Truda Williams McCoy’s The McCoys: Their Story (1976) is a classic book about the Hatfield-McCoy Feud. Truda, a McCoy descendant born in 1902 who married a grandson of Ran’l McCoy, collected her stories directly from feud participants and close family members prior to and during the 1930s. Truda was unable to publish her manuscript, but after her death in 1974 Dr. Leonard W. Roberts located and edited the manuscript, then published it through Preservation Council Press. In this 1982 interview, Dr. Roberts contemplates general issues about the feud:

Was the Hatfield-McCoy Feud one in which more people were killed?

I suppose there were fewer people killed in this feud than say some others, although we don’t have any documentation of that one. But the number killed runs anywhere from 20 to 75, let’s say, Hatfields and McCoys. Some of the elements in this fight might be noted. Notice the first time there was some fighting was over a hog that had pigs and the owner Randolph McCoy had marked his ears with a mark. He found those in a pen of a Hatfield. Now rather than pulling a gun—guns on each other—they weren’t that savage, all they wanted was law to take its course. Randolph simply went to the magistrate of the district and brought out a warrant against Floyd Hatfield for the return of his hogs. The old sow had had pigs, you see, by this time. And what happened? The magistrate was a Hatfield. And he knew it. Yet he thought that everybody would play fair and square. We had just come out of the Civil War. We were righting wrongs. They were going to, if they were ever going to. And it seemed they wanted law and order to take over. But it didn’t hardly take over in this case. The fellow Hatfield [presumably, he means Preacher Anse] who brought the trial decided on a jury. Rather than just have two or three testify here or there and let him then make the decision himself, he called in twelve jurors. And then they started voting. And they came out 7 to 5 in favor of Hatfield to keep the hogs.

What should we really remember about the feud? How is it important to us today?

Well that it was simply honest men and women living in a kind of rough and tumble era, especially just after the Civil War when emotions and values were pretty badly mocked and pretty badly thrown aside. But remember that some people including Hatfields and McCoys tried to see that law was established again. Rather than simply running amuck as they had done in small groups, robbing and killing. Remember the Civil War and the conditions of the times. Coming out of the war was this idea of posse or idea of organizing a group. It was almost as if any time there was a fight going between one man and another, pretty soon he was backed by fifteen or twenty men that he’d drawn in, either through persuasion or through kinship or access to mercenary ways—they offered him a piece of land or help him build his home or something of that kind to come in and fight—and so it developed in some cases into a kind of mercenary situation. But let’s remember that there weren’t too many actually killed and eventually the governors began to try to stop it and almost got in a war themselves. Finally threw the thing in the courts and even the Supreme Court made a decision about what states could do and what they couldn’t do in handling and controlling their citizens. So law and order did begin to develop. And of course we began to have the recovery of America after the Civil War. Timber. Lots of fuel and coal, things of this kind. So pretty soon, business began to boom in the mountains where there was plenty of timber, plenty of coal, plenty of resources. And so by 1900 the thing had sort of drifted over. And nowadays when you go into the area, here’s a McCoy that’s married to a Hatfield, Hatfield married to a McCoy, and down and down the line. And unless you name it to them they have forgotten about anything like a feud.

Is there anything else you would want someone to know about the story?

Well, I guess it’s generally unknown or understood that Hatfields and McCoys are simply decent, honest, migratory people who had come into the mountains from their areas back in the east and eventually further back, you know, in Scotland and Ireland. And they settled here in the mountains and they began to pick up land in the legal and rightful ways and establish their families. And actually the first decade or the first generation, they’d married within one another. They’d lived on the West Virginia side at the time and then later on the Kentucky side. What drove a wedge between them probably was not the Civil War alone but notice what the Civil War produced. It produced a separation of Virginia from West Virginia. Now how would you feel if you were fighting for your mother country living across here on the Tug River side and all at once you were, you became another state that was with the Union? So the people was thrown into kind of a quandary. The Hatfields on the West Virginia side were largely Southern because they were for the South and their mother country immediately was changed for the North. And so they were trying to live a decent life going along with the Southerners and here these people just across the river accusing them of course of rebellion and joining and fighting against the Union. That’s one big thing that we might leave out, the historical patterns and problems that developed pretty fast on the frontier here.