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Monday, September 9, 2019
Texas History Minute John Murrell was always trouble, but he and his criminal network terrorized much of the South in ways that no organized crime figures have Dr. Ken before or since. Bridges Called the “Great Western Land Pirate,” the facts of his life are dramatically conflicted among biographers, but he nevertheless caused total chaos from the mountains of Tennessee to the edges of Texas in his criminal career in the 1820s and 1830s.
causing riots in Nashville and Memphis in July 1835. Alleged conspirators were arrested in New Orleans and Alabama. Thirty people were hanged for threatening a rebellion, including twenty slaves.
Murrell was released from prison in April 1844. Reportedly, he lived the life of a model citizen as a blacksmith after his release. The official record is that he died after a prolonged illness in November in the small community of Pikeville, Tennessee, admitting to all his crimes but the killings with his last breaths. He was allegedly buried at the Methodist cemetery John Andrews Murrell was born in Smyrna where his body was sometime between 1800 and 1806. His father, a Methodist circuit-rider later dug up and dismembered. preacher, raised the growing family Parts of his body, including his head, were supposedly displayed in eastern Tennessee shortly afterward. Murrell was the third of at county fairs across the South for the next several years. The eight children, and as his father’s Tennessee State Museum in ministry required him to ride the long, dangerous distances from one Nashville displays what they church to the next each week, he saw claim is his thumb. very little of his father growing up. But others insist that the ending for one of the South’s most He was in trouble with the law at a notorious figures was not so young age. He was convicted as a teenager of causing a riot in which he simple or mundane. Stories circulated for years that Murrell threatened a Tennessee man. In 1826, he was convicted of stealing a managed to slip away once again, horse and sentenced to be branded for perhaps to Arkansas, Texas, the crime instead of imprisonment, as Mississippi, or even England, penitentiaries were still rare. By his where he lived for many years more on his looted bounty. early twenties, he was posing as a Others claim that surviving Methodist preacher, traveling from members of his gang turned on one place to another along the Mississippi River basin. He mastered him and killed him. No reports of small cons to talk people out of their any further crimes attributed to money and stole whatever he could. him were reported, and no evidence definitively points to him living after 1844. However, His robberies became increasingly daring, and he developed a network the Mystic Clan continued to of thieves that became known across operate into the 1850s, including a raid on a steamboat in Chicot the South as the Mystic Clan. County carrying barrels of Estimates put the strength of this whiskey resulted in not only the organization at more than 500 loss of cargo but the sinking of people. One of his hideouts was in the boat itself. Locals still refer to East Arkansas where he ran a the scene of the sinking as counterfeiting ring and sold stolen “Whiskey Chute.” horses. Murrell also resorted to stealing slaves, often telling them he would help them escape only to sell The real story of John Murrell may be disputed for some time. them to someone else. In the mid1820s, he began holing up in an area While it was comparatively easy called the Neutral Strip, a stretch of for any individual to disappear and start a completely new life at land along the Sabine River in western Louisiana where the United that time, it was also quite States had only recently settled a land common for people to succumb to dispute with Spain. As such, it was illnesses at comparatively young still a relatively lawless area. Murrell ages. Murrell’s story had a supposedly hid his ill-gotten gains in considerable impact on a young the caves near the Sabine River, now Samuel L. Clemens, who grew up near the Mississippi River in the Texas border. He and his men were known to venture into Texas on Missouri in the 1830s and 1840s and was better known to the occasion. world as Mark Twain. Stories In 1834, he planned to incite a major about Murrell’s stolen treasure played a prominent part in his slave uprising across the South. In 1876 novel Tom Sawyer. As the the chaos, he and his Mystic Clan years have rolled by, Murrell’s aimed to loot and steal as much as legend continues to be retold, they could, including slaves and though often more as myth than horses. Word spread quickly, and fact. panic set in. Before it could be set into motion, Murrell was arrested in Dr. Bridges is a Texas native, Tennessee and sentenced to ten years writer, and history professor. He of hard labor in the state penitentiary can be reached at for slave theft. In the meantime, the drkenbridges@gmail.com. plans for the insurrection continued,
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