Part 4

About the year 1840 Colonel G. W. Sevier, son of Governor John Sevier, in an interview with Lyman C. Draper, the historian, stated that Big Harpe, when asked shortly before he was killed why he had committed so many crimes, answered that he had been badly treated and consequently had become disgusted with all mankind. [12G] The same statement is made by J. W. M. Breazeale, another well-known early Tennesseean, who had lived in Knoxville the greater part of his life and had investigated the careers of the outlaws.

One writer attributes their acts of fiendish inhumanity to the fact that they believed every man’s life, whether good, indifferent or bad, was predestined and that the All Wise had foreordained for them a hatred of humanity and a career of crime. [121] Draper, in his “Sketch of the Harpes,” comments on the fact that “their tawny appearance and dark curly hair betrayed a tinge of African blood coursing through their veins.”

Criminologists may or may not agree as to the underlying cause of the great thirst for blood possessed by the Harpes, but the fact that they were the most savage and terrible characters in this period of American history cannot be disputed.

About the year 1795 the two men, accompanied by Susan Roberts and Betsey Roberts, left North Carolina for Tennessee. Susan claimed to be the legal wife of Big Harpe, whereas Betsey merely posed as such. Big Harpe, however, claimed both women as his wives. The Harpes cared as little for the laws of matrimony as for any other laws and the legality or illegality of anything they did was a matter of indifference to them.

The two men and their women roamed in central Tennessee about two years. Most of their time was spent with a few stray Creek and Cherokee Indians who at the time were ostracized by their tribes and were committing atrocities against their own people as well as against the whites. The Harpes joined the savages in their outrages, and not only encouraged them in their bloody deeds, but gave them many demonstrations showing to what extent barbarity could be practiced. Asleep or awake they were armed with tomahawks and knives and never took a step from camp without a gun. They were always prepared to shed blood for the satisfaction of shedding it, or to resist arrest should any attempt be made to capture them. They lived like man-eating animals. The women as well as the men wore leather hunting shirts and moccasins made from the untanned skin of animals they killed. They never wore hats except in the coldest weather and then used the kind they “whanged” together with deer skin thongs. [121]

Some time during 1797 the four left middle Tennessee for the new settlement of Knoxville. While wandering toward the eastern part of the state they met a young Methodist preacher named William Lambuth, who was traveling through the wilderness alone. They robbed him and among his belongings found a Bible. In turning the leaves, looking for bank bills, Big Harpe discovered on the front page, written in plain letters the names “William Lambuth” and “George Washington.” Pointing to the name of the General, Harpe remarked: “That is a brave and good man, but a mighty rebel against the King.” The articles found in Lambuth’s possession convinced the Harpes that he was a preacher, whereupon they returned to him not only his Bible but also the gun, the little money, and the horse they had taken. Then abruptly turning from him and shouting, “We are the Harpes,” they quickly disappeared. This is probably the only instance in the lives of the Harpes, after the beginning of their murderous career, when they had anyone, old or young, in their power, and showed less than a fiendish barbarity. [121]

Obeying the principle that birds of a feather flock together, the Harpes, it seems, were attracted toward the new settlement of Knoxville. In March, 1798, James Weir, on his way from South Carolina to Kentucky, spent a few days in the town. Writing of his short stay there he says:

“In the infant town of Knox the houses are irregular and interspersed. It was County Court day when I came. The town was confused with a promiscuous throng of every denomination. Some talked, some sang, and mostly all did profanely swear. I stood aghast, my soul shrank back to hear the horrid oaths and dreadful indignities offered to the Supreme Governor of the Universe, who with one frown is able to shake them into non-existence. There was what I never did see before, viz., on Sunday, dancing, singing, and playing of cards, etc.... It was said by a gentleman of the neighborhood that ‘the Devil is grown so old that it renders him incapable of traveling and that he has taken up in Knoxville and there hopes to spend the remaining part of his days in tranquility, as he believes he is among his friends,’ but as it is not a good principle to criticise the conduct of others, I shall decline it with this general reflection, that there are some men of good principles in all places, but often more bad ones to counterbalance them.” [109]

