The Natchez Trace and the Harpe brothers

The most robbed road in early America

The Old Natchez Trace is one of the oldest travel routes in North America, a network of trails people have used for some 10,000 years through the homelands of the Natchez, Chickasaw and Choctaw nations. From about 1785 it became the road home for the Kaintucks, the boatmen who floated flour, salt pork, tobacco, coal and whiskey down the Ohio and Mississippi to Natchez and New Orleans. Their flatboats could not go back upstream, so they sold them for lumber and walked the 500 miles to Nashville, about 35 days on foot, with a season's pay in their pockets. More than 10,000 of them made the trip in 1810 alone.

Men carrying money through wilderness drew predators, and the worst were the Harpes. Micajah "Big" Harpe and Wiley "Little" Harpe, born Joshua and William Harper in North Carolina, were brothers or perhaps first cousins, Tory raiders in the Revolution and afterwards outlaws on the frontier. They are often called the first documented serial killers in American history and are believed to have killed 39 people, perhaps 50, across Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois and Mississippi. They killed for little reason, and they had a signature: victims cut open, filled with stones and sunk in rivers. They were too savage even for the river pirate Samuel Mason's gang at Cave-in-Rock on the Ohio, which threw them out after they took to stripping travellers and pushing them off the bluff.

Big Harpe's end came in August 1799 in Kentucky. A posse that included Moses Stegall, whose wife and four-month-old son the Harpes had murdered, ran him down, and Stegall cut off his head while he was still conscious; it was spiked at a crossroads still called Harpe's Head. Little Harpe got away and rejoined Mason's gang. When Mason was shot, Little Harpe and another gang member, Peter Alston, alias James May, tried to collect the reward on him by presenting his head. A Kentuckian in the crowd recognised them. They escaped, were recaptured, and early in 1804 they were hanged, and their heads were set on stakes along the Trace as a warning.

The steamboat ended the Kaintuck era by 1830, and the Old Trace went quiet. In 1938 Congress made the Natchez Trace Parkway a unit of the National Park System, and today it runs 444 miles through three states, passing more than 350 archaeological sites, Emerald Mound and old stands like Mount Locust, and foot trails that follow surviving stretches of the Old Trace.