JOHN A. MURREL WAS BORN in 1804, somewhere in the middle valley of Tennessee, some fifty miles south of Nashville,
on the old Natchez Trace. "My father was an honest man, I expect," he once said; "my mother was
of the pure girt; she learnt me and all her children to steal, as soon as we could walk. At ten years old I was
not a bad hand."
Murrel was the cruelest and the most gentlemanly of the land pirates. He dressed elegantly; his clothes were tailored
down the river in New Orleans; his boots and his hats he bought in Philadelphia. He rode the finest specimens of
horseflesh obtainable. His manner was courtly, beyond reproach. He carried his handsome head high. But "there
was always something about the pose that suggested a snake about to strike."
In the pioneer settlements, Murrel often posed as an itinerant preacher. "I preached many a damn fine sermon,"
he boasted. He was a murderer, a heartless killer; he scorned the ruffians of the trail who were so squeamish as
to allow their victims to live to tell of the outrages perpetrated upon them. He ripped open the bellies of his
victims, took out the entrails, substituted sand or rocks, and sank the bodies in wilderness streams.
Details of the robbery of Abraham Scholl by the Murrel gang are lacking. Scholl repeated the story to some of his
descendants; also to some of the settlers in the early neighborhood. Only a few facts from Abraham's recitals have
survived the lapse of years. The following are the known facts, about which descendants and others to whom the
story has been handed down are positive:
Scholl, to avert quibbling over the value of notes at a time when the country was flooded with bills of doubtful
value, before leaving Kentucky, converted everything possible into gold. This he was bringing with him to the Illinois
country, gold in the amount of $1,000. Shortly after crossing the Ohio river at Ford's Ferry to Cave-in- Rock,
Illinois, he was robbed of his gold by members of Murrel's gang clothed in the guise of pioneer preachers who were
either holding a pretended camp meeting near Cave-in-Rock or who accompanied the Scholl wagon for a time upon the
trail.
"In those days," says a chronicler of Murrel's activities, "the arrival of an itinerant preacher
was a magnet drawing settlers in from the deepest wilderness." Everybody came. "I have seen," says
one writer, "from fifty to a hundred ladies, walking barefooted to the meeting, carrying their shoes and stockings
in their hands." Reaching town, they would sit down by the nearest branch or creek, wash their feet and put
on their shoes.
Says Coates: "Men would come, stiff in their home-woven, home-sewn jeans. Sometimes a family would drive in
with a wagon-load of produce as well, to sell for market. Hucksters would put up stalls; traders and peddlers followed
the evangelists as gypsies follow the fair. Saloon-keepers would move their whiskey barrels out to the edge of
the field where the exhorter had taken his stand; camouflaged in booths ‘composed of bushes, cut and piled up,'
they would be filling bottles for the thirsty gentlemen among the congregation.
"The service itself," says the same chronicler, "was a frothing frenzy. ‘I have seen a hundred women
with the jerks'; they would fall on the ground, screaming and foaming. Men would be seen to start forward, ripping
their clothes away, staggering down to the ‘bull-pens' under the platform where the reclaimed sinners rolled and
slavered in the straw. Everything went by rhythm: the ‘workers' with their hails, the exhorters stamping and repeating
their set phrases, the evangelist breathless and incoherent but timing his utterance to the tomtom thud of a stave
on the platform railing — a rhythm that beat faster and faster, with the whole assembly swaying in time to it,
crying out in unnatural voices, hoarse or high and squealing, frantically gesticulating, screaming, jerking, the
women's very hair ‘popping like the crack of a whip,' the men straining with gritted teeth — until in the final
pitch of pandemonium sometimes even the preacher himself would catch the contagion and fall in a fit of the ‘jerks,'
pitching and tumbling down in the midst of the congregation."
The "shouting revival" was introduced to the territory in the year 1802 by an itinerant preacher named
Granado; he had great success, was called "the wild man," and left a trail of "shouting congregations"
after him. The year following, a Reverend Doak startled a revival meeting by suddenly pitching from the pulpit
and rolling all the way down a hill in a fit of the "jerks." Soon no sermon was complete without a seizure;
astonishing incidents occurred. "Once," says Coats, "a man who had been sitting astride a white
horse, listening to the sermon, ran amuck through the crowd, spurring madly, shouting hallelujahs, until he fell
from the saddle, rigid. Several people were trampled and one killed, but the event was hailed as a signal manifestation
of divine favor."
