In the early days of the American western expansion, the favored means of traveling to the lands of Ohio and beyond was by water. The Ohio River served as the main thoroughfare, its tributaries reaching into the fertile lands of Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and beyond. Families headed west on rafts, on river barges, on pole boats, carrying with them all of their worldly goods, in the hope of establishing a new life in the American West.
At points where the rivers were shallow enough to allow fording, travelers encountered Indian trails, many originally created by buffalo and other large animals. These trails served as highways to the interior settlements springing up along the frontier. Unpaved and unpoliced, the trails, like the rivers, posed considerable dangers to travelers. Besides the dangers inherent in untamed lands, the trails, the rivers, and the lands they traversed were liberally populated with hostile Indians, river pirates, and highwaymen.
By 1795, the Treaty of Greenville ended the threat of the Indian tribes along the Ohio River Valley, and settlers poured into the region, down its tributaries into Kentucky, Tennessee, and further west into Spanish-controlled Missouri and beyond. Former Indian trails, called traces, were the favored overland route, with the Natchez Trace becoming the most famous of them all. Along both the rivers and the traces, there was little in the way of law enforcement and little regard for what did exist. Hundreds of men, women, and children ventured forth along the routes, never to reach their hoped-for destinations, many never to be seen again.
Highwaymen, robbers, and thieves along the traces, and river pirates who preyed upon the travelers afloat, operated under the rule that the dead cannot identify their attackers, nor testify against them in court. Those who did survive an encounter with criminals, usually through the expedient of running for their lives at the first sign of an attack, began circulating tales of uncommon cruelty practiced by the criminals along the frontier. It should be noted that due to the laws of the time, a known murderer in Kentucky could walk about in another state, Indiana, for example, with impunity. In some territories, the local magistrate’s jurisdiction did not extend beyond the territory’s borders in which he held authority, for example, from county to county. If a posse from Kentucky pursued a murderer into Tennessee and arrested a fugitive guilty of a crime in Kentucky and carried their quarry back to face justice, the members of said posse were liable to charges of kidnapping in Tennessee. Criminals learned to commit their crimes in one territory and quickly relocated to another where they were safe from pursuit.
Known killers moved about the region freely, leaving behind their victims and a reputation for ferocity and mercilessness. On the Ohio River, a notorious gang of river pirates led by Samuel Mason operated out of caves along the Ohio River, carefully ensuring the crimes they committed were done outside the jurisdiction of local authorities. They were known, up and down the river, for their viciousness and complete disregard for the lives of their victims. Yet, even such hardened criminals as the Mason Gang, as they were known, eventually encountered a pair of murderers whose senseless violence sickened the pirates. The pair were known as Wiley and Micajah Harpe, who went by the nicknames Little Harpe and Big Harpe. Throughout the late 1700s and early 1800s, the Harpes were believed to have killed over fifty people, most for no other reason than that the opportunity to murder presented itself. They are widely regarded as the first serial killers in America.
The Harpe Brothers
Who the Harpe brothers really were is subject to considerable debate. It is most likely that they were born in western North Carolina, though they may not have been brothers at all, but rather first cousins. It is also likely that their last name was Harper rather than Harpe, and it is possible that one, or perhaps both, emigrated from Scotland in or around 1770. It is likely that the tensions between Loyalists and Patriots in the region during the American Revolution led them to leave the area. The first confirmed record of the existence of the Harpes is their appearance in Virginia in 1775, where they worked as overseers on slave plantations. That fact leads most historians to assume their births around 1750, and no later than 1760, but the actual dates and places are simply unknown.
During the American Revolutionary War, the Harpes returned to the backwoods of North Carolina, where they operated with various gangs known as associators. Ostensibly part of the Loyalist militia, also called Tories, such gangs raided area farms and settlements under the guise of foraging for supplies for the British. They were opposed by the Revolutionary Patriots, whom they called Rebels. In reality, the associators committed crimes including rape, kidnaping, murder, robbery, and the looting of corpses. They served with the Loyalist militia at the Battle of King’s Mountain in 1780, a significant British defeat, and later in Lord Cornwallis’s campaign in South Carolina.
The American Revolutionary War took on the appearance of a Civil War in the backcountry of the Carolinas between the Loyalists and Patriots. Americans fought each other in pitched battles between militia units of both sides, as well as in guerilla warfare among neighbors and communities. The Harpes were noted Tories, making them targets of reprisal from Patriots once the shelter of British protection was removed.
At the time, the brothers, if that is what they were, still used the name of Harper. The Harper clan in the Carolina backcountry was extensive, and the majority of Harpers were supportive of the King.
