Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of "Tropic of Cancer" Read Online Free PDF Page A

they really robbed so that they could have the greater satisfaction of murdering their victims. A shot in the back or a tomahawk to the head were their preferred methods, after which they would slit open the dead man’s belly, fill it with rocks, and dump it into the river. When Big Harpe was mortally wounded by a pursuing posse in western Kentucky in 1799, one of the posse sawed off the dying outlaw’s head while Big Harpe cursed him. “You are a God Damned rough butcher,” he panted, “but cut on and be damned!”
    Colonel Fluger, in some contrast, was interested in profits, though his method of making them was murder-by-the-boatload. Colonel Plug, as he was known, would slip aboard a boat, get down into its hold, and bore a hole in it. When the boat began to sink, Plug’s companions, watching from shore, would row out to the rescue—but rescue only the goods, leaving the crew to drown. Eventually Plug was trapped belowdecks when a boat filled too quickly, and he went to the bottom with his victims.
    The end of the outlaw chieftain Mason wasn’t as neat as that of Plug or as savage as that of Big Harpe. Nevertheless, it has its characteristic frontier flavor. When a posse caught up with him west of Natchez, the pursuers tomahawked and decapitated him. Then, in order to claimthe reward money, they covered the head in a ball of blue clay to prevent putrefaction and carried it to Natchez where it was duly identified.
    Brawlers, outlaws, gamblers, filibusterers, land sharks, whores, runaway slaves—all these drifted on the Mississippi River’s mighty sweep down to New Orleans. And there on its waterfront, in its cafes and coffeehouses, its high-roller casinos and splintered gambling dens, in its garishly appointed whorehouses and stinking one-room cribs there grew up a rich gumbo of oral traditions that persisted and multiplied long after print and the stage had pretty well choked off authentic folklore in regions where it once had flourished.
    In New Orleans they told of the rough hordes of boatmen who would arrive there starved for women, whiskey, and fresh opponents to fight. And the town had everything they wanted, including the far-famed brawler Bill Sedley, who for years was more than a match for any upriver newcomer—but not for Annie Christmas, a six-foot-eight woman who could carry a flour barrel under each arm and a third one atop her head when she worked down on the docks. When she got bored with stevedoring, she would turn tricks down there until she’d worn her line of customers down to the last man. At other times she would transform herself into a one-woman towingmachine capable of pulling a fully-loaded keelboat from New Orleans to Natchez on the dead run. Bill Sedley steered clear of Annie, and it was said she was also the reason Mike Fink stayed away from New Orleans. So one group’s lore imaginatively overthrows another’s.
    The city’s huge black population claimed Annie as its own and said she had twelve sons, each of them a seven-footer and coal black. But black and white, all New Orleans residents claimed the pirate king Jean Lafitte, who over the course of his career amassed a fortune by taking tall treasure ships in the Caribbean and running slaves up to the city from his base on Grand Terre. It was Lafitte and his pirates—Dominique You and Nez Coupe Chighizola, among others—who heroically came to General Andrew Jackson’s aid at the battle of New Orleans that ended the War of 1812, and had it not been for them, the outcome, they say, would have been different. 7 Treated shabbily by the government he’d helped to save, the pirate king and his crew left America behind, sailing south. A few years later—off Mexico some said—he died in battle, leaving his treasure buried somewhere on Grand Terre where it lies undiscovered to this day.
    Maybe only Macao was as given to gambling as New Orleans in the nineteenth century. Men would bet on anything and would bet everything, including all