The Hatfield-McCoy saga begins with 'Devil' Anse Hatfield (Costner) and Randall McCoy (Paxton). Close friends and comrades during the Civil War, they returned to their neighboring homes - Hatfield in West Virginia, McCoy just across the Tug River border in Kentucky - to increasing tensions, misunderstandings and resentments that soon exploded into all-out warfare between the two families. As hostilities grew, friends, neighbors and outside forces joined the fight, bringing the two states to the brink of another Civil War.