Thus terminated the career of one of the members of the mysterious Ford’s Ferry band, and with it passed away forever bloodshed and robbery at Cave-in-Rock.
The Cave in Fiction
Historical novels, with some exceptions, present the past in a more interesting manner than do the formal histories which are intended as chronicles of actual facts. It has been said, on the one hand, that “truth is stranger than fiction,” and on the other that “fiction is often more truthful than fact.” Fiction is undoubtedly more truthful in the presentation of the manners and social life of the period portrayed than is formal history. The history of Cave-in-Rock and the careers of the outlaws identified with the place is not only stranger than fiction, but is besprinkled with many tragic and melodramatic scenes which, although almost unimaginable, are actually true. For more than a century fiction writers have used the Cave as a background for stories. These authors by freely discarding the leading facts and drawing on their own imaginations wrote stories less original than might otherwise have been produced.
No effort has been made to compile a more or less complete collection of works of fiction pertaining to the Cave. The stories and poems commented on in the course of this chapter are only such as were incidentally found while in search of history. Although this fiction has very little of facts for a basis, and most of the scenes are far from probable, nevertheless it necessarily stands not only as Cave-in-Rock literature, but also as a contribution to the good, bad, or indifferent literature of America. The fact that more than one edition was published of the Cave-in-Rock novels here referred to indicates, to some extent that they represent some of the types of stories then in demand.
Stories dealing with mysterious murders and highway robberies have always found many enthusiastic readers. It seems that every decade of the nineteenth century produced at least one new tale of Cave-in-Rock. And in our own times the writings of some well-known living authors show that the Cave is still supplying material for fiction.
In Irvin S. Cobb’s story “The Dogged Under Dog,” (originally published in the Saturday Evening Post, August 3, 1912, and shortly thereafter printed in Cobb’s book entitled Back Home) one of the characters, recalling some of the rough men who lived near the Cave when that country was still new, says Big Harpe and Little Harpe were run down by dogs and killed and that “the men who killed them cut off their heads and salted them down and packed them both in a piggin of brine, and sent the piggin by a man on horseback up to Frankfort to collect the reward.”
Nancy Huston Banks in Oldfield, 1902, devotes a few pages to Cave-in-Rock, the Harpes, and a character she calls “Alvarado,” a mysterious Spaniard who frequented the lower Ohio valley and who was suspected of having been a comrade of Jean Lafitte. Mrs. Banks, in her next historical novel, ’Round Anvil Rock, 1903 (in which Philip Alston is one of the leading characters) refers to that section of Kentucky lying opposite the Cave as having been the “Rogues Harbor.”
The Harpes, Masons, and the Cave are introduced in The Ark of 1803, by C. A. Stephens. This book for boys, published in 1904, is intended as a picture of romances and tragedies incidental to early navigation on the Ohio and Mississippi. It serves that purpose fairly well, although practically no statement made by the author regarding the Harpes and the Masons is in accordance with history or tradition.
