The most famous of the Natchez Trace robbers was Samuel Mason, born in Virginia in 1739, a militia captain in the Revolution who went into river piracy at Cave-in-Rock, a cavern on the north bank of the Ohio in what was then the Northwest Territory, before moving the operation onto the road. Travellers walking north with the proceeds of a sold flatboat on them were an obvious market, and the road gave them nowhere to go but forward. In 1803 the governor of the Mississippi Territory, William C. C. Claiborne, offered two thousand dollars for Mason, taken alive or delivered as a severed head, which is a fair measure of what sort of jurisdiction the Trace was understood to run through. The reputation ran well ahead of the recorded robberies, which is true of most famous roads and was no comfort to anyone walking this one.
Two of Mason's own men brought the head in. Whether they killed him, or he died of a wound taken escaping custody, has never been established. They were recognised on the spot as wanted men themselves. One was Wiley Harpe, called Little Harpe, who with Micajah Harpe had left a trail of killings across Tennessee, Kentucky and Illinois in 1798 and 1799, and who was then going by the name John Setton. The other gave his name as James May and was Peter Alston. Both were convicted and hanged at Greenville in the Mississippi Territory on 8 February 1804. Joseph Thompson Hare, another Trace highwayman, was hanged in Baltimore in 1818.
Getting there
35.6418, -87.3740
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
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