One of the prisoners whispered to Duff that he found he could slip his irons off. Pompey hearing this, passed a file to him and, taking advantage of the absence of the guard, who went ashore for a few minutes, he filed away at Duff’s fetters and soon succeeded in breaking them. At a signal, Pompey sprang upon the guard and tied him to a tree and then proceeded to liberate the two men chained in the boat. Duff and the other unfettered prisoner immediately seized the stacked arms and rushed upon the men in the Cave who, having no side arms, were forced to an unconditional surrender.
Some of the soldiers were tied and others secured with irons and all thrown into the boat and set afloat. They drifted down the river and, as they were floating opposite the fort from which they had been sent, they were ordered to stop, but of course could not do so. They were fired upon a number of times before the commander discovered their helpless condition. He then sent out a skiff and brought them ashore. In the meantime, Duff and his companions had made their way up the river to the Saline and had got safely home again.
The inglorious outcome of this expedition greatly incensed the commander of the fort and he was determined upon revenge. He accordingly hired a Canadian and three Indians to go up the river to Duff’s Fort and kill him. They were to ingratiate themselves into the good graces of the counterfeiter and watch their opportunity to kill him. If they succeeded they were to return and receive a reward.
They arrived in Duff’s neighborhood and camped below his house. The Canadian soon became friendly with Duff, who did not suspect the object of his presence, and was invited to his house. The genial hospitality of the counterfeiter was fatal to the Canadian’s plan, and each day he found himself less inclined to carry out his murderous scheme. Meanwhile the Indians were becoming impatient. One evening they informed the Canadian that they had concluded to kill Duff the next day, whether he helped or not. He then decided to put Duff upon his guard.
The next morning, although Duff was drinking rather heavily, the Canadian disclosed the plot to him. Duff, seizing a stick, rushed from the house, swearing he would whip the Indians with it and drive them off. He met them coming towards his house, painted and armed for a conflict. Pompey, recognizing the danger his master was facing, rushed to him with a loaded gun, but before it could be used the Indians shot Duff and his slave. “The leader having fallen,” says the author of A History of Union County, Kentucky, in concluding his account of Duff, “the rest of the gang were speedily dispersed.”[36]
About a generation after the days of Duff there appeared upon the scene a man named Sturdevant, whose counterfeiting career continued in the Cave-in-Rock country until 1831. In the meantime the flatboat pirates who had used the Cave as their headquarters had disappeared and the mysterious Ford’s Ferry band was drifting towards its dispersement.
The identity of Sturdevant is as vague as that of Duff. Tradition has it that Sturdevant did not counterfeit money in the Cave but that, beginning about 1825, and for a short time thereafter, he used the “House of Nature” as a “Banking House of Exchange.” There he met his confederates and exchanged, at an agreed rate, some of the counterfeit money he made in his fortified home nine miles below the Cave. Judge James Hall, in his Sketches of the West, published in 1835, devotes two pages to Sturdevant. His is the best of the few published accounts. It is well worth quoting in full:
“At a later period [that is, after Mason’s time] the celebrated counterfeiter, Sturdevant, fixed his residence on the shore of the Ohio, in Illinois, and for several years set the laws at defiance. He was a man of talent and address. He was possessed of much mechanical genius, was an expert artist and was skilled in some of the sciences. As an engraver he was said to have few superiors; and he excelled in some other branches of art. For several years he resided at a secluded spot in Illinois, where all his immediate neighbors were his confederates or persons whose friendship he had conciliated. He could, at any time, by the blowing of a horn, summon some fifty to a hundred armed men to his defense; while the few quiet farmers around, who lived near enough to get their feelings enlisted and who were really not at all implicated in his crimes, rejoiced in the impunity with which he practiced his schemes. He was a grave, quiet, inoffensive man in his manners, who commanded the obedience of his comrades and the respect of his neighbors. He had a very excellent farm; his house was one of the best in the country; his domestic arrangements were liberal and well ordered.
“Yet this man was the most notorious counterfeiter that ever infested our country and carried on his nefarious art to an extent which no other person has ever attempted. His confederates were scattered over the whole western country, receiving through regular channels of intercourse their supplies of counterfeit bank notes, for which they paid a stipulated price—sixteen dollars in cash for a hundred dollars in counterfeit bills. His security arose, partly from his caution in not allowing his subordinates to pass a counterfeit bill, or to do any other unlawful act in the state in which he lived, and in his obliging them to be especially careful of their deportment in the county of his residence, measures which effectually protected him from the civil authority. Although all the counterfeit bank notes with which a vast region was inundated were made in his house, that fact could never be proved by legal evidence. But he secured himself further by having settled around him a band of his lawless dependents who were ready at all times to fight in his defense; and by his conciliatory conduct, which prevented his having any violent enemies. He even enlisted the sympathies of many reputable people in his favor. But he became a great nuisance from the immense quantity of spurious paper which he threw into circulation; and although he never committed any acts of violence himself, and is not known to have sanctioned any, the unprincipled felons by whom he was surrounded were guilty of many acts of desperate atrocity; and Sturdevant, though he escaped from the arm of the law, was at last, with all his confederates, driven from the country by the enraged people, who rose, almost in mass, to rid themselves of one whose presence they had long considered an evil as well as a disgrace.”
Governor Reynolds notes that in 1831 Sturdevant’s fort was attacked by some Regulators, and that one Regulator and three counterfeiters were killed, and “the suspected gang broken up.”