The Harpes doubtless felt they could better gratify their thirst for blood in the vicinity of a settlement like Knoxville than in a wide wilderness where subjects for their cruelty were too few. They found a small tract of cleared land on Beaver Creek, about eight miles west of Knoxville. Upon this they built a log cabin for themselves, and a pen for their horses, and, in order to conceal their motives, cultivated a few acres of ground. Under this feint of honest occupation they experienced no difficulty in gaining the confidence of their neighbors. In fact, so easily had they made a favorable impression that within a few weeks after their arrival Little Harpe married Sarah or Sally Rice, a daughter of John Rice, a preacher living about four miles north of the Harpe hut.

In the meantime the two brothers made trips to the seat of justice, for then, as now, the occasion and the desire “to go to town” to see “what’s going on” was a common one among the people who lived in the country. Swapping horses was then, and still is to a great extent, one of the features of a day at the small court house towns. So when, on one of their first trips to Knoxville, the Harpes brought with them a fine three-year-old mare and offered to run her in a race, no suspicion was aroused. The horse was apparently superior to any other in town that day and no owner could be induced to venture his quarter nag against her. A Mr. Aycoff, recognizing the mare as an unusually good one, bought her and became so attached to the animal that he kept her almost a quarter of a century. It is interesting to note that twenty years after he purchased her, a gentleman from Georgia, visiting near Knoxville, recognized her as the filly that had been stolen from him many years before. [12G]

The Harpes rapidly increased the number of their trips to town, but it was soon noticed that with each succeeding visit their supply of pork and mutton increased. They sold this meat to John Miller, one of the most respected merchants of Knoxville, through whom the Harpe hams soon became well known. But the reputation of the two brothers for drinking and gambling, and the disturbances they raised in the village were sufficient to arouse suspicion in the community. By this and other evidence John Miller was convinced that the Harpes were hog thieves, and suspected that their dishonesty and meanness had no limit. [12G]

Soon after the arrival of the Harpes in east Tennessee a number of houses and stables near Knoxville were set on fire and many of them burned to the ground. As no motive for such destruction of property could be discovered, the citizens attributed it to downright rascality. So strong had become suspicion against the Harpes that when Edward Tiel, who lived a mile from Knoxville, discovered that several of his best horses had been stolen, he enlisted a number of neighbors and immediately proceeded to the home of the Harpes. The investigators found that the cabin had been deserted recently, but noticed indications that horses had been tied to some near-by trees. Tiel and his men took up the trail and followed it across Clinch River into the Cumberland Mountains. There they captured the two Harpes who were alone at the time. The stolen horses were recovered, but when the captors and their prisoners reached a point about five miles northeast of Knoxville, the horse thieves made their escape. [21]

Tiel and his men tried to effect their recapture but, failing in the attempt, returned to Knoxville. That same night the two Harpes appeared at Hughes’ “rowdy groggery,” a few miles west of Knoxville, where they had gone to exercise their brutality before leaving Tennessee. Hughes, his wife’s two brothers, named Metcalfe, and a man named Johnson, living in Jefferson County, were present when the Harpes, who knew the men, rushed in. Johnson was last seen alive there. A few days later his body was discovered in the Holstein River. It had been ripped open, filled with stones, and thrown into the water. Notwithstanding this excess of caution the stones became loosened and the corpse rose to the surface. When the body was discovered Hughes and the Metcalfes came forth with a declaration that the Harpes had committed the crime. Suspicion fell upon the accusers and as the two Harpes were nowhere to be found, the three men were arrested and put in jail. They were acquitted on trial, due to lack of evidence. The Metcalfes immediately fled the country. A party of “regulators” followed Hughes to his groggery, gave him a whipping, pulled down his house and drove him out of the country. [12G]

The killing of Johnson, as far as is known, seems to have been the first of the murders committed by the Harpes. Up to this time they had apparently confined their operations to stealing hogs and horses, and setting fire to houses. They now began a career of ruthless murder which was so bold that it not only terrified the citizens of Tennessee and Kentucky, but also alarmed settlers in many other sections of the Middle West.

