest AKA Keesje de Duivel (“Little Cornelis the Devil”) and Jacob Benckes, turned up in New York harbour, demanding the city be surrendered to it. Evertsen knew from intelligence gathered that the English governor (Francis Lovelace) was absent and the settlement’s defences were in a shabby state with Fort James being poorly garrisoned. After a brief military flexing of muscle by the Dutch, the English acting commander surrendered without resistance – in a reversal of the events and results of 1664! [‘The End of New Netherland’, (American History From Revolution to Reconstruction and beyond’), www.let.rug.nl].

New York was renamed Nieuw Oranje (New Orange) in honour of the Prince Willem of Orange (ironically the future King William III of England and Ireland). The officer commanding the Dutch land forces, Captain Anthonij Colve, was appointed governor-general of the restored Dutch colony. The Dutch coup was short-lived however, within a year the English had regained the settlement through the Treaty of Westminster – by which the Netherlands received Suriname in South America as a swap. New York was New York again – this time for good!96CCC6E2-B0B8-4820-ACBE-495885D53447

PostScript: New York by metonym✪ or other informal name

Aficionados of mainstream American popular culture know Gotham or Gotham City as the supposed abode of the superhero Batman, courtesy of the long-running DC comic strip-cum-TV and film series (Gotham City is modelled on NYC albeit evoking the darkest possible manifestation of the city). The original attribution of ‘Gotham’ to New York however long predates the Batman phenomenon (the first Batman comic hit the book stalls in 1939). Its genesis was a creation of the mind of celebrated 19th century writer Washington Irving…Irving first referred to Gotham/NYC in a satirical periodical on New York culture and politics, Salmagundi, in 1807, and the association caught on with the public [‘Gotham City’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

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There are a host of other nicknames for New York but by far the most popular, the most affectionate, is “the Big Apple”. The term gained currency on provincial racecourses circa 1920 and was made popular by newspaper reporter John Fitz Gerald, [‘Why is New York City nicknamed the “Big Apple”?, Elizabeth Nix, 23-Jul-2014, www.history.com].

As The New York Times‘ Sam Roberts remarked of the city’s Dutch name of 1673/1674:

(New York) “was the Big Orange before it was the Big Apple”! [quoted in ‘When New York was officially named New Orange’, Ephemeral New York, 07-Mar-2011, www.ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com].

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✲ the colonists followed this later by naming the adjacent island, present-day Long Island, Nieuw Amersfoort

✥ leaving aside the undocumented and speculative claim made on behalf of Norseman Lief Ericsson who may conceivably have been the first to visit the site of New York over 1,000 years ago

✪ metonym: the use of a (descriptive) name in place of the proper) name because it is closely associated (eg, the “White House” in lieu of the US Presidential Palace)

Robinson Crusoe, the Making of a Universal and Versatile Myth

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Biographical, Creative Writing, Geography, Literary & Linguistics, Popular Culture, Travel

Robinson Crusoe Tercentenary, 1719-2019

3451C32D-A5EC-4678-A59E-FC9A8DB57BB4Three hundred years ago this coming April, London merchant-cum-journalist Daniel Defoe published his debut novel anonymously✱ – it was to become one of the most iconic and most imitated literary works ever…it began with a title page descriptor that read in full:

The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by Pyrates.

74E3659A-FFFB-42DA-B2B0-FCCA848D2F79Once “cast on Shore by Shipwreck”, Crusoe, isolated and alone, is forced to make the best  of a perilous predicament in an alien and challenging environment. His solitary, epic struggle in the face of hardships and the existence of threats from wild animals and the unknown elevates the story to mythic proportions. The myth is complete when Crusoe ultimately succeeds in conquering all impediments and fashions the island into his own “miniature Great Britain”.

A multiplicity and diversity of readings
Robinson Crusoe is a multifaceted work of fiction, viewable from a number of different perspectives. On a straightforward level its an adventure novel and a travel book (rather than a guide) tantalising the 18th century Englishman and woman with a sense of faraway “new worlds” which were still undergoing a process of discovery and exploration.

The personality of the protagonist Crusoe himself is an Everyman figure, representing a cross-spectrum of contemporary English societal types – above all he is the archetypical survivor prompting untold numbers of readers to identify with the despair of his plight and “embraced his myth of struggle, survival and triumph against all odds” [Crusoe: Daniel Defoe, Robert Knox and the Creation of a Myth, Frank, K (2011)].

