Robert Brassel resumed his pursuit of the Harpes and was soon joined by William Wood and others. When they arrived near the farm of John Tully they met Nathaniel Stockton and a number of neighbors looking for Tully, who they supposed was lost in the woods. The search continued and “near the road they found Mr. Tully, killed, and hidden under a log.” [[63]] The company buried him and some of the men agreed they would pursue the murderers.[10]
Immediately after it was discovered that Tully had been murdered, William Wood and Nathaniel Stockton started afoot to Colonel Daniel Trabue’s farm, a distance of forty miles. They suspected that because Colonel Trabue had been active in the pursuit of the Harpes after his son had been murdered, the monsters were on their way to his home and store and might be captured there. They related to the Colonel the details of the crimes the Harpes had recently committed and he, before they had finished, decided to forward the news to the governor of Kentucky. In order to impress the governor with the fact that the report was not another wild rumor, Colonel Trabue, who was a justice of the peace in Green County, prepared a written statement, giving a brief account of the recent acts of the Harpes, as related to him by Nathaniel Stockton and William Wood, and forwarded it to him in the form of an affidavit. [[63]]
This sworn statement, consisting of about five hundred words, was published in the Kentucky Gazette on August 15, 1799. From it some of the details of the three crimes just related were taken. It begins with the declaration: “About the middle of July there was a man killed by the name of Hardin, about three miles below Knoxville: he was ripped open and stones put in his belly, and he was thrown into Holston River.” After briefly noting the circumstances and the exact date of the killing of Coffey, James Brassel, and John Tully, it calls attention to the fact that the night after the Harpes murdered Tully “they passed by old Mr. Stockton’s going toward their father’s-in-law, old Mr. Roberts.” A point of great human interest is the concise and vivid description of the two Harpes given in the affidavit prepared by Colonel Trabue: “The big man is pale, dark, swarthy, bushy hair, had a reddish gun stock—the little man had a blackish gunstock, with a silver star with four straight points—they had short sailor’s coats, very dirty, and grey greatcoats.”
Colonel Trabue, in his Autobiography, does not give a copy of his affidavit, but relative to it, he writes: “I sent out that night for some neighbors and made arrangements. We sent one man off the next morning by sunrise to Frankfort to the Governor, that he might have it published in the newspapers. Mr. Wood’s and Mr. Stockton’s statement I wrote down and had them swear to it, what they knew of their own knowledge and what Robert Brassel had told them. I sent another man down to Yellow Banks [should read Red Banks] to General Samuel Hopkins with the news and the statement. I directed the men to go as fast as they could, and spread the news as they went; it was also immediately put in the newspapers. The man I sent to General Hopkins was John Ellis. As he went on he spread the news. He happened to go the same route the Harpes had taken. When they heard of him they pursued and tried to overtake him. Ellis had a good horse and went sixty or seventy miles a day. The whole state got in a great uproar, because it was uncertain which route the murderers would take.”
The two messengers sent by Colonel Trabue rode over trails that wound through a sparsely populated wilderness where danger in one form or another was likely to be encountered at any moment. One rider dashed in a northerly direction about ninety miles, while the other rushed westward twice that distance. Each “spread the news” along his route, and from every settlement he passed, the report—“The Harpes are here”—was hurriedly sent out. The warning, in comparatively little time, reached practically every family in Kentucky and many in Tennessee. The press verified the reports and soon the people saw for themselves in “black and white,” which was then considered the garb of “gospel truth,” that the Harpes had returned to Kentucky and were guilty of crimes even more brutal than any heretofore perpetrated.
The Frankfort Palladium, on August 15, 1799, published the names of four men and on what day in July each was killed by the Harpes, and concludes its paragraph with the statement that “we are happy to hear they are closely pursued and sincerely hope they will ere long meet the punishment which the atrocity of their crimes demands.” The Western Spy and Hamilton Gazette, of Cincinnati, on September 3 published a Frankfort news item giving practically the same facts and expressing the same hope.
Such widespread terror and fear as was aroused by the raid of the Harpes found expression, no doubt, not only in the Kentucky Gazette and the Palladium, but in all the papers published in Kentucky and Tennessee. Stewart’s Kentucky Herald, of Lexington, the Mirror, of Washington, Mason County, Kentucky, and the Gazette and the Impartial Observer, both of Knoxville, Tennessee, were in existence at the time. Careful research in these four papers has failed to reveal any allusion to the Harpes, for the copies available are of other dates than those likely to mention these outlaws in their presentation of current events. It is possible that a number of current newspapers in the east and south printed more or less about the Harpes and thus warned the people of the possibility of their sudden appearance. As we shall see later, the Carolina Gazette, of Charleston, South Carolina, in its issue of October 24, 1799, devoted twenty-five lines to the Harpes. This story, in all probability, was not its first and only paragraph relative to them.
Although the alarm was being spread by the people and the press, and many a man had prepared to slay the outlaws, the report of the latest butchery was soon followed by another. The day after Colonel Trabue sent the messengers to Frankfort and Henderson, the Harpes traveled up Marrowbone Creek and, about twenty-five miles south of Colonel Trabue’s home, stopped at an out-of-the-way place on which John Graves and his thirteen-year-old son were cultivating a crop and making preparations for the rest of the family to join them. [[63]]
The Harpes arrived at their cabin late in the evening and got permission to spend the night. “Early in the morning, probably before the Graveses awoke, they, with Graves’ own axe, split the heads of both open and threw the bodies of both in to the brush fence that surrounded the house.” “There they lay,” writes Draper, in one of his note books, “until some one, seeing so many buzzards around, made an investigation and discovered what had taken place.” [[12E]] This tragedy was announced in the Palladium of August 22, in a paragraph quoted from the Guardian of Freedom, Frankfort, Kentucky. The statement then published is another verification of the notes made by Draper many years later.
From the Graves cabin they traveled north twenty miles or more into Russell County to the home of old man Roberts, the reputed father of the two women Big Harpe claimed as wives. The only reference to this “old Mr. Roberts” is in Colonel Trabue’s affidavit sent to the Governor of Kentucky in August, 1799. Local tradition has nothing to say about Roberts—when he came or left, or where his cabin stood. Evidently he was still living in Russell County in 1802, for in November of that year Reverend Jacob Young, a Methodist preacher, met “a brother-in-law of the infamous Micajah Harpe,” who, although his name is not stated in the preacher’s autobiography, must have been a son of the “old Mr. Roberts” in order to qualify for the connection. At any rate, two of the Harpe women were doubtless invited by their father to remain with him. If, however, such an invitation was not extended, the women would have appealed to him for help had they been inclined to reform, and he, as many other fathers would have done, might have consented to make an effort to lead them from the vile associations into which they had fallen. What these two daughters might and should have done they failed to do. They clung to their companions in crime and with them fled westward south of Green River toward Mammoth Cave and Russellville.