BOOKS

Cave-In-Rock is the centerpiece of a state park in Hardin County. Parents walk along the Ohio River shore while their kids scramble across the stepped cave floor in the bluff above.

We don't know if Otto Rothert brought his children when he visited the cave in 1915. We do know he became captivated by its history. "A century ago and more," he wrote, "its rock-ribbed walls echoed with the drunken hilarity of villains and witnessed the death struggles of many a vanished man."

The secretary of the Filson Society of Louisville, Ky., dug up newspaper accounts, court records and legends about the cave, and published Outlaws in 1924. Sales were dismal. The public's appetite for Cave-In-Rock stories had peaked a century earlier when the cave was a popular setting for romances and melodrama. And the amateur's florid style may have put off professional historians.

Outlaws deserves a better reception in this year's reprint by the Southern Illinois University Press. The modern reader has the pleasure of being transported back to two different eras. Rothert's overblown Roaring '20s prose is charming, and the book is stuffed with accounts of outlawry and trial transcripts that take you further back. Rothert focuses on the infamy of three criminals: pirate king Samuel Mason, and early American serial killers "Big" and "Little" Harpe.

Cave-In-Rock, one of Southern Illinois' first named landmarks, appeared on a French map in the early 1700s. From about 1795 to 1820, the easiest way to go West was to float down the Ohio River on a flatboat. Until the development of faster steamboats, immigrants were easy pickings for bands of canoe-borne pirates.

Samuel Mason commanded an outlaw fleet, but many of his victims came right to his front door. Mason erected a sign reading "Liquor Vault and House of Entertainment" outside his "Cave-Inn-Rock" in 1797.

The scheme is described in one of the first accounts of the cave, a short story published in the early 1800s:

"This novel sign had a magnetic effect upon the boatmen who were almost daily passing en route to the southern markets, with flatboats loaded with produce. The boat crews were generally jovial fellows, fond of rum, rest and merriment, and hardly a boat passed without stopping. Thieves and gamblers stopped here and in a few months the place became infamous for its licentiousness and blasphemy."

While the boatmen made merry, Mason's operatives inventoried their cargo, decided if it was worth stealing, then forced the crews either to join the gang or meet their maker. Rothert quotes no less than John James Audubon: "By dint of industry in bad deeds, [Mason's] depradations became the talk of the whole western country ... the horses, the Negroes, and the cargoes, his gang carried off and sold."

Mason's Cave-Inn-Rock operation lasted only a couple of years before being broken up by "regulators," vigilantes who meted out rough frontier justice. Mason escaped to the South, terrorizing the Natchez Trace from Kentucky to Mississippi. Rothert wrote that this man of "excellent birth," who "acquitted himself with courage" as a fighting soldier during the Revolutionary War, was at last executed by turncoats in his own band.

Cave-In-Rock serves much the same purpose in Outlaws as it did during the flatboat days: We don't stay there long. As Rothert writes, "an outlaw's stay in any place is of nessecity [sic] short." The action ranges from Kentucky to New Orleans. The book includes portraits of counterfeiters and pioneer "godfathers" who used the cave as a headquarters before moving on.

Rothert laments the lack of details on life in the cave itself. Dead men tell no tales, after all. That being the case, it's a wonder anyone knows anything about Micajah and Wiley Harpe. These brothers had already robbed and murdered their way across Kentucky when they sought refuge among Mason's gang at Cave-In-Rock. Rothert's moral indignation hardly conveys the depth of the brothers' malevolence: "This aggregation of outlaws [Mason's gang at Cave-In-Rock] was doubtless a depraved conglomeration of evil doers, but in the Harpes they found two human brutes beyond even their toleration."

Soon after joining the Mason gang, "Big" and "Little" Harpe kidnapped a man, stripped him naked, tied him to a horse and galloped the horse off the 100-foot cliff above the cave. The Harpes were expelled from the cave and began a rampage across the Ohio River in western Kentucky. Rothert details the elder brother's capture and execution in a chapter entitled "Big Harpe's Ride to Death."

More than once in Outlaws, Rothert defends himself against skeptics who dismiss Cave-In-Rock's lurid history as distasteful at least and fictional at worst: "The lives and exploits of these men constitute an important phase in pioneer life because their deeds greatly affected the settlement of the new country. ... The historian who passes over [these stories] as mere blood-and-thunder tales misses entirely one of the high lights in the great adventure of the settling of the Mississippi Basin."

Outlaws is the third of SIU Press' "Shawnee Classics" series, which has been shepherded by Gordon Pruitt. He calls the book "one of the jewels of Southern Illinois Americana." Outlaws opens a window on a very young, very violent America, a wilderness barely governed either by far-off colonial powers or a fledgling United States.

Gary Hart is a free-lance writer who lives in Murphysboro.

38 ¦ May 1996 Illinois Issues