The Palladium, March 3, published a news item dated Natchez, February 9, 1804: “Setton and May were executed at Greenville yesterday between three and four o’clock, pursuant to their sentence. We are informed that Setton made some confession at the place of execution which has a tendency to implicate several persons not heretofore suspected as parties concerned with Masons in their depredations. May complained of the hardship of his fate; said he had not been guilty of crimes deserving death and spoke of the benefit he had rendered society by destroying old Mason.”
The hanging of Little Harpe and James May for highway robbery was a fulfillment of the written law of pioneer times as well as the unwritten law of frontier communities. But many of the enraged citizens felt that the law of pioneer justice had not been satisfied for the known and unknown murders committed by these two offenders. There is nothing in history or tradition to indicate that an attempt was made to lynch the two condemned outlaws. But the lynch spirit evidently raged. In the words of Franklin L. Riley, an authority on early Mississippi history: “After their execution on the Gallows Field their heads were placed on poles, one a short distance to the north and the other a short distance to the west of Greenville, on the Natchez Trace.” [[105]]
How long these gruesome warnings to highwaymen stood along the road and what finally became of them is not known. Each doubtless met with a fate befitting a head so ignoble. It is not probable that they were ever interred in the grave with the two headless bodies. Tradition has it that the two bodies were placed in a box and buried in a new grave yard about one hundred yards east of the Greenville jail and court house and about the same distance north of the hotel in the central part of the village.
This new grave yard was on the Natchez Trace and contained less than half a dozen graves. Tradition says that an effort was made by a number of people who had kinsmen buried in it to influence the officials to bury elsewhere the decapitated remains of these despised desperadoes. Their request was not granted, and the burial was held late on the night of the execution within a few yards of where stood one of the head-surmounted poles. The next day the indignant men who had opposed this as a burial place for the two villains, exhumed their dead and removed the remains about a half mile south of Greenville and there began a new burying ground which today is known as Bellegrove Church Yard.[33]
What attempts were made to collect the reward offered for the capture of Mason? What became of the Masons? It is probable these questions can never be fully answered. The court records showing the total expense involved in the trial and transportation of the Masons, and in the trial and execution of Little Harpe and James May, have not been found. These expenses were paid by the territorial and federal governments. One of Governor Claiborne’s letters [[113]] shows that in January, 1806, one Seth Caston “exhibited demands for one hundred dollars for apprehending and bringing to justice” these two notorious outlaws. There is nothing indicating the character of Caston’s claim; nor is there anything to show whether or not he received any money. Harpe and May were entitled to the reward offered in Governor Claiborne’s proclamation; it doubtless would have been granted to them in full had they not proven that above all other rewards they best deserved that which they received on the gallows.
Neither history nor tradition tells what became of the Mason family after Samuel Mason met his fate and Little Harpe and James May received their reward. Samuel Mason’s wife, who evidently did not approve of her husband’s lawlessness—at least not in her later years—made her home, as we have already seen, not far from old Shankstown, in Jefferson County, Mississippi. There, according to Claiborne, the historian, she was “generally respected as an honest and virtuous woman by all her neighbors, and one of her sons [probably Magnus or Samuel Mason Jr.] was a worthy citizen of Warren County.” Monette says that “the Mason band being deprived of their leader and two of his most efficient men, dispersed and fled,” and thus terminated the greatest terror to travelers which had infested the country.[34]
In the meantime, the headless bodies of Little Harpe and James May continued to lie in their double grave near the Natchez Trace. As time rolled on the narrow Trace widened and, as roads frequently do, it wore deeper into the slight elevation over which it led. About the year 1850 this widening and deepening process reached the fleshless bones in the solitary grave, and the two skeletons, protruding piece by piece from the road bank, were dragged out by dogs and other beasts until the highway widened beyond the grave and the burial site became part of the ditch along the Natchez Trace.
Some twenty years ago, upon straightening out a part of the Natchez Trace, the small section of the old road of which the burial place was a part, was discarded as a highway, and today the old road bed, including the site of the grave, is a mere jungle of briars and brush.
Thus the last vestige of these two villains disappeared on the very highway upon which they had committed so many crimes, and possibly on the very spot where one of their victims breathed his last. The ocean of time has closed over every one of the personal relics of all these enemies of society, but the waves that their activities started still carry on as ripples of human interest.