Sport Feuding
It's a beautiful day in this neighborhood. By Bill Vaughn
 

[read the beginning] One early fight, however, was a rock-throwing battle in 1922 sparked by the issue of abusive language. Over the next nine years a dozen men were murdered by gunshot or bludgeon, and there were scores of assaults and several torched buildings. In 1931 a local newspaper, the Daily Progress, reported that “wholesale hotheaded shooting was the order of the day yesterday . . . when two men stood face to face and killed each other in a fierce pistol-shotgun duel.” The combatants were Manuel Morris, 45, and Bernard Shiflett, 35. Three bystanders were also wounded in the melee. According to witnesses, Shiflett’s carcass was filled with lead from head to toe. These clans were still going at it as late as 1961, when a jury sentenced 40-year-old George Shiflett to 60 years in the state pen for shooting to death his cousin, Eugene Morris, a 38-year-old father of nine, in a dispute about a stolen barrel of corn mash.

America’s most notorious feud was played out in a forested floodplain not unlike that of the Clark Fork’s. Trouble in the remote Tug River Valley, on the border between Kentucky and West Virginia, had been percolating long before Randolph McCoy accused Floyd Hatfield in the fall of 1878 of stealing his hog. But contrary to folklore, the families didn’t take up arms to settle the dispute, they went to court. A jury ruled in Hatfield’s favor, and McCoy abided by the verdict, although he did not accept his defeat gracefully. However, none of the preexisting bad blood compelling the judge to stock the jury with equal numbers of Hatfields and McCoys was spilled until Johnse Hatfield knocked up Randolph’s daughter, Rose Anna. Two years later, in 1882, three of the girl’s brothers murdered Ellison Hatfield. Then the Hatfield patriarch, “Devil Anse,” avenged his brother by executing Randolph’s three sons near what is now Matewan, West Virginia. This blood feud would embroil Kentucky and West Virginia for another decade, bring the dispute over borderland jurisdiction to the U.S. Supreme Court, and cost eight more lives.

 During the same decade a lethal running battle broke out between cattlemen and sheepmen along Cherry Creek in the Tonto Basin of what is now central Arizona. For years the first cattlemen in these meadows, where grama grass grew to the stirrups of a horse and the ridges were black with pine forest, had vowed that no matter what squabbles arose among themselves, not a single sheep would enter this open range. They looked down on sheepmen and the Navajo herdsmen they employed, and were horrified by the grotesque damage done to other areas of the territory, where the naturally close-cropping sheep had been allowed to graze grass to the nubbin and whose sharp hooves had torn up the turf. When the biggest sheep outfit in the territory, the Dagg Brothers of Flagstaff, decided in 1886 to move a herd south over the Mogollon Rim from exhausted pastures, they hired a local clan of ne’er-do-wells, the Tewksburys, for protection. Within a year local cattlemen had driven the sheep out of the Basin, sparking a full-tilt feud that would claim the lives of a score of men over the next six years in what would become known as the Pleasant Valley War.

Range wars between ovinophiles and bovinophiles would flare across the grasslands of the West for many decades to come. In Wyoming, for example, it was estimated that in a two-decade period surrounding the turn of the twentieth century raiding cattlemen and their henchmen bludgeoned and shot to death more than 100,000 sheep. It was predicted that this sort of carnage would occur in the incomparably rich prairies of Montana, but in fact many cattlemen here were hedging their bets and setting aside part of their range for sheep. Even so, when Kitty was a child growing up in the 1960s on a thousand acres of irrigated Hereford ranch in Montana’s Helena Valley, the frontier prejudice against woolies was still rampant. Every fall when the cattle buyer came to call she and her five siblings were compelled to hide their thirty-head herd of Suffolks—each beloved 4-H sheep bestowed with a name like Stuart, Stanley or Stephanie—because their presence might make the buyer lower his price for the family’s beef.

PEOPLE FROM DIFFERENT CLASSES fight in different ways. While the rabble are fond of throwing rocks, upscale persons hire lawyers. In the early 1990s a scion of the family that owned a famous Midwest candy company bought eighty acres in the hills overlooking what I call the Valley of the Liberals, which is home to some of Montana’s pricier addresses and its leading professional people, and commissioned an architect to design an elegant concrete house to perch on a piney ridge. The problem, as the Midwesterner discovered, was that the most convenient road to this acreage was claimed by a man the neighbors called The Troll. And The Troll decided that no one could pass. After ordering the Midwesterner and his wife repeatedly to stay off his road, he dug a trench across it and built a barricade of felled trees. The Midwesterners went to court, allied with several other families. Expensive proceedings drug on for years, demonstrating to all parties that the legal system will bend over backward to accommodate lawsuits as long as the litigants continue to pony up the money to keep them alive. After The Troll counter­sued, claiming that the vehicles of his enemies had damaged his road, the Midwesterners finally abandoned their suit. The house remains unbuilt. And there the matter sits.

