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 recollects the story behind the book and how it led him to find another manuscript written by Squirrel Huntin’ Sam McCoy:

How did you get involved in Hatfield-McCoy research?

Well, if you want me to come right down to a fine point, it happened one spring when we were putting on a little program of art exhibitions and so forth in the little park of Pikeville, near Pikeville College, where I taught. And the leader of the arts and crafts just happened to be talking you know about how he would get up and steer the county and this sort of thing and finally he said something like, “We’d like to name this road from here to Williamson, West Virginia, the Hatfield-McCoy Highway, but we don’t know much about the Hatfields and McCoys. It’s just largely hearsay.” Well almost before he snapped off, a woman called him and said, “Wait a minute now, why my mother (which most people know was a poet) wrote a pretty good history of the feud, but she sent it off and she couldn’t get it published so she willed it to my brother and he has it in his trunk right now.” Well that liked to bowled a man over. We didn’t expect that sort of windfall. So I was on the group… I was secretary, actually. And as secretary, I got to go and hunt this person and she let me have a copy of this manuscript and I was reading it before we heard from the owner who began to object by saying he “hadn’t give permission for her to give that to you.” And so after a good bit of wrangling and so forth I finally got to read the manuscript. And it was an excellent almost unheard of story of the Hatfield-McCoy Feud. Because she had been a teacher. Truda McCoy was her name. And she had walked all over Pike County teaching and that sort of thing and interviewing people in the ‘30s. And built up a manuscript of four or five hundred pages. And there it was.

It reads almost like fiction with dialect and all. You edited this book. How much did you change it?

How much did I change it? I changed it so little that you can’t tell it really. As the editor said in the preface, Leonard has taken this material and seemingly has done a good job but we can’t see his tracks anywhere. I simply touched it here and there in a matter of maybe a word or something of this kind and that’s all that I did for it. And since it’s the first story written especially with the viewpoint of the McCoys, the only one that we have, alongside numbers of books by the Hatfields, this turns out to be probably the best history now and probably the best history we will ever have of the Hatfield-McCoy Feud entirely. She didn’t just talk about the McCoys. She showed the compassion and so forth of the Hatfields in the story, too.

How important was her documentation of where she found the stories?

Well, she knew that… Since she was trying to sell it apparently as documentary material, she footnoted it herself. Her material. I think that certainly is what saved the book and made it authentic. Because she, in the early thirties and even before that, had interviewed people still alive who knew about the feud and even had been in the feud, had fought and died and sweated in the feud. And she put those names, well she footnoted the original manuscript. I simply left it out to some extent and put them in separate statements below the end of chapters. So it seems an authentic book by having those documented there by the McCoys and Hatfields themselves.

Why were the people willing to talk to her?

That was the key to the entire thing because after the feud was over and everybody had been killed off that was going to be killed off the thing settled down into kind of a limbo. The Hatfields had been put away pretty well, you see, in the novels and books that had been written about them. But the McCoys had not had that much publicity and most of it seemed bad so they simply did not talk about the feud. Didn’t want to talk about the feud. And I’ve met people who still won’t talk about the feud. But some few that I got the names of from Mrs. McCoy’s book and from inquiring, while I was at their home they did let me hear from them. And especially when they showed me McCoy artifacts that they had. And them show me pictures on the wall that had been taken back during the time. And so you see the pictures are quite authentic and valuable too that fill the book.

What are the feelings today about the feud?

Well now that we have heard from the McCoys and they have taken… When this book came out, some McCoys maybe didn’t want to buy it. But when it caught on, you might say, we began to get orders from all over the United States from both Hatfields and McCoys, and in-laws and so forth, saying they were kin to the Hatfields and McCoys. So it seems except for rare exceptions the McCoys have simply gone ahead and accepted the story and accepted the material. And some have been willing to offer their information fairly freely. After the book came out, I’ve been able to collect a good bit of stuff, including the old Squirrel Huntin’ Sam McCoy manuscript that I found with another McCoy: Orville McCoy.

Does he talk about the feud?

Squirrel Huntin’ Sam McCoy was in the feud. And here’s the only person I’ve heard from on either side that really can tell almost all of the feud. So he fled under attack as late as 1910 from people who was still picking at him and went West. And when he settled out at Joplin… He first went all around the United States. But he settled in Joplin. And there in 1931… He got a little tablet, a schoolroom tablet, and he started writing and putting chapters and verses and subject matter of the heading and he was writing an epic. Wrote page after page, handwriting. And he condensed it. And he told a pretty good story in 52 pages of manuscript. And Orville McCoy had that and was willing, after the other book had come out and after he had learned me and came and visited me, and I promised him of course them royalties, that I was able to put together the Squirrel Huntin’ Sam McCoy manuscript.