Following the British defeat at the Battle of Yorktown, the Harpes fled to the west, having made North Carolina too hot for them, and took shelter with a renegade Cherokee tribe known as the Chickamauga, which had been allied with the British. They settled in a Chickamauga village called Nickajack, near present-day Chattanooga, Tennessee.
From there, they participated in Cherokee raids on White settlements in eastern Tennessee and in Kentucky to the north. In 1782, they joined a combined Loyalist and Indian force to attack Kentucky militia in the Battle of Blue Licks in Kentucky. There, the Indians and their allies, which included many Loyalists, defeated a Patriot force of mostly Kentucky militia.
For the ensuing decade, the Harpes resided with the Cherokee at Nickajack and supported themselves by raiding settlements and travelers. They are known to have kidnapped two women during this time, one of whom was Susan Wood, the sister of a Patriot militia leader in North Carolina. Micajah Harpe claimed Susan was his wife, a claim he would repeat about other women throughout his life. Susan later claimed she was forced to cohabitate with Micajah. The other woman, Maria Davidson, also lived with Micajah, allegedly fearful of his reprisal if she attempted to flee.
In 1794, the Harpes learned of an impending militia raid on the village of Nickajack. Rather than warn their allies and prepare for the attack, they fled, surfacing in the region of Knoxville, where it is believed they began calling themselves Harpe, rather than Harper, in an attempt to separate themselves from their past as Tories. In 1797, Wiley Harpe married, recording his name as such in the Knox County records. His bride was named Susan Rice. They resided, along with Micajah and his consorts, in a small cabin on a creek outside of Knoxville.
The brothers allegedly supported themselves by subsistence farming and hunting, but in reality by stealing cattle, pigs, chickens, and horses. In 1797, shortly after Wiley’s nuptials, the brothers were chased out of the area by the local militia. They had been accused of stealing a pig from a neighbor known to posterity simply as Johnson. They left behind the body of their accuser, discovered in a creek, its chest cavity cut open and filled with stones to weigh it down and cause it to sink. Such disposal of victims became a signature of the brothers, they attempted to hide several of their victims in a like manner.
Undoubtedly, it was not their first murder, but it was the first of which they would later confess to the authorities. Eventually, the brothers would confess to 39 murders, beginning with that killing in 1797. The trail of murder began in Tennessee and eventually continued through that state, Kentucky, and Illinois.
The Murder Spree
Fleeing Tennessee militia, the Harpes moved to Kentucky via the Wilderness Road through Cumberland Gap. The road provided a steady source of victims for robbing and murdering, and they took advantage of it. At least three murders were attributed to them in 1797, each a traveler along the Wilderness Road, and each discovered submerged in a nearby stream, the body weighted down with stones. In 1798, the body of a Virginian named John Langford was discovered, similarly mutilated. A local tavern owner informed authorities that the Harpe brothers, living in a cabin with their wives nearby, had boasted of the crime. The Harpes were arrested and jailed in Danville, Kentucky, but they escaped in early 1799, before their trial. The body of the tavern owner who had informed on them was found soon after.
In April 1799, the governor of Kentucky, James Garrard, issued warrants for the arrest of the Harpes, including a bounty of $300 on each, roughly $5,600 in today’s money, which seems low for serial killers.
It was from the governor’s warrants that the only known description of the Harpe brothers is obtained. The governor described Micajah as “…about six feet high – of robust make, and is about 30 or 32 years of age. He has an ill-looking, downcast countenance…” He described Wiley as having a similar countenance, though he noted that Wiley appeared to be the older of the two. In fact, he was the younger of the pair. From their earlier history during the Revolutionary War, it is evident both brothers were considerably older than the age assessed by the governor. If Micajah had been born in 1767-1769, as the governor implied, he would have been between six and eight years of age in 1775, when he was believed to have been working as an overseer in Virginia.
With an armed group of Kentucky militia aggressively pursuing them, the brothers fled across the Ohio River, killing at least two other men during their journey, with their wives and at least two children in tow. They crossed the river into Illinois, where Kentucky law could not touch them, and turned up at Cave-in-Rock, the base of operations for Samuel Mason and his band of river pirates.
Cave-in-Rock is in a bluff that towers over the banks of the Ohio, clearly visible from Kentucky across the river. There, the Harpes, along with their wives and children, found refuge among the river pirates, with Samuel Mason viewing the brothers as potential allies. Undoubtedly, he regarded them as, to use the parlance of a modern crime boss, good earners. The brothers were safe from pursuit since, to that point, they had not yet committed any crimes in Illinois. That would soon change.