The Harpes evidently had arranged to meet their three women associates at some definite point if they should for any reason find it necessary to separate. Shortly after the killing of Johnson the five met in western Virginia, near Cumberland Gap, and there, in December, 1798, they entered Kentucky--the “dark and bloody ground,” to be made even darker by the deeds they were to commit during the next twelve months.

They traveled the Wilderness Road more or less closely, leaving it only when they felt their safety demanded a detour. Their first victim in Kentucky was a peddler named Peyton, whom they encountered near the Cumberland River in what is now Knox County. They killed him and took his horse and some of his goods, but the details of this deed are not known. [21]

The outlaws continued along this trail toward Crab Orchard and Stanford, in Lincoln County, and overtook two Marylanders named Paca and Bates. Night came on and it was proposed that the party camp on the first suitable spot. This was agreed upon, but the Harpes managed not to find a desirable place until it grew dark. Suddenly, as if by accident, the brothers changed positions, Big Harpe getting behind Bates and Little Harpe behind Paca, the women walking about thirty feet in the rear. The Harpes fired and the two unfortunate Marylanders fell. Bates died instantly. A few minutes later Paca, who was badly crippled and knocked speechless, attempted to rise. Big Harpe rushed up to the struggling man, “splitting open his head with a hatchet or tomahawk he carried in his belt.” The Harpes, being in need of some clothing, appropriated only such garments as were immediately useful. They took, however, all the gold and silver and Continental coin found in possession of their victims. [121]

The villains continued along the Wilderness Road and one night in December, 1798, arrived at a public house kept by John Farris in what is now Rockcastle County, not many miles from Crab Orchard. With them came Stephen Langford, of Virginia, who was on his way to Crab Orchard to visit a kinsman and to consider making that locality his home. Langford probably had not met the Harpes until that morning. The story of what took place after they met was related about a quarter of a century later by Judge James Hall, who, in his day, ranked among the best living authors in America, and whose statements were then, and have been ever since, cited as high authority. His story of their encounter with Langford was first published in August, 1825, in _The Port Folio_. After making some slight revisions in his “Story of the Harpes” he republished the sketch in 1828 in his _Letters from the West_, from which book his account of the Langford tragedy is here quoted:

“In the autumn of the year 1799, a young gentleman, named Langford, of a respectable family in Mecklenburgh County, Virginia, set out from this state for Kentucky, with the intention of passing through the Wilderness, as it was then called, by the route generally known as Boone’s Trace. On reaching the vicinity of the Wilderness, a mountainous and uninhabited tract, which at that time separated the settled parts of Kentucky from those of Virginia, he stopped to breakfast at a public house near Big Rockcastle River. Travelers of this description--any other indeed than hardy wood men--were unwilling to pass singly through this lonely region; and they generally waited on its confines for others, and traveled through in parties. Mr. Langford, either not dreading danger, or not choosing to delay, determined to proceed alone. While breakfast was preparing, the Harpes and their women came up. Their appearance denoted poverty, with but little regard to cleanliness; two very indifferent horses, with some bags swung across them, and a rifle gun or two, comprised nearly their whole equipage. Squalid and miserable, they seemed objects of pity, rather than of fear, and their ferocious glances were attributed more to hunger than to guilty passion. They were entire strangers in that neighborhood, and, like Mr. Langford, were about to cross the Wilderness. When breakfast was served, the landlord, as was customary at such places in those times, invited all the persons who were assembled in the common, perhaps the only room of his little inn, to sit down; but the Harpes declined, alleging their want of money as the reason. Langford, who was of a lively, generous disposition, on hearing this, invited them to partake of the meal at his expense; they accepted the invitation, and ate voraciously. When they had thus refreshed themselves, and were about to renew their journey, Mr. Langford called for the bill, and in the act of discharging it imprudently displayed a handful of silver. They then set out together.