Men learn to quarrel with one another in the same way they learn how to sit a horse, or talk to a woman; that is, from their dads. The eccentric habits of Ben Vaughn were legendary in the marshy boondocks where he raised me and my sister, without the benefit of a woman’s touch, after our mother died when I was seven. We lived on three bushy acres straddling Sand Coulee Creek south of Great Falls, Montana, in a paradise for hayseeds called Rat Flats. Although it was scraped from the Great Plains instead of the Rockies, Rat Flats, which also lay in an economy-class floodplain dotted with shabby, cold comfort ranchettes, was culturally identical to my new Squalor Zone. The refurbished commercial turkey coop we called home was less than a quarter mile from the Missouri.
My old man kept chickens and pigs and a horse named Pinky and for a time owned part-interest in a buffalo named George. He fed his pigs stale doughnuts he fished from bakery trash cans. For his sake it was probably a good thing he had this menagerie to fuss over, to distract him from his darker passions. Besides bars and bar fighting he also enjoyed spreading roofing nails in the ditches of the county road because he didn’t like the growl of dirt bikes. After shooting a neighbor’s noisome dog he claimed that he was just trying to scare it into silence and it musta hadda heart attack. He regularly strode along the creek and shotgunned crows in the box elders because their cackling put him on edge.

In his later years he sought to augment his civil service pension with extra cash, so he invested in plumbing and electrical outlets in order to create lots on his front acre for three rent trailers. The neighbors circulated a petition intended to stem the buildup of even more squalor and forced the county commissioners to deny him permission for any hookups. Cantankerous to the end of his life, he trucked three dented mobile homes to his pasture anyway, and parked a couple of his vintage Dodge Darts out there as well. When the neighborhood complained he gleefully pointed out that since I ain’t hooked up nothin’ no law was broke.

So on that tempestuous day of the fire at the Rent Trailer I found myself thinking about my old man’s seething inner world and wondering if it was possible that the dark side of his character might be at play again, this time in the fields of Dark Acres. It was one thing, of course, to ponder the past intellectually, but when another outbuilding exploded and the hot astringent smell of burning chemicals wafted over us as we scurried away from the flames, my whole being was instantly swept back to another hot summer day, this one when I was ten years old. My father had disregarded common sense and was burning off thistles and tumbleweed by dragging around a sputtering tire on a chain, when one of those inevitable prairie gusts came up and swept flames into the fort I had built in the brush along the creek. The little shack was instantly engulfed. As Dad ran to fetch a hose the vials of chemicals that came with my chemistry set arrayed inside began to pop and sputter, spouting purple and chartreuse flares, filling the air with the smell of vaporizing sulphur and manganese and cobalt. My fort, my sanctuary, burned to the ground as he wrestled helplessly with the hose.

Much to my surprise, however, this would not be the fate of the Rent Trailer. Because the next thing that happened was deputies and firemen all over, speeding up in a dozen trucks, shaking their heads in amusement at our puny efforts, circling the Rent Trailer like Comanches in some ancient oater. They squashed the inferno in short order and even managed to save the home, whose shell-shocked occupants moved right back in. People from different classes fight in different ways. While the rabble are fond of throwing rocks, upscale persons hire lawyers. In the early 1990s a scion of the family that owned a famous Midwest candy company bought eighty acres in the hills overlooking what I call the Valley of the Liberals, which is home to some of Montana’s pricier addresses and its leading professional people, and commissioned an architect to design an elegant concrete house to perch on a piney ridge. The problem, as the Midwesterner discovered, was that the most convenient road to this acreage was claimed by a man the neighbors called The Troll. And The Troll decided that no one could pass. After ordering the Midwesterner and his wife repeatedly to stay off his road, he dug a trench across it and built a barricade of felled trees. The Midwesterners went to court, allied with several other families. Expensive proceedings drug on for years, demonstrating to all parties that the legal system will bend over backward to accommodate lawsuits as long as the litigants continue to pony up the money to keep them alive. After The Troll counter­sued, claiming that the vehicles of his enemies had damaged his road, the Midwesterners finally abandoned their suit. The house remains unbuilt. And there the matter sits.  [read more tomorrow or maybe the next day

COPYRIGHT © 2009 BILL VAUGHN