The Harpes began to kidnap victims on the river and on the Kentucky side, returning with them to the bluffs. They would then take them to the top of the bluff above the cave, strip them of all belongings and clothes, and then casually push them off the bluff, to die on the rocks far below. If such tales be true, as they have not been proved, the victims who plummeted to their deaths at Cave-in-Rock should be added to the death toll accrued by the Harpes.
According to one tale, which is unproven, the brothers once put a victim on a blindfolded horse and forced the animal over the bluff, killing both horse and rider.
How many victims of the Harpes’ died in such a manner is unknown, but by most accounts, the river pirates found the manner of execution repulsive and complained to Mason so forcibly that he was forced to order the Harpes to leave. Some versions of the story claim it was the killing of the horse, which could have been useful, rather than the murder of human beings, which upset the pirates. At any rate, Mason ordered them out, and the Harpes were absent when Cave-in-Rock was raided by a group of vigilantes from Mercer County, Kentucky, in the late summer of 1799. Mason escaped, resuming his criminal career along the Natchez Trace in Mississippi. He would meet Wiley Harpe again.
The Spree Continues
The brothers returned to eastern Tennessee, leaving a trail of dead bodies in their wake across Kentucky. They continued to dispose of some bodies by disemboweling them, loading the cavity with stones, and tossing the body into a nearby stream. If no suitable body of water was handy, they simply left the bodies as they lay. It became evident to pursuers that the brothers killed for no reason other than bloodlust. Though they did strip victims of valuables, their thefts appeared to be incidental rather than the motives for their murders. For example, near Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, the brothers killed a man they met as they were traveling by repeatedly slamming the victim’s head into a tree.
Most of their killings appeared to have been unplanned. They simply met someone as they traveled and killed them, frequently disposing of the body by disembowelment and submergence. Another opportunity occurred when they asked for shelter for the night. Frontier hospitality would not allow a party including women and children, as theirs did, to spend the night in the open if they had a barn, or a shed, or room in their homes. Several of the Harpe’s victims died for being hospitable. Their preferred method of killing was with a knife, or an axe, or by bludgeoning, rather than by gunshot.
At least seven more murders occurred at their hands in Kentucky before they arrived in eastern Tennessee, where they were once again safe from the jurisdiction of Kentucky justice. They then headed west, roughly following the Tennessee-Kentucky state line, committing additional murders in both states. In August 1799, they were just above Russellville, Kentucky, when Micajah Harpe, irritated by his infant daughter’s crying, killed the baby by bashing its head against a tree. Later that month, while sheltering in a cabin in Webster County, Kentucky, they killed another guest in the same home, silenced a crying baby by slitting its throat, and then killed the infant’s mother. The woman’s husband, Moses Stegall, was absent from the home at the time of the murders, returned to find his slaughtered family, and joined the group of vigilantes in pursuit of the Harpes.
That group, led by John Leiper, which is sometimes recorded as Leeper, finally caught up with the Harpes on August 24, 1799, in Webster County. Leiper demanded the Harpes’ surrender, which was refused, and Micajah Harpe was shot in the leg as he attempted to flee. Wiley escaped. As Micajah slowly bled to death, he confessed to more than 20 murders in Tennessee, Illinois, and Kentucky. He expressed remorse for only one, that of his own infant daughter. There is no record of any attempt to treat his wound or save his life.
According to some later accounts written by eyewitnesses, including one by John Leiper, Moses Stegall was so enraged by Harpe’s recounting of the murder of his wife and child that he cut off Micajah’s head before the murderer had completed his confession. In his official report to Kentucky Governor James Garrard, Leiper stated that Harpe was dead before Stegall decapitated the corpse.
Regardless, none of the group claimed the $300 bounty the governor had placed on the Harpes. After cutting off the head, Stegall impaled it upon a pole and placed it along a nearby road, today known as Harpe’s Head Road. The spot is marked with a historical marker.
Search for Little Harpe
At the time of Micajah Harpe’s death, three women were traveling along with the brothers. Two, Susan Wood and Maria Davidson, were consorts of Micajah Harpe. The third, Sally Rice Harpe, whose marriage to Wiley Harpe had been recorded in Knox County, was arrested and taken to Russellville, Kentucky, as were Micajah’s “wives”. All three were questioned and released after the authorities realized they had not participated in any murders.
None of the women could provide any insights as to the whereabouts of Wiley Harpe, and upon their release, they each went on with their lives. Sally Rice Harpe later remarried and in 1820, moved with her second husband to Illinois, crossing the Ohio River via the ferry at Cave-in-Rock. One can’t help but wonder if she regaled her new husband with tales of her earlier stay at Cave-in-Rock.