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⍐ One of the numerous screen adaptations of the ‘Robinson Crusoe’ tale


Crusoe as “economic-imperialist” and coloniser
There is the hero of romantic, bourgeois individualism, the Englishman who turns his dire circumstance to his ultimate financial advantage. When others appear on the island (Friday, the boy slave Xury, the ‘savages’, the Spanish sailors and English mutineers), Crusoe reacts with a sensibility typical of the “natural superiority” of a coloniser and uses the others as ‘commodities’✥. James Joyce described Robinson Crusoe as the “true symbol of the British conquest”, embodying “the whole Anglo-Saxon spirit” [quoted in ‘An introduction to Robinson Crusoe’, (Stephen Sharkey), 21-Jun-2018, www.bl.uk].

A spiritual voyage
On another level Robinson Crusoe can be read as a kind of spiritual autobiography (popular in Defoe’s time). Crusoe’s journey from one exotic land to another can be seen as the “spiritual voyage” of Bunyanesque Puritan Christianity. Crusoe’s long, long sojourn on the island is a test of his faith. Being alone with infinite time on his hands he devotes himself to intense self-scrutiny, questioning the Providence that landed him in his predicament (ie, his relationship with God). Some critics have noted that Crusoe’s thought processes on the island entailed a progression from rebellion, acknowledgement of mortal sin, atonement and religious conversion [‘Robinson Crusoe Theme of Religion’, (shmoop), www.shmoop.com].

DIY Robinson Crusoe and the Conduct book
Defoe provides a very detailed description of how his hero goes about making the most of his enforced stay on the island. As Katherine Frank observes, DeFoe’s novel is the “ultimate how to book: a step-by-step guide on how to live in a particular tricky situation”, ie, a method for surviving alone on a desert island◘ [Frank, op.cit.]. On the ship and again on the island Robinson spends copious amounts of time cataloguing items and making lists of everything that comes into his head.

The novel’s preoccupation with DIY touches on something else close to Defoe’s heart, the “Conduct book”✪ (a kind of user’s guide for life in the 18th century). The self-help component in Robinson Crusoe gives a sample of the writer’s broader interest in instructional works…Defoe spilled a lot of ink in writing a series of published texts telling people how they should live their lives – with titles like The Family Instructor, The Compleat English Tradesman and The Compleat English Gentleman.

A Defoe conduct book on the Robinson Crusoe theme

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Always look on the bright side of life
Defoe’s faith in the individual’s capacity for self-improvement comes through in his novels as much as in the didactic Conduct books. In Robinson Crusoe Defoe’s central character refuses to give up and submit to his fate no matter how glum his prospects look. With each new challenge he faces on the island, Crusoe time and again evokes the “power of positive thinking”…in his solitude he learns “to look more upon the bright Side of my Condition and less upon the dark Side” (Defoe imbues the protagonists of his later novels like Moll Flanders with this same positive disposition) [ibid.]. Defoe really had to be a glass half-full kind of guy to keep bouncing back from all the reversals life was lobbing on him (viz. a succession of self-inflicted, calamitous business ventures he managed to embroil himself in, doing gaol time for failure to pay his debts, etc).CA6103A9-E02F-4B27-B46E-DCD1A6029538

