Wicked River

by Lee Sandlin

  The way it was imagined, the Mound Builder civilization at its height had been as rich and profound a culture as ancient Greece. The Mound Builders had cultivated the land, built monumental cities, created a sophisticated society that was spread out all down the river valley and throughout the forests of the eastern seaboard—but they had proved helpless before the danger of the primitive and cunning Indians. There had been, centuries before the Europeans arrived, a vast war across America, in which the Mound Builder civilization had at last been overrun and all its great works, except the mounds, wiped off the face of the earth.

  The story can be found in a poem by William Cullen Bryant called “The Prairies,” first published in 1832. This is the section about the mounds:

  A race, that long has passed away,

  Built them;—a disciplined and populous race

  Heaped, with long toil, the earth, while yet the Greek

  Was hewing the Pentelicus to forms

  Of symmetry, and rearing on its rock

  The glittering Parthenon. These ample fields

  Nourished their harvests, here their herds were fed,

  When haply by their stalls the bison lowed,

  And bowed his manèd shoulder to the yoke.

  All day this desert murmured with their toils,

  Till twilight blushed, and lovers walked, and wooed

  In a forgotten language, and old tunes,

  From instruments of unremembered form,

  Gave the soft winds a voice. The red man came—

  The roaming hunter tribes, warlike and fierce,

  And the mound-builders vanished from the earth.

  The solitude of centuries untold

  Has settled where they dwelt. The prairie-wolf

  Hunts in their meadows, and his fresh-dug den

  Yawns by my path. The gopher mines the ground

  Where stood their swarming cities. All is gone;

  All—save the piles of earth that hide their bones.

  The great masterpiece about the fate of the Mound Builders, though, wasn’t a poem but a work of art: Thomas Cole’s series of five paintings known collectively as The Course of Empire. They trace the rise and fall of an unknown civilization deep in the American wilderness. The civilization is never named; there are no markings or inscriptions or hieroglyphs on their buildings; the citizens are seen only at a great distance, so that it’s impossible even to say what race they are. The only clue to their identity is in their style of architecture: a wild, classical jumble that simultaneously recalls Rome, Carthage, the Aztecs, and Atlantis—just the same chaos of origins attributed to the Mound Builders.

  The first painting, titled The Savage State, shows the American landscape in its primeval desolation. There is a wigwam village in a hollow sheltered from an autumnal storm, figures are paddling a canoe up a creek, and in the foreground a hunter with a bow and arrow pursues a deer. The second painting, The Arcadian or Pastoral State, shows the same scene now in the springtime of civilization: the land is tamed and cultivated; there are shipbuilders at work along the shore; the village has been supplanted by a fuming stone temple resembling Stonehenge; in the place of the hunter is an old Socrates-ish philosopher scratching some sort of calculation in the dirt with a stick. The third painting is called The Consummation of Empire, and the scene is now a summery high noon. The pastoral world has been wholly covered over by a kind of classical version of urban sprawl: instead of the serene meadows and forests there is a fantastic clutter of colonnaded marble buildings and towering monuments; the water of the harbor is swarming with sailboats, keelboats, triremes, and gondolas; the bridges and promenades are thronged by citizens in a riotous festival. In the foreground a general is seen making a victory procession across one of the great arched bridges, surrounded by solemn priests dressed in white. The fourth painting is the inevitable crisis: The Destruction of Empire. The harbor city of the third painting is shown in the midst of a vast disaster. The great palazzi are in flames, the bridges are collapsing, the sky is congealing into a furious storm. The throngs have become stampeding mobs; soldiers are everywhere, looting, torching the buildings, grabbing at fleeing women. It’s an invasion, an uprising, a natural disaster—maybe all of the above. The last painting is the dark and tranquil epilogue: Desolation. The imperial city is gone; the wilderness is reclaiming the land. In the background, over the placid ocean, the moon is rising into a clearing sky. A fading twilight plays over the deserted ruins that line the estuary; the broken arches of the bridges and temples are being overgrown by weeds and ivy. A lone pillar on the shore is home to seabirds. The people have all vanished, and the land will soon erase their last traces.

