Lower Tennessee and pretty much all of Mississippi made his stamping-grounds, and his name became a terror there, as it had been along the Ohio. The governor of the State of Mississippi offered a reward for his capture, dead or alive; but for a long time he escaped all efforts at apprehension. Treachery did the work, as it has usually in bringing such bold and dangerous men to book. Two members of his gang proved traitors to their chief. Seizing an opportunity they crept behind him and drove a tomahawk into his brain. They cut off the head and took it along as proof; but as they were displaying this at the seat of government, the town of Washington, they themselves were recognized and arrested, and were later tried and executed; which ended the Meason gang, one of the early and once famous desperado bands. [Illustration: TYPES OF BORDER BARRICADES] From the earliest days there have been border counterfeiters of coin. One of the first and most remarkable was the noted Sturdevant, who lived in lower Illinois, near the Ohio river, in the first quarter of the last century. Sturdevant was also something of a robber king, for he could at any time wind his horn and summon to his side a hundred armed men. He was ostensibly a steady farmer, and lived comfortably, with a good corps of servants and tenants about him; but his ablest assistants did not dwell so close to him. He had an army of confederates all over the middle West and South, and issued more counterfeit money than any man before, and probably than any man since. He always exacted a regular price for his money--sixteen dollars for a hundred in counterfeit--and such was the looseness of currency matters at that time that he found many willing to take a chance in his trade. He never allowed any confederate to pass a counterfeit bill in his own state, or in any other way to bring himself under the surveillance of local law; and they were all obliged to be especially circumspect in the county where they lived. He was a very smug sort of villain, in the trade strictly for revenue, and he was so careful that he was never caught by the law, in spite of the fact that it was known that his farm was the source of a flood of spurious money. He was finally "regulated" by the citizens, who arose and made him leave the country. This was one of the early applications of lynch law in the West. Its results were, as usual, salutary. There was no more counterfeiting in that region. A very noted desperado of these early days was Harpe, or Big Harpe, as he was called, to distinguish him from his brother and associate, Little Harpe. Big Harpe made a wide region of the Ohio valley dangerous to travelers. The events connected with his vicious life are thus given by that always interesting old-time chronicler, Henry Howe: