James Whitcomb Riley corroborates the impression of earlier writers in a characteristic poem, “My Fiddle:”[15]—
“My playin’s only middlin’—tunes I picked up when a boy—
The kind o’-sort o’ fiddlin’ that the folks calls ‘cordaroy’;
‘The Old Fat Gal’ ‘Rye-Straw,’ and ‘My Sailyor’s on the Sea,’
Is the old cowtillions I ‘saw’ when the ch’ice is left to me;
And so I plunk and plonk and plink
And rosum-up my bow,
And play the tunes that make you think
The devil’s in your toe!”
In several of the Southern Indiana counties the least admirable traits of the ancestors of the “poor whites” who came in from the South have been continued into a third and fourth generation; but these do not appear prominently in any fair or comprehensive examination of the people. Much has been written of the lawlessness of Indianians, and lynching and white-capping have sporadically been reported from many of the southern counties. An attorney-general of the State who had brought all the machinery of the law to bear upon particular instances of lynching during his term of office, and who had given much study to the phenomena presented by these outbreaks, expressed his opinion that the right of way of the Baltimore and Southwestern Railway marked the “lynching belt” in Indiana. Statistics in confirmation are lacking, but it is safe to say that a large percentage of the lynchings reported in the State have occurred either in counties on the line of the road or in those immediately adjoining. Lynchings have also occurred in at least half a dozen counties north of Indianapolis, so that all the crimes of this sort perpetrated in Indiana cannot be charged to the descendants of the “poor whites” in the more Southern counties. Lynching has not been viewed with apathy, and every instance of it has been followed by vigorous efforts at punishment. In 1889 a drastic law was added to the statutes, defining lynching and providing severe penalties. It struck to the quick of the matter by making possible the impeachment of law officers who yield prisoners to a mob. But under any circumstances these people are so intensely clannish that even the sincerest prosecution usually fails for lack of witnesses. The Hon. W. A. Ketcham, State attorney-general, after heroic efforts to fix responsibility for the lynching of five men in Ripley County on the night of September 14, 1898, gravely stated in his official report that he had applied the Sherlock Holmes principle to the incident; that is to say, after excluding every other possible hypothesis he had assumed the correctness of the one remaining, and this he stated in his syllabus of the case to be: “That A broke jail and travelled across the country to the town where the revolver had been pawned, a distance of seven miles, broke into the store, stole the revolver, returned again, broke back into jail, shot himself, then killed B and C and hung their dead bodies to a tree, put the finishing touches to his crime by hanging D and E, and then in order that suspicion might be directed against innocent men, finally hanged himself.”[16] The milder form of outlawry, known as “white-capping,” has also been practised in Indiana occasionally, and sometimes with barbarous cruelty; but it, like lynching, is not peculiar to the State, and its extent has been greatly exaggerated by Eastern newspapers.