“A few days after, some men who were conducting a drove of cattle to Virginia, by the same road which had been traveled by Mr. Langford and the Harpes, had arrived within a few miles of Big Rockcastle River, when their cattle took fright, and, quitting the road, rushed down a hill into the woods. In collecting them, the drovers discovered the dead body of a man concealed behind a log, and covered with brush and leaves. It was now evident that the cattle had been alarmed by the smell of blood in the road, and, as the body exhibited marks of violence, it was at once suspected that a murder had been perpetrated but recently. The corpse was taken to the same house where the Harpes had breakfasted, and recognized to be that of Mr. Langford, whose name was marked upon several parts of his dress. Suspicion fell upon the Harpes, who were pursued and apprehended near Crab Orchard. They were taken to Stanford....”

The killing of the two Marylanders and the peddler was not known until many weeks thereafter. The report of the murder of Langford spread like wildfire. _The Kentucky Gazette_, January 2, 1799, in a characteristically brief paragraph gave sufficient details of the discovery of the body on December 14 to impress its readers with the seriousness of an act of barbarity that might be repeated by the Harpes at any time. “We also learn,” says this paragraph, “that Mr. Ballenger is in pursuit of them, with a determined resolution never to quit the chase until he has secured them.”

Captain Joseph Ballenger, the organizer and leader of the pursuing party, was a prominent merchant of Stanford, Lincoln County. He and his men trailed the Harpes and their women to the neighborhood of what was then Carpenter’s Station, a settlement near the present town of Hustonville and about eight miles southwest of Stanford. There Ballenger discovered them sitting on a log, evidently confident that no one could detect their whereabouts. [12F] The pursuers rushed on them so suddenly that resistance or escape was impossible.«5»

The five prisoners were taken to Stanford, placed in jail and, about ten days later, tried before the Court of Quarter Sessions.

Hall’s story of the frontier tragedy, based on personal accounts that had survived for a quarter of a century, has already been given. It is brief and is correct as far as it goes, but while Hall was hearing it from the lips of men who had it from those concerned with the vengeance of the law, there lay in the custody of the records of the backwoods court of Lincoln County, the grim details of that crime of base ingratitude and cruelty in solitude which so shook the Wilderness. They had lain there forgotten more than a century when they were found and examined in 1918. Yellowed with age, written with the goose-quill pen of that period in a penmanship characteristic of the pioneers, a jumble of half narrative, half legal style, much of which, however, is in use in courts today, these records of a terrible episode in history are eloquent with interest.

The piling up of item on item of court forms, of testimony laboriously written out and signed, of official jail accounts for the handling of the criminals, tells in its own way every detail of a crime committed in fancied obscurity yet which by a series of fortunate circumstances, was to blaze into a notoriety that set all the West on fire with fear and horror. One who holds these long-forgotten records in his hands and curiously searches them could, with patience and without the aid of imagination, build up the story of frontier life and the people who lived it. The story would show that the power of observation exercised by some of the pioneers was equal to any ascribed to a Sherlock Holmes. It would be a story of chance incidents woven into chains of circumstances that were to reveal crime with unerring certainty--a story of the capture of the criminals, of their life in jail, and of the destiny by which each of the three women involved was to have her only child born to her in that frontier jail, the branded fruit of awful parentage. The mute entries in pounds, shillings, and pence for every item, set down on these yellow pages without malice or comment, tell their part of the story as implacably and dispassionately as fate itself.«6»

