Back Home: Being the Narrative of Judge Priest and His People

by Irvin S. Cobb

“I notice some of you younger fellows have taken here lately to calling this town a city, but when I first came here, it wasn't even a town—just an overgrown wood landing, in the river bottom, with the shacks and houses stuck up on piles to keep 'em out of the river mud. There were still Indians a plenty too—-Chickasaws and Creeks and some Shawnees—-and some white folks who were mighty near as ignorant as the Indians. Why it hadn't been but a few years before—three or four at most, I reckon—since they'd tried to burn the widow woman Simmons as a witch. As boys, some of you must have heard tell of old Marm Simmons. Well, I can remember her and that's better. She lived alone with an old black cat for company, and she was poor and friendless and sort of peculiar in her ways and that started it. And one spring, when the high-water went down, the children got sickly and begun dying off of this here spotted fever. And somebody started the tale that old Marm Simmons was witching 'em to make 'em die—that she'd look at a child and then the child would take down sick and die. It was Salem, Massachusetts, moved up a couple of hundred years, but they believed it—some of them did. And one night a dozen men went to her cabin and dragged her out along with her cat—both of them spitting and yowling and scratching like blood sisters—and they had her flung up onto a burning brush pile and her apron strings had burnt in two when three or four men who were still sane came running up and broke in and kicked the fire apart and saved her. But her old cat went tearing off through the woods like a Jack-mer-lantern with his fur all afire.”

He paused a moment to suck deliberately at his pipe, and I sat and thought about old Marm Simmons and her blazing tom cat, and was glad clear down to my wriggling toes that I didn't have to go home alone. In a minute or so Cap'n Jasper was droning on again:

“So you can tell by that, that this here city of yours was a pretty tolerable rough place In its infancy, and full of rough people as most all new settlements are. You've got to remember that this was the frontier in those days. But the roughest of them all, as I recollect, rougher even than the keel-boaters and the trappers and even the Indian traders—was Harve Allen. He set himself up to be the bully of this river country.

“Well, he was. He was more than six feet tall and built like a catamount, and all the whiskey he'd drunk—you could get a gallon then for what a dram'll cost you now—hadn't burnt him out yet. He fought seemingly just for the pure love of fighting. Come a muster or a barn raising or an election or anything, Harve Allen fought somebody—and licked him. Before he had been here a year he had beat up half the men in this settlement, and the other half were pretty careful to leave him alone, even those that weren't afraid of him. He never used anything though except his fists, and his feet and his teeth—he never needed anything else. So far as was known, he'd never been licked in his whole life.

“You see, there was nobody to stop him. The sheriff lived away down at the other end of the county, and the county was five times as big as it is now. There were some town trustees—three of them—and they'd appointed a long, gangling, jimpy-jawed fellow named Catlett to be the first town constable, but even half grown boys laughed at Catlett, let alone Harve Allen. Harve would just look at Catlett sort of contemptously and Catlett would slide off backwards like a crawfish. And when Harve got a few drams aboard and began churning up his war medicine, Catlett would hurry right straight home, and be taken down sick in bed and stay there until Harve had eased himself, beating up people.

“So Harve Allen ran a wood yard for the river people and had things pretty much his own way. Mainly people gave him the whole road. There was a story out that he'd belonged to the Ford's Ferry gang before they broke up the gang. That's a yarn I'll have to tell this boy here some of these days when I get the time—how they caught the gang hiding in Cave-In-Rock and shot some of them and drowned the rest, all but the two head devils—Big Harp and Little Harp who were brothers—and how they got back across the river in a dug out and were run down with dogs and killed too; and the men that killed them cut off their heads and salted them and packed them in a piggin of brine and sent the piggin by a man on horseback up to Frankfort to collect the reward. Yes, that's what they did, and it makes a tale that ought to be written out some time.”

That was old Cap'n Jasper's way. His mind was laden like Aladdin's sumter-mule, with treasures uncountable, and often he would drop some such glittering jewel as this and leave it and go on. I mind now how many times he started to tell me the full story of the two dissolute Virginians, nephews of one of the first Presidents, who in a fit of drunken temper killed their slave boy George, on the very night that the great Earthquake of 1811 came—and taking the agues and the crackings of the earth for a judgment of God upon their heads, went half mad with terror and ran to give themselves up. But I never did find out, and I don't know yet what happened to them after that. Nor was I ever to hear from Cap'n Jasper the fuller and gory details of the timely taking-off of Big Harp and little Harp. He just gave me this one taste of the delightful horror of it and went on.

“Some of them said that Harve Allen had belonged to the Ford's Ferry gang and that he'd got away when the others were trapped. For a fact he did come down the river right after the massacre at the cave, and maybe that was how the story started. But as for myself, I never believed that part of it at all. Spite of his meanness, Harve Allen wasn't the murdering kind and it must have taken a mighty seasoned murderer to keep steady company with Big Harp and Little Harp.

“But he looked mean enough for anything—just the way he would look at a man won half his fights for him. It's rising of sixty years since I saw him, but I can shut my eyes and the picture of him comes back to me plain as a painted portrait on a wall. I can see him now, rising of six feet-three, as I told you, and long-legged and raw-boned. He didn't have any beard on his face—he'd pulled it out the same as the Indian bucks used to do, only they'd use mussel shells, and he used tweezers, but there were a few hairs left in his chin that were black and stiff and stood out like the bristles on a hog's jowl. And his under lip lolled down as though it'd been sagged out of plumb by the weight of all the cuss-words that Harve had sworn in his time, and his eyes were as cold and mean as a catfish's eyes. He used to wear an old deer skin hunting vest, and it was gormed and smeared with grease until it was as slick as an otter-slide; and most of the time he went bare foot. The bottoms of his feet were like horn.

“That was the way he looked the day he licked Singin' Sandy the first time—and likewise the way he looked all the other times too, for the matter of that. But the first time was the day they hanged Tallow Dave, the hall breed, for killing the little Cartright girl. It was the first hanging we ever had in this country—the first legal hanging I mean—and from all over the county, up and down the river, and from away back in the oak barrens, the people came to see it. They came afoot and ahorseback, the men bringing their rifles and even old swords and old war hatchets with them, with the women and children riding on behind them. It made the biggest crowd that'd ever been here up to then. Away down by the willows stood the old white house that washed away in the rise of '54, where old Madame La Farge, the old French woman, used to gamble with the steamboat captains, and up where the Market Square is now, was the jail, which was built of logs; and in between stretched a row of houses and cabins, mainly of logs too, all facing the river. There was a road in front, running along the top of the bank, and in summer it was knee deep in dust, fit to choke a horse, and in winter it was just one slough of mud that caked and balled on your feet until it would pull your shoes off. I've seen teams mired down many a time there, right where the Richland House is now. But on this day the mud was no more than shoe-throat deep, which nobody minded; and the whole river front was just crawling with people and horses.