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Illustration from 19th century.
On a brisk day in December 1787, a well-appointed young man named Thomas Langford was breakfasting at an inn near the small settlement of Crab Orchard in Lincoln County when a ragged group of two men and three women appeared. Feeling sorry for the small band, Langford generously bought them breakfast, unwittingly showing a purse of silver coins. Bandits were common on the Wilderness Road, and when the time came to continue his journey, he joined them, for security.
It was the worst decision Langford ever made and his last. Unbeknownst to him, the two men were the notorious Harpe Brothers, and they had come to the inn after robbing and brutally murdering several travelers. Two days after Langford left the inn, two drovers found his body covered with leaves and hidden behind a log.
For years during the late 18th century, the Harpe Brothers ranged unimpeded throughout Kentucky and frontier regions from pre-state Illinois to Louisiana. Notorious as highwaymen and river pirates, they were most specifically feared as wanton, indiscriminate murderers of men, women and children. So widespread and vicious were their depredations that historians have referred to them as America’s first serial killers.
According to most reliable sources, Micajah “Big” Harpe and Wiley “Little” Harpe were not brothers, but rather first cousins and the sons of Scottish immigrants. Big Harpe was born Joshua Harper, probably in the 1750s; Little Harpe was named William Harper and was about two years younger than his cousin. Arrest warrants and reward notices of the time include fairly detailed physical descriptions of the two, with Big Harpe depicted as a hulking 6-footer “of robust make” with wiry black hair, while Little Harpe was redheaded and, as the moniker suggests, considerably smaller than his cousin but no less psychopathic.
The two had sided with the British during the Revolutionary War and had purportedly fought against the Patriots alongside other Tories at the battles of Cowpens and King’s Mountain. For years after the British surrendered, the two continued to raid Patriot homesteads, farms and settlements as members of Dragging Canoe’s renegade Chickamauga Cherokee raiding parties.
By this time, the Harpes had kidnapped two young women, both of whom Big Harpe claimed as his “wives.” In a short while, Little Harpe took a woman of his own, and the cousins freely shared their “brides” with each other. Three children were born out of this arrangement, one of whom Big Harpe killed simply for crying while he was trying to sleep. The women accompanied the Harpes on their murderous forays despite the brutal treatment that the men meted out.
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There is no accurate account of the number of murders the Harpes committed. Estimates have ranged between 50 and 100. They first achieved notoriety when mangled bodies began to turn up in the wilds. The Harpes’ trademark manner of disposing of their victims was to eviscerate them, fill the body cavities with rocks, and sink them in the nearest stream or river. Since they made no secret of their depredations—often announcing, “We are the Harpes!”—their name spread rapidly through the tiny communities and lone farms on the frontier.
The people who chose to make their way in the wilderness were, of necessity, a hardy lot. Living lives that were, in the words of English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,” they were accustomed to death in its many forms: disease, fire, freezing, starvation, childbirth loss, and attack by animals, Native tribes and bandits. Writes historian Henry Lincoln Keel, “[N]o Americans had witnessed more death than the backwoods pioneers had.”
In the absence of available law enforcement, those living on the frontier were accustomed to dealing with outlaws decisively. Resilient though they were, the threat of the Harpe Brothers instilled a terror that was unique among the settlements. Observes biographer Wallace Edwards, “In the wake of their wanderings around Kentucky, Tennessee and southern Illinois, [the Harpes] left a trail of dread among frontier families. This was a remarkable accomplishment.” Newspapers were few, and their circulation limited. Widespread rumors and gossip often blew the already-dreadful news out of proportion. Settlers knew, writes Keel, “the evil was out there somewhere and … it might blow over them like a foul wind at any time.”
Finally arrested and confined in the Danville jail, the Harpes managed to escape, leaving their women and children behind. Freed for lack of evidence, the women were given an old mare by sympathetic citizens. With children in their arms, the Harpe women traded the horse for a boat and rowed down the Ohio River to rejoin their men.
By this time, the Harpes had joined the gang of the notorious river pirate Samuel Mason in his lair at Cave-in-Rock, a vast cavern situated above a bend in the Ohio River. The gang lured flatboat crews to shore, robbed them and often gave them the option of dying or joining the pirates.
