THE OUTLAW YEARS—Robert M. Coates—Macaulay ($3).
For 38 years (1797-1835) the overland wilderness route known as the Natchez Trace was the best but most dangerous road from New Orleans to the Midwest. Ol' Man Mississippi brought the cargoes down, but it was more than sail or paddle could do to get all the way upstream again. The gold went back in saddle bags over the narrow, bandit-infested trail stretching from Natchez, Miss, to Knoxville, Tenn.
First and worst of the Natchez Trace bandits were the Harpes: Micajah ("Big") Harpe and Willy ("Little") Harpe. With their three women (a wife apiece, one in common) they roamed the wilderness four years, robbed many a night-foundered traveler, sank his corpse, gutted and weighted with sand, in a nearby stream. The Harpes were killers for the fun of it; they never missed a chance, whether it paid them or not. "Big" Harpe was finally shot; "Little" Harpe, born to be hanged, kept his appointment with the gallows five years later.
Joseph Hare was an outlaw dandy, a city boy in the wilderness. After a lucrative career along the Trace, he was captured in a Baltimore tailor's shop, buying fancy clothes.
Samuel Mason had an honorable past: he had served in the Continental Army, not without distinction, afterwards became a justice of the peace. But his daughter eloped with a scalawag and Mason's career started with his son-in-law's murder. Almost up to the end he kept his pose of being a respectable, peaceable man, but robbers in those days had to be killers. To make sure he got the credit, Mason would scrawl his signature in his victim's blood.
Last and most dangerous of the Trace pirates was John Murrell, criminal extraordinary. A student of law, he sold slaves, sold them again and again, often killed them in the end to destroy the evidence. Murrell used to pass as an itinerant preacher. Said he once, describing one of his forays: "In all that route, I only robbed eleven men, but I preached some damn fine sermons." He planned a gigantic simultaneous uprising of slaves and white trash throughout the West, and his organizing genius almost succeeded in bringing it to a head. But he talked too much; one of his confidants got him arrested just before the zero hour.
The Author. Robert M. Coates, 33, is a Yale graduate (1919), onetime left-wing litterateur (contributor to Broom, transition, Gargoyle). He is married to Sculptress Elsa Kirpal, lives in Manhattan, but is building a house, "almost single-handed," near Brewster, N. Y. Just over six feet tall, burly, shy, he has gentle blue eyes, a mop of red hair, his clothes flap on him. He throws an ice pick at a bull's-eye painted on a barn door with persistence and accuracy. He has written one other book: The Eater of Darkness. He works on the editorial staff of The New Yorker, Manhattan smartchart.
The Outlaw Years is the August choice of the Literary Guild.