Thus it would seem that the first quarter of the last century on the frontier was not without its own interest. The next decade, or that ending about 1840, however, offered a still greater instance of outlawry, one of the most famous ones indeed of American history, although little known to-day. This had to do with that genius in crime, John A. Murrell, long known as the great Western land-pirate; and surely no pirate of the seas was ever more enterprising or more dangerous. Murrell was another man who, in a decent walk of life, would have been called great. He had more than ordinary energy and intellect. He was not a mere brute, but a shrewd, cunning, scheming man, hesitating at no crime on earth, yet animated by a mind so bold that mere personal crime was not enough for him. When it is added that he had a gang of robbers and murderers associated with him who were said to number nearly two thousand men, and who were scattered over the entire South below the Ohio river, it may be seen how bold were his plans; and his ability may further be shown in the fact that for years these men lived among and mingled with their fellows in civil life, unknown and unsuspected. Some of them were said to have been of the best families of the land; and even yet there come to light strange and romantic tales, perhaps not wholly true, of death-bed confessions of men prominent in the South who admitted that once they belonged to Murrell's gang, but had later repented and reformed. A prominent Kentucky lawyer was one of these. Murrell and his confederates would steal horses and mules, or at least the common class, or division, known as the "strikers," would do so, although the members of the Grand Council would hardly stoop to so petty a crime. For them was reserved the murdering of travelers or settlers who were supposed to have money, and the larger operations of negro stealing. The theft of slaves, the claiming of the runaway rewards, the later re-stealing and re-selling and final killing of the negro in order to destroy the evidence, are matters which Murrell reduced to a system that has no parallel in the criminal records of the country. But not even here did this daring outlaw pause. It was not enough to steal a negro here and there, and to make a few thousand dollars out of each negro so handled. The whole state of organized society was to be overthrown by means of this same black population. So at least goes one story of his life. We know of several so-called black insurrections that were planned at one time or another in the South--as, for instance, the Turner insurrection in Virginia; but this Murrell enterprise was the biggest of them all.