America’s First Known Serial
Killers:
The Harps, Big and Little
by Doris Lane
Harp’s Hill is near the Pond River in western
Muhlenberg County, Ky., not far from Highway 62. There is a crossing in the road
near Dixon named Harp’s Head and one of the crossing roads is named Harp’s
Head Road. Some miles away, the precise location lost to time, there is a cave
known as Harp’s House. To tell how these places earned their names is to tell
the story of Micajah (Big) and Wiley (Little) Harp, America’s first known
serial killers.
They passed for brothers, but were cousins, sons
of brothers John and William Harpe, Scottish immigrants to Orange County, N.C.
The boys were named William (Micajah/Big), son of John, and Joshua
(Wiley/Little), son of William. Big Harp and Little Harp left home as young men
in 1775, aiming to become overseers of slaves in Virginia. Career plans diverted
by the American Revolution, the Harps instead became Tory outlaws in a gang that
roved the North Carolina countryside, raping farmers’ daughters, pillaging
livestock and crops, and burning farmhouses. In the attempted kidnapping of one
young girl by a Tory rape gang, Little Harp was shot and wounded by local
Patriot Captain James Wood.
In 1780, the British took the Tory irregulars and
their Cherokee allies into their ranks. The Harps fought under Tarleton's
command at King’s Mountain, near the Carolinas’ border, in October; in the
Battle of Blackstocks in November, and in January 1781 in the Battle of Cowpens.
Shortly after Cowpens, the Harps left the army and joined up with their Cherokee
confederates, taking part in the Indian raid on Station Bluff, now Nashville,
Tenn. They soon returned to North Carolina, where they kidnapped Captain Wood’s
daughter, Susan, and another local girl, Maria Davidson. The kidnapped women
would serve as wives to the Harps until the bitter end.
The Harps took the women across the Appalachians
to the Cherokee-Chickamauga town of Nickjack, in the vicinity of what is now
Chattanooga, Tenn. Along the way, a member of the gang, Moses Doss, objected to
the brutal treatment of the women and the Harps killed him. The Harps, with
their wives, lived in the Indian village at Nickjack for over a decade. In that
time, they participated in British-backed Indian raids on Kentucky settlers west
of the mountains, such as the Battle of Blue Licks in 1782. Later they took part
in the Indian attack on Bledsoe's Lick in Tennessee. The night before the
Americans finally wiped out Nickjack in 1794, the Harps received warning and
managed to escape with their women before the battle.
While living at Nickjack, both women had given
birth twice; each time, the fathers murdered their babies. Counted with Moses
Doss, the four infanticides made five known killings before 1797, or so, when
the Harps settled in a cabin on Beaver’s Creek near the frontier capital of
Knoxville, Tenn. On June 1, 1797 Little Harp legitimately married Sally Rice,
the daughter of a local minister, bringing the number of Harp wives to three.
A Killing Rampage
After two killings, one in Knox County and one on
the Wilderness Trail, the Harps left Tennessee in December 1798 for Kentucky,
where they killed two traveling men from Maryland. The Harps liked to gut their
victims and fill their stomach cavities with rocks to weight them down so they’d
sink in a river.
When they stopped for breakfast on Dec. 12, 1798
at John Farris’ Wayside House near the Big Rock Castle River, despite the
thieving and killing along the way, the Harps were hungry and flat broke, filthy
and bedraggled. But there was a kind and generous young man who was staying at
the inn who invited them to be his guests at his table.
His name was John Langford. He was traveling from
Virginia to pay a visit to a friend in Crab Orchard, Ky. A halfway house, such
as Farris’, was a place many travelers stopped and waited in order to join up
with others heading in the same direction. It was wild and dangerous countryside
and earned its name, The Wilderness. Two cattle drovers found Langford’s
mutilated corpse in The Wilderness two days later, when their cattle shied off
Boone’s Trace into the woods at the scent of blood.
The body was taken back to John Farris’ Wayside
House and the innkeeper pointed the way to the Harps and their women, who were
apprehended outside Crab Orchard. All five were imprisoned, but the Harp men
managed to escape, leaving their women to face justice alone. The Harps fled for
the barely settled and ill-defined Henderson County, Ky. Eventually, the Harp
wives were released, escorted out of town with three infants born in jail, and
one gift horse among them.
As abused and frightened women are wont to do,
they immediately swapped the horse for a canoe, traveled west along the Green
River toward the Ohio River, and a reunion with the husbands Harp at a pirates’
den called Cave-In-The-Rock on the Illinois side.
The Kentucky frontier had gone on alert after the
Langford killing and the Harps’s subsequent escape from the law in Danville.
Kentucky Gov. James Garrard ordered out a posse after the Harps. The posse
caught up with the Harps in a cane field in Central Kentucky, but the posse
members were too afraid to try to capture them, allowing them to get away
through the cane.
In disgust, one of the posse members, Henry
Scaggs, went to the home of Col. Daniel Trabue, a Revolutionary War veteran and
wilderness pioneer, who lived near the present Columbia in Adair County, to
report the posse’s cowardice.
As Scaggs sat in Trabue’s house discussing the
critical situation, Trabue’s young son’s dog, covered in blood, came limping
into the yard. The dog had left the house earlier with Trabue’s 13-year-old
son, John, who had been sent along the old buffalo trace to borrow some flour
and seed beans from a neighbor. About two weeks later the boy’s body was
found, decomposed, dismembered, and dumped in a sinkhole. The seed beans were
there, but the flour was gone.