PostScript: Cashing in on the “golden egg”
The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe was an instant commercial success with four editions printed in 1719. Defoe, always with his mind fixated on how to enrich himself, was quick to follow-up Robinson Crusoe with a sequel. The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, published in the same year, proved to be almost as much a hit with the public. The Farther Adventures (usually today called the Further Adventures) was intended to be Robinson Crusoe’s swan-song, but Defoe couldn’t resist going to the well one time too many with a third book in 1720 entitled Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: With his Vision of the Angelick. Serious Reflections ‘bombed’ badly and the less said about it the better⊡.
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✱ it was commonplace for 18th century texts to be published either anonymously or using a pseudonym…Defoe was especially inclined to obscure textual ownership to try to cover himself when raising polemical questions [‘Anonymity in the Eighteenth Century’, (Gillian Paku), (Literature, Literary Studies – 1701 to 1800: Aug 2015 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935338.013.37 www.oxfordhandbooks.com]
✥ Crusoe’s mercenary nature (equating with that of the money-obsessed Defoe) is best illustrated with Xury who Crusoe is happy to sell back into slavery when he is no longer required and by so doing fetch a tidy sum for himself
◘ novelist EM Forster once remarked that Robinson Crusoe reminded him of a “Boy Scout manual”
✪ Conduct books, today’s self-help guides, in Defoe’s day took the form of sermons, devotional writings, familiar letters, chapbooks and instruction manuals offering advice on social mores and manners, spiritual guidance and practical information on state and household duties, [Batchelor, Jennie. “Conduct Book”. The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 09 July 2004
https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=216, accessed 29 December 2018.]
⊡ the Farther Adventures had the same trademark derivative framework as the original novel – Defoe borrowed heavily once again from Robert Knox’s autobiography and seems to have modelled the last part of Crusoe’s journey on a 17th century Moscow Embassy secretary’s travel journal (Moscow – Peking), The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org; Frank, op.cit.]

Creating Crusoe: A Raft of Derivative Sources of Defoe’s Classic Tale

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Creative Writing, Geography, Literary & Linguistics, Natural Environment, Popular Culture

A common retort to people purporting to be in a unique situation of any kind is the phrase, usually emphatically stated, “you’re not Robinson Crusoe!” – ie, (not) alone. The phrase references probably the best-known solitary and physically isolated character in English literature, a shipwrecked voyager stuck seemingly alone on a deserted island in some unidentified expanse of the great oceans. Daniel Defoe’s classic 18th century novel Robinson Crusoe.

A search for the genesis of The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, like the story’s narrative itself, has taken scholars far and wide. Geographically, this has included both the South Pacific and the South Atlantic Oceans, the Caribbean and Ceylon (Sri Lanka). The search has also led, through the work of biographers, to a study of DeFoe’s own life experiences for sources of inspiration for the work of fiction.

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Alexander Selkirk’s adventures
For the great bulk of the (almost exactly) 300 years since Robinson Crusoe was first published, the conventional wisdom has been to attribute the book’s origin to the real life experiences of Alexander Selkirk. Selkirk was a Scottish privateer who fell out with his captain and crewmates on a voyage and was voluntarily marooned on an uninhibited island for a bit over four years. When Robinson Crusoe was published less than a decade later, many made a clear link between it and the well-publicised accounts of Selkirk’s episode of being a solitary castaway. Moreover, some people thought that Defoe’s hero must have been a real person and that the book was a travelogue of actual events [‘Robinson Crusoe’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

Selkirk’s Island 🔽

Some commentators today still hold that Selkirk was the true inspiration for Defoe’s most famous fictional protagonist [‘The Real Robinson Crusoe’, (Bruce Selcraig), Smithsonian Magazine, July 2005, www.smithsonianmag.com; ‘Scientists Research the Real Robinson Crusoe’, (Marco Evers), Spiegel Online, 02-VI-2009, www.spiegel.de]. A perception that was given some added credence by the Chilean government. With an eye to the tourist potential spin-off, Chile renamed Más-a-Tierra, the small island in the South Pacific which had been Selkirk’s enforced home for over four years, Robinson Crusoe Island.

Defoe’s ‘Crusoe’ cf. Selkirk
Most literary critics these days however accept that Selkirk’s epic misadventure was “just one of many survival narratives that Defoe knew about” (by no means the major one)✲. Becky Little has listed some of the key differences between Defoe’s story and the accounts of Selkirk…Robinson Crusoe was shipwrecked, whereas Selkirk asked to be cast on shore; Crusoe is a plantation owner with a colonising mentality who adapts the island to his own world, while Selkirk was effectively a “glorified pirate” who “goes native”; Crusoe’s Island, as Robinson was to discover in time, was inhabited, whereas Más-a-Tierra was completely uninhabited; Crusoe was stuck on his island for 28 long years compared to a shade over four years that Selkirk had to endure [‘Debunking the Myth of the “Real” Robinson Crusoe’, (Becky Little), National Geographic, (28-Sept-2016), www.nationalgeographic.com].

imageAside from Selkirk’s story, Defoe who read widely and voraciously would have drawn on other, existing accounts of shipwreck and survival – this includes a work by 12th century Arab Andalusian writer Ibn Tufail, Hayy ibn Yaqzan, both a philosophical treatise and the first novel to depict a desert island castaway, and the story of Pedro Luis Serrano (Maestre Joan)♉, a 16th century Spanish sailor thought to have been marooned on a small Caribbean Island for seven or eight years [‘RC’, Wikipedia, loc.cit.]❇.

