n Ever Planned_.

Before passing to the review of the more modern days of wild life on the
Western frontier, we shall find it interesting to note a period less
known, but quite as wild and desperate as any of later times. Indeed, we
might also say that our own desperadoes could take lessons from their
ancestors of the past generation who lived in the forests of the
Mississippi valley.

Those were the days when the South was breaking over the Appalachians
and exploring the middle and lower West. Adventurers were dropping down
the old river roads and "traces" across Kentucky, Tennessee, and
Mississippi, into Louisiana and Texas. The flatboat and keel-boat days
of the great rivers were at their height, and the population was in
large part transient, migratory, and bold; perhaps holding a larger per
cent. of criminals than any Western population since could claim. There
were no organized systems of common carriers, no accepted roads and
highways. The great National Road, from Wheeling west across Ohio,
paused midway of Indiana. Stretching for hundreds of miles in each
direction was the wilderness, wherein man had always been obliged to
fend for himself. And, as ever, the wilderness had its own wild deeds.
Flatboats were halted and robbed; caravans of travelers were attacked;
lonely wayfarers plodding on horseback were waylaid and murdered. In
short, the story of that early day shows our first frontiersman no
novice in crime.

About twenty miles below the mouth of the Wabash river, there was a
resort of robbers such as might belong to the most lurid dime-novel
list--the famous Cave-in-the-Rock, in the bank of the Ohio river. This
cavern was about twenty-five feet in height at its visible opening, and
it ran back into the bluff two hundred feet, with a width of eighty
feet. The floor of this natural cavern was fairly flat, so that it
could be used as a habitation. From this lower cave a sort of aperture
led up to a second one, immediately above it in the bluff wall, and
these two natural retreats of wild animals offered attractions to wild
men which were not unaccepted. It was here that there dwelt for some
time the famous robber Meason, or Mason, who terrorized the flatboat
trade of the Ohio at about 1800. Meason was a robber king, a giant in
stature, and a man of no ordinary brains. He had associated with him his
two sons and a few other hard characters, who together made a band
sufficiently strong to attack any party