A feud revisited

Like most area residents, I’ve always had a passion about the Hatfield and McCoy feud. I've heard about it from the time I was old enough to sit and listen to my elders. No complete story formed in my mind, just the idea that two families had taken an intense dislike to each other and that bloodshed was the result.

I eventually got my hands on a book that more or less explained the whole thing to me. That was a rarity, something that went into detail on local history. That was something that was lacking even in our 7^th grade Kentucky history book.

I even wrote my first research paper in college on the feud. I eventually narrowed the thing down to how the feud got started. This was in Comp 102 at Eastern Kentucky University.

But it was here that I found out just how little was actually written on the feud itself. In all of that school’s mammoth library, I found just three books.

No matter, I wrote an A paper, one that had only one red mark, at the beginning where I used the past tense of the verb to dwell as dwelt. That, I was told, is an archaic form of the verb. Not where I come from, I responded.

The one thing that kept me interested in the feud was the part played by a relative, probably a distant one, but a relative, nonetheless, who went by the name of Bad Frank Phillips.

Bad Frank went into WV after the members of the raiding party that was responsible for killing Alafair McCoy. Now you know you had to be bad to be able to do that. These boys weren’t coming out peaceably, after all.

But knowing all about the feud, and also finding out how widely the feud itself became known in its time always made me want to see this thing on the wide screen.

Well, all of us who have always wanted to see this tragic bit of history acted out as well as it could be have been disappointed in those feeble attempts made so far. Pretty much all you ever saw about the feud was satirical references to it in cartoons and sitcoms.

That may be about to change. I’m pretty sure everybody knows by now that the History Channel is doing a miniseries on the feud and it stars no less than Hollywood legend Kevin Costner.

Now you and I both know that Kevin is not going to halfway do anything, so his portrayal of Devil Anse will be done right.

And while I’m definitely no actor, I would have given my eye tooth to have gotten the role of Bad Frank. I really do believe I was born to play this part. 

But you ought to also know that I found reference to a real movie being developed by Crazy Heart director Scott Cooper, Robert Duvall and Brad Pitt. And if you’ve ever seen Robert Duvall do anything, you know he’s gonna really own the role he’ll play; no doubt Devil Anse again.

At any rate, the History Channel’s version, the miniseries, will begin starting on Memorial Day and will continue for three nights, and I can’t speak for everyone else, but I can’t wait