Robert Knox, a prototype for Crusoe?
One of the major influences on Robinson Crusoe is sea captain Robert Knox’s experience of prolonged confinement after his British East India Company ship was forced aground on the island of Ceylon (published in 1681 as An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon). Katherine Frank in her book Crusoe: Daniel Defoe, Robert Knox and the Creation of a Myth, has pointed to the parallels between Defoe and Knox. Knox’s Island confinement consumes some 20 years, comparable to the 28 years Crusoe is marooned on his remote island. Both Crusoe (in the book) and Knox (in real life) are unable to secure the full patrimony (inheritence) entitled them upon their return. Both are engaged in slave-trading activities at different times [Katherine Frank, Crusoe: Daniel Defoe, Robert Knox and the Creation of a Myth, (2011)].

The derivative Defoe
Frank describes Defoe as a “congenital plagiarist” who freely borrowed material  and ideas from numerous sources for Robinson Crusoe. Among the literary works mined by Defoe are Homer’s Odyssey, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations of the English Nation, and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. He also relied upon the books of voyages by contemporary explorers such as William Dampier and Woodes Rogers. And of course there was the borrowings from published accounts of real castaways and their ordeals – in addition to Serrano, Selkirk and Knox, Defoe drew upon the accounts of Fernando Lopez on St Helena in the South Atlantic and Henry Pitman’s stranding on Tortuga, et al [ibid.].

‘Robinson Crusoe’, allegory of incarceration
Frank also draws on biographical aspects of Defoe’s life that can be reflected in the famous novel. On two separate occasions Defoe was imprisoned for failure to settle his (very considerable) debts (the first saw him detained in the Fleet and the King’s Bench Prisons and on a subsequent occasion in notorious Newgate). DeFoe’s journal tells us how profoundly affected he was by imprisonment. Frank invokes the symbolism of being “shipwreck’d by land”, analogising the author’s mandatory detention with the catastrophe of being tossed about in a storm and helplessly cast adrift on a desert island, and concludes that “Robinson Crusoe clearly had its autobiographical genesis in Defoe’s bankruptcies and incarceration” [ibid.].

PostScript: a legion of imitators, the Robinsade
As plentiful as were Daniel Defoe’ sources of inspiration for Robinson Crusoe, the novel has continued to this day to capture the imagination of countless writers, film directors and TV producers. Seemingly ubiquitous, it has inspired the creation of a genre of writing, “survivalist fiction”, and even spawned a literary sub-genre known as the Robinsonade. These works include novels as disparate as Swiss Family Robinson, Treasure Island, The Lord of the Flies and JM Coetzee’s Foe, filmic representations of the novel by Luis Buñuel and modernised updates of the story such as Cast Away, plus the television series Lost in Space and Gilligan’s Island. The form of the Robinsonade has also extended to a Science Fiction offshoot with Sci-Fi Robinsonades (movies: Robinson Crusoe on Mars, The Martian; fiction: The Survivors (Tom Godwin), Concrete Island (JG Ballard)). Robinson Crusoe has proved to be particularly fecund in the world of reality television, inspiring a host of “real life”(sic) programs with titles like Lost! and Survivor that say it all! As Katherine Frank commented, “Crusoe hasn’t just survived, he has thrived, flourished and proliferated”.

﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎﹎
✲ eg, the scholarly consensus tends to the view that no single, real life ‘Crusoe’ existed, the character was an amalgam of “all the buccaneer survival stories” [AD Lambert, Robinson Crusoe’s Island, (2016)]
♉ after Robinson Crusoe was published Serrano became known as the “Spanish Crusoe”
❇ Defoe got the idea for Crusoe’s familiar goatskin clothing from reading about another exile, John Segar, on St Helena

The Much Mooted ‘Hillbilly Wars’ of Appalachia: The McCoy v. Hatfield Feud

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Cinema, Popular Culture, Regional History

One of the iconic historic associations with the hills of Appalachia is the fateful conflict in the last quarter of the 19th century between two mountain-dwelling families – the Hatfields and the McCoys. The feud between the two “warring clans” has tended to be wrapped in the veneer of legend, obscured by the myth-making of popular culture over the decades. The McCoy-Hatfield feud has featured in a raft of US books, songs, comic strips, feature movies and television shows (with both animated and human content)✱. These overwhelmingly fictionalised narratives of the Hatfields and the McCoys have vouchsafed a place for them in the annals of American folklore and at the same time contributed to the caricatured impression of ‘hillbillies’ in the popular consciousness.