Wiley Harpe rejoined Samuel Mason in Mississippi, where the two continued their depredations along the Natchez Trace, working as highwaymen. Wiley Harpe began calling himself John Sutton or Setton. Mason, the former river pirate who had found the Harpes’ too violent for his tastes, began signing his crimes along the Trace as “Done by Mason of the Woods”. When the crime was murder, as it often was, Mason left his message in the blood of his victims. He also frequently scalped his victims.
The extent of Wiley Harpe’s involvement in the crimes along the Natchez Trace is largely unknown. It is presumed he resided in Missouri, then a Spanish Territory, along with the rest of Mason’s new gang. Meanwhile, the crime rate along the Natchez Trace grew exponentially. Travelers along the trace, particularly in Mississippi, frequently carried large sums of money in gold to transact business at their destination in New Orleans, also then under the control of Spain.
Samuel Mason is Arrested
In 1803, in response to pressure from New Orleans businessmen and the American government, Spanish authorities raided Samuel Mason’s home, arresting him and several members of his gang. Mason denied any criminal activity, including piracy, robbery, and murder, but was unable to explain away the more than $7,000 in gold and both American and Spanish banknotes he had in his possession, over $200,000 in today’s money. He also failed to offer a reasonable explanation for the 22 human scalps he had in his home as mementos.
Wiley Harpe successfully hid his true identity, the name John Sutton, shielding him from being known as a murderer. Spanish authorities found no crimes had been committed in their territory and decided to send Mason and the others, including Harpe, to New Orleans to await extradition to the United States.
Wiley learned that the United States had a price on Mason’s head, roughly equal to $7,500 in today’s money, though the actual size of the bounty is frequently disputed. It applied whether Mason was delivered alive or if indisputable proof of his death was presented to the proper authority.
Harpe enlisted the support of a colleague, Peter Alston, who also went by the name of James May and who was a former member of Mason’s gang. Peter was also the son of a notorious counterfeiter, Philip Alston, and on occasion dabbled in his father’s trade. He used the alias James May to dissociate himself from the counterfeiting activities. He, too, was in Spanish custody awaiting extradition to the Americans.
Harpe and Alston agreed that it would be better for them if they turned Samuel Mason over to the American authorities and collected the bounty rather than see it go to servants of Spain. During the prisoners’ journey down the Mississippi River by boat, a storm provided them cover to make their escape. Harpe, Alston, and Mason fled their guards, eluding them, though according to some reports, Mason was wounded by a gunshot in the leg.
Here, the story gets murkier still. What is certain is that Samuel Mason died. Whether he died as a result of his wound suffered while escaping or whether Wiley Harpe and Peter Alston helped him along to his reward is uncertain. What is known is that in late 1803, two men appeared before the American authorities in Greenville, Mississippi Territory, calling themselves John Sutton and James May. They had in their possession the severed head of Samuel Mason, which they offered as proof of his death as they claimed the bounty for the pirate.
Unfortunately for Wiley Harpe, he was recognized, his identity as the notorious Little Harpe proclaimed, and he was arrested along with his partner. Within hours, both escaped, though they remained free only a few hours before they were recaptured. They were held in irons in Greenville, Mississippi Territory, today a ghost town known as Old Greenville. There they were tried, convicted, and sentenced to death by hanging.
On February 8, 1804, Wiley Harpe and Peter Alston were executed by hanging in Old Greenville, Mississippi Territory. After they were dead, their bodies were taken down and decapitated. The bodies were buried in a nearby potter’s field. The heads were impaled on stakes, with a sign listing their names and crimes, and displayed along the Natchez Trace outside of Old Greenville. They were to serve as a warning to those considering crimes along the trace as to what their fate would be. Any sign of the site is gone today, as is Old Greenville. All that remains of what was at the time the largest town on the Natchez Trace is its cemetery.
America’s First Serial Killers
Micajah and Wiley, Big Harpe and Little Harpe, are generally described as America’s first serial killers, though general agreement on the number of their victims is disputed. Their own confessions, Micajah’s as he lay grievously wounded and Wiley’s from Greenville jail, came to 39 in most accounts. There were most likely many others, beginning with the mayhem on the Carolina frontier, when they routinely raided the homes of non-combatants. Even in war, the killing of noncombatants is considered murder by any civilized definition. Neither brother volunteered information about their murders; instead, they simply responded to questions about known murders by admitting or denying their guilt. As noted, the killings at Cave-in-Rock, if they happened, would have been the business of Illinois authorities. No Illinois authorities participated in their capture and deaths, and they were never asked about them.
How many men, women, and children they actually murdered during their killing spree is unknown and really doesn’t matter much more than two hundred years following the events. They are acknowledged as America’s first serial killers. One can’t help wonder when, if ever, some future historian will be able to write of the last.