These records show that all the Harpes gave their name as “Roberts,” except Betsey Harpe, the supplementary wife of Big Harpe, whose name is given as “Elizabeth Walker.” Five witnesses appeared against them, two of whom--John Farris and his daughter-in-law, Jane Farris--lived in the house near Rockcastle River where Thomas Langford, or Lankford, was last seen alive. The fugitives were captured December 25, 1798. On January 4, 1799, they appeared before the three judges of the Lincoln County Court of Quarter Sessions, as it is so recorded, by Willis Green, the clerk, on the twenty-second page of the Record Book marked “September 1798–March 1802:”

“At a court called and held at Lincoln Courthouse on Friday the 4th day of January 1799 for the examination of Micajah Roberts, Wiley Roberts, Susanna Roberts, Sally Roberts, and Elizabeth Walker for the murder of Thomas Langford.

“Present Hugh Logan, William Montgomery, and Nathan Huston, Esquires, [the three judges who presided].

“The said [naming the five prisoners] were lead to the bar in custody of the Sheriff and charged with feloniously and of their malice aforethought murdering and robbing a certain Thomas Langford on Wednesday the 12th day of December 1798 on the road leading from Kentucky to Virginia through the Wilderness, and denied the fact, sundry evidences were therefore examined and the prisoners heard in their defense.”

Five witnesses appeared on behalf of the Commonwealth. The statement of each is written on loose leaves and signed in the presence of Thomas Montgomery, the official notary, and all were therefore in a form to be turned over to a higher court should it become necessary to do so. The affidavit of Captain Ballenger, who lead the pursuing party, is here quoted in full:

“Joseph Ballenger of lawful age, and sworn, deposeth and saith that at about the 19th or 20th day of December 1798 he heard that a murder had been committed in the Wilderness on the body of a certain Thomas Langford, as supposed; that he, at the request of James Blain the Attorney General of this Commonwealth with others (including Thomas Welsh) went in pursuit of some persons suspected of being the murderers who had passed through Lincoln County; that they went to the house of John Blain in Lincoln County where they heard that persons similar to those they were in pursuit of had left Brush Creek, a branch of Green River, and passed over to the Rolling Fork of Salt River; that they pursued them and overtook five persons, the same who this day on their examinations were called Micajah Roberts, Wiley Roberts, Susanna Roberts, Sally Roberts, and Elizabeth Walker; that after taking them into custody they proceeded to search them and found in their possession a pocket book with the name of Thomas Langford, a great coat, a grey coating cloth, a short coat--in the pocket of it were broken pieces of glass--a mixed colored long coat, a pair of breeches, a shaving glass, a whip, a pair of wrappers, and a horse, this day proved to be the property of Thomas Langford said to be the person murdered in the Wilderness, and that they found also a Free Mason’s apron and many other things in their possession said to be the property of Thomas Langford. Further saith not.”

David Irby, in his sworn statement, explained that: “he and Thomas Langford set out from Pittsylvania County in Virginia for Kentucky, they traveled five days journey together and sometimes one paid their traveling expense and sometimes the other, all of which Thomas Langford marked down in his pocket book. Before they crossed Inglish’s Ferry [Ingle’s Ferry in what is now Montgomery Country, Virginia] they got a half bushel of oats which the deponent paid for and also their ferryage at Inglish’s Ferry in Wythe County (Virginia) the deponent purchased a cheese which Thomas Langford set down in his pocket book, he says that the pocket book now before the examining court is the said pocket book which Thomas Langford had when they traveled together in Tennessee State. [The trail from Virginia to Cumberland Gap extended into northeastern Tennessee before reaching Kentucky]. The deponent and Thomas Langford separated when they agreed to meet at Frankfort in Kentucky; the deponent heard in Kentucky that the said Thomas Langford was murdered on his way to Kentucky, he set out towards the place where the crime was committed and went to the place where the person who was killed was buried and he, the deponent, and John Farris unburied and raised the decedent and found him to be Thomas Langford.”

What Irby saw and heard he further declared convinced him that the murdered man was no other than his recent traveling companion.