ry from a terror which had long paralyzed
its boldest spirits.

"The 'Little Harpe' afterward joined the band of Meason, and became
one of his most valuable assistants in the dreadful trade of
robbery and murder. He was one of the two bandits that, tempted by
the reward for their leader's head, murdered him, and eventually
themselves suffered the penalty of the law as previously related."

Thus it would seem that the first quarter of the last century on the
frontier was not without its own interest. The next decade, or that
ending about 1840, however, offered a still greater instance of
outlawry, one of the most famous ones indeed of American history,
although little known to-day. This had to do with that genius in crime,
John A. Murrell, long known as the great Western land-pirate; and surely
no pirate of the seas was ever more enterprising or more dangerous.

Murrell was another man who, in a decent walk of life, would have been
called great. He had more than ordinary energy and intellect. He was not
a mere brute, but a shrewd, cunning, scheming man, hesitating at no
crime on earth, yet animated by a mind so bold that mere personal crime
was not enough for him. When it is added that he had a gang of robbers
and murderers associated with him who were said to number nearly two
thousand men, and who were scattered over the entire South below the
Ohio river, it may be seen how bold were his plans; and his ability may
further be shown in the fact that for years these men lived among and
mingled with their fellows in civil life, unknown and unsuspected. Some
of them were said to have been of the best families of the land; and
even yet there come to light strange and romantic tales, perhaps not
wholly true, of death-bed confessions of men prominent in the South who
admitted that once they belonged to Murrell's gang, but had later
repented and reformed. A prominent Kentucky lawyer was one of these.

Murrell and his confederates would steal horses and mules, or at least
the common class, or division, known as the "strikers," would do so,
although the members of the Grand Council would hardly stoop to so petty
a crime. For them was reserved the murdering of travelers or settlers
who were supposed to have money, and the larger operations of negro
stealing.

The theft of slaves, the claiming of the runaway rewards, the later
re-stealing and re-selling and final killing of the negro in order to
d