The Old Charnel Trail

SPAWN OF EVIL by Paul I. Wellman. 350 pages. Doubleday. $5.95.

Legend, song and the movies have portrayed the desperadoes of the U.S. frontier as Robin Hoods. This may have had some validity in the case of folk heroes like Jesse James and Billy the Kid, on whom the wide open plains imposed a certain gallantry. But in earlier days, when the West was still east of the Mississippi, the frontier spawned a group of brutal outlaws lauded in no song or story. They gouged out eyes, bit off noses, scalped, never robbed without murdering, casually shot women and children. They disposed of bodies by splitting them open, filling them with stones and dumping them in the river.

Exploring this neglected part of the U.S. frontier with the help of diaries and a somewhat perfervid dramatic style, Paul Wellman, a novelist and historian of the West, has produced a lively account of a criminal empire which "exerted an influence of bale and woe for a full generation and held all of interior America in a web of terror."

After the turbulence of the Revolutionary War, people swarmed into the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys. They found no land of their dreams but a forbidding forest. The favorite rendezvous of almost every crook in the region was a cave on the banks of the Ohio on the Kentucky-Illinois border. More than 50 feet wide and 140 feet deep, the cave provided all that a hardened criminal could ask for: prostitutes "none cranny, gambling in another; heaps of counterfeit coin; and an escape hatch in the rear. The cave, Wellman writes, was the "lair of the worst cutthroats, freebooters and gallows-birds this continent ever witnessed."

> Micajah and Wiley Harpe killed for the fun of it; they rarely made a profit. Followed by a retinue of three prostitutes and some offspring of indeterminate parentage, they roamed Tennessee and Kentucky murdering anybody who seemed defenseless: old peddlers, itinerant fiddlers, children, slaves. Hospitality especially infuriated them. When a woman gave them lodging for a night, they tomahawked a fellow lodger because he was snoring too loudly. They slit the throat of the woman's baby while pretending to rock it; finally, they knifed the woman.

Lumbering frontier justice eventually caught up with the Harpes. Wiley was hanged and Micajah was shot. While Micajah was dying, a man whose family had been wiped out by the Harpes slowly cut off his head with a knife. "You're a God-damned rough butcher," gurgled Micajah, "but cut on and be damned!" --

>Billy Potts owned a tavern in Ford's Ferry, Ky. Its floor was covered with bloodstains; outside, the grounds were filled with shallow graves. Travelers who stayed overnight could not depend on getting up again next morning. Billy's son, a chip off the old block, was caught robbing by two farmers, was forced to leave the state. Years later he returned with a hefty bankroll and a beard. He decided to surprise the folks by not letting on who he was. Not recognizing him, Daddy cheerfully sank a knife into his back, fleeced him, and went to bed boasting to his wife. Next morning he learned his victim's identity from other outlaws. At least, Potts had the grace to shut down the tavern.

> John Murrell was educated, and thought big. The son of a prostitute, he was taught by Mama to rob her clients while she had them in bed. One day, Murrell robbed his mother and set out on his own. He became a slave snatcher.

Pretending to be an Abolitionist, he talked slaves into running away with him, then sold them to another slaver. If the slave balked, Murrell killed him. At one point, Murrell spent a year in jail for horse stealing, where he was branded, whipped and pilloried. He came out determined to take his revenge on the whole South by fomenting a slave revolt--and getting some loot for himself during the fracas. He boasted: "I'll have the pleasure and honor of knowing that by my management I have glutted the earth with more human gore, and destroyed more property, than any other robber who has ever lived in America or in the known world." The uprising was scheduled for July 4, 1835. But the slaves, as well as Murrell, talked too much. The plot was discovered, and Murrell went to prison for ten years. When he came out, he was so broken he became a harmless blacksmith.

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