20 Bitter Historical Feuds That Refused To End

The Hatfields of West Virginia and McCoys of Kentucky, living across the Tug Fork from each other, had been feuding on and off since the late 1870s, into the early 1890s. Most scholars doubt the feud was in fact precipitated by the hog-theft that is the root of the legend, though there was an attack on the McCoys’ house on New Year’s in 1888, and by the time Ellison “Cottontop” Mounts was hanged in 1890 for one of the Hatfield-McCoy scuffle’s more dastardly deeds, most of the action was done. The irony, of course, being that folklore remembers a stolen pig as being more noteworthy than a hanging, after more than ten years of vicious violence. Huh.

In 1880, after over twenty years of hostility from the local community, a vigilante mob killed five people associated with James Donnelly and his family and torched their house in Biddulph Township, Ontario. Two trials followed, neither of which resulted in a conviction. The tensions that led to the Donnelly Massacre stemmed in part from James Donnelly killing his neighbor Patrick Farrell in the middle of a dispute in 1857. Relations with neighbors soured over alleged land disputes, business rivalry with stagecoaches, and many accusations of assaults. The Donnellys were an Irish immigrant family who lived under a cloud of enmity for much of their time in Ontario.

The Graham–Tewksbury range war was a long feud in Arizona Territory between the Graham and Tewksbury families. Although estimates of the death toll range from 35 to more than 50, and it’s unclear exactly how the war began, its carnage and violence marked the majority of the 1880s. Both families vied for control of sheep and cattle ranges, for water, and even hired guns in their respective causes. Lynchings and ambushes were commonplace during this time in the territory. Eventually, the war died down.

The so-called Sutton-Taylor feud of the Reconstruction era pitted the extended Taylor family network of DeWitt County, Texas, and its allies against lawman William Sutton and his allies for nearly a decade. While it is superficially a family feud, the violence was driven in part by Confederate loyalties and local politics. The outlaw John Wesley Hardin sided with the Taylor faction during the feud. The feud was eventually ended by Texas Rangers.

The Civil War may have been over for the nation, but not for northeast Texas. The pro-Confederate faction led by Bob Lee and the Union supporters led by Lewis Peacock continued their war of kidnappings, ambushes and killings. The Lee-Peacock feud continued for several years into the early 1870s, and took both leaders’ lives.

A family feud? People often describe this as one, but the Tolliver faction and Martin faction spent years battling for control of Morehead, Kentucky. Dirty elections and arrests escalated into vengeance killings; in 1887, Craig Tolliver and several associates were killed. What we think of as a classic mountain family feud was actually, at root, a ruthless tussle for who would rule the county. (It reminds us that city council elections used to be scary, scary business. But then who wants excitement at the local level?)

The Gunns have a legendary feud with the Keiths going back some five hundred years in which, one tradition says, the Keiths turned up to an arranged battle with two riders on each horse. According to tradition, in the late medieval period the Gunns and Keiths were feuding for land and power in Caithness and Sutherland. This was symbolically resolved by modern representatives in 1978 in a reconciliation ceremony.

There’s some debate among historians about exactly who fought whom. What’s clear is that generations of tension between the Clan Chattan and (traditionally) Clan Cameron culminated in a staged battle in 1396 at the North Inch of Perth, in front of King Robert III. However, the two sides still went on to fight for years afterwards, so the “problem solved” approach worked out about as well as you’d guess.

MacLeod and MacDonald branches fought for generations over territorial control of the Hebrides and the Isle of Skye. In 1601, the feud reignited when Donald Gorm Mor MacDonald humiliatingly ended his marriage to Margaret MacLeod, sending her home on a one-eyed horse — an insult that sparked the so-called War of the One-Eyed Woman.

The Percys, major lords on the English border, and the Douglases, one of Scotland’s most powerful noble families, were locked in conflict for several generations, as England and Scotland clashed. Their most famous meeting was the 1388 Battle of Otterburn, but that battle was only one episode in a much longer story.

In general terms, the Guelphs were the papal party, and the Ghibellines supported the emperor. This distinction divided cities all over northern and central Italy for several generations, continuing long after they forgot the original cause of the quarrel. That original cause was probably of little interest to most people, as business rivalries and family grudges provided more immediate incentives for strife. Florence itself later divided into Black and White Guelphs, who fought no less relentlessly.

In 1511, Pope Julius II successfully enforced a peace agreement between two of Rome’s most powerful baronial families, the Orsini and the Colonna, which had been rivals for centuries over control of territory, military forces, influence within the city, and elections of the popes. Each had produced numerous cardinals, even popes, and their allegiances and alliances had shifted in a pragmatic way, depending on where their interests might lie.

The Strozzi family was a major Florentine banking dynasty and rival to the Medici family. During several generations of their history, the two families were rivals, as the Strozzi challenged Medici political dominance, resulting in Medici governments banishing leading members of the Strozzi. Filippo Strozzi the Younger led the resistance against Medici rule, which was defeated at Montemurlo in 1537. He died in custody.

The rivalry between the Percy and Neville families for territory and royal favor in northern England saw Percy men attack a Neville wedding party at Heworth in 1453, and continued between the families for several decades. The families broadly opposed sides in the early decades of the Wars of the Roses, with historians still arguing over the extent to which the rivalry helped cause the Wars.

After the longtime lords of Devon, the Courtenays, came to see William Bonville’s rise as a threat to their power in the county, the king issued a ‘royal command’ to stand down — which both sides ignored for years. The result was years of raids, sieges, and other mayhem that ultimately culminated in the bloody Battle of Clyst Heath in 1455.

Contrary to popular belief, Billy the Kid did not start the Lincoln County War. The war was the culmination of a rivalry between the commercial faction of Lawrence Murphy and James Dolan and the faction of John Tunstall and Alexander McSween, who were fighting in New Mexico Territory over government contracts and political influence. This rivalry simmered for years before finally erupting into violence. Billy the Kid came onto the scene during this war after John Tunstall was killed.

Newton’s method of calculus was discovered earlier, but Leibniz’s was the first to be published. Leibniz also developed the notation that still is standard. Supporters on both sides fanned the flames of a dispute that burned on for decades, and, when Newton was president of the Royal Society, he was able to tilt the outcome of the society’s investigation of the matter in his own favor. Most historians today, however, believe that they worked independently.

A common but unproven tale asserts that Newton deliberately ruined a portrait of Hooke. Hooke did however strongly criticize Newton’s theories of optics, and the two had disputes on priority concerning ideas about gravity and planetary motion. Their rivalry continued for the rest of their overlapping careers, and Newton sometimes withdrew his ideas from public debate so as to avoid criticism. The extent to which Hooke influenced Newton’s thinking is still an open issue among scholars.

In the late 1800s, Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh feuded furiously for nearly two decades to out-shovel and out-species each other in the fossil departments. Although their attempts to steal specimens and sink each other’s careers led to some taxonomic boo-boos and shakier-than-they should be reconstructions (which later scientists had to fix), Cope and Marsh managed to produce gargantuan fossil collections and super-charged American paleontology.

I just learned this. I am a huge fan of Adidas as well as Puma but I had no idea they were one company in the beginning. Brothers Adi and Rudolf Dassler had a shoe company together. Things between them fell apart during and after World War II. Adi started Adidas and Rudolf started the company that eventually became Puma. The entire town of Herzogenaurach was divided for decades along brand lines. In 2009 employees of both firms had a symbolic soccer match to demonstrate “closure” between the two brands. It would appear, however, the reconciliation didn’t happen until after the brothers were dead.

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