this book is intended to give the authentic story of the famous cave-in-rock of the lower ohio river, as collected from historic and romantic sources, and to present verified accounts of the most notorious of those highwaymen and river pirates who in the early days of the middle west and south filled the mississippi basin with the alarm and terror of their crimes and exploits.
all the criminals herein treated made their headquarters at one time or another in this famous cavern. it became a natural, safe hiding-place for the pirates who preyed on the flatboat traffic before the days of steamboats. it came also to serve the same purpose for highwaymen infesting the old natchez trace and other land trails north and south.
a century ago and more, its rock-ribbed walls echoed the drunken hilarity of villains and witnessed the death struggles of many a vanished man. today this former haunt of criminals is as quiet as a tomb. nothing is left in the cave to indicate the outrages that were committed there in the olden days.
one state historian of our own times—parrish, of illinois—thus describes it: “the gruesome spot, which in those old border days witnessed many a scene of revelry and bloodshed, is today no more than a curiosity, its past victims, white and black, forgotten. just below it, where, in 1801, there stood one lone cabin, there is today a thrifty village.” in a sense the victims have been forgotten; yet they survive in the true stories
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of such of them as the preserved records can be made to disclose.
the story of the harpes is more than that of mere criminals. they were arch-criminals among criminals, apparently loving murder for its own sake. there was a time when the whole of kentucky and tennessee was terrorized at the possibility of their appearance at any hour in any locality. samuel mason (or meason) the wilsons, and others, measured up more nearly to the standard of true highwaymen and pirates. if they had lived in england their careers would have closed on tyburn hill or at the rope’s end on “execution dock.” the stories of james ford show that his real classification must forever remain largely a mystery.
any history of these outlaws would doubtless be looked upon as wild fiction unless the statements were carefully verified by court records and contemporary newspaper notices, and the records of early writers who gathered the facts regarding them when these facts were told by men and women who lived at the time the atrocities were committed. the adage that “truth is stranger than fiction” is exemplified fully in their careers.
the lives and exploits of these men constitute an important phase in pioneer life because their deeds greatly affected the settlement of the new country. dread of them brought peaceful settlers together in communities and helped to hasten the establishment of law and order. their histories are therefore a part of the history of the country. the historian who passes them over as mere blood-and-thunder tales misses entirely one of the high lights in the great adventure of the settling of the mississippi basin.
owing to the sparse population and the great distances
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between settlements in the west, the early accounts of these criminals and their crimes were subject to change and to the effects of terrorizing rumor. in time the deeds of one would be attributed to another, and the circumstances of one crime confounded with others. in the main, however, tradition preserved a generally consistent story. here and there men like james hall and the editors of early newspapers preserved accounts of them and so blazed the way to court records and approximated the dates for private archives to be consulted. the pages that follow contain the result of years of patient investigation of these records and of archives that have never been published.
numbers in brackets inserted in the text refer to the authorities as numbered in the bibliography.
otto a. rothert
louisville, kentucky, march 17, 1923.