In response to the boy’s murder, the governor
issued a $300 reward on each of the Harp heads.
In the reward notice issued at Frankfort, Ky.,
Micajah Harp was described as being about six feet tall, as robustly built with
an erect carriage, about 32 years old, with short black hair growing low on his
forehead. He wore "a striped nankeen coat, dark blue woolen stockings,
leggins of drab cloth and trousers of the same as the coat." Wiley was
"very meagre in the face…looks older but really younger, and has likewise
a downcast countenance. He had on a coat of the same stuff as his brother’s,
and had a drab surtout coat over the close-bodied one."
Moving north, the Harps killed a man named
Edmonton, a settler named Stump, and, upon reaching the Potts Plantation near
the mouth of the Saline River, they killed three men sitting around a campfire.
Meanwhile, the posse, out after the Harps on their race across the state,
summarily hanged some dozen criminals along the way, and ran a host of outlaws
out of Kentucky. They stopped just short of Cave-in-The-Rock, on the Illinois
side of the Ohio River, or they might have had the Harps that day.
This limestone opening in a bluff above the Ohio
River at its junction with the Saline, was a well-known natural landmark
throughout the 18th century, a rest stop for river travelers
migrating west. Beginning in the 1790s and until the 1830s, it was home base to
an entire corporation of river pirates. In 1798, the most famous among them was
Samuel Mason, a Revolutionary War veteran turned river bandit. His large sign
outside invited weary travelers to "Wilson’s Liquor Vault and House for
Entertainment." His unwary victims were beaten and robbed in the cave, and
sometimes they lived to tell about it.
Mason’s favorite prey was the slow-moving
flatboats laden with produce for Natchez and New Orleans. Pretending to be local
pilots guiding the boats through shallow parts of the rapidly flowing and
eddy-ridden Ohio, the pirate/pilot would steer the craft onto a shoal, where
Mason’s gang would pick it clean and take the goods to market themselves. With
the arrival of the Harps and their three wives and three babies, the relatively
non-violent ways of the river pirates took a murderous turn. After a few Harp
games of taking travelers to the top of the bluff, stripping them naked, and
throwing them off, they were politely asked to leave.
The final stretch of slaughter took place soon
after this, in July 1798, when the Harps returned to Eastern Tennessee. The
victims included a farmer named Bradbury; a man named Hardin; a boy named
Coffey; William Ballard, who was cut open, filled with stones, and dumped in the
Holston River; James Brassel, with his throat ripped apart on Brassel’s Knob;
John Tully, father of eight. On the Marrowbone Creek in south central Kentucky,
John Graves and his teenaged son, out planting crops, had their heads axed.
Moving toward Logan County, the Harps came upon a little girl, whom they killed,
as they did a young slave on his way to the mill. Once in Logan County, near
today’s Adairville, near the Whippoorwill River, they butchered an entire
migrating family asleep in their camp, but for one son who survived.
Stopping at a spot on land owned by Samuel Wilson
on the Mud River near Russellville, they rested, thinking what to do to escape
the posse in close pursuit. (The clearing in which the Harps rested later became
a staging ground for Methodist revivals.) Sally’s four-month-old daughter was
fretful, perhaps hungry. Big Harp took the baby from her mother’s arms, swung
her by her tiny ankles, and brained her little head against the trunk of a tree.
Still, the killing continued.
A man named Trowbridge who’d gone for salt at
Robertson’s Lick, his torso hollowed out, loaded with stones and sunk in
Highland Creek; Maj. William Love, an overnight guest at the Stegall home in
Webster County, who snored; the Stegall’s baby who cried; Mrs. Stegall who
screamed when she saw her infant’s throat was slit. Gilmore and Hudgens,
returning from the salt lick with their hounds, came upon the Harps. Pretending
to be the posse, the Harps accused the two men of being Harps, arrested, and
executed them. As they prepared to kill settler George Smith, near where the
Harps were living in the cave that came to be known as Harp’s Home, the posse
rode in.
After a chase, the posse left Big Harp’s body
on Harp’s Hill, took his head to the crossroads, Harp’s Head, and displayed
it there on Harp’s Head Road, attached to an oak tree, for the sober
contemplation of passers-by. Before dying, Big Harp confessed to 20 murders,
probably not counting the babies. Estimates are as high as 40, but usually
around 30.
The three captive Harp wives lived on: Sally Rice
returning to her family in Knoxville, remarrying, and migrating west with her
new husband and her father, by way of Cave-In-The-Rock; Maria Davidson, called
Betsey Roberts, marrying, moving to Illinois and raising a large family; Susan
Wood becoming a weaver, raising her surviving daughter in Tennessee, and dying
there.
As for Wiley, Little Harp, he rejoined the pirate
Mason at Cave-In-The-Rock for about four years, when he showed up in Natchez
with Mason’s head for the reward money. Little Harp was recognized, hanged,
cut down, and decapitated, his own head impaled along the side of the Natchez
Trace outside Old Greenville in Mississippi Territory, as a warning to outlaws.
At least that is one story of the end of Wylie
Harp, and it makes a good ending to the story of The Harps, Big and Little.
E-mail Doris Lane: Jerseycoa@yahoo.com