Murrel and his gang made the most of these shouting revivals, followed by the inevitable letdown when men were
not themselves and were an easy prey. With Murrel was a man named Carter. In Natchez-under-the-Hill, vile vice
den of the period, Carter was as wild a roarer as any. There, with his little shifty-eyed quadroon girl and a bottle
of rum, he would sit in Walton's tavern-bar and quote the Scriptures to the girl until she would leap at him, spitting
and scratching. On the road, Carter changed as if by magic. Traveling disguised as a Methodist preacher, he was
"as slick in the tongue as goose grease." From Carter, Murrel learned to shout sermons and sing psalms;
he soon perceived how easy it would be to lay down counterfeit currency, to run off niggers and unload stolen slaves,
and rob travelers of their gold, unsuspected, in the frenzied atmosphere of the camp-meeting.
With Carter for a companion, Murrel made a long circuit through the valley. "In all that route," said
he, "I only robbed eleven men (Abraham Scholl may have been one of them), but I preached some damned fine
sermons and so scattered a lot of queer money among the pious." Carter was a "queersman"; through
him Murrel got in touch with the counterfeiters at the Cave and in the dives along the river.
It was a wild period. Floods of worthless currency poured into the valley. Wildcat banking flourished. The procedure
was simple; anyone could procure a bank charter, issue currency, unload it in the settlements. Says former Governor
Edward F. Dunne in his "History of Illinois": "Some of the notes in circulation were issued by solvent
banks, some by specie-paying banks, some by banks that had already failed, some by barks that were about to fail,
some were counterfeits, and some purported to be issued by banks that never existed."
Clerks, cashiers and business men went armed with copies of the various Bank Note Detectors, such as that published
by R. T. Bicknell in Philadelphia and advertised as "a handsome super royal sheet, published weekly at $2
per annum. The plan is to give the names and locations of all the Banks in the United States that are in credit,
stating the discount on their notes at Philadelphia. To give also a list of all the broken banks, and a list of
all the counterfeits known to be in circulation."
Consulting this, the harassed merchant would know at a glance which bills were worth a dime on the dollar, which
were worthless, and which might be accepted at half, one-third or full value. But few would take these rulings
tamely, and most, like Abraham Scholl, especially when going into a new country, to avoid dispute chose to carry
their funds in gold; which made matters simpler for the bandits who overtook them on the way.
Abraham Scholl lived to see the extermination of the gang that robbed him and the sweeping of the land pirates
from the western trails. Murrel one day stole the niggers of an obscure parson, a neighbor of the outlaw. The parson
and his wife suspected their courteous and well-dressed neighbor who made frequent unexplained trips and was gone
over long periods of time. They confided their suspicions to a young man whom they had once befriended, by the
name of Virgil Stewart.
Stewart rode out on the trace and fell in with Murrel as he was leaving on one of his mysterious trips. Together
they rode, and Stewart indicated to his companion that he was down on his luck and at odds with the world; he suggested
that if chance offered he might go far to exact from society what he deemed his due. Murrel listened; he was won.
But he was cautious.
Murrel, as they rode the desolate trace, fell to talking to his young companion of two brothers whom he knew, an
elder brother and a younger; he told of the elder brother's crimes, of how he robbed and plundered and stole the
niggers of the planters, citing case after case of robbery and pillage. Stewart, unobserved, made notes, scratched
names and dates on his saddle shirts with a pin.
Growing bolder, Murrel at last told his companion of murder after murder committed by that elder brother, of how
he slew his victims on the trail, of how he disemboweled them, filled their bodies with sand or stone and sank
them in creeks and rivers. Stewart's pin pricks recorded date, name and place. At last, one day, completely won
to his young comrade of the trail, Murrel confided that he himself was that Elder Brother.
Murrel prevailed upon Stewart to join him; he took him to the robber rendezvous in Arkansas; he told him of his
great scheme to incite the slaves and found a robber empire in the west, the most grandiose scheme in the history
of American piracy. Stewart took the robber oath, the oath of Murrel's clan. He shared the innermost secrets of
the great outlaw band; and still he kept jotting notes and transferring them at night into a blank book he carried
with him, from which, later, in a crowded court room, he was to read names, dates and circumstances that were to
rock Murrel from his robber throne and send his clansmen to the noose.