The Harpes brought their own form of mayhem to the pirate lair. They clearly reveled in the act of killing, and they practiced it in ways that shocked even the pirates. On one occasion, they stripped a prisoner, tied him to a horse’s back, and whipped the horse off the cliff above the cave and onto the rocks below. The stunned pirates threw the Harpes out of the gang.
Accompanied by their women and children, the Harpes returned to their old killing grounds in Kentucky, murdering as they went. They left victims in Stockton’s Valley, Russellville, the Kingston area, present-day Montgomery County, the woods around Bowling Green, and on Wolf River near the Kentucky/Tennessee border. By this time, a huge reward had been posted, and “hunting parties” searched for the two without success.
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Then came the act that ended their murder spree. On Aug. 21, 1799, after an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate a local justice of the peace, the Harpes sought shelter at the home of Moses Stegall a few miles east of present-day Dixon (Webster County). Stegall, it turned out, was away, and the Harpes convinced his wife, Mary, to feed and house them for the night. They shared the loft with a surveyor who was there to meet with Stegall, and when the man’s snoring disturbed their sleep, the Harpes killed him. The next morning, they slew Mary and her 4-month-old son and burned the house to the ground. Taking two horses from Stegall’s stable, they rode what they considered a safe distance, slaying two local men along the way.
Moses Stegall returned later that day and was informed of the catastrophe. Bent on revenge, he joined a rapidly assembled posse, and—well armed and mounted—they pursued the Harpes to their camp. Wiley managed to escape capture, but Micajah was shot and mortally wounded. As he lay dying, he begged for water, which a posseman brought him. It was the only kindness afforded the killer. Bent on retribution, Stegall cut off Micajah’s head with his knife to serve as both a trophy and a warning.
Given Stegall’s expressed thirst for vengeance, it is not known if he waited for Micajah to die of his wounds prior to removing his head. However, a macabre piece of folklore describing Harpe’s end has been passed down through generations of Kentuckians. In this iteration, he is still alive as Stegall applies his knife and growls mid-procedure, “You are a God-damned rough butcher, but cut on and be damned!”
Harpe’s head was posted at a crossroads in Webster County on what is now known as Harpe’s Head Road, and there it remained for years as a grisly warning to would-be malefactors. Today, a Kentucky Historical Society highway sign marks the spot.
Meanwhile, having escaped capture, Wiley convinced Samuel Mason to take him back, and he soon rose to second in command. By now, Wiley and Sam were the two most wanted men in Mississippi, with Wiley heading the list nationwide.
Now calling himself John Setton, Wiley discovered that a $1,000 reward (worth more than $30,000 today) had been offered for Mason’s capture or death. He and an associate killed the pirate leader, and—presenting his head to the authorities at Natchez—claimed the reward. At some point, Wiley was recognized, and he and his accomplice were summarily tried. They were hanged on Feb. 8, 1804. Locals beheaded the two, and—as with Micajah four years before—posted their heads along the roadside as a grisly warning.
After Micajah’s and Wiley’s deaths, their three women were taken to Russellville, tried as accessories to the Harpes’ crimes, and acquitted. Following their release, Wiley’s wife (he had legally married her) went to live with her father and eventually married a respectable citizen. One of Micajah’s “wives” settled in Russellville and, according to one chronicler, “lived a normal life.” Living under an alias, the other married in 1823 and moved to Illinois. It is not known what became of the two surviving children. In all the time they were with the Harpes, the three women, who clearly suffered terrible abuse, never attempted to escape, even when the opportunity presented itself.
Various historians have attempted to link the Harpes’ murder spree to a bitter disappointment in the outcome of the American Revolution. In fact, as with such modern-day serial killers as Ted Bundy and Kentucky’s “Angel of Death” Donald Harvey, their psychopathy calls for no justification at all. The Harpes simply enjoyed killing for the sake of killing. Writes biographer Edwards: “They were indiscriminate murderers dispatching people they came across with complete abandon. Their crimes were for the most part devoid of any detectable motive.”
One thing is certain: With the deaths of the Harpes, settlers throughout the frontier breathed a collective sigh of relief.