These were flourishing times for the Western desperado, and he became famous, and, as it were, typical, at about this era. Perhaps this was due in part to the fact that the railroads carried with them the telegraph and the newspaper, so that records and reports were made of what had for many years gone unreported. Now, too, began the influx of transients, who
saw the wild West hurriedly and wrote of it as a strange and dangerous country. The wild citizens of California and Montana in mining days passed almost unnoticed except in fiction. The wild men of the middle plains now began to have a record in facts, or partial facts, as brought to the notice of the reading public which was seeking news of the new lands. A strange and turbulent day now drew swiftly on.
Chapter IV
The Early Outlaw—The Frontier of the Past Century—The Bad Man East of the Mississippi River—The Great Western Land-Pirate, John A. Murrell—The Greatest Slave Insurrection 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