This is a new release of the original 1930 edition.

1930. Robert Coates studies the outlaws who preyed on traffic along the Natchez Trace from Natchez all the way to New Orleans from about 1880 to 1885. Among other violent and lawless acts, they planned to build an empire using the labor of stolen slaves. They stole and pillaged to the extent that this period is sometimes referred to as the outlaw years, as bands of land pirates roamed the country in search of riches.

1930. Robert Coates studies the outlaws who preyed on traffic along the Natchez Trace from Natchez all the way to New Orleans from about 1880 to 1885. Among other violent and lawless acts, they planned to build an empire using the labor of stolen slaves. They stole and pillaged to the extent that this period is sometimes referred to as the outlaw years, as bands of land pirates roamed the country in search of riches.

1930. Robert Coates studies the outlaws who preyed on traffic along the Natchez Trace from Natchez all the way to New Orleans from about 1880 to 1885. Among other violent and lawless acts, they planned to build an empire using the labor of stolen slaves. They stole and pillaged to the extent that this period is sometimes referred to as the outlaw years, as bands of land pirates roamed the country in search of riches.

1930. Robert Coates studies the outlaws who preyed on traffic along the Natchez Trace from Natchez all the way to New Orleans from about 1880 to 1885. Among other violent and lawless acts, they planned to build an empire using the labor of stolen slaves. They stole and pillaged to the extent that this period is sometimes referred to as the outlaw years, as bands of land pirates roamed the country in search of riches.

The Natchez Trace is remarkable in American history for the legends and tales surrounding it. During the first half of the nineteenth century, travelers--traders, settlers, and the occasional war party or fugitive from justice--followed its course from the Appalachians to the lower Mississippi, from Knoxville to Natchez.

In this vibrant and energetic account, the author has mined both history and legend for startling tales of the near-mythical thieves, cutthroats, and confidence men once reported to have stalked their unsuspecting victims along this frontier trail--the terrible Harpe brothers, who came to a satisfactorily bad end; Samuel Mason, a thief done in by other thieves; and John Murrell, whose reputed schemes threw the South into a paroxysm of fear. Robert M. Coates retells the stories of these and other "land pirates" in chilling and ominous detail, preserving for us the tales once whispered on the edges of the dark southern woods nearly two centuries ago.