  These paintings caused a tremendous stir when they were first exhibited in 1836. “A great epic poem,” James Fenimore Cooper called them. “The highest work of genius this country has ever produced.” While Cole never explained exactly how his paintings should be interpreted, few of the original spectators seem to have had any trouble decoding them. They were a rebuke to the idea that America had no history, that the land was a clean slate, that the new civilization the pioneers were building was its first. The truth was, the same grand historical cycles were playing out here just as they had in Europe or Asia. A great civilization had once risen up in the American wilderness, had reached the crest of the wave, and had toppled over into destruction and disappeared. And even as the spectators gawked at Cole’s paintings, far away, in the depths of the American interior, the whole story was happening again.

  12

  A Young Man of Splendid Abilities

  ONE WINTER AFTERNOON in the mid-1830s, two men met on a deserted Tennessee road near the Mississippi. One was a young man who said he was looking for a lost horse. The other, who was several years older, said he was a commercial traveler on his way to the ferry to cross into Arkansas. After a brief conversation, the older man offered to delay his journey and help the young stranger in his search.

  To an onlooker it would have all seemed quite innocuous. But this was the river valley: neither man was what he appeared to be. In fact, both were taking part in an elaborate masquerade. The exact nature of this masquerade wasn’t clear then, and it may not be clear even now—but one thing about it can be said for sure: no other such meeting by the Mississippi has ever stirred up anywhere near as much trouble.

  The men spent the rest of the day meandering through the winter landscape in the general direction of the ferry. All the while, they were engaging in the sort of idle chatter that American men have always gone in for when at loose ends: blunt, earthbound spitballing about the sorry state of the country. “What is it that constitutes character, popularity, and power in the United States?” the older man asked at one point. The answer was obvious: “Sir, it is property; strip a man of his property in this country, and he is a ruined man indeed—you see his friends forsake him; and he may have been raised in the highest circles of society, and yet he is neglected and treated with contempt. Sir, my doctrine is, let the hardest fend off.”

  As the two men ambled on, their talk drifted to the exploits of a celebrated local horse thief and slave stealer named John Murrell. With typical bravado and cynicism, the men agreed that Murrell was a true hero of the age: admirable for his courage, his daring, his cleverness, his rebellious spirit. The young man was so caught up in enthusiasm that he compared Murrell favorably with Alexander the Great and Andrew Jackson—they were “little and inconsiderate” next to him, since “he is great from the force of his mental powers, and they are great from their station in the world.”

  That was when the older man confessed: he himself was Murrell.

  The young man was astounded. “Is it possible,” he asked, “that I have the pleasure of standing before the illustrious personage of whom I have heard so many noble feats, and whose dexterity and skill in performance are unrivalled by any the world has ever produced before him: is it a dream or is it reality? I can scarce believe that it is a man in real life who stands before m
e!”

  Murrell, flattered and impressed by the young man’s attitude, invited him to forget about the missing horse and cross the Mississippi with him to Arkansas, where he had “a thousand friends.” The young man accepted at once. He introduced himself as Arthur Hughes, and never mentioned the horse again. But this was hardly an act of neglect. The horse didn’t exist, nor, for that matter, did Hughes—the young man, whose real name was Virgil Stewart, had made up the story as a way of introducing himself to Murrell. He had in fact been hired by one of Murrell’s victims to track him down and bring him to justice.

  Murrell suspected nothing. He was so taken by Stewart that, as they went on together toward the ferry, he launched into a detailed account of his life and past crimes. He told how he was instructed in villainy by his mother; how by the age of sixteen he’d become so expert a sharper that he could walk into a clothing store, order a new suit, and have it charged to the son of the richest man in town. He’d since become a master of disguise who could pass himself off as both a Catholic priest and a Protestant minister (he was especially good at the falling exercise). But his most lucrative career was as a slave stealer. He claimed that “fifteen minutes are all I want to decoy the best of negroes from the best of masters.” Some slaves he would trick into throwing in with him; he would sell the slave to somebody else, and the slave would escape again. Sometimes they did this five or six times. He would promise the slave a share of the profits—but sooner or later would kill him instead, bury him in the swamps, and keep all the money for himself.

