The Outlaw Years (Paperback or Softback)

The Natchez Trace is remarkable in American history for the legends and tales surrounding it. During the first half of the nineteenth century, travelers--traders, settlers, and the occasional war party or fugitive from justice--followed its course from the Appalachians to the lower Mississippi, from Knoxville to Natchez.

In this vibrant and energetic account, the author has mined both history and legend for startling tales of the near-mythical thieves, cutthroats, and confidence men once reported to have stalked their unsuspecting victims along this frontier trail--the terrible Harpe brothers, who came to a satisfactorily bad end; Samuel Mason, a thief done in by other thieves; and John Murrell, whose reputed schemes threw the South into a paroxysm of fear. Robert M. Coates retells the stories of these and other "land pirates" in chilling and ominous detail, preserving for us the tales once whispered on the edges of the dark southern woods nearly two centuries ago.

The years just before 1880 until about 1885 are considered the "outlaw years." Lawlessness developed a law of its own and planned an empire.

Operating along the Natchez Trace, an overland trading and postal-rider route that in places was barely a trail, the outlaws preyed upon the traffic along this line. Their plans were laid in the dives under the bluffs of the river towns--Natchez and Vicksburg and as far south as New Orleans.

One gang of outlaws under John Murrell even threatened national stability for a time in his plot to steal slaves and organize insurrection, in order to disorganize the government and establish his own state.

Robert M. Coates has built his research on this little-known period of American history into a vividly told, unified story, which restores the outlaw to his prominent place in the frontier during a critical period in American history, without making outlaws into heroes.