Life and bloody career of the executed criminal, James Copeland, the great Southern land pirate — John Shaqi
Life and bloody career of the executed criminal, James Copeland, the great Southern land piratePitts, J. R. S. (James Robert Soda)
History
Life and bloody career of the executed criminal, James Copeland, the great Southern land pirate
Pitts, J. R. S. (James Robert Soda)
Copeland, James, 1823-1857; Criminals -- Gulf States -- Biography
All that night I did not sleep one minute of sound sleep. The most
awful and frightful dreams infested my mind all night, and Wages told
me the next day that his sleep was disturbed in the same way, and he
then regretted the act and wished he had not done it.
Wages rose in the morning and easily waked me, for I was not in a sound
sleep. We took our guns; I crawled close to where the young man lay,
and got my gun ready. Wages was to fire first. He put his light against
a small brush, and the old man partly waked and turned his face toward
Wages, who fired the contents of one barrel in the old man’s forehead.
The young man was lying with his back to me; I placed the muzzle of my
gun to the back of his head, where the neck joined it. My finger was
on the trigger. At the report of Wages’ gun, I pulled the trigger, and
there was but little distinction in the report of the two guns.
Both men gave a suppressed, struggling scream, and expired.
Our next work was to dispose of them, which we did by slinging them
with ropes, swinging them on a pole, carrying them to one of the sink
holes close to the camp, and burying them there. We deposited with them
all the clothes that had any blood on them; and with the hatchet they
had, we sharpened a short pole and partially covered them with dirt. We
next went to the camp and raked out with sticks and brush all the signs
of blood, and took brush and dry leaves and built fires on the ground
where we had killed them. All of this we had accomplished by a little
before sunrise.
Our next work was to prepare to leave the place. We took the old man’s
fine massive silver spurs, his silver stirrups and silver bridle bits,
his gold rings, sleeve buttons, etc. We took our new saddle and
bridles, and concealed all the old ones in the prairie, about five
miles from the camp. After we had arranged everything to our liking, we
gathered our pack mules and packed them; herded up the lead mule and
the drove; Wages mounted the old man’s horse, and I the young man’s, we
tied our other two horses together and turned them in the drove, and
all things being now completed, we set out about eight o’clock in the
morning.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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