  Several times in the course of this confession, Murrell intimated that he had a larger design. It took very little coaxing on Stewart’s part for him to reveal it. For many years, Murrell said, he had been engaged in a vast and secret project to organize all the thieves, murderers, and pirates in the river valley into one overarching criminal organization, which he called the Mystic Clan. The clan had two major components. The large outer circle of around a thousand men, called the Strikers, consisted of conventional lawbreakers who thought the purpose of the clan was simply to commit crimes more efficiently. Only the inner circle of four hundred men, called the High Council, knew the clan’s true purpose: to foment a slave insurrection throughout the South. Even as Murrell and Stewart talked, this plan was moving toward the crisis point—the moment when, Murrell said, “every state and section of the country where there are any negroes, intend to rebel and slay all the whites they can.”

  The insurrection had been surprisingly easy to set up. It relied on Murrell’s skill at tricking slaves into betraying their masters. He laid out the technique in detail to Stewart. “We do not go to every negro we see, and tell him the slaves intend to rebel,” he cautioned. Instead the clan had to find “the most vicious and wicked-disposed ones on large farms.” The first step was to “poison their minds by telling them how they are mistreated, and that they are entitled to their freedom as much as their masters, and that all the wealth of the country is the proceeds of the black people’s labor.” Next, lessons from current events: “We tell them that all Europe has abandoned slavery, and that the West Indies are all free; and that they got their freedom by rebelling a few times and slaughtering the whites.” From there it was a quick route to the ultimate prize: “If they will follow the example of the West India negroes, they will obtain their liberty, and become as much respected as if they were white; and that they can marry white women when they are all put on a level.” And to seal the deal, they were told they had the backing of the world at large: “We get them to believe that most people are in favor of their being free, and that the free states in the United States would not interfere with the negroes if they were to butcher every white man in the slave-holding states.”

  Of course, Murrell was careful to stress, this was all nonsense. He didn’t believe in abolitionism at all. The slave uprising was only a diversion. His real motive was larceny. In the midst of the chaos, the Mystic Clan was going to loot simultaneously all the banks in the slave states. “We have set on the 25th December, 1835, for the time to commence our operations,” he told Stewart. “We design having our companies so stationed over the country, in the vicinity of the banks and large cities, so that when the negroes commence their carnage and slaughter, we will have detachments to fire the towns and rob the banks while all is in confusion and dismay.”

  It was a dizzying and nightmarish prospect for Stewart. But that was not the worst of it. As Stewart listened, he began to realize that there was something much darker at work in Murrell’s soul than greed. He was really a visionary. His ultimate motive was a kind of satanic spite. As he put it to Stewart: “I will have the pleasure and honor of seeing and knowing that my management has glutted the earth with more human gore, and destroyed more property, than any other robber who has ever lived in America, or the known world. I look on the American people as my common enemy. They have disgraced me, and they can do no more; my life is nothing to me, and it shall be spent as their devoted enemy.”

  At the end of this monologue, Murrell invited Stewart to join with him in the Mystic Clan. As a sign of good faith, he offered to supply Stewart with a complete list of the clan’s membership, both the Strikers and the High Council, including addresses. “I consider you a young man of splendid abilities,” he declared. “Sir, these are my feelings and sentiments towards you.”

  This story is told in a pamphlet, first published early in 1835, that caused a tremendous stir in the lower river valley. The pamphlet’s full title is A History of the Detection, Conviction, Life and Designs of John A. Murel, the Great Western Land Pirate; Together with His System of Villany, and Plan of Exciting a Negro Rebellion, Also a Catalogue of the Names of Four Hundred and Fifty-five of His Mystic Clan Fellows and Followers, and a Statement of Their Efforts for the Destruction of Virgil A. Stewart, the Young Man Who Detected Him; to Which Is Added a Biographical Sketch of V. A. Stewart, by Augustus Q. Walton. Several things about it are peculiar. There is the putative author, for instance: Augustus Q. Walton is a name otherwise unknown to literary history. There is the style, which mixes self-consciously poetic prose (“It began to grow late in the evening, and the sun shone dimly as it was sinking below the western horizon, and reflected a beautifully dim light from the sleet which shielded the lofty young timber of Poplar Creek bottom”) with crude phonetic spellings (“Murel” for “Murrell,” “Hues” for “Hughes”). And then, of course, there is the very odd story it’s telling.

