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
John Harden brought three or four fine horses, one, he said, from
Florida and the others from Georgia; I advanced him the money and
passed them on to Wages, who sold them for me. S. Harden made two
trips to the vicinity of Mobile that year, one from North Alabama, and
one from western North Carolina: The first trip he brought two good
horses and a likely negro boy. I assisted him to sell the horses near
Fort Stoddart, for a fine price, to some men going to Texas. I then
furnished him two ponies and sent McIntosh to pilot him through to
Wages, who paid him for his negro and sent him to Pearlington, where he
again embarked for Tennessee, by way of New Orleans.
About four months afterwards Harden returned again. He had two splendid
horses, fine traveling equipage, and a likely mulatto girl about
sixteen years old, dressed in boys clothes, traveling with him as his
waiter. He said he had traveled through Georgia and Eastern Alabama
to Blakely, and crossed the Bay over to Mobile, and came out to our
place. He told us he feared no pursuit; that he had traveled too far,
that there was no danger. I assisted him in selling the two horses, in
Mobile, and saw them often afterwards. They were fine buggy horses. The
girl he sold to a man in Mobile, who kept her as a wife, and she now
passes for free. He had stolen her from a rich old widow lady in North
Carolina, who had sent the girl on an errand, on a Saturday morning,
some twenty-five miles on the same fine horse, to return on Sunday
evening, and she never did return.
In these two trips of Harden’s he gave me five hundred dollars for
my assistance. I then assisted him to steal a very fine horse on the
Tombigbee River, for which he gave me fifty dollars more, and left for
Tennessee. This had pretty well consumed the fall of 1845.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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