19. The feud became a lynchpin of American culture
Throughout the twentieth century, the Hatfield and McCoy feud grew in legend. It became sensationalized in newspapers and magazines, fictionalized in periodicals and film, satirized in vaudeville, and trivialized in cartoons and comics. Portions of the feud were presented as romantic drama, as in the film Roseanna McCoy, released in 1949, which approached the feud from the perspective of star-crossed lovers of the Romeo and Juliet type. Mark Twain was one of the first to use the feud as a basis for one of his tales, describing the feud between the Grangerfords and the Shepherdson’s in his novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Even Betty Boop appeared in the cartoon with a feud as a backdrop.
Abbott and Costello used the feud as a backdrop, though a highly fictionalized version, in their film Comin’ Round the Mountain in 1951. The Flintstones presented a version of the feud, featuring the Hatrocks and the Flintstones, in an episode entitled The Flintstones Hillbillies which originally aired in 1964. Some attempts have been made to present the feud accurately as a historical event, all of which have come under criticism from some quarters due to the variations in the records of the actual event, which were skewed by the viewpoints of the source information, with records coming from Kentucky favoring the McCoy family, and those from what is now Mingo County (formerly part of Logan County, West Virginia) tending to support the Hatfields.