Tug Fork Valley and the family patriarchs
In the 19th century the McCoys lived (as they do today) on the Kentucky side of Tug Fork (a tributary of the Big Sandy River), with the Hatfields residing on the other side of the river (in West Virginia). The Hatfield patriarch was William Anderson Hatfield, widely known as ‘Devil Anse’, while the patriarch of the McCoys was Randolph McCoy (sometimes identified as ‘Randall’ McCoy). Of the two families the Hatfields were appreciably more affluent than the McCoys (Devil Anse’s profitable timber business employed many men including some McCoys).

Patriarch of the Hatfield family, ‘Devil Anse’ ⬇
Background to the feud
The earliest incident between the two families seemed to have occurred during the Civil War…in 1865 Asa Harmon McCoy, who fought with the Union during the war, was ambushed and killed by members of a local Confederate militia connected to the Hatfield family. Some have identified the feud’s genesis in the murder, but Harmon McCoy’s siding with the North (while almost all of the McCoys and the Hatfields gave their allegiances to the Confederacy) made him unpopular with both families. His death did not trigger a reprisal and most historians have concluded that the incident was a stand-alone event [‘The Hatfield & McCoy Feud’, History, www.history.com].

A porcine pretext for feuding
Some thirteen years after the shooting of Randall McCoy’s brother, a new incident was the catalyst for a downward decline in relations between the McCoys and the Hatfields. The trigger was a dispute over the ownership of a razorback hog in 1878. The McCoy clan claimed that the Hatfields had stolen one of their pigs. A subsequent legal case (known as the “Hog Trial”) was brought before the local Justice of the Peace (who happened to be a Hatfield), who predictably dismissed the charge…the McCoys responded by killing one of the allies of the Hatfields.

Makings of a vendetta: “Tit-for-tat” acts of vengeance
Over the next ten to twelve years a pattern emerged of accusations, recriminations, acts of violence and retaliations – with excesses on both sides. Both clans used their connexions with the law in ‘home’ jurisdiction (either Kentucky or West Virginia) to try to exact retribution against the other. In separate incidents, the McCoy boys ‘arrested’ Johnse (pronounced “John-see”) Hatfield after he entered into a romantic liaison with Roseanna McCoy✦, followed in turn by Hatfield constables apprehending and extraditing three of Roseanna’s brothers for the killing of Devil Anse Hatfield’s brother Ellison.

Escalation and denouement of the feud
By now “bad blood” was endemic between the families. In the years after 1882 the conflict escalated dramatically…killings met with counter-killings (more than 12 members or associates of the two families died during the decade). A Hatfield raid on the McCoy patriarch’s farm in 1888 – known as the ‘New Year Night’s Massacre’ – resulted in the murder of two of Randolph McCoy’s children. The subsequent Battle of the Grapevine Creek, an attempt by the Hatfields to take out the McCoys once and for all, resulted in an ambush gone wrong…the tables were turned on the Hatfield raiders and the bulk of their number were arrested. Over the next few years they were tried and all given jail sentences (except one, possibly a ‘scapegoat’, who was executed). The ill feelings slowly dissipated with the conclusion of the trials and the conflict receded from memory – in 1890 the New York Times reported that the feud was at an end (there was in fact still the odd simmering flare-up such as in the mid 1890s but the potentially explosive incidents were effectively over) [‘A Long Feud Ended’, NYT, 06-Sep-1890, www.rarenewspapers.com].

