Oh Beautiful Ohio, Bloody Ohio, and the Last Days of Wiley Harpe

Kenneth Tucker

Description

Based on shocking, but forgotten historical events. James, Ford, the local justice of the peace, runs a ferry  from Kentucky to Illinois, but also a gang of  river pirates.  Wealthy travelers he sends to the Inn of his ally Billy Potts, who murders them. Local citizens, like Norman and Catherine Pierce, and Dr. Charles Webb hope that a trial will bring forth evidence against Ford but the judge throws the case out of court. And the other characters must decide whether to take the law into their own hands and execute Ford.

Sujets

• Literary
• Historical
• Literature
• General officer
• General
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Outskirts Press
• Date de parution: 18 février 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781977263605
• Langue: English

Extrait

-->

Oh Beautiful Ohio, Bloody Ohio, and the Last Days of Wiley Harpe A Novel Based on History All Rights Reserved. Copyright © 2022 Kenneth Tucker v2.0
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
The opinions expressed in this manuscript are solely the opinions of the author and do not represent the opinions or thoughts of the publisher. The author has represented and warranted full ownership and/or legal right to publish all the materials in this book.
This book may not be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in whole or in part by any means, including graphic, electronic, or mechanical without the express written consent of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Outskirts Press, Inc. http://www.outskirtspress.com
ISBN: 978-1-9772-6360-5
Cover Photo © 2022 www.gettyimages.com . All rights reserved - used with permission.
Outskirts Press and the "OP" logo are trademarks belonging to Outskirts Press, Inc.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
For Chris Woodall Who encouraged my writing this book
Table of Contents
Preface
Book One: The Reign of James Ford
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Book Two: The Rise of the Regulators
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Epilogue
The Last Days of Wiley Harpe
Reader’s Guide for Book Clubs and Individuals
Long time they thus together traveiled, {The Red Cross Knight and beautiful appearing witch Duessa}
T’il, weary of their way, they came at last
Where grew two goodly trees, that faire did spread
Their armes abroad, with gray moose overcaste :
And their greene leaves, trembling with every blast,
Made a calme shadow far in compasse round :
The fearfull shepheard, often there aghast,
Under them never sat, ne wont there sound
His mery oaten pipes ; but shuned th’ unlucky ground.