  The story does go on. Murrell and Stewart cross the Mississippi together. Murrell presents the young man to the High Council, Stewart makes a long extempore speech that immediately convinces the council that he is a kindred spirit, and they welcome him into their most secret deliberations. (A sample of the speech: “The conspiracy of four hundred Americans, in this morass of the Mississippi river, will glean the southern and western bank, destroy their cities, and slaughter their enemies.”) Stewart then manages to make his getaway, carrying enough proof with him to have Murrell arrested, convicted, and sentenced to the penitentiary.

  For a modern reader, there isn’t much question about how to assess all this. It’s flagrantly absurd. It’s absurd not simply because of the wooden speechifying of the characters or the ridiculous melodrama of the action; there isn’t anything about the basic situation that seems even remotely plausible. How could Murrell have concocted such an enormous conspiracy, and how could he have kept it so secret? And why, if he had done all this, would he casually confess it to a total stranger—and then offer to supply the stranger with the names and addresses of every one of the conspirators?

  But these weren’t doubts that troubled the original audience. People then had a different standard for judging the truth of what they read. Newspaper stories, and even formal histories, routinely recorded people making impossibly high-flown speeches to each other at moments of dramatic crisis and revealing all their dread secrets in ornate soliloquies. The overall effect was somewhere between Gothic melodrama and the oratory of
Cicero. Readers did not find it necessarily implausible. They would have found a modern reader’s objections to be niggling and irrelevant. Even if Stewart’s account wasn’t a naturalistic rendering of how people actually behave, that didn’t mean the underlying substance wasn’t, in all the most important senses, true.

  And besides, there were many things about the pamphlet that were already known to be true. There really was a man named John Murrell (or possibly Murel, as the pamphlet spelled it, or Murrel, as some later writers favored) who had been put on trial in Tennessee for slave stealing. He had been convicted, and in the spring of 1835 he was in a Tennessee penitentiary. Virgil Stewart was also a real person, and it was a matter of public record that he had been a witness against Murrell at the trial. And then, too, there was that list Murrell had promised Stewart of all the members of the Mystic Clan. The pamphlet reproduced it in full. It was disturbingly plausible; it carefully mixed vague and not-quite-traceable names (somebody called Williamson in Kentucky, a D. Harris in Georgia) with the real names of some of the most prominent citizens in Tennessee and Kentucky. No wonder that the original readers found it so convincing—in fact, wholly terrifying.

  In the spring of 1835, Virgil Stewart went on a speaking tour on the lower Mississippi. At each stop along the way, he repeated the charges made in the pamphlet: that the Mystic Clan was real, that it was organizing a slave insurrection, and that the entire South was in imminent peril. The arrest of Murrell hadn’t put an end to the plot; in fact, it had accelerated it. The original target date for the uprising had been Christmas Day of that year; now it had been pushed forward to the Fourth of July.

  Stewart caused a sensation everywhere he went. He impressed everybody with his demeanor: despite the desperate urgency of his message, he was in all respects modest and dignified, the model of a respectable young man. He told the most hair-raising stories about the Mystic Clan’s campaigns to kill or otherwise silence him, and yet he was never boastful, never arrogant; he was decorous, even prim. (The credited author of the pamphlet, Augustus Walton, remained out of sight—the widespread assumption was that Stewart had written the pamphlet himself.) Only a few people failed to be won over. In Vicksburg, for instance, Stewart was introduced to the celebrated lawyer Henry Foote (the defender of the Horace-reading highwayman Alonzo Phelps), who had read the pamphlet and found it “fearfully exciting and inflammatory.” But Stewart himself seemed somehow troubling; Foote described him as “sagacious and insinuating,” a rather ambiguous compliment. But then Foote thought it would be a bad idea to express any doubts, given the enthusiasm of Stewart’s supporters. “Those who dared even to question the actual existence of the dangers which he depictured,” Foote wrote later, “were suspected by their more excited fellow-citizens of a criminal insensibility to the supposed perils of the hour, or were denounced as traitors to the slaveholding interests of the South.”