⇧ Hatfield clan 1890s

Scope of the feud: a media “beat-up”?
While the McCoy-Hatfield feud played out in the Appalachians, the Eastern Seaboard press whetted the public’s imagination with its well-received accounts of the conflict. The press coverage tended to be negative, especially towards the wealthier Hatfields, who it portrayed as “violent backwoods hillbillies” roaming the mountains wreaking violence. As the shootings continued, what had been a local story of isolated homicides got national traction and was sensationalised by the newspapers.[‘History’, loc.cit.]. Some historians, in particular Altina Waller, have argued that the myth-making surrounding the ‘feud’ has obscured the realities and significance of the event. Waller’s contention is that the feud lasted only twelve years – from the hog episode to the sentencing of the Hatfields. [AL Waller, Feuds, Hatfields, McCoys and Social Change in Appalachia,1860-1900, (1988)].

Advocates for the Appalachian region tend to view the Hatfield-McCoy feud (as depicted by the press) as part of the widespread stereotyping of the entire mountain region [West Virginia Archives and History,, ‘Time Trail, West Virginia’ (1998), www.wvculture.org]. The negativity of the story and the focus on it by external mechanisms of popular culture is seen by many locals in Pike and Mingo counties (where the events took place) and the wider region as another example of the outside’s “Appalachia bashing”✥.

Matewan (WV) wall illustration: ⬆ depicting the Hatfield-McCoy feud

Economic underpinnings of the feud
The feud at its height was a deeply personal one for both families, however an underlying factor in the hostilities was the depressed economic situation in Appalachia at the time. Resentment of Devil Anse Hatfield’s success as a timber merchant (contrasted with the less sanguine fortunes of the McCoys) no doubt played a part in the inter-family tensions. Given the McCoys’ struggle to make a go of farming their land, the incident of the stolen hog (from their perspective) was a serious economic setback for the family. Another player and prime mover behind the conflict was McCoy cousin Perry Cline, who hated Devil Anse and the Hatfields as much as any of the McCoys. Cline was sued by Devil Anse for allegedly cutting timber on Hatfield land. Devil Anse won the judgement and was awarded as damages all of Cline’s virgin West Virginian land (5,000 acres). From that point on, Cline, a lawyer, believing he had been robbed of his rightful property, unwaveringly pursued the Hatfields using his political connections in Kentucky. Cline’s actions, spurred on by the desire to payback Devil Anse Hatfield, helped revive and prolong the feud [AL Waller, ‘Hatfield-McCoy: Economic motives fuelled feud that tarred region’s image’, Lexington Herald Leader, 30-Jul-2012, www.kentucky.com].

Footnote: Rampant flourishing commercialism
The famous feud is long-buried but not forgotten in the Tug Fork and Big Sandy River valleys. The opportunity for commercial advantage from the McCoys and Hatfields’ past remains alive…tourism of the area is well-served by the “Hatfield and McCoy Historical Site Restoration”. In the 21st century reunion festivals and marathons (“no feudin’, just runnin'”) have taken place. More crassly opportunistic was the appearance of descendants of the two families as contestants on the TV panel show ‘Family Feud’ in 1979 [‘Hatfield-McCoy feuds’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

PostScript: The ‘Sheep Wars’
The Hatfield-McCoy feud is not the only protracted inter-clan feud in American history, just the most famous. Arizona’s version of Hatfield v. McCoy was the Pleasant Valley Feud (AKA the ‘Tonto Range War’) which pitted the Grahams’ against the Tewksburys’ in the 1880s and ’90s…the Arizona-based feud was the classic “grazing war” of cattle-men versus sheep-herders, a recurring source of conflict in much of the ‘Old West’ [‘Arizona’s Pleasant Valley War’, www.legandsofamerica.com].

Tewksbury homestead

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Ya-hooo! The Ad-men milking the stereotype for all its worth…

✱ the preceding blog, ‘Ma and Pa Kettle on the Farm Again: Hillbilly Stereotypes in Film and Television’ touched on films based on the McCoy and Hatfield saga. Even in mainstream product advertising, the  overly hirsute, “Moonshine-crazed”, “gun-toting” hillbilly trope permeates, eg. PepsiCo’s “Mountain Dew” soft drink
✦ the subject of a 1949 Hollywood B-movie (Roseanna McCoy) which largely fictionalised the cross-clan romance – New York Times‘ short-hand summation of the movie was “feudin’, fussin’ and lovin'”. The real Johnse later dumped Roseanna for another McCoy, her cousin Nancy who he married
✥ part of a whole litany of complaints by Appalachians about how they are portrayed in the media, in film and TV, by Democrat politicians in the big cities