But this good knight, as soone, as them he can spie
For the coole shade him thither hastly got ;
For golden Phoebus, now ymounted hie.
From the fiery wheeles of his faire chariot
Hurled his beame so scorching cruell hot,
`That living creature mote it not abide ;
And his new lady it endured not.
There they alight, in hope themselves to hide
From the fierce heat, and rest their weary limbs a tide.
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Book I, Canto iI Stanzas 28-29
Preface
When in 2005, I published A Wilderness of Tigers, a novelization of the savage careers of Micajah and Wiley Harpe and their three women followers, I did not realize that I was participating in a revival of interest in this 1790’s’s precursor of the Manson gang. The Harpe brothers killed perhaps 30-odd persons in their rambles through the wildernesses of North Carolina, Tennessee. Kentucky, and were finally stopped near the town of Dixon, Kentucky in i779.
While I was working on the manuscript, I did not know that Black poet Robert Hayden had completed a short poem on the notorious killers, "Theory of Evil." At the same I was writing my book,, E. Don Harpe, a descendant of the family was finishing in Tennessee his retelling of their odyssey of evil; in his Die Wolf, the Last Rampage of the Terrible Harpes and Born Wolf, Die Wolf. I had no problems with Don’s retellings. A good tale demands differing versions. Besides, while my version is a naturalistic depiction of the historical events., Don’s version moves toward the horror genre and suggests that Micajah was possessed by an evil wolf spirit Indians believed in. Certainly room exists for both versions.
Even in those days I dreamed of writing a sequel portraying the outlawry after the Harpe brothers’s careers had ended, a kind of frontier villains the Next Generation. Two realities hindered me. One, I had other books in my imagination begging to be written, and , two, I knew that if I dealt with James Ford and Billy Potts I would be entering the ring against Robert Penn Warren, one of modern literature’s giants.
An outstanding achievement is his narrative poem The Ballad of Billy Potts. While I did not know Warren, I encountered him several times during my career as a professor of English and talked with him much when he was a visiting lecturer at Murray State in 1975, He was kindly, friendly, gentlemanly. I doubt that he would have ruffled at another telling of the tale. After all, as I wrote, good tale deserves retellings.
Of course, in the early days of the nineteenth century, many tales circulated about the deeds of James Ford, the justice of the peace who secretly commanded the river privateers and Billy Potts, senior and junior. who slaughtered wealthy -seeming patrons of their inn. Many of these stories have faded into time or become blurred together. As the source for this book, I selected a classic modern retelling of these events W. D. Snively and Louanna Freebee’s Satan’s Ferryman. Extensively researched, the book offers a dynamic presentation of these events. However, even these authors admit that uncertainties remain. Although retaining the traditional narrative that Dr. Charles Webb of Princeton, Kentucky, was the captive released by the pirates of Cave In-Rock to wander in the wilderness to be met and taken into Ford’s house by the bandit leader’s daughter, Cassandra
they married. However, Snively and and Furbee raise doubts that Webb the rescued prisoner who married Cassandra. Another early writer, a novelist, gives the character a different name but has him marry Cassandra. This writer also renames Ford Wilson and relates another version of his death: That he was shot as he sat upon his front porch by an unknown rider. I abide by the standard view of the ambush at Ford’s Ferry, Kentucky.
Of course, the researcher has to account for the possibility that rumor and folktale have contaminated historical accounts. I like to think that Cassandra did marry the rescued prisoner, whoever he was.
Nevertheless, I am writing fiction and not bound by historical accuracy.
At times I have departed from the traditional events for the sake of the novel. I have involved whose historical characters possibly knew each other only marginally. I have endowed them with character traits which their historical counterparts might not have had.
Another point needs stressing, The diary of Catherine Pierce does exist! Snively and Furbee do quote from it, but cite it as an unpublished source, giving no hint as to whether it exists in some library vault or in some family safe. Hence, I could not locate it. But I paraphrase portions of it, combinie some of her somm4ents, rewritten in my own words, and add imaginary details not found in Snively and Furbee.
While planning this book, I decided to include a short story portraying the death of Wiley Harpe. The climactic moment of A Wilderness of Tigers is the attack of Magby’s regulators upon the Harpe band. However, Wiley Harpe escaped and later teamed up with Samuel Mason, whose gang had been driven from Cave-In-Rock. To have included these events in Wilderness would have made the novel too long and anticlimactic. But the possibility of narrating them in a short story added to this book proved too tempting. Hence, I included the story. It can be read as an individual work on its own or as the conclusion of Wilderness. Enough is said about the Harpe brothers themselves in the current novel and in the following short that a reader unacquainted with Wilderness should be able to follow the events easily.
Murray, Kentucky, April 16, 2022.
Book One
The Reign of James Ford
Chapter One
As time draws closer for our migration to the new state of Illinois, I continue to feel uneasy about the trip. Norm tells me I worry too much; things are no longer as dangerous in the state we’ll have to travel through. But we’ve all heard such frightful tales about Kentucky.
From the Diary of Catherine Pierce.
Jeb Hardesty stood upon a gradual slope and looked at the sun-glittering Ohio River below, the peacefully moving waters and the gray bluffs beyond them topped by the greenery of the forest. He fancied that he was beholding the primeval world itself, the way things were before the Fall. He smiled at his fantasy; the world before him had suffered a lot of upheaval and change since the days of Adam and Eve. In fact, just a few years before, in 1811, an earthquake had shaken the hell out of the land around him for miles upon miles. Some said more than a hundred miles. It had changed the course of the Ohio and even created Reelfoot Lake out of part of it. But he reckoned that a quake that big wouldn’t come around again for several hundred years. By then he would be long dead and buried. He was watching the ferryboat beneath him being loaded. At that very moment his black stallion was being led upon it.
The coat he wore was a bit heavy for that early spring day. But he knew he could endure the troublesome warmth for a few days longer. Nevertheless, it remained unbuttoned, so that passersby could see that he had a pair of flintlock pistols jammed behind the belt encircling his mid-sized girth.
He was preparing to descend the slight hill to enter the ferry when a crunching on the grass turned his head. A huge man was approaching him, a man evidently three or four inches taller than his own five feet, nine inches. The man was massive in his shoulder span as well. He wasn’t fat, but the sides of his stomach were beginning to bulge and seemed to forewarn of corpulence.
The reddish h