Reelfoot Lake is fifty miles long and several miles in width, and where it steams in the sun were once great forests and primeval hunting-grounds. In 1907, it was the scene of a murderous affair that brought the Night Riders of Tennessee into ghastly prominence. On a dark night they killed two men, and a third escaped by hiding under one of the many logs near the edge of the lake. He was wounded by the bullets of the murderers and thought to be drowned. So little is known of the lake, that a description of some of its features should be interesting. In 1909 Richard A. Paddock, in an article in _Sports Afield_, wrote: “It is a strange, weird, mysterious place, filled with uncanny sights and sounds, haunted by the ghosts of former dusky inhabitants, whom it swallowed without warning and extinguished in a twinkling of an eye in the most diabolical manner, and whose tortured spirits even now cry out for relief and freedom from cruel bondage on every dark and stormy night. Strange and uncanny are its surroundings, and strange and mysterious are its inhabitants; stealth and superstition lurk on its borders. Danger and sudden and premature death are so common as to be held in contemptuous disregard. Mysterious secrets are hidden in its almost impenetrable islands――secrets and mysteries that I hesitate to mention here, for I have had my warning, and know the danger of disregard. “The lake is inhabited by a race of people who are a class unto themselves; there are no others like them; they take their living and surplus from the waters of Reelfoot Lake. They have nothing else――no other means of livelihood. It is their sustenance, their farm, their business, their all. These fishermen make no idle threats. They are stern, determined, ignorant, superstitious physical giants, who make and execute their own laws, and recognize no others. They suffer from mosquitoes, malaria, and chills and fever, to such an extent that their livers are always out of order, and life has a bilious hue. They go hungry often enough to make them desperate. They do not take kindly to the visiting sportsman. They feel that he is a trespasser on their rights; he is making them and their children go hungry and naked; he ought to be made an example of, to the discouragement of other future unwelcome guests.” The lake now has all and more than it can support in comfort. Its inhabitants are very poor, always on the ragged edge, always in a hand-to-hand scramble with starvation. They have no other way of gaining a living; they cannot do manual labor; they never have done it, nor have their fathers before them. It is fish, hunt, and trap, or starve, with them, and they usually do all four.