Time passed; in 1832 (seven years after the robbery of Scholl) the first blow fell. While in Nashville, Murrel
was arrested for the theft of an ornery mare (it had belonged to "a widow woman in Williamson county");
he was tried, sentenced. "The verdict and judgment was that Murrel should serve twelve months' imprisonment;
be given thirty lashes on his bare back at the public whipping post; that he should sit two hours in the pillory
on each of three successive days; be branded on the left thumb with the letters ‘H. T.' (Horse Thief) in the presence
of the court; and be rendered infamous."
The sentence was carried out to the letter. He was whipped; hooted and jeered at, he spent his period in the pillory;
on the third day he was taken in and branded. "At the direction of Sheriff Horton, Murrel placed his hand
on the railing around the Judge's bench. With a piece of rope, Horton then bound Murrel's hand to the railing.
A negro brought a tinner's stove and placed it beside the Sheriff. Horton took from the stove the branding iron,
glanced at it, found it red hot, and put it on Murrel's thumb. The skin fried like meat. Horton held the iron on
Murrel's hand until the smoke rose two feet. Then the iron was removed. Murrel stood the ordeal without flinching.
Then his hand was released; he calmly tied a handkerchief around it and went back to the jail."
Calm without, he was not so within. He served his year in prison and every day added fuel to his consuming rage.
"I wanted to kill all but my own girt," he said. A madness seized him. His scheme for the Mystic Confederacy
and negro rebellion was born. Instead of urging slaves to run away as before, he would persuade them to rebel.
"I have carried off more than a thousand slaves," he is quoted as saying in "The Life and Adventures
of John A. Murrell." Now, instead of selling slaves, he would organize them; at his signal all should rise
together. His friends among the outlaws should each have his regiment. He himself of course should be the supreme
commander. And when the time came, "with his army of slaves behind him, with the outlaws around him, with
his powerful friends paving the way before him and in every river town and wilderness crossroads a gang of skulking
ruffians eagerly awaiting his coming, he would sweep in bloody and destructive fury through the country, pillaging,
sacking, burning, looting — until ‘all but his own girt' had been killed, and he himself had been raised in omnipotent
magnificence to rule his pirate kingdom." This was the plan of Murrel's great conspiracy. Two in Pike county,
by the names of Carr and Tolliver, were reputed to have belonged to it.
Murrel galloped up and down the territory. He formed his Clan, with its hierarchy of officers and underlings. He
mapped his ground and apportioned his districts. He sent his agents proselyting among the bewildered negroes. He
had everything ready. He had a nucleus of some 80 officers and about 300 lesser agents banded together. He had
set the date of the uprising-Christmas Day, 1835- and the first objective - Natchez. And then the creator of this
daring and dazzling scheme stole two niggers from an obscure parson and riding along the lonely trace with a young
man named Stewart, told Stewart everything.
Murrel's trail was held at Jackson, at the sessions of the Circuit Court, in July, 1834. Murrel was defended by
no less a personage than the Honorable Milton Brown, Esq., who ten years later introduced in Congress the bill
by which Texas was annexed to the United States. Murrel had nearly fainted when his young companion of the trail
had stalked forward as his accuser, when he was first arrested. Stewart, standing before the Judge's seat, "read,
painstakingly and conscientiously," the entire transcript he had made of his conversations with Murrel on
that famous ride.
Murrel, found guilty of negro-stealing and of selling stolen negroes, commanded by the Court to rise. He did so,
"his face beet-red with the last great rage that burned within him." He was sentenced to ten years at
hard labor in the State Penitentiary at Nashville. Lawyer Brown, strolling debonairly on the streets of Nashville,
threatened with a horsewhipping by Stewart, whom he had abused at the trial, left town. Murrel's wife, with her
household, moved out of the territory. His strange friends vanished mysteriously, retreating to swamp and forest
fastness, where one by one they were dragged forth and hanged or whipped into bleeding, insensate masses under
the code of "Judge Lynch and Squire Birch."
Now, definitely, the back of western piracy was broken. Here and there the highwayman still robbed and the murderer
struck his victim down, but such incidents were scattered. The day of the Great Land Pirates was done. Murrel was
the last and greatest.
In the penitentiary he lay, serving out his time, working as did the 80 other convicts there, at the prison occupations
of "shoemaking, lathing, tailoring, coopering, carding." For a time, in prison, he studied law, and then
he turned to Scripture; he had the ambition to be a minister in fact when he got out.
