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
In December, Wages came home to his father’s; sent for me; told me that
he was going to get married shortly, and invited me to his wedding; I
promised him I would go if my business did not prevent me; but it so
turned out that he did marry a short time after, and I was not present.
After his marriage, he brought his wife to see his father and mother,
and spent some weeks with them. He had with him plenty of counterfeit
coin, and wanted me to take some and pass for him. That I refused to
do, and I then advised him that it would be better for us all to let
that alone; and then reminded him that when there was none but him,
McGrath and I together, that we could get along to better advantage,
do a more profitable business and had a wider field to operate in. But
he seemed to think that they could manage to get along; and I found
from his conversation that old Allen Brown had got control of him, and
I said no more on the subject. I told him frankly that their money I
would have nothing to do with; but in other matters of stealing and
selling horses, negroes and cattle, I would take a hand as heretofore,
to which he assented, and here we dropped the subject for the present.
I again urged upon him the removal of our money. I dreaded an outbreak,
for I then believed that old Brown would blow the whole matter; and
sure enough he afterwards did.
So Wages and his wife left, and went back to Mississippi, to old Brown,
and he went to work building his house on Catahoula, in Hancock County.
He got it completed; moved into it; took his horse; came again to
Mobile; procured his father’s two horse wagon to haul some articles
for house-keeping from Mobile, and on his way back I went with him,
the first night, and we camped near where our money was buried. We
went and got the three kegs; placed them in the bottom of his wagon,
covered them with hay and placed the balance of his load on them. He
hauled them out to Hancock county, and deposited them in Catahoula
Swamp, about a mile and a half or two miles from his house, and
designated the place by a large pine tree that grew at the margin of
the swamp, to the north-east, and about thirty-five yards from where
the kegs were deposited, and a magnolia tree that grew about ten yards
to the south-west. He gave me a diagram of the place, the courses,
and distances which he had measured accurately, marked in lines and
explained in our mystic key. That paper I somehow lost in the famous
Harvey battle.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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