Long before his sentence ended, his mind cracked. When at last the prison doors opened and he emerged, it was as
"an invalid and practically an imbecile." His wife was gone, his lands claimed, his brother vanished.
He, too, in his turn, disappeared; his final ending, his death, his place of burial unknown.
The facts of the foregoing narrative have been drawn chiefly from Robert Coates' "The Outlaw Years" and
from "The Life and Adventures of John A. Murrell." The story has been recited in some detail because
it portrays a forgotten period in the settlement of this region, when numerous sections of Pike county, Illinois,
yet untouched by the hand of the white man, were being settled by the sturdy Indian fighters from the "dark
and bloody ground" of Kentucky.
Bitter indeed must have been the thoughts of Abraham Scholl when he was robbed of his gold. Dire misgivings as
to the outcome of his adventure in the west must have beset him. Discontented with conditions in Kentucky, seeking
refuge from a system he abhorred, he was now faced with a sudden and unexpected handicap in a strange country.
An old settler, one of the early Shelley family, related to the late W. C. Dickson that he heard Abraham Scholl
tell of his loss on the journey to Illinois and of how the whole family, disheartened, wept bitterly.
But Scholl did not turn back. He who had fought alongside Daniel Boone, had faced tremendous odds before. Resolutely,
he faced towards the claim he had staked beyond the Illinois river. The great wagon, containing his family and
household goods, moved on across the prairies of Illinois.
At Richard (Old Dicky) Rattan's, three miles south of present White Hall, long the last house on the border, they
stopped overnight. Hiram Rattan "took a shine" to one of Abraham's young daughters, Leah. Later, on June
15, 1827, Hiram and Leah were married here in Pike county, John Garrison, an early minister of the Pike county
Christian church, officiating. Mearel Rattan became Pittsfield's first log-cabin postmaster in 1833 and kept the
first tavern in Pittsfield on the site of H. J. Hesley's new store building (the old Oregon House corner) at the
southwest corner of Courthouse Square; he was also Judge of Probate for Pike county 1835-37. Later he left Pike
county and returned to the old Rattan settlement east of the Illinois river, where he died.
In what is now Scott county (then Morgan county), the Scholls encountered old friends and relations from Kentucky
— the early Elledges — William and Boone and Banner Boone and Edward (Neddie) and Neddie's wife (Matilda Scholl)
and Benjamin and Uriah. The Scholls and Elledges had already intermarried: Matilda Scholl, a daughter of Peter
and a niece of Abraham, had married her cousin, Edward (Neddie) Elledge in 1812; Edward Elledge being a son of
Charity Boone, daughter of Edward (Daniel's brother), and Matilda Scholl being a daughter of Edward Boone's daughter,
Mary. William Scholl, Matilda's eldest brother, in 1806 had married Edward Elledge's sister, Martha Elledge, and
in 1818 Jesse Bryan Scholl, another of Matilda's brothers, had married Charity Elledge, a daughter of the famous
Preacher Elledge (Jesse Elledge) of pioneer times in Pike and Scott counties.
Also, on the Morgan side of the river at that time were the Bealls, noted in the history of the Exeter region and
intermarried then and later with the Elledges and Scholls, as will appear in ensuing chapters; also the families
of John Scott, Thomas Allen and Adam Miller and the yet unmarried James Scott, Thomas Stevens and Alfred Miller,
these being the parties with whom Abraham Scholl was to have come to the Illinois country in 1819. These two Millers
were kinsmen of Sallie and Elizabeth Miller who in 1813 and 1824 had married Septimus and Jesse Scholl, sons of
Abraham's brother Joseph and Daniel Boone's daughter Levina. Thomas Allen was a brother of Zachariah (Boone) Allen,
who married Daniel Boone, daughter of Daniel's brother Jonathan, and settled in Pike county in what is now Detroit
township, early in 1822. John Scott died at Griggsville in January, 1856; two of his daughters, Caroline and Nancy,
married the Elledge brothers, Uriah and Benjamin F., sons of Boone and Rebecca (Beall) Elledge (buried in Hinman
cemetery, Pike county), and grandsons of Edward and Martha (Bryan) Boone.
Over the famous Phillips Ferry road, great thoroughfare of the early days, came the Scholls, on the last lap of
their long journey; reaching Phillips Ferry May 18, 1825, where they crossed and moved on westward to the knoll
where Griggsville later arose. And now a new life in a new land opens before